Marozzo's Second Presa Revisited and Translation Funtimes

So a couple days ago I did a look at Marozzo's second presa. It was fine, it's a short little thing, and a fun play. Good times!

Then my friend Kate (whose blog is here, and has made some fantastic things and also has done some translation work!) was chatting with me about it and said that the take on it that she had was less of a shove, and more of a lifting motion from the legs. I could see that, but didn't have that as my takeaway. She mentioned having grabbed her copy of Swanger's translation of Marozzo, and that's when it clicked.

I hadn't used my copy of that translation. I'd gone over Wilson's translation at Wiktenauer, because I'd read through Swanger's before, thought myself broadly familiar enough with the play, and I didn't have the book at hand. This was where things got funky for me. Kate said that she had looked up Wilson's version, and said that it was pretty different. 

The key part of the play as translated by Wilson reads, "In the throw you will grasp the right thigh with your right hand while thrusting your head under his right arm and you will turn your shoulders and in this manner you will take him away and throw him to the ground." I read that as turning into your opponent with your right shoulder, which was more of a shove to me. 

Swanger translates that as, "...grab his right thigh with your right hand, shooting your head under his right arm as you grab his thigh, and straighten your back. This way you'll pick him off his feet and throw him to the ground..." Further he footnotes, 'straighten your back' with "Literally, "turn your shoulders rearwards"." This completely changed how the end of the play goes for me. Would lifting your opponent's leg and shoving them with your shoulder work? Yeah, I think so. On the other hand, would a lift with your legs as you straighten your shoulders out work better? Absolutely. As soon as your opponent's feet lose contact with the ground, their options shrink by a lot. They don't necessarily go down to zero, but they get pretty close to it.

So what did I learn from this?

1) Take the time to go find my preferred translation. (Even if it was out in the car and I would have had to brave the cold and snow.) Swanger is absolutely my translation of choice because of those footnotes, the extensive introduction, and the clarity of work that he has. (Which isn't to say that the text isn't unclear at times - but it's generally going to be Marozzo's fault when it is.)

2) Swapping translations mid-effort, even between discrete chunks like the blog posts let me do, can lead to some weirdnesses.

3) Talking to other people about their takes on a play and why they are what they are is going to be enlightening. (This is something I knew, but it sure got reinforced here.)

So! Next time, I'm for sure going to be working from my book.

Marozzo's Second Presa and Fiore

So a year and change ago, I took a look at Marozzo's first knife defense and compared it to the material in Fiore. After the last series of posts I wanted to get back to something I hadn't poked at in a while and also something that would be contained to a single post - so let's look at Marozzo's second defense against getting jumped by a guy with a knife!

Here we have a response to someone coming at you with an underhanded attack with a dagger. Marozzo wants you to block down hard with your left hand, grabbing his wrist or forearm. While you're making the grab, step in with your right foot to their outside. To perform the throw from there, grab their right thigh and pull up while you shove under their arm with your shoulder, putting them into the ground. (One of the sword and buckler plays describes a very similar presa but notes that you can "carry him away" if you want, so lifting them up into a fireman's carry is a very period option as well, it looks like!)

My first thought upon working through this in my head was that unlike the first presa, there wouldn't be clear depiction of this defense in Fiore. As best I can tell, I'm not mistaken here. Of the nine dagger masters in Fiore, only the eighth and ninth discuss dealing with this kind of underhand dagger attack, and there are no plays from either of them which resemble this takedown at all. 

Very similar takedowns do appear elsewhere in earlier wrestling texts though - on page 51 in Jessica Finley's Medieval Wresting, which is a working guide to Ott Jud's German wrestling treatise from the mid-1400s, this is termed the "slipping through" and Finley states, "This throw is shown in many manuscripts including the Kal (In Service to the Duke, Tobler, page 182), Talhoffer (Medieval Combat, Rector, plate 196), and Auerswald's "Running through Under the Arm", plate 10." Germany had a very rich tradition of unarmored wrestling both for sport and earnest defense, so honestly if it was going to show up anywhere else, I'm not surprised it showed up here. 

I have a couple thoughts about why a similar style of takedown doesn't show up in Fiore though, and they all center around one thing - Fiore has an assumption of armor. It isn't that everything is illustrated with armor (it isn't), but the techniques as best I can tell are based around the worst-case assumption in terms of dealing with the additional weight, bulk, or restriction of armor.

