Oh yeah okay, I can see something a little bit different, a little bit different.
I will swear blind there is nothing there, there's no sign of it it, never has been.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm at the Wallace Collection again
with Toby Capwell. So Toby is a curator at the arms and armour collection here. For those of
you that don't know the Wallace Collection, it is a late 19th century collection of, well artefacts
of all kinds. Art, sculpture and armoury and it's right in the heart of London and it's fantastic,
but I'm here to look at a particular dagger and it is this one. I'm going to put my replica
down which I brought along to show. Thank you Toby and it is this one here and it is
absolutely beautiful. Like so many pieces in the Wallace Collection, it is completely iconic that
the collection is just full of absolutely gorgeous things, but can you just tell us
about this one Toby. Yeah this is inventory number A726, it's a late medieval rondel dagger.
Rondel daggers came in a number of shapes and sizes but the the large proportions of this one,
the very strong construction of the blade the relatively large grip and large guards,
suggests to me that this has as good a chance of any as being the rondel dagger of a knight
fighting in full plate armour as opposed to one that's used for civilian self-defense
or whatever. This feels like a military weapon of the late 14th, 15th centuries. It it's absolutely
no messing about you know, there's no frills on this. The only sort of little hint to fanciness is
this lovely little floret rivet here and the the brass plates, but interestingly both of them in
brass not bronze as perhaps you would expect. But yeah it's a, it's a businessman's tool, it's not
for pouncing around in in the marketplace, this is to be used, not necessarily to be seen
with and although it's got kind of a a darkened patina now, overall the condition of it is pretty
good and it hasn't been messed with it, hasn't been taken apart and restored or whatever, it
is very much is what it's supposed to be. It may have spent a bit of time in the ground and then
been excavated that's true of many of the medieval weapons in this collection, they come from burials
in France of one sort or another and so therefore this this one likely does also have an original
french medieval provenance although we can't prove it. I hadn't considered actually where
it had been found that's not something that got into my head, but you can see there's a bit of
quite aggressive corrosion here on the blade that looks like it was quite acidic. Yeah and there's
some heavy pitting here, but essentially it is you know pretty good, pretty complete condition.
What is interesting is these two brass plates here and how they're fixed, so this one is missing but
you can see from it that they're actually put into dovetails which is really quite
an awkward and a difficult way to make a handle, it's strange.
So one of the reasons that I came here is I I've done a couple of films before Toby where
I've replicated pieces out of the Wallace and brought them along, put them side by
side and to see how they are. So this is one that I've made, so it is a copy from this
and we'll see how they they fare. So overall, well give your opinion. Yeah it's.... Be kind.
It's pretty close the uh the unsharpened back section of the blade on yours is a bit longer,
yeah um but you know overall, the the intricacies of the construction are very much there.
I'm particularly interested to know what you uh have to say about the construction of the rondels,
it's easy to look at these daggers and just think okay they've take they've cut a couple of
uh circles out of a plate of steel and stuck them on but that's not what's going on here,
they're actually two plates that have been um slightly dished and then put together to form
this kind of lens shaped construction, but when you when you talk about it that way it
sounds awfully simple but actually making that with a historical technique is perhaps not so
so straightforward. Well I don't do it purely with a historic technique, so I can't answer that
directly in that sense, but obviously dishing the the discs is fine you can do that on a
log with a hammer and again I showed how it did that and then you, I'll just pop that one down,
you then have to flat the edges of the disc because otherwise if they come in like that you
won't get a good and a neat bond brazing, so you just flatten them so now you've got sort of flat
edges to the disk, now the way I do it is I actually bolt them together and then you braze it
and so what that does is it aligns the holes through the centers of the disk. Everything's as
it should be, everything's straight, everything's nice and then you can braze it and clean up. So
forming the disc is is fine but then what you need to do, obviously these don't turn on the blade, so
you have to make sure that the apertures through the discs are cut to match the tang right so that
everything is fixed together solidly and even this 500 year old, 600 year old knife there's nothing,
nice and tight. It's nice and tight, that's as usable today as it was 600 years ago.
