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.

Intermission: The Warrant for the London Masters of Defense

It's been a while since my last update, and I've still got my notes on the next set of Fabris' rules to go through. As we all know though, things are kind of a mess right now and it can be really hard to accomplish anything.

So just to keep posting anything, here's the text of the Warrant that Henry VIII signed on July 20, 1540 to form the London Masters of Defense, because it's interesting!

Ric. Beste, Humph. Bassett, Rob. Polmorth, John Legge, Peter Beste, Philip Williams, Ric. Lord, John Vincent, Nic. de la Hay, masters of the “Science of Defence,” and Will. Hunt, John Frye, Hen. Whytehed, Gilbert Bekett, Edw. Pynner, Thos. Tourner, Jeffrey Gryffyn, Thos. Hudson, Thos. Tynosey, Hen. Thyklyppes, and John ap Ryce, provosts of the same science. Commission to enquire and search, in all parts of England, Wales, and Ireland, for persons being scholars of the said science of defence (many of whom, regardless of their oaths made to their masters on first entering to learn the said science, upon the cross of a sword in remembrance of the Cross whereon Our Lord suffered, have for their own lucre of their “unsaciable covetous minds,” without sufficient licence, resorted to all parts of England, keeping open schools and taking great sums of money for their labours, and yet have insufficiently instructed their scholars, to the great slander of the masters and provosts of the science and of the good and laudable orders and rules of the same), and to take any scholar so misusing himself before the nearest justice of the peace to be bound in sufficient sureties not to repeat his offences against his said oath and the said orders and rules, or in case of refusal to be committed to gaol. Westm., 20 July 32 Hen. VIII. Del. Westm. 20 July.—S.B. (In English.)

(Text from: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol15/pp445-481)

It's really interesting to see that it isn't about going out and teaching, but about going out and dragging off teachers who are misrepresenting themselves or not teaching sufficiently well and punish them for it.

Huh!

Okay, we're going to try to get the first post up for the Fourth Rule for the sword alone by the end of the coming weekend.

(Be safe, everyone. Okay?)

Some Notes From a Fencing Student, 1657

I've got a couple more half-written drafts for Pennsic-related posts, but a sudden explosion of awful real world things ate my head. I'll get them up this weekend.

In lieu of this though, I was just pointed at this HROARR article from 2013 which contains a translation of notes from a student who was learning from one of Fabris' students.

I'm really, really amused by how many of those notes look incredibly similar to notes I've taken from things like VISS and WMAW.

Journals, Letters, and Travelogues - Primary Source O'Clock, a post-Pennsic Post

This is the first of a series of post-Pennsic blog posts. Yay! This is mostly me working through an inspiration that Pennsic gave me, as well as collecting a bunch of resources that folks gave me elsewhere on the internet. So, onward!

One of the things I've been inspired to start doing is journaling as Donovan. I've seen this done before by a few people; notably Master Luke Knowlton's journals, but as recently as this Pennsic by Master Adam Comyn of the Middle Kingdom.

As a point of difference, Luke's journals are written as if by a purely historical Luke Knowlton - in and around historic real world events. (And they are amazing.) Adam's writings are written in a historical style, but by the SCA persona of Adam, Baron Comyn.

I'm planning on beginning this as an exercise in thinking more like Donovan would have or should have, and so to begin I'm going to be taking Adam's track on this - writing journals, letters, and so on as Donovan the persona, as opposed to Donovan in history. This basically means that I'll be referencing SCA occurrences, but tweaking them to get them to work better as though they were actually happening in a more period context. I mean, let's be clear - I don't have the masterful grasp of the time period and events as Master Luke does, so I don't want that to be a barrier to getting this project rolling - I can always start writing Donovan's Journals from the Low Countries later on! Beginning steps are just fine, and I think I'll still learn a good deal from this. Also, it's a good penmanship exercise, though I won't always be using a pen with a nib, just for practical reasons.

Master Adam has four rules that he uses, and I think they're pretty good:

1. Try to write about the day on that day.
1. If nothing else, this will let me keep things straight in my head.
2. No editing once words are on the page.
1. I'm going to be physically writing! I may cross out a thing and re-phrase it, but the crossed out section should still be legible. (If nothing else, this is some real opportunity for comedy.)
3. Allusion and allegory are always allowed.
1. Basically, I can always reference other bigger stories, but they may not be what they sound like.
4. Be the persona, more or less.
1. Donovan in this sense is a historic character, and I'll be trying to sort out some attitudes he may have had through this, as well as better fleshing out his actual historical persona. Also, it's about trying to write as though he would have circa 1600, and that means removing modern references and making it work.
2. This also means that I get to start playing with ideas as to how my more amusing associations and such in the SCA may or may not actually make historic sense in some ways, though for these writings I'll still be writing as a resident of my local Shire with these neighboring Baronies, in my Eastern Kingdom.

To help with this, I asked on Facebook if anyone had suggestions as to journals and letters that I could read, so as to get a better idea of the writing styles of the time, as well as daily life and the like. And oh man, did people deliver! Here's what I was given (and at least one of these is winging its way to me even now):

England, or England in the Low Countries

• Samuel Pepys' Diary
• "An Elizabethan in 1582, The Diary of Richard Maddox, Fellow of All Souls"
• "The Actions of the Low Countries", by Sir Roger Williams, ed. D.W. Davies.
• Monro, His Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment Called Mac-Keys
• Correspondence of Sir Henry Unton
• Thomas Conigsby's journal (The English side of the Seige de Rouen!)

France

• Agrippa D'Aubigné "Sa Vie à ses Enfants" (Available in English!)
• Blaise Monluc's "Commentaires," trans. by Charles Cotton
• Essays of Michel de Montaigne (Also available at Project Gutenberg.)
• Relation du Siege de Rouen by Guillaume Valdory (Mirrored in Conigsby's journal, above!)
• Memoirs of Robert, Segnieur de Florange
• Memoirs of Chevalier de Bayard 

Spain, or Spain in the New World, also Spain in Southeast Asia

• Catalina de Erauso, the "Lieutenant Nun" (Apologies for the dated title of this edition.)
• The Memoirs and Memorials of Jacques de Coutre: Security, Trade and Society in 16th- and 17th-century Southeast Asia

Italy

• Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo  (Translated excerpts; if you read Italian you can get the whole thing.)

More Travelogues

• Coryat, Thomas. Coryat's Crudities. 1611
• Volume One
• Volume Two
• Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary: Containing His Ten Years Travel Through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland and Ireland. 1617. 
• Volume One
• Volume Two
• Volume Three
• Volume Four

Other

• The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554-1562

Early Exploration of New England

• Gabriel Archer and John Brereton writing about Gosnold's 1602 expedition. 
• Pring 1603
• Waymouth, and others 
• David Quinn has edited some excellent books on the subject.

Thanks to Jehan, Luke, Niccolo, Elias, Aildreda, LOGOS, Rufinia, Aubri, Christian, and Tacit for supplying all these recommendations! I'll keep editing this post with links to where they can be found as I dig them up.