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The second question was to look at who could actually afford a sword, and when they could carry them. These were presumably women who had gained guild membership through husbands or fathers, but were now trading in their own right. Perhaps unexpectedly, looking at guild records to investigate the size of workshops also brought to light several female armourers. Very often blades were by one craftsman, then hilted and finished locally for their final purchaser. Manuscript sources also show a number of unusual longsword designs optimised for fighting in armour, blunt for much of their length but with flared spearpoint tips and even secondary handguards on the shaft.Īs part of this, I spent time with several modern swordsmiths looking at the metallurgy behind swords and physical processes of making a blade, and studied documentary sources to see how it was done in the middle ages. However, there were definite changes through time – notably with swords optimised for thrusting becoming more common than those optimised for cutting, and then a move back toward dual purpose designs - which reflected changes in fighting style and armour. Partly, this was simply because longswords were never produced to standardised patterns, and each maker and user had their own preferences. The first was obviously to look at how designs changed through time. When I was planning the book, I therefore wanted to make sure it answered a number of questions.
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Instead, we can only date the first longswords from their appearance in art, after which they appears in a variety of different forms for the next several centuries, and are used in a variety of different ways and contexts, not all of them strictly functional. Whereas something like a Bren Gun or the Luger was adopted on a known date, had a reasonably short, defined service life and was used by clearly defined military forces, none of those things are true of the Longsword. Writing an Osprey book for something like the longsword is rather different from writing one about a more conventional weapon. This may far outweigh how often it was actually used in combat – we still speak of towns being “put to the sword” whatever the actual weapons used were, and no amount of pointing out that polearms were probably more common and effective weapons is ever going to offset generations of watching sword-fights in movies and video games. The sword has always had a special significance among weapons. On the blog today, author Neil Grant explores how his upcoming Weapon title, The Medieval Longsword, came to be. It went on to become a key weapon on the battlefields of late medieval Europe, creating a new system of sword fighting. The longsword evolved from the war swords and great swords of the 14th century, and emerged as a battlefield weapon in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. The formidable European longsword remains one of the most impressive and distinctive edged weapons of the late medieval era.