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The Trial of the Pyx

3 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
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

3 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology

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

3 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology, History

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

3 February 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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

28 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
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

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

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.

The Classification of Swords

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

Ewart Oakeshott did more for the study of swords than anyone else in the 20th century. Oakeshott received no formal training in scholarship, nor did he have an academic position to lend weight to his opinions. His standing amongst his peers was entirely the product of decades of handling, owning, assessing and cataloguing swords.   

Without any academic training, but with boundless interest and energy, Oakeshott set about revolutionising how old weapons would be regarded and classified. His great insight was to treat the swords as practical weapons, forged and used by men to kill other men.

It might seem obvious now, but before Oakeshott the people responsible for looking after and curating collections of arms had seen them in terms of the history of art rather than as weapons, assigning ages and provenances to weapons based upon the decorative features of hilt and guard, pommel and scabbard rather than using the business end of the sword for classificatory purposes.

Oakeshott, on the other hand, visited museums and old houses, trying out those weapons he was allowed to handle. As he did so, he began to develop a physical understanding of the nature of the weapons he was wielding, getting a feel for balance, weight – the indefinable ‘life’ that marks out an exceptional weapon as something that seems alive in the hand.

The First Iron

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

The earliest iron artefacts so far found, dated to circa 3200 BC, were made from meteoritic iron. The iron was found as nine small beads which were excavated in 1911 from two burials in Gerzeh, north Egypt, a prehistoric burial site that has produced a great deal of information about very early Egyptian civilisation.

Seven of the beads were found in one grave, four in a necklace that was also strung with lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold and agate, and three at the waist.

The other two beads, discovered in a nearby grave, were found in each hand of the dead body, the grave itself being almost a magpie assemblage of grave goods, including beads made from lapis lazuli, obsidian, gold, carnelian, calcite, chalcedony, steatite, faience, garnet and serpentine, as well as a porphyry bowl, a miniature pink limestone jar, a bird scutiform-shaped palette, an ivory spoon, a flint flake, shells, a jackal canine tooth, 16 stones of carnelian, green jasper, quartz, a lump of red resin and nine pottery vessels.

In both cases, the richness of the grave goods that were buried with the dead person to accompany them into the afterlife tells that they came from rich and powerful families.

From The Perfect Sword.

What is a Sword?

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Perfect Sword

The sword as a weapon exists on more levels than the purely practical. It is more than the sum of its parts.

A sword is a signifier, an indicator of rank, power, prestige and potential martial prowess. A man (or potentially a woman) with a sword has the wealth and status necessary to ensure access to a good diet, leisure time to train, a psychology that is suited to fighting, and the will to use it.

A person carrying a sword also carries the threat of a sword, which is usually far more important than the sword itself. A man carrying a sword seldom had to wield it in order to get his way.

In most cases, it was far better to convince via the threat of a sword than to actually use it.

From The Perfect Sword.

The Individuality of Swords

26 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Swordsmith Owen Bush holding one of the many swords he has forged.

Swords are individual. Each is unique, with its own set of characteristics. These characertistics impress a style upon the man wielding it who in turn exerts his own style upon the sword.

A sword is not a dumb brute of a weapon but rather one that works in partnership with its wielder. Depending on the sword and the swordsman, the partnership may be one of equals, the sword may be superior to its wielder, or the swordsman may have to impose his own style upon a crude and poorly made weapon.

From The Perfect Sword.