Academic Exercises (35 page)

No offence intended to the bottle-choppers. It’s entirely thanks to them that we have any insight at all into European swords and swordsmanship in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, before the Society for Creative Anachronism kick-started the re-enactment hobby and made it possible for grown men to earn a living making faithful reproductions of old swords, all manner of weird myths had grown up about the medieval European sword. It weighed ten pounds. It was basically a heavy iron bar for bashing with. There was no skill involved. It’s not hard to figure out where these misconceptions came from. The number of surviving medieval swords is quite small, and they tend to be in museums, where you’re not allowed to take them out of the case and play with them, to see how they handle.

Fortunately, there was one man, an eccentric English book-illustrator and sword collector, who was prepared to do just that. Starting in the 1940s, Ewart Oakeshott devoted his life to the medieval sword. Many of the finest extant specimens passed through his hands at one time or another, and, since he wasn’t afraid to pick them up and waggle them in the air, he made the remarkable discovery that they weren’t absurdly heavy and unwieldy; in fact, they handled really rather well. Oakeshott went on to classify sword types from the Viking Age to the Renaissance, and his research was taken up, not by the scholars and curators, but by the stick-jocks and tatami-mat-slicers of the living history movement. Once authentic replicas were available, re-enactors went to the library and discovered the small but meaningful number of medieval fencing manuals, whose existence had been more or less forgotten about since the last brief flurry of interest at the end of the 19th century. The manuals are oblique, elliptical and deliberately obscure—they were study aids for students of the fight schools rather than teach-yourself books—but we do at least have a keyhole through which we can peer at medieval swordsmanship, and form the inescapable conclusion that it was a true martial art of exceptional subtlety and sophistication. With some idea of the fighting techniques, we can go back to the swords and begin to understand them properly.

There are twenty-two well-defined different types in Oakeshott’s classification. Take the Type Fourteen, a popular 14th century pattern. It’s the perfect cutter. The blade is relatively short, wide at the hilt, narrowing to an acute point. Running down the middle for most of its length is a fuller, a broad groove designed to reduce weight by removing superfluous metal without compromising strength; also, in the process of hammering the groove into the blade, you spread metal sideways, widening the blade, thinning the cutting edge to give you a pointier, more efficient wedge. The Type Fourteen was an effective cutter of flesh, but when the armourers upped the stakes by introducing plate armour in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Fourteen was outmatched. It wasn’t stiff enough to deliver powerful thrusts into the joints and weak points of armour. Also, fighters started armouring their legs, which had always been a favourite target (2). A new pattern was needed; still a dual purpose weapon, but favouring the thrust, the way the Fourteen had favoured the cut. The Type Fifteen was roughly the same shape—broad at the hilt end, tapering to a needle point—but instead of the fuller, it had a strong central rib, formed by the forging out of the cutting edges. It was stiffer for the thrust, while still capable of efficient cutting. Superbly balanced (all medieval swords achieve balance by means of a thick, heavy pommel, usually wheel-shaped; the optimum centre of balance is around two to three inches in front of the crossguard) and weighing in at somewhere between two and three pounds, it feels light and quick in the hand. It’s the ideal weapon for sword-and-shield fighting.

The shield, however, was on the way out. Plate armour for the nobility and long-handled cutting weapons for the rank and file that needed both hands to use them made it obsolete in the 15th century, and the Fifteen became the Eighteen (to be precise, the 18a); roughly the same blade, but longer and with an extended hilt, making it possible to use the sword single or double handed. The 15th century longsword is a landmark in sword design, perfection within its own terms of reference, and around it there grew up a school of swordsmanship of which we get tantalising glimpses from the fencing manuals of Ringeck and Talhoffer. By the time these books were written, longswordsmanship was already into the early stages of decadence and decline, the silver rather than the golden age. Suffice it to say, Hollywood has never put on screen a fight sequence as beautiful or viscerally thrilling as the half-guesswork reconstructions of longsword fighting staged by modern re-enactors. Look for them on YouTube and save yourself a fortune in movie tickets.

