Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod
Cutler here and today we're going to talk about
this. Which is a dagger that Geoffrey Chaucer
could have owned. I'm taking some liberties with that, but we're going to
get that to that in a minute. This is a custom dagger made for the
Tod's Workshop brand and this is a production dagger made for
the Tod Cutler brand. Two different brands, two websites, that's
what it's all about and the daggers that I'm going to be demonstrating with today
are Tod's Workshop dagger, the Chaucer one and the other ones
are Tod Cutler daggers. Right at the beginning i said that this was a dagger
that Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer could have worn and owned.
And I also said that I've taken some liberties. So let me explain.
The artwork that it has been taken from is this picture here which is held
at UC Berkeley Library I believe, and is a portrait of Chaucer. Now you can
see just around about here, is a dagger worn on a
baldric or a belt. The problem is the resolution on that
and the original artwork even when it was drawn,
just shows very, very little detail and I have to interpret that for my client, so
this whole thing is about how do I get from a picture there, which is just a few
blobs, into something like this dagger. Clearly I've taken some
liberties. I mean that's without a shadow of a doubt, but
there are some things that we do know and some things that we can interpret
and guess from the artwork. So the first thing we can see is that
he's wearing it on his right hand side. Now mostly at this period dagger
fighting manuals show a rondel dagger, and this is a rondel dagger, an early
one, being used in the ice pick grip. So we
know that it's probably edge upwards, okay?
So he pulls it out and he does that. Again,
you can see that the dagger is just being worn at a slight angle.
That means that it's probably a single point suspension
that gives you something much like the portraiture on the dagger.
What it also means, you can't see it, but because it is a single point suspension
there's a good chance and he's you know he's got money, of course has
got money, that it's quite a swanky dagger.
So there's going to be some metal fittings some something here which is
nice, and then on the bottom here there's
going to be some sort of a chape as well, because it works well. Now 14th century
on swords often they didn't put chapes, but you know,
daggers are slightly different if you've got a metal fitting at the top you've
probably got a complimentary metal fitting at the
bottom. Rondel daggers at this period could be incredibly long
and the English and the French particularly, favoured very, very long
daggers but there was another style that was
popular in England where they were quite short
and you even see them because the blade is so short
it doesn't give you the leverage and the hilt is often quite heavy. You often see
rondel daggers worn, and they're actually suspended upside down, which of
course to us in a modern context is absolutely
crazy because your knife can fall out. But
hell; it's fashionable and that was so important in medieval Europe so I've
given this a sort of an intermediate blade because we don't know where it is.
Again the portraiture i would say is not one of the stupidly long English blades
so I've given it around about an 11 inch blade or 27 centimeters, something like
that. Rondel daggers were usually single edged.
So we've got a single edged blade here, you know fairly stout, this is about 10
mm thick. And it's hollow ground, because it would
be a real chunk, it'd be a real tank of a weapon if it wasn't at
that kind of blade thickness, so I've given it a little bit of hollow grinding
there. These are all things that we have to
interpret. So I don't know any of this for a fact,
but these are things from around the subject matter, from the other daggers
that are in existence, knowing a little bit about Chaucer, that
he's got money, and so on. That we can begin to interpret these things.
Now the other thing is we don't know how old he is in this portrait i'm going to
take a stab and say he died in 1400 so i'm going to take a
stab and say 1380. Right now rondel daggers
really only began about mid 14th century and they started
with a rondel disc at the front here and pretty much a regular kind of dagger
pommel at the back, and as we got more towards the 1400's,
we end up with more classically shaped rondel like these two
Tod Cutler examples. Now these ones... this is very typically English,
this is sort of French or English, modeled a bit and one in the Wallace.
And what that is notable about these is there's a style difference,
but, that has got a disk top and bottom, that's got disk top and bottom, and by
1400 rondel daggers had developed into that.
But the other thing that's very noticeable on this one here, is that we
have metal disks with an organic, a wood in
this case, spacer between them. A very, very English
thing. So we have done an organic disc in the
middle there, wood, with a sheet bronze disc top and bottom
a little bit flouncy on the edge here because again he's got money
and the client wanted a sort of a nautical theme a little bit with the
whole thing, so we've done a little bit of shell work on the
scabbard as you saw and and these are sort of like hinting towards
sort of being a clamshell type thing. Octagonal grip,
quite English and then this pommel here is not solid cast,
it's hollow, it's done out of sheet. Very often
reproductions are made where you see it and you think well it looks
solid, so you make it solid, and then the whole thing is just like a club.
It's not this is actually a relatively light, relatively handy dagger, even
though the blade is thick even though you've got what looks like a
lot of metal in the hilt. Now if we look at that I've done what's
called pounced work. I've just punched into the bronze that's all i've done is
put it onto a log shaped it a bit put it onto a log
punched it in. And you get you can see it there that almost repousse look
of the flowing petals. Well 14th century, flowers were quite a thing;
look at the effigies on tombs, you see them all over the scabbards
and pouncing work is relatively straightforward. Then on the inside
you're gonna get focus? yes. You can see that I've just crimped it around and
again done that sort of shell little firework decoration there. And
then we come to the button at the top here.
Just a little bit prominent, now again if we go back
to the portrait, you can see from the dagger one of the very few details we
can see, is that it's got a little tang button on
it. Now one of the other things that I would note actually of course
is that the pommels on there and the guard look very much
like it's in steel, not in bronze. But again the client wanted bronze, so bronze
we did. But they could have done these daggers
in steel or bronze, so it doesn't really make any difference.
And then the last thing, just trying to obscure my face again,
so we focus on that, is there's like a mythical beast
on the scabbard there. Which is a sort of a wyvern I think it's called,
so it's kind of I don't know part eagle, part
boar, part fish. But either way, it's got fish in it and we wanted
something a bit nautical for this theme. And then we got of course the last thing
that I mentioned is that we've got the rope
work decoration just here and here on the hilt. And again
although it is rope work it is you know decoration that's seen
everywhere, but ostensibly being rope, it's kind of like nautical
themed as well. And that's really it I suppose what this film is about, is
that part of my job is to interpret what the
client wants and and looking at a picture even though it
might be incredibly indistinct, but putting that together with what we
know about the person who's wearing it, the portrait,
the the painting, the quality of it, the time period, the fashions that were around at the
time. All of that, and we can begin to get
together, with putting a knife, that might
plausibly have existed for this person. And that's
where we're at. So we've got Geoffrey Chaucer there who
is wearing a dagger that you can make almost nothing out of, and we end up
with that. Is it correct? Well clearly I can't ever say that it is
correct. Is it plausibly a dagger that Chaucer could have worn?
Yes it is, and that's really what the brief was.
Thank you very much.