hi it's Tod of Tod's workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're gonna have a
look at how medieval and renaissance people wore their daggers. There's lots
of different ways and I'm just going to run through the different systems, the
different ways of doing it, with my assistant Hob here who you'll be pleased
to know is wearing his hat at the fashionable "at the pill-garlic". Now the
first thing to say is that of course there's no standardized way of doing
anything people were individual then their individual now people chose to
wear things in different ways but if you look through the artwork you'll find
probably a million different ways that people wore their daggers but I'm going
to talk about some of the principle ways that it was done so most of the daggers
that I supply come very simply with a thong. The idea of suspending a dagger on
a frog, so basically a leather fitment, here that the belt then fits through
which does have the advantage of keeping the dagger exactly in the place you want
it to be, that's really more of a 17th century and onwards thing before that
the ways of wearing a dagger were much more personal they were cobbled together
by the individual. They were just done how the person wanted to do it so nobody
can come up to you and tell you that that's wrong really unless you're
wearing a frog. If I'm wrong about the Frog please send me pictures but that's
my understanding of it. The most simple way of doing it this is a Mary Rose
bollock dagger so a mid 16th century dagger the thong has got a knot in the
end here the belt is very simply just passed through. Put that on now. What it
does mean of course is that the knife dangles around a lot and you'd
intuitively think that that's a really bad system but actually it does have
advantages so you can see that the whole knife is free to move it does mean that
when Hob is passing through doorways and sitting down and chairs and things like
that the knife will tend to move out of the way if any of you've worn a long
dagger sitting down in chairs it can be quite problematic as an example again if
you're moving past things this has some freedom to move out of the way and not
get caught up so it's not as daft a system as it seems. Hob can you just whip
the belt off again. Now just passing the thong through allows hob to move the
dagger in two different places and if you're a working man that could be quite
useful but there are other times where actually you want the dagger to stay
pretty much where it is so what you have here is you've inverted the loop you've
just turned it inside out and created a loop that you can pass your belt
through and so now it locks down onto the scabbard and it doesn't want to move
it still has those advantages of being free to move and can get knocked out of
the way but the dagger now doesn't slide up and down the belt the loop is holding
it in position again depending on who you are and how you live your life and
what kind of fighting you like doing or whatever that dagger is now allows you
the freedom of the dangle but what it does do is stay in the same place so
when your hand goes there it's here and it hasn't moved around to the back so
we're now going to switch onto another dagger here we have an early 15th
century bollock dagger and this one has had a couple of slits cut in the back of
the scabbard and the belt has passed through that it's a double layer
scabbard so it doesn't interfere with the blade going in and out but they
still did it like that anyway even on single layer scabbard but it wasn't that
common you look in the museum's you look at the found examples you see the slits
sometimes but not very often. You see it on eating knives as well and then the thong
has just been brought around and tied off in a pretty little scabbard knot for
a bit of decoration so there's no particular advantages to this I think it
just comes down to preference again do you want your knife a little more
free-flowing do you want to absolutely locked solid
that probably depends a lot on the trades that you were doing as well you
know if you're a clerk or something you sitting down most of the time and it's a
shortish dagger you can probably get away with that right let's look at
another one here we've got a an English or Italian style Basilard and very
simply I've used the thongs to tie off a loop going over the belt and back around
the front and tied off in a knot again it comes down to personal preference so
it's nice and solid stays exactly where you know it's going to be next up is a
Rondel these often have a particular problem in that there's quite a lot of
weight in the hilt and especially with things like the Begundian Rondel the
late 15th century ones where you get fat Rondels here then you've got the grip
and you end up with a short blade as well it's a style at the time and what
that means is the dagger often doesn't really hang vertically particularly with
short Rondel daggers this is quite long it actually can hang upside down you see
that in the artwork quite a lot so if you put two hanging points using your
cord so you can see that the thongs pass through punched holes in the belt and it
allows that that width of suspension for some stability into the dagger
then if we just turn it over you can see I've just turned the the thumbs through
it comes in here back out the front and tucked underneath but if you do it that
way it hangs much better being a military knife it's very often worn on
the right hand side and the knife now is hanging vertically and it's secure it
stays where you want still also has a little bit of flexibility about it which
is handy like I said for moving around here we've moved into another system of
suspending daggers so medieval people didn't have pockets so all their bits
and pieces were carried in their pouches and so on so you've also got eating
knives and daggers there's quite a lot of stuff dangling off your belt so often
you see it where people condense that and all I've done here is just push the
dagger through the suspension loops on the pouch so now you have a single unit
that you can pick up and put on in the morning or whatever, so Hob. Civilian
daggers are often seen on on the left hand hip or the right hand this is
usually seen on the right hand hip which is naturally where you go for your pouch
so it makes sense that that's where that is worn you might have a piece tie here
as it's called just a leather thong to hold it in which the thong of the
scabbard itself has so you can use it for that or if the scabbard is
tight-fitting then you just leave it and you know that the knife will be there in
a way another way of wearing it with the pouch is wearing it vertically this way
and this has been done slightly differently again so rather than
threaded through the owner of the pouch has cut a couple of slits in the back of
the pouch here that the dagger passes through and then it's held at the top
here by the belt I guess you can tie the thongs onto the belt so that the
scabbard stays where you want it to be and again it's it's just another way of
having a single kit apart when you get up in the morning and you go out and
about this particular style you often often see with bollock daggers both this
one and passing through the loops of the of the pouch and again as you can see
everything you want is in one place your money and your knife to protect it what
we have here is late 16th century left-hand dagger so about 1580 this is a
Tod's Workshop piece the other ones were all Tod Cutler now this one is
slightly different because it is specifically a left hand dagger so not to
be drawn across with the right hand or up with the right hand but it's to be
drawn with the left then it's used in accompaniment with a rapier really so what
we have going on here is a metal fitting at the top here throat fitting and then
a belt fitting on the back with a metal staple here set at an angle
and pop that on for me so what's going on here is it goes roughly over the
small of his back so that's out of the way of the rapier it's just the fashion
of the time really but that angled staple allows the dagger to hang at a
slight angle so the blade doesn't fall out obviously but it allows Hob to reach
behind and to grab the dagger very easily he knows exactly where it is so
this is a particular feature of left hand daggers of this period the last
system is suspension I'm going to show you is particular to Bolock daggers and
you see in the medieval and the 16th century artwork now if you pass me my
watch coat Hob the coat that I had didn't have skirts on it but often coats
will have quite a long skirt on it watch coat here obviously it's it's very
encompassing it covers everything on my belt very difficult to find a dagger if
you need to find it in a hurry it seems a little preposterous and certainly
obscene to modern eyes but you can wear your Baalak dagger right at the front
here and it is literally let's say with the watch coat but with a normal coat is
literally poking out the front of his skirts here clearly it looks patently
ridiculous but actually it has the advantage that you can put your hands on
it as fast as you want it still allows you to do it. In a previous video I
alluded to the fact that I think the bollock daggers must frankly just be here
an obscene joke that 700 years old and of course that really perpetrates that
joke and the last advantage it has medieval life is all about money it's
about how much money you've got and showing off and this allows you to show
off the fact that you've still got a swanky dagger there so really it has its
advantages I don't think I've ever seen a reenactor wearing him like this but
people should do well thank you very much for watching and I hope this has
cleared up some of your ideas about how daggers were worn but remember we're all
free-thinking individuals so go your own path but if you base them roughly on
some of these designs here nobody can tell you it's wrong
you