Talhoffer’s longswordsmen don’t cut very much; and when they do, they tend to come to a bad end. The cut was out of favour, particularly since most of Talhoffer’s book deals not with battlefield armoured combat but fights between unarmoured civilians. Economic and social changes in the late Middle Ages meant that the sword was no longer exclusively the battlefield weapon of the aristocratic knight. With the rise of an affluent urban middle-class, eager to ape their sword-wearing betters and addicted to picking fights in the street, the sword acquired a new, non-military function. The enthusiastic students who flocked to the German and Italian fighting schools in the 15th century weren’t training for war.

The fight schools are a significant development. Trainee knights didn’t need them; they learnt swordsmanship from the castle master-at-arms, practically as soon as they were weaned. The schools were there to teach merchants’ sons how to survive street brawls, a genre of combat for which the military swords of the High Middle Ages weren’t really suited. For one thing, they either needed a shield (3) or else were awkwardly long to wear with everyday costume. Although some form of cutting continued to be taught and practised, the thrust began to dominate, logically enough. Edges shrank, blades thinned and lengthened. Marozzo, who wrote at the turn of the 16th century, teaches an awkward, clumsy proto-rapier called the
spada di lato
. By the middle of the century, the true rapier had arrived from Spain. Three to four feet long, with only a vestigial cutting edge, the rapier is comparatively slow, best used with a defensive weapon in the left hand (a dagger, a cloak, something to parry with) but it’s much better than anything that had gone before for its intended purpose, the formal duel and the street-corner rumble. By the turn of the 17th century, Ridolfo Capo Ferro had refined rapier fencing to a precise science. It’s not fencing as a modern Olympic athlete would understand it. For one thing, the rapier fencer isn’t restricted to moving in a straight line. He can sidestep, performing devastating moves like the
volte
(a twisting side-shuffle that leaves your lunging enemy impaling himself on your sword). He isn’t restricted to the ritual exchange of lunge, parry, riposte; defence and counterattack are combined in the same move, making a rapier duel short and extremely lethal. The rapier was soon obsolete itself, replaced by the shorter, lighter, more convenient smallsword, the ancestor of the modern foil. The most efficient non-projectile tool ever designed for killing an unarmoured man, the smallsword made no pretence at a cutting edge. It was a sharp, stiff, triangular-section wire, so quick in the hand that there was no longer time for the rapierman’s sidesteps and simultaneous defence and counterattack. Once again, the sword had arrived at total perfection, only to find once it got there that it was obsolete, replaced by the flintlock pistol for duelling and self-defence.

Poor old sword. Few artefacts have commanded so much care, skill and resources, and at each stage of its development it’s been superfluous or obsolete. If swords had never been invented, history would barely have noticed (4). Other weapons were just as good or better for business purposes; armour always won in the end; apart from a brief spell in the hands of the Roman legions, it’s always been a rich man’s accessory, a status symbol, an overrated icon. Mostly, it survived because it looked cute, and people felt safer if they had one when things got bad.

For a ninety-percent pacifist like me, it’s the weapon of choice. Its purpose is and always has been unambiguous, but compared with the instruments that actually did the business—the spear, arrow, cannon, machine-gun, tank, bomber, nuclear bomb—the sword may be allowed to have a relatively clean conscience. On the battlefield, it was generally the last line of defence rather than the weapon that started the fight. The duellists who died on the points of rapiers and smallswords were at least willing participants in their own undoing. If you want an abiding image of the sword in the West, think of the Polish cavalrymen in World War II who charged the German tanks with their sabres. A professional soldier’s summary of another stupid cavalry charge sums up the sword for me;
magnifique
(if you like that sort of thing)
mais ce n’est pas la guerre
—which I’d venture to suggest, is about the nicest thing you can say about any weapon.

NOTES

(1) Actually, it’s a moot point whether swords in the hands of ancient swordsmen could cut mail and cleave helmets. Modern researchers say no, but back in the 13th century they were pretty sure they could, to judge from contemporary literature and art. For example, the Maciejowski Bible, an illuminated manuscript painted for the French crusader king Louis IX, has many scenes showing swords cutting armour in graphic, almost photographic detail. The context is worth considering:

1. The Maciejowski Bible was commissioned by an experienced and horribly enthusiastic fighter, who wouldn’t have been amused by gross inaccuracies.

2. The painter records arms, armour, clothes and footwear with great care and precision. The illustrations are meant to be totally realistic.

3. The battle scenes are generic images of warfare rather than particular exploits of superhuman heroes. The armour-cutters are just plain folks, not legendary heroes of whom exceptional feats are to be expected.