In this case, getting under the arm as shown in Marozzo is a tight fit in many cases. I certainly wouldn't want to trust my ability to get my helmeted head and armored body into there if I'm wearing a full harness. I might also be worried about if I'd get hung up on my opponent's armor in this case as well. It's a good takedown - and Fiore loves him some takedowns - but I'm really not sure I see it being a great idea here.

Also, I'm not all that sure that it's reasonable to assume that someone in full harness can themselves pick up their similarly armored opponent and be balanced and in good control. Unless, I suppose, they're Hulk von Hogan - well known practitioner of Fiore! (I'm a very serious scholar who takes himself very seriously. Clearly.)

With that, I'm going to wrap this post. I think I'll do the next presa pretty soon though - I'm hoping to find more lines to draw between them and Fiore's plays before I'm done, and I want to get to a presa that has a solid similarity to dig into!

More Guild Ranks and Drama and Things Like That!

Well, pandemic brain, mental health, surgery, and the holidays all conspired to make this take a lot longer then I wanted to get this done. (Remember when I said a day or two? Ha ha, I'm so optimistic before the crushing reality sets in.) But here we finally are, and that's just how it is, and we're doing the research and writing as we can, as best we can.

When we left off, we'd walked through the promotions up from scholar to free scholar. Next up would be Provost, and then finally Master. (To remind folks, there were the four ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole guild. They must have changed over time, but we have no record of this specifically, let alone how the promotions were decided.) 

The prize for Provost is where some of the really entertaining stuff starts to appear. When a free scholar decided to play for Provost, both he and his Master went to the four ancient Masters to discuss it. (The manuscript specifically notes that if the student's master were dead, they could choose one of the four ancient masters to fight under, so that's nice.) The four ancient Masters set the day of the prize, where the free scholar was supposed to fight at the longsword, backsword, and staff (though in reality these were somewhat flexible). At this point, the free scholar had to, at his own expense, give four weeks notice to all Provosts of the guild who lived within 60 miles of the location where the prize was to be fought that it was happening. For any Provost inside that radius who was not informed, the free scholar had to pay the ancient Masters a penalty of five shillings. According to the currency converter from my previous post, that comes out to $44.40 in today's dollars. Additionally, any Provost who lived more than 20 miles from the prize fight would have half of their travel expenses paid by the free scholar. (As an aside, Lilias pointed out to me the possibility of doing some fun math here as a free scholar - is it more expensive to pay half of someone's travel expenses or to pay the penalty for not inviting them?) Finally, assuming they pass their prize fight, to receive their Provost's Letter they must pay "to the four ancient Masters for the sealing thereof after the rate which is set amongst them with all manner of other duties belonging to them."

It all keeps coming back to those promotion fees and belt tests, right?

Once the free scholar fights his prize and becomes a Provost of the guild, some new rights and responsibilities are theirs. First, they may not keep a school within seven miles of any Master's school unless they receive permission from the four ancient Masters. They may not teach any scholar unless that scholar is sworn to the Provost's own Master; if done, the Provost must then pay the Master a fee of two pence for each scholar and another two pence to the "most ancient Master of the four" as well as showing his account books every quarter. If they happen to live within the 60 mile radius of a Provost's prize and they know about it, they must appear and fight (unless they are ill or "busied in the Queen's affairs") or pay a penalty of six shillings eightpence to the four ancient Masters. Finally, they are not supposed to play their Master's prize for another seven years - which again, seemed in practice to be a guideline more than a rule.

Now, the prize fight for Master. The Provost who wishes to become a Master does this through the Master under which he fought his prize for Provost (or again, under one of the four ancient Masters if necessary). Assuming they all approve, the four ancient Masters choose the day for the prize, and the Provost will have to fight at the two handed sword, the "Basterd sword", the pike, backsword, and (finally!) the rapier and dagger. The Provost was required to inform all Masters that lived within 40 miles eight weeks in advance of the day. Unlike the Provost, there's no mention of penalties for either the Provost for not informing anyone nor to the Master who doesn't attend. 

Assuming the student does well, he pays for his Master's letter and the sealing of it and all the duties that he might owe (which again, are unspecified), he's given his Master's oath and boom! A new Master! At this point, according to the Master's oath, the newly promoted fencer should not set forth any prize (which I take to mean bring up a student for a prize fight, but I could be wrong) or keep more than one school in London. Other items of the oath include stating that they also shouldn't poach students from another Master, set up a prize fight for a hopeful free scholar or Provost without going through the proper channels, and so on in that vein. 

