Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and Matt Easton from Schola Gladiatoria.
So it's been two or three years since we did the last video together, so felt it was about time.
Yeah and thanks for having me over. Pleasure. It's great to be over here again and I'm obviously
watching your channel regularly so I still feel spiritually like lovely seeing you plenty though.
Thank you, but the reason Matt's really here other than the flattery, thank you very much,
is I've made two swords which are unusual and you know I'm good at making swords or at least
I like to think so, I'm not so good at using them. Matt on the other hand, he can use the sword. So
he's not seen them. So the first up. I'll show you this baby. Is a Swiss sabre. There we go
it's a monster. Matt take her away. Right so the first thing I have to say about this sabre
is obviously the original is in the Wallace Collection. I grew up knowing this sword
from pretty much the Wallace Collection going forwards. As a kid I grew up in London,
was one of my first kind of hooks I guess to getting addicted to arms and armour, so
it it's amazing to see it you know recreated I suppose and also of course I know that you've
been to the Wallace Collection in the past haven't you, compared ones you've made of these.
Yeah that that was a really interesting process putting the one that I originally made next to
the original original. Yeah and obviously these are all handmade so is this very similar to that
one, are there any slight differences? Well I must confess I can't actually remember fully the
answer to that question; yes there are differences I know there were. What's interesting about making
a replica like that is when the guy made the Swiss sabre originally, made the sword originally,
he just made a sword and he made it kind of in this style and the new flashy Swiss sabre style
and that's what he made. What he didn't do was go there measuring every single component piece
and so the way I try to work is in that spirit, that I try to make something similar to the thing
I'm seeing but what I don't do so much of is just measuring exactly because then my interest goes
and the spirit of the piece goes I think. And I mean I suppose, the original maker of that
original example in the Wallace Collection if he made 20 of those a year they all would have been
different. Yeah they may not have even had exactly the same arrangement of bars or you know, they
certainly would have felt the same in the hand but yeah. So I mean that I suppose the characteristic
thing to note about this, well I guess look at the blade in a second but about the hilt, but
it is a basket hilt is yeah and that's the weird thing isn't it? A basket with a long sword and I
think a lot of people don't realise that there are basket hilted long swords. Well that to be honest,
that's one of the main reasons that I've asked you over actually is because I find this thing very
intriguing because it's clearly, it's a hand and a half or two-hander, that's clearly what it is
and and yet my understanding of sword fighting techniques will make that rather difficult with a
basket. So how does this work? So you do get long swords which have a basket on just the first half
of the of the grip as it were, on the first half of the hilt and you were saying on Swiss sabers
that tends to be, tends to be, the way they are. Well as far as I've seen, so I mean there's quite
a lot of variety and and these Swiss sabres which as we call them now, but uh at the time they, I
think they were called a schnepf or something like that, which possibly alludes to a bird's beak. So
this term Swiss sabre is quite a modern term, but they do have an association or they seem to have
been popular should we say in Switzerland, but they were certainly used in other areas as well, I
think Germany and Austria but certainly when we're looking at long swords which have complex hilts
usually the complex hilts amount