I inherited these swords from my
father – I remember he bought them in a fleamarket in Bolton, about forty years
ago. The tale the stall-holder told him was that they had been made as a
presentation gift for a naval officer. How he came about this information I’ll
never know; there are no inscriptions on the swords - the only marks are a maker’s stamp for “Weyersberg & Co.,
Solingen”. Solingen, in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, is the German
equivalent of English Sheffield – it is the knife-making centre of the country,
producing over 90% of the country’s knives. Weyersberg & Co. merged with
Kirschbaum in 1883 to form Weyersberg, Kirschbaum & Cie, so it seems likely
that the swords date from before that date. Grubbing about on tinternet has
brought up next to nothing – some similar style swords were issued to the
French military in the 1830s, and an 1855 British pattern private’s hanger for
Land Transport Corps, but nothing definite.
The swords themselves are broadly
speaking copies of the Roman gladius style. The gladius was the standard issue
to the legionaries, a short sword (about 24 to 28 inches), used primarily for
stabbing and thrusting from behind a shield wall, but also capable of slashing
and cutting. The hilt, or capulus, had a solid pommel (latterly, from the
French pomme – ‘apple’, referring to its shape), which could be used
offensively in close combat.
Some swords (but not these) have
a ‘fuller’ (a shallow groove) running down the length of the blade. Fulling the
blade adds strength to it by giving it a dual spine, and can reduce the weight
by between 20-35%, also reducing the material, and thus the cost, needed to
make the sword. The fuller is not, as some think, a ‘blood-groove’ – an error
that comes from the fallacious idea that a blade can somehow get stuck inside a
body when a vacuum is formed by the tensing of muscle tissue around it, and
that the groove allows air into the wound, releasing the vacuum. The simple
truth is that if a blade is sharp enough to cut its way into a body, it can
also cut its way out.
The plant gladiolus gets its name
from the sword shape of its leaves; the word gladius is also, of course, the
root of gladiator (‘swordsman’). The
word ‘gladiator’ has come to be used as a generic term for any of the combatants
fighting in the Roman arena (‘arena’ comes from harena – the Latin word used
for the fine sand used to absorb blood), but there were different types of
gladiators, their names derived mainly from the weapons or armour they carried.
Examples include the cestus – a fist-fighter equipped with armoured gloves, the
laquearius – armed with a lasso and a dagger, and the retiarius – fighting with
a net and a trident. The earliest gladiatorial combats may have grown out of
funereal games (think of those described in The Iliad), and may originally have
been fights between slaves. Prisoners of war were made to fight in the arena,
and condemned criminals were executed there, before the highly-trained
professional fighters came to be used. As the Roman Empire declined (some
argue, convincingly, it was bankrupted by the spiralling cost of the games),
the populace of Rome were appeased with the spectacle of the arena and a dole
of free grain – the ‘bread and circuses’ bemoaned by the poet Juvenal. An
unscholarly, but riveting, account of the decadence of the Roman circus is
Those About to Die by D P Mannix; the title references the supposed, but
unsubstantiated, myth that the gladiators would salute the Caesar with the
salute “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant,” – “Hail, Emperor, those about to
die salute you.” This is the splendidly lurid cover of my seventies paperback
copy, showing a bewildered slave girl about to be torn apart by bulls.
The word ‘sword’ comes from
proto-Indo-European swer – ‘to wound’, with cognate words developing in many
later tongues; Old English sweord, Old Saxon swerd, Old High German swert, Danish sværd,
Norwegian sverd and Swedish svärd. The Saxons took their name from their
characteristic dagger, the seax.
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