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held Jerusalem at that rime) and the other for Saladin himself. Considcring that thc one symbol the Muslim will on no account evcr have any truck with is the Cross, this is stretching imagina-tion beyond the limits ofreason.

However, having said that, sonie of what Mr. Shaffrey propounded is, I believe, correct. The main outline figurę probably does represent a church - or perhaps, The Church. The arch is a west doorway, and thc crosses at the end represent either the altar cross or the cross on the East End. (Though the double cross still remains an enigma.) I don't know what the double uprights mean, especially as they often appear in purcly pagan inlays in iron, on Viking-Age blades, but the star-like figures do undoubtedly have Christian significance. On the reverse side of the blade are three other silver-inlaid symbols - rwo Greek crosses, each within a circle, and between them an eight-petalled flower. These, of course, are well-known Christian signs. Mr. Shaffrey misread these, for he assumed that thc Greek crosses represented flowerheads with four large petals. You can see how easy it is to make this error (Fig 64).

Perhaps the most interesting figures on the blade, also inlaid in silver, appear one on each side, right down by the point; on the side with the "church" symbols, a floriated cross, and on the other, an open hand with two fmgers raised - the age-old signs of blessing, not the morę commonplacc modern one which is the reverse of a blessing. This mark of the Hand of God was used frequently in the early Middle Ages. It appears on sonie Anglo-Saxon coins, and there is a good example of it in the Bayeaux Tapestry, coming out of the sky above the representation of Edward the Confessor's Westminster Abbey. 1 know of two other swords which have it in the same position near the point. The first is that one I wrote about and illustrated in Chapter 6, found near Fornham; the other is on one of the swords Dr. Leppaaho found in Finland. (Not Dr. Leppaaho again?) But, yes. We haven't quite fmished with him yet, for his finds are so intensely significant for all those swords wrongly dated to the 13th century. There is also an interesting reference to a sword "marked with the hand" in a lOth century Saxon will.

Figurę 64. Silver-inlaid marks on thc blade ofType X sword, llth century. (C) Silvcr-inlaid marks on a bladc-frag-ment from a Viking grave in Finland, llth century. Notę the similarities in shape between thc church doorway on the wory panel and thc figurę on the left of the inscription at B; also notę how^r closely the double cross at A match-es the single one at B. The second inscription B shows the same use of pairs of upright rectangles, though there are X-shaped figures between instead of stars.