Interestingly, there are a small number of instances where there did not seem to be a prize fight at all. Four times in the Sloane manuscript we see, instead of the usual prize fight information, "Master's agreement" which seems to indicate a handwaved promotion to Master. This also happened six times with a promotion to Provost, three times for free scholar, and in one Provost's prize it let the candidate skip the back sword fights, though not long sword. Naturally, there aren't any notes describing why this happened, only that it did.

Aylward has some notes as to how the prize fights themselves were conducted, which are pretty interesting. He notes that in each weapon, the prizor would be fighting two bouts with each person answering the prize - so if there were four weapons and six answerers that would mean the prizor would be fighting forty-eight bouts in that day. Naturally, many of those bouts would be one right after the other as well, although Aylward describes how the Masters running the show would call "this weapon is now done" with a fanfare of drums and would then confer with themselves upon it, giving the prizor a chance to sit and rest. They would then call "The first bout at such-and-such weapon" to more drums, and the bouts would continue.

There were definitely rules of engagement in the fights, too. Per Aylward, in 1599 George Silver (we had to bring him up eventually!) bemoaned that "there are now in these days no grips, wrestling, closes, striking with the hilts, daggers, or bucklers used in our fence-schools." I can almost hear him shaking his fists at the sky while screaming, "Back in my day!"

Interesting fact about Silver, though? He was not remotely associated with the London Masters of Defense. They were a trade guild, and Silver was a gentleman - certainly not someone who would join a common corporation! That said, he did write that he had nothing bad to say about the Masters, and he accounted them quite skilled.

I know, I said I'd yell more about Silver. I'll yell about him in another post, because we need to wrap this up sometime. But I did promise some drama, so here we are:

The Company of the Masters of the Science of Defense was not, as far as we can tell, actually an officially chartered guild. I mentioned this in a previous post. Henry VIII signed letters patent in 1540 to charter the guild. Henry died in 1547, and papers like the one he signed typically lapse upon the monarch's death and as Aylward puts it, "it depended largely upon the capacity of the grantees to satisfy the claims of officials paid only by their fees as to whether a revival was obtained from his successor." We had been wondering how the guild funded itself, and it seemed pretty slim - and this may well be proof of that. The Masters sure kept acting like they had a patent and they said they had one, but there's no record of it existing during Edward VI's, Mary's, or Elizabeth's reigns. In fact, they had been ordered to produce it in 1545 so they could set up schools in London, and the paperwork did not appear in court.

No, I don't know how they were able to open up schools anyway.

The Sloane manuscript purports that Elizabeth renewed the patent and added to it the right "to play openly within the City of London." (Which is just really stylish.) But no, there's no record of this existing anywhere else. They did fight a number of prizes before royalty, so they seemed to have some favor there, but not enough to get the paperwork from them.

With that, I'm going to wrap it here because otherwise I'll never post it. Next time, maybe Fabris. Or yelling about Silver and his shenanigans. Maybe Marozzo for variety. Who can say what'll happen around here?

Guild Ranks! Money! Politics! All that kind of drama! Part One of a Dramatic Series!

In my latest entry for my Let's Yell About the London Masters of Defense posts, we're going to look at the various ranks in the guild, what they would be allowed or forbidden, the money that was involved, and all that stuff that's both pretty practical and also could contribute to a ridiculous amount of drama.

There will, naturally, be some yelling about George Silver. Because if we're yelling about money and drama involving the London Masters, I can absolutely work in some complaining about Silver at the same time. It's basically mandatory.

To recap, there were four normally achievable ranks in the guild: Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were the Four Ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole thing, but we don't have any records of how the people in those positions changed or were replaced.)

Becoming a Scholar was something that basically anyone could do. When you decided to go to a master (or a provost who had been permitted to teach), the presumptive scholar would be given the oath by their new master (or possibly an usher or Provost so delegated) and pay the master 12 pence for the oath and 4 pence for entrance to the guild. Additionally, whatever fee the scholar and master agree on would be paid half up front, and the remainder as they agree to it; the examples of these fees are 30 and 40 shillings, which I imagine is a ballpark number for what the costs would have been. Despite there being no specific fee, masters are forbidden from undercutting one another. The scholar also had to bring their own weapons and supplies, or else "agree with his master or his master's deputy" for them.

(As an aside, I went to this currency converter and checked how much 40 shillings (or two pounds, per this site) would be in 2021 dollars, and it says about $710. I haven't done any real digging into how accurate that truly is, but it's amusing nonetheless!)

What's missing is how often a scholar is typically going to pay this fee to their master. The 16 pence in up-front fees are pretty clearly one-time costs, but the payment for lessons seems like something that would be recurring. There's nothing in the Sloane manuscript hinting at whether these are yearly or something else.

