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75

it is with thcse soldiers that we arc immediately concerned. So I come to William of Apulia and a few direct quotations from his Gęsta in translation from the Latin. He says:

"The tali, long-haired Teutons jeered at thcse Normans ofshorter staturc.. .They gathcred round the Popc and arrogantly addressed him. Tell these Normans to leave Italy, to lay down their arms herc, and go bach where they came from. If they refuse, don ’t accept their offers of peaee."

They went on to assurc the Pope that these puny crop-haired little men were going very soon to be madę into mincemeat. Then William, several pages later, described the fighting method of these Schwabians, who were (like the Anglo-Saxons in the North) trained to fight on foot. This passage is the one which is generally translated as referring to their using two-handed

swords.

"This race is fuli of w ar like courąge, but is not very surę in the managemcnt ofhorses, striking harder with the sword than with the lance. Their borses are not trained to tum at the touch of their hands, nor do their lancesgive a powerful blow. The sword is preferred, and their swords are in fact especially long and sharp: they are in the habit of cut-ting a body in two. Dismounting, they stand with firm feet, and prefer to die sword in hand rather than flce." (1 owe this extremely careful, totally literał, translation to Mr. M.J. Schofield of London University.) The words "their swords were especially long" have been assumed ncarly always, to infer that these swords were "two-handed" swords, and the inference goes further into the assumption that these were like the great six-foot two-handers so prominent in almost any pub-lic collection of arms and armour. Such swords belong, almost exclusively, to the years be twe en 1490 and 1600; however, there are references in 14th-century poems and chronicles to

Figurę 68. Silver inlaid inscriptions on the blades of the Type XII swords shown in Figs. 66 and 67. The exquisite calligraphy of these inscriptions, particularly the one on side B of the blade, very clcarly shows the work of skillcd and practiced calligraphers, not illiterate bladcsmiths.