43837 oak sih4

126

126

Figurc 108. A XVIA, also from London, once destroycd bm now restored by the Royal Armouries, Leeds, c. 1325-50.

BL: 83.8cm.

There is a very nice elear representation of a XVI sword in a little sculpture of St. Peter, dated to 1328, in a roof-boss high up in the vault of the nave of Exeter Cathedral (Fig. 110A), and another with a long blade is shown in a St. Paul painted by Lippo Menami in 1317, in a large mural at San Gemigniano in Italy. Another - a XVTA in its scabbard - is shown in the same painting (Figs. 110B and C), and there is an actual sword, a very good example of XVIA, which I sup-pose is somewhere out there, now. It used to be, long years ago before the war--the Great War, not World War II!--in the collection of M. Charles Boissone in Switzerland (Fig. 110D).

Type XVII is one which can fairly safely be said to be dateable, in the same way as XIV and XVI, for it seems to have been fashionable all over Furope between c. 1350 and 1425. As we have seen, XIV was universally popular between 1275-1325, and it seems that XVI was much in favour between 1310 and 1360. Type XVII is charaeterised, in the first place, by being a big "bastard" sword - I know of no short-gripped examples. Although one must beware of statements like that--of all the literally hundreds of thousands of swords, even of one type or another, which were actually madę, only a tiny, pitiful remnant survives for study. So if one says, "I have never seen one," it cannot, by any trick of casuistry, be taken to mean that there never was one. However, as far as can be known from what we have been able to study, it is possible to say that Type XVII was a long "sword of war" with a hand-and-a-half grip and a blade, sharply tapering, often of fiat hexagonal section, but sometimes of diamond section, with sometimes (not always) a shallow fuller at the forte, running about one third of the length. Characteristic also is a large, flat-oval pommel which appears on perhaps 75% of actual survivors and on those shown on monumental brasses and sculptures. (Fig. 111 is a finc example.) Pommels of a different shape, like a long pear or a plummet or the stopper of an old-fashioned cut-glass scent bottle, are found on later examples, after c. 1380 (Fig. 112).

As a footnote, let me add that the sword shown here in Fig. 111 was once minę. I bought it at Sotheby's in London, in 1952, and had it for sevcral years before the necessities of feeding and schooling three children led to the painful necessity of selling it. I did at least have the satisfaction of parting with it to one of the world's great collectors and a very fine gentleman, Mr. F. A. Christensen of Copenhagen. It rests now, I believe, with the rest of his magnificent collection, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. The photograph shows what a fine condition it is in, but it cannot show the gorgeous colour of the patination on the unblemished blade, which was a rich purple with here and there glints of almost peacock blue.

The next type, XVIII, is perhaps the absolute ideał of what everyone imagines (if they bother to imagine at all) a medieval knightly sword should be like. It is the perfect cut-and-thrust sword: its edges taper in a gende, elegant curve to an acute point, and its section is that of a flattened diamond, often with the four faces hollowed to produce a