Incidentally, we don't have anything like an exact wording for the oath a scholar had to take. We know that it was on the cross of a sword, and that he wasn't allowed to use the teachings against his master or to teach them until he was permitted, but that's about it. No specific wording is recorded for that oath.

So! Moving upward, like I described in my previous post, the scholar could say that he wanted to fight for free scholar, get tested, get permitted to do so, and get the prize fight scheduled. There was one hitch which didn't come up in my last post because it was a background point to the prize fight itself, but it's germane to what I'm writing about here:

The London Mayor and Aldermen. 

As previously described, a prize fight was kind of a big deal - nearly a local holiday in terms of impact on the city around it. The fighter would process through the city with drummers and a retinue all the way to the location of the fight. People would want to skip out on work to go watch, and it seems about as disruptive to an area as a big game day is to the area around Fenway Park. In the "Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia,"(a catalog of London legal correspondence and records) we can see mention of letters from Ambrose, Earl of Warwick to the Aldermen asking for a license for his servant to play his prizes. The aldermen would routinely pull out "but the plague" as a ready excuse, and it really seemed as though getting permission from them could be a real pain. While they could prohibit the procession through the City of London pretty readily, there were a couple workarounds for holding the prize fights themselves: either go outside the city, or take advantage of one of the liberties therein - specifically Blackfriar's.

Going outside the city was straightforward enough, and there are records of a number of prize fights taking place almost literally in the shadow of the city walls. What seemed to happen more regularly however, was making use of the liberties of London - areas which were outside the control of the civic authorities. These liberties contained theaters such as the Curtain and the Theater, and inn-yards at the Bell Savage and the Bull. Blackfriars as well was located within a liberty, and has evidence of potentially being a headquarters of sorts of the London Masters, including rooms owned by William Joyner, one of the four Ancient Masters of the guild.

Back to the prize fight itself! These were events which were potentially extremely lucrative for the individuals fighting their prize, as well as the guild itself. There's no particular proof that theaters or inns would charge for admission; there seemed to be a strong ideal that prizes should be public. That said, it's very likely that they would have done a brisk trade in drinks. However, the real  money made for the guild would be from the audience throwing it at the stage if they were particularly pleased with the fights that they saw - certainly a real motivation for the fencers involved! The take from the stage seems as though it would have been divided up among the prize fighter(s), the guild, and based on a remark from the diary of Philip Henslowe, who owned a number of theaters, the venue itself. Henslowe notes that he was owed 40 shillings, which as noted above could be a really decent chunk of money for just supplying the space. If that's the cut that the guild was willing to hand over to the venue, I'm very sure that what they wanted to keep for themselves and for the prize fighters would be comparable at the least.

So! Assuming the scholar was judged sufficiently skilled, he would have to pay "all orders and duetyes" as appropriate to a free scholar. The Sloane manuscript doesn't indicate what those would be, though. There aren't any indications of further privileges that a free scholar gets, only that they need to wait for seven years before they're allowed to test for Provost.

This is getting a little long, so I'm going to cut it off here, and wrangle the remaining draft into a part two within a day or so, rather than sitting on this for even longer. (Pandemic brain is a thing. Who knew? Focusing on things is hard now.)

Let's Yell About Prize Fights

So wow, you get one injury and a lot of your focus for even writing about fencing and fencing-related topics is just completely shot. Whoops. But hey, we're back now and as promised I'm going to have another couple of fun times posts and yell about the London Masters of Defense prize fights, how they worked, fun things around them, and all of that. I've talked a little bit about them before (in this four-part series: one, two, three, and four) but I really wanted to focus in on the guild in general and the prize fights in particular here, rather than as an adjunct topic to the sizes of raised stages. Also, honestly, they're a fun thing to read about and also for me to write about here, and I wanted to spend some time just going on about a fun topic today. I'm going to focus solely on the prize fights in this entry; I think in a subsequent post I'll yell about the guild as a guild, talk about how it worked, poke more at their structure, and talk about the money.

Sources for people to hunt down and read! I'm pulling from a few books and articles here. The first is "The Noble Science" by Herbert Berry. This is a transcription and study of the Sloane Ms. 2530, which are some papers pertaining to the Masters of Defense, covering about 1540 to 1590. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend this. It's a fantastic resource. Next is "The English Master of Arms" by J.D. Aylward. The sections which cover the time period of interest are just wonderful. Finally, "Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay" by Craig Turner and Tony Soper. This is less about the time period in general and focuses more on presenting the manuals of di Grassi, Saviolo, and Silver for stage combat purposes, but it still has some good stuff in here.

