More Parrying Dagger Data Thoughts

So in the aftermath of my last post, trying to kick around some thoughts, and at the prodding of Bella di Sicilia and Katerina Falconer de Lanark, I accepted that I should really figure out some kind of overall typography for sorting the various types of hilts on parrying daggers.

I looked through A.V.B. Norman's "The Rapier and Smallsword 1460-1820" for ideas. For this, Norman broke down as many variations on hilts that he was able to find (which was a fairly hefty number - he had worked at the Wallace Collection and as the Master of the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London) and broke them down with a number for each individual type or style of hilt. There's a lot there. He didn't do daggers, but he did reference Harold Peterson's "Daggers & Fighting Knives of the Western World" in his work. I immediately hunted down a copy of Peterson's book, and while it's interesting and fairly extensive - he covers "the stone age to 1900" -  he doesn't go into typing the hilts of daggers in the way that Norman does for rapiers. That's the price of casting such a wide net, though. With the limitations that Norman placed on his survey, it was much more reasonable to expect him to start to categorize and apply some kind of system to the hilts he looked at.

The thing is, I don't really want to use his system. He basically breaks down each variation of hilt into its own specific type, with some variations on them when needed. Which is fine, but I just don't think that there are so many different styles of parrying dagger hilts that I'll need to give each variation an individual type. There are just way too many similar trends among them.

So I did a first attempt of something else, which I amended into my spreadsheet of data for each of the daggers there so far. Here's a clip of the notes explaining it:

Click on this for a full size (legible) image!

I realize that this isn't perfect, and that there are already daggers which don't fit exactly into this. I was wrestling around with how to visualize this and also how to expand it in a logical way and while I was complaining about this to Lilias de Cheryngton, she said, "Like a tree or a flowchart?" and my mind went "YES DO THAT!"

Includes product placement! Check out Remy's website for fencing coaching and personal training services!

So that's probably what I'll use to really flesh this system out. Ideally, it will make expanding it easier (just add on a new branch and flow down from there) and there'll be a couple different ways to visualize the summary.

I thought about shifting every step of the way to numbers (it works for IP addresses, right?) but the existence of daggers with multiple sets of quillons makes that hard. Using letters for the subcategories allows me to describe some of these daggers, but not all. For instance, this example should be easy enough, because the quillons are the same style - just change it from quillon type e to 2e and that's a  straightforward. On the other hand, we have examples like this which would necessitate going down two separate branches of the tree, and I'm not sure how to get that to parse correctly. I'm sure that I can but I'm just not sure how yet. I'm going to keep trying to get this to work, and I can at least keep surveying more dagger sizes while I do. I'm going to end up going back over the list again and again anyhow, right?

Let's Do Dagger Data!

 (or: in which a random question makes me wonder a few things, so I made a spreadsheet about it!)

I know, I keep saying that I'm going to post about certain things (more on prize fights, more on Fabris' second book) and believe me I have some incomplete posts sitting in the drafts folder, but I got hit with a thing so here we are.

Over on the Facebooks, Lissa posted a question about daggers and dagger length, and it set off a short side conversation in the comments about what were actually used historically. So I decided to take my recollections and go get some data and throw them all together.

It's kind of an aphorism that fencers in the SCA trend towards "longer is better" in terms of weapons. As a general rule, there's something to it: being able to get your point on someone before they can reach you is always good. On the other hand, there are some important points which can throw a wrench into this. For instance, a smaller person using a sufficiently long sword can run into leverage and movement issues with the blade. If a sword is too long, a canny opponent can potentially get past your point more easily. A longer sword can be harder to keep free from being found by your opponent. 

...and a longer dagger can be much, much harder to maneuver around your sword into sound guard positions. Folks with shorter arms are particularly prone to this.

Those are all functional combat concerns, though. On a more practical level, a sufficiently long dagger becomes increasingly useless as a generally useful knife as well as becoming more and more annoying to wear as a daily carry item. If the dagger was purpose-built to be used as a dueling weapon, a companion to a sword, that might be one thing. As a day-to-day item though, that's something else.

So where does that lead us? 

Well, it lead me to hitting up the Wallace Collection, and going through their collection of daggers. I skipped past weapons which weren't plausibly parrying daggers from the period I'm studying - call it the mid 1500's onward - and then I weeded out more modern composites as well. (There were a surprising amount of 1550s dagger blades mounted on 1800s small sword hilts!) The bulk of them are from Italy, Northern Europe, Germany, or Spain. When an item had a date range listed, I used a year in the middle of the range for mapping purposes, but made a note of the range on the spreadsheet.

Of the 61 examples, all but two had the full weapon length listed. There were 23 entries which didn't have the blade length specified. Despite that, there was some neat data that I grabbed! As a note, one foot is 30.48 centimeters. I've been doing a lot of eyeball conversions during this!

Here we've got a breakdown of the overall length of the daggers in question. There's a really clear clump in the middle, ranging from just short of 37cm up to a bit more than 43cm - that's about 14.6 inches to about 17.1 inches of overall weapon length. Many fencers I know use daggers whose blades alone are in the neighborhood of those sizes, yet here we have a number of parrying daggers whose full length sits nicely inside the blade length of SCA daggers.

Now let's take a look at the weapon lengths compared to when they're from. The bulk of them are clumped from 1600 through 1615 or thereabouts, which works pretty well for what we generally study and recreate with rapiers. The much later group - 1650 through 1675 - is interesting in that the bottom half of the weapon length drops right off, leaving us with generally longer weapons in that time. We have a good number of full sail guards from Spain in there (and it may be totally composed of them, but I'd need to dig around further), with blades which are solely made for combat, and not at all suitable for general knife use.

So I mean, in short? (Ha ha.) Shorter daggers, more minimal hilts seem to be the order of the day. 

Also, here's a link to the spreadsheet if you want to take a look at the items, the raw data, or anything else! Warning: it's a work in progress! For instance, I need to clean up the conventions for descriptions (which is to say, I need to create conventions for the descriptions). Going forward, I'm hoping to get data from other institutions for fun as well. I want to hit up the Royal Armouries site next, but their interface just isn't as convenient for grabbing this information so it may take longer.

Anyway, more ongoing projects that I can do when I'm bored and that aren't dependent on the weather are handy. I'll still get back to the London Masters prize fights real soon though, and of course more Fabris.