So making those is is not too too difficult, what I find interesting now
is I've done a standard construction here on on this knife where I've put the peen of the tang
all the way through, right and pinned it over. I haven't dressed it back particularly,
I could have done a flatter job on that, but the bigger the the rivet the more secure it is,
however if you look at this one, I will swear blind there is nothing there. There's no sign
of it it, never has been, I think even if this is totally flush, ground, counter sunk
tang, you'd still see something, there's nothing there which really intrigues me because it means
that I have no idea in fact how that has been put on. I'm not sure this has ever been x-rayed,
but an x-ray might tell you something, it it probably would. In the case of the original dagger
it's quite convenient that the other copper alloy plate is missing, very convenient, so you can see
that the wood grip itself is one piece, it's not scales that have been sandwiched on. One presumes
that these decorative rivets are holding some kind of fastening through the middle maybe possibly
that that might be related to that possibly but it'll be an odd thing to do with these florets,
it seems like an odd thing to do just for abstract decoration, it it feels to me as though they have
to be there for some constructional purpose and they've then made a decorative thing out of it.
Maybe it is related to this or related to just fixing a single the single piece grip in there,
I mean, I guess you wouldn't need to once you've got the discs in place, but there's nothing there,
there's nothing there. So what is going on? I can't think of any other knife
that's constructed like that where there is just a complete mystery about how the pommel
is attached. Yeah it's a curious one. Another one that I find curious,
I'd like to know your thought on, it is the shape of the grip, because for me
the grip feels comfortable it's very tight on the hand, yeah as it should be,
but it feels comfortable when the blade edge is not aligned with your arm. It's oval, so you
want to you want to hold it with the blade going sideways. Yes that's the natural position for it,
yeah I see what you mean, which is you can get the job done that way but it's not somehow
perfectly ideal it's almost like the grip is 90 degrees incorrect to the knife, it's strange,
it doesn't make it uncomfortable, it just makes it more comfortable if the blade is on the edge.
It's sort of more comfortable if the blade is facing you
or if it's to the side; well you know these are very personal things and maybe the person who
had it liked it just fine. Well actually that's a good point, how do you think, or do you know,
knives like this were bought and sold. Was this just on a market stall or was this commissioned
for an owner who sat there and did sketches and did the modern sort of design thing?
I suspect that in weapons, it's similar to armour that you know the lower and middle echelons have
off the peg gear and noblemen tend to have custom pieces. I mean it's a little bit easier to make,
you know all kinds of weapons speculatively and I wouldn't be surprised if rich weapons did get
sometimes made speculatively, but the more rich material is involved the more of a chance you're
taking and yeah the more you want to know that you've got a buyer lined up and that's essentially
then a custom piece. This one I mean you know it's, it's nice, but it's not super duper fancy.
I don't, I think this is this dagger is well within the realm of something you just find
at a cutler's stall. It's always been one of my favourite pieces, Wallace is just full of them.
The handle wood itself, I've gone for a boxwood which is very light now in comparison with that.
Looking at it I'm guessing that's box, do we know what it is? I don't think it's ever been
analysed and you know the Wallace is a very well studied, very well documented collection,
but even then there's always new things that you can do and comprehensive wood analysis as
far as I know, hasn't really been done individually. There are certain pieces
we've done a lot more like wood and hard animal tissue analysis in the non-European parts of
the collection as part of the modern catalog project, but the European catalouges were done
in the mid-20th century when they weren't quite so rigorous with the scientific end of things.
So yeah there's still more to find out. The hollow, well really nice hollow grinding on
there as well, they've used a slightly smaller wheel than I have, in fact yeah lovely.
Otherwise next time I'll get that, yeah I've got to shorten that if we're being really pernickety,
we might as well be, But lovely, thank you very much, all right. So Toby Capwell, the Wallace
Collection, the A726 and its original maker and owner that we'll never know. Thank you very much.