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Type X, or very narrow, as in Type XI, or broad and not very long, as in Type XII, and so on. Therc are, of course, many surviving swords which for one reason or another just won't fit into any type or sub-type: they are mavericks which have to be treated with care and discre-tion. Swords ofType X have the Viking Age blade, broad and gently tapering with an ade-quate point, a wide shallow fuller running the whole length, and the point of balance near the hilt - the form of blade which, as far as the present State or our knowledge allows, may be attributed to the mid-9th century and the workshops of Ulfberht, Inc., in the Rhineland.

These blades might be mounted with any variants of the late Viking styles of pommel and cross. These forms of pommel, which had originated in the 9th and lOth centuries - the lobated, the Brazil-nut, the cocked hat, the tea-cosy, the disc and its development, the wheel -were all in use together, c. 1100, and most of them remained popular until the early 14th cen-tury. Then, and only then, new forms appeared, and the old Viking styles fell out of use, as we shall see later. It may be said that there are as many styles of cross as there were hilt-makers and their customers, though common sense and practicability limited such variations, which all sprang from a few basie themes. In Figs. 60 and 61,1 have drawn diagrams of the most common of these pommel-forms and cross styles, any of which taken in isolation is of no use what-soever as a dating criterion, in spite of the assertions of leading experts of the past. If any sort of decoration - arms, patterns, lettering, whatever-is present, these may give a clue to datę, but the bare form of the piece, whether pommel or cross, never can. It is often impossible, too, to give a datę to a complete sword, as for example that exquisite Type XA in the Wallace Collection in London (illustrated in Chapter 6), which may well datę at c. 1100, or, eąually well, at c. 1350. And I must stress again, using that one as an example, that the condition of a medieval sword is of absolutely no use at all in trying to determine a datę. Swords from the River Thames provide a case in point. The Viking sword in the British Museum (Chapter 2, Fig. 3) is in nearly perfect, quite usable, condition; and its form and the INGETRII inscription in iron letters on the blade give it a positive datę between, say, 950 and 1050. And in the Museum of London is part of a sword, nearly all eaten away, whose form (such of it as we can see) cannot be dated earlier than c. 1460; yet it came out of the same part of the river. If one were to take condition as an indication of age, then we should have to put the tatty one into the Viking Age and the well-preserved one into the Renaissance. This is another example -the Wallace sword is an even better one - of the utter invalidity of the "Too Good To Be True" syndrome. Of course, the most desperate care and caution is essential in assessing the genuineness or otherwise of a well-preserved sword in the saleroom, for in these days, fakes are so good that they can (and do, alas) deceive even sonie of the Pundits. But in spite of this, I think it is a mistake to condemn something out of hand as fake (as so many do) simply because it is in good condition. I ani, of course, referring in principle to medieval arms and pieces of

Figurę 60. Diagram of pommel-forms in use c. 1050-1300.

Figurę 61. Diagram of cross-styles in usc c. 1050-1300.

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