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So altogether this is an interesting sword. No previ-ous owner of it has noticed that it has a pattern-welded blade, but one has eonie up with an ingenious, though quite untenable, theory as to its provenance; but I wisli I could find a solution to the double conjoined cross. There is another point to make about this sword as well. Here is a pattern-welded blade of the same graceful, tapering, sharp-pointed outline as the Ulfberhts and their successors. In Chapter 4, I said that the pattern-welded blades were ugly and clumsy looking. When I wrote that, I had not noticed (incredibly) that this blade of minę was pattern-welded; and once I had noticed, I went off to the British Museum to look at sonie other Migration and Viking period swords, and surę enougli, there was one, with a typical Viking-style liilt, with a graceful pattern-welded blade. So I had madę a rash generalisation. Not all pattern-welded blades are of an ugly shape!

[Author's notę: Further research has shown that what I wrote here is wrong. It caine out of a Norman tomb in Apulia, and the unusual corrosion is caused by the perishing of the scabbard which enclosed it, and its cleaing sonie 80 years ago by acid. The designs are Byzantine. They do rep-resent The Church. The four uprights represent the essen-tial four pillars in a church for the four evangelists, the four quarters of the earth, and the four winds. The sun symbols represent the Windows which let in God’s holy light. The conjoined crosses symbolise the short lived reconciliation between the Church of Ronie and Bvzantium, achieved in 1150 in a Papal/Byzantine bid to get the Normans out of Italy. The hopc was destroyed at Civitate. It is not unrea-sonable to suppose that this sword was used in that battle. ]

Such then is Type X. I should add, perhaps, that the width of the fLiller varies from this very wide, very shallow form to one which is still wide, but morę well marked (Fig. 65). Type XA has generally a longer blade and a narrower fiiller, which runs very nearly to the point: there are many examples where it is virtually impossible to determine whether they are of Type X or XA, but this is the case with all types (Fig. 62B). One type tends often to merge into the other. However, Type XI is generally easy to distinguish, for it has a long, narrow blade (Fig 66A) with a very narrow fuller running almost to the point. It has a sub-type, XIB, of which I know at present of only two examples. One, quite a smali weapon, is in the Royal Armouries in Leeds (Fig. 66B) and the other, an extremely large one which I will have a great deal to say about next time, is in a private collection in America. Characteristic of the sub-type is a igurc 65. A Type X sword c. 1000 showing a narrower fuller than A in Fig. 62. BL: 86.5cm. Author's photo.