For easily found online articles and resources we have "Public Fencing Contests on the Elizabethan Stage" and "The Schools of Defense in Elizabethan London" both of which are available on JSTOR. (Herbert Berry also has a handful of articles there, focusing primarily on playhouses. Not directly relevant here, but really good reads!)

Getting to it, then!

In this context, prize fights were fought because they were a requirement of advancement in the London Masters of Defense. There were four ranks in the guild - Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were four Ancient Masters who were the heads of the guild, but we don't have any record about if or how they were replaced over time.) When someone decided that they wanted to go learn the noble science and became a student, they were administered an oath and admitted to the guild as a Scholar. (There was some entertaining financial rigmarole around this, which I'll get into in another post.) At this point, they'd study under that master for an indeterminate period of time; there's no specific time laid out that a scholar was required to study before they could challenge to become free scholars. 

When a scholar felt as though they were ready to become a free scholar, they would first go to their master and ask permission to hold a prize fight. Their master was supposed to contact the four ancient masters of the guild and let them know of the scholar's intent. At that point, the ancient masters would set up a private test within a school where the scholar would be required to defeat six other scholars, specifically with the back sword and longsword. This private test is not a requirement we see for the later prize fights but let's be honest, we can all think of newer fencers who would absolutely have tried to rush ahead with a public display before they were ready. Assuming the scholar passed that test to the satisfaction of the ancient masters the scholar would be told what days he would play his prize. The first day would involve the longsword against whatever scholars wished to fight, and the second day would have whichever other weapons the ancient masters decided upon. Sword and buckler were the most common, but staff and backsword also showed up in the records we have. Afterwards the ancient masters would confer and decide whether or not to promote the scholar.

Assuming the scholar was promoted to free scholar, they would pay whatever dues were owed to the guild and not be permitted to fight their prize for provost within seven years. Despite this restriction, the Sloane manuscript notes a number of folks who fought their provost's prize well before the seven years were up, though I don't know of any source explaining how those came to pass. I'm assuming that money talks, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Things would get more interesting when the free scholar sought to play for provost. Just like the last go-round, the free scholar would ask his master's permission to fight the prize and the four ancient masters would set the day and location. At that point, it was up to the free scholar to notify all provosts who lived within 60 miles of the prize fight's location, and they would owe a fine to the guild for each provost not notified. While provosts who lived within 20 miles of the prize fight traveled on their own dime, any provost farther away would have half their travel costs paid by the free scholar. In the section describing how the Provost's prize was to be played, the Sloane manuscript states that the free scholar would play at the two handed sword, back sword, and staff but the summaries of a number of prize fights list a number of different weapons used. Sometimes fewer than those three were used and sometimes more; I presume it was up to the ancient master who was overseeing that particular prize being fought. As before, the ancient masters discussed the prize fights and decided whether or not to promote the free scholar.

Again, assuming the free scholar was promoted to provost, they were not to be allowed to fight their master's prize for seven more years. Also, again, there are a number of people who fought their provost's prize well before the required seven years between free scholar and provost. Maybe the idea of seven years between ranks was more a guideline than a hard and fast rule?

Moving up to master was much the same as moving to provost. He would approach the four ancient masters, and they would set the day. The provost would then give warning at least eight weeks in advance to all masters who lived within 40 miles of the prize fight's location. The page listing the order for the master's prize says that the weapons would be the two handed sword, bastard sword, back sword, and the rapier and dagger. As with the provost's prize, in actuality there were some variations in the weapons used. While there was no further rank to challenge for, the restriction at this point was that the new master could not open up a school of their own for a year and a day after they were promoted.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, at each of the ranks of free scholar, provost, and master, there are recorded instances of the prize fight not being fought at all, but the rank being awarded by an agreement of the four ancient masters. There aren't any details about the reasons for these, so it is up to us to speculate as to why this was the case.

Finally, the Sloane manuscript lists a number of challenges which were fought before the Crown. These weren't prize fights, but presumably displays of skill which the Crown had to attend as part of the job; I don't think this was a specific indication of royal favor beyond "this is one of the guilds in London and the Crown is attending this function" or something similar, mostly because the London Masters weren't nobility or the like, but were middle-class tradesmen.

That's the quick and dirty discussion of the prize fights themselves. In the next couple posts, I want to look at some other issues in and around the guild - the duties and restrictions on the various ranks, as well as some of the problems they had in getting the prize fights set up. I also want to touch on what I've been able to figure out of some of the economics that were in play.

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.