How to Make the Perfect Sword

[Photo credit Metoc]

On the face of it, there doesn’t seem much involved in making a sword. Get some iron, heat it, hit it with a hammer until it is flat and shaped like a sword, stick a handle on it and sharpen the edge.

In actuality, every one of those steps is fraught with difficulty. But ultimately all the work that went into forging a sword was in answer to the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of sword-making. A sword needs to be hard so that it can hold an edge, but it needs to be flexible so that it will not break. All the smith’s art and craft was devoted to solving this paradox.

The solution depended upon marrying iron with its closest cousin, steel.

Student Power

Bologna University is the oldest university in the world, first established in 1088. But if professors struggle with bumptious students today, these first professors had an even more difficult time of it: the students ran the university, voting through their representatives on who to hire as teachers, how much to pay the professors and the content of the courses.

There was even a committee, called the ‘Denouncers of Professors’, to which students could report teachers who did not keep time or who failed to teach all their classes during a term. Students at Bologna, and indeed at all the later medieval universities, began their education by studying the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

The Trials of Anne, Duchess of Brittany

Anne of Brittany (1477 – 1514)

While medieval royal women were accorded high status, when it came to the task of producing heirs to the throne, they were sometimes subject to the most humiliating examinations.

One example is what Anne of Brittany had to endure. Charles VIII, king of France, had besiedged her in her city of Rennes to persuade her to marry him. Anne was the Duchess of Brittany and marriage meant that Charles would bring the previously obstinately independent Bretons under his control. When Anne realised that none of her allies would break the siege, she agreed to negotiate terms.

The terms were clear. Charles wanted to marry her. But before Charles would enter into marriage with Anne – and remember she was only 14 at the time – the French required that she prove that she was able to produce children for the king. To that end, Anne had to parade naked before the king’s commissioners: Anne, Charles’s elder sister, and two male advisers.

Having inspected the naked duchess as one would inspect a brood mare, the commissioners wrote a report that noted Anne had a congenital limp but concluded that she would be capable of bearing children.

The marriage duly agreed, the ceremony was fixed for 6 December 1491. Making her views about her future husband very clear, Anne arrived for the marriage celebration with two beds.

Anne and Charles were married for seven years – until Charles, a famously short man, contrived to hit his head on a door lintel and died shortly afterwards.

Charles VIII and the End of the Middle Ages

Charles VIII, King of France, didn’t mean to end the Middle Ages. He just wanted the kingdom of Naples and to be taken seriously.

Charles was short, ugly and rumoured to be stupid. The first two were true. But when he took control of France from his regent, his elder sister, he was determined to prove his mettle.

In 1494, with his army pulling its mobile cannon, he invaded Italy, intent on getting to Naples. Everyone expected his advance to be halted by the many fortresses in the way but the French cannon smashed down the walls.

To the shock of all, Charles and his army rolled down through Italy and conquered Naples in a matter of months.

The Middle Ages were over. The modern world was born in rolling clouds of cannon smoke.

The Trial of the Pyx

Credit Richard Lea Hair

The oldest judicial procedure in England, dating to the 12th century, is the annual Trial of the Pyx. This is a formal legal procedure during which the Assay Office tests over 50,000 coins taken at random to check that their metallic content is within the boundaries set by law.

The testing begins in February each year and lasts for two or three months. When the testing has been completed, the Trial of the Pyx is held, wherein the verdict as to the content of the coins is announced before a jury including members of the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Queen’s Remembrancer (who is also the senior judge of the Royal Courts of Justice).

The Chancellor of the Exchequer attends the trial for, as chancellor and custodian of the royal exchequer, the chancellor has responsibility for the purity of the coinage of the realm. Strictly speaking, should any coins fail at assay, then the chancellor would be liable to execution but luckily for recent chancellors the coinage has proved true.

Bog Iron

Bog iron is, literally, iron from a bog. You might well have seen traces of bog ore yourself when walking near wetland environments, although it can often look like pollution.

An extrusion of red-orange mud by a stream leaks what appears to be oil or petrol into the water, producing an orange sludge in the bottom of the stream and a reflective and refractive scum on top of the water.

The way to tell whether the scum is petrol/oil pollution or iron is by taking a stick and breaking the scum. If it’s petrol/oil, the scum will flow back together and reform. If it is iron, the scum breaks but does not readily reform. It’s as if you’ve broken a thin skin of floating iron, which is exactly what has happened.

Finding Iron

Swords need iron.

For finding iron, small boys are ideal.

On the beach, in the depths of winter, these small boys were finding and collecting rocks and bringing them back to the growing pile. The best rocks were small, about the size of a thumb, and deep rust-red. They dropped them at the feet of the waiting overseer. The overseer then ran a metal rod over the stone and added it to the pile or tossed it away before dispatching the boys to search for more.            

It’s a common fate for children born to archaeologists. They get put to work on archaeological projects – such as finding ironstone to smelt down into iron. The rod was a magnet; if the rock stuck, it had enough iron to make it worth the keeping.

Roman Officer, Anglo-Saxon Warlord

The Roman officer, splendidly caparisoned – wearing a full-face crested helmet and with his elegant sword sheathed at his waist, sitting astride his horse with 2,000 legionaries arrayed in front of him – was the very model of command.

The Anglo-Saxon warlord was no less splendidly equipped, his helmet just as magnificent. But he would be standing with his sword drawn, its pommel glinting with red garnets and yellow gold, at the centre of a line of fifty warriors, their shields overlapping and their spears outthrust.

The Road by Jack London

The Road by Jack London

Jack London, who died when he was only 40, packed more life into those few decades than most people could manage – or endure – in twice the time. He was a gold prospecter, a sailor, a tramp, a hobo, a journalist, a writer and a war correspondent.

The Road tells of London’s life on the road, as a tramp and a hobo, riding the trains, cadging meals off kind families, following the signs left by other travellers on the road, signs that told whether a town had good pickings or a mean sheriff inclined to throw vagrants in jail.

Among the many fascinations of the book is London’s ambivalence: it was a hard life and often brutal but its freedom clearly appealed greatly to London. His views, as expressed in his later works, were clearly influenced by the social Darwinism of the time, which viewed life as essentially an amoral struggle for survival. But bound with this was a deeply romantic view of freedom and the possibilities available to a man around the next corner or over the next hill. The two come together in The Road, a celebration as well as a requiem for a way of life that could only be spawned by poverty.

I presume that Cormac McCarthy read London’s book before writing his version of The Road. It strikes me that there would be an interesting thesis to be had from comparing and contrasting the two stories.

How to Test a Sword for Sharpness

One Norse tale tells how a Viking warlord would test the keenness of his sword by slicing through the neck of a nearby slave. If the slave’s head fell from his body, then the blade was not sharp enough. Only when the head remained in place, balanced upon the now severed neck, would he judge the sword properly sharp.

If this seems unlikely, one of the bodies excavated from the Bowl Hole cemetery at Bamburgh revealed a man who had been killed by a sword cut that had struck him on the shoulder, passed diagonally down through his body, severing his spine and several ribs, before reaching his waist. That’s how sharp some of these weapons were, and how lethally they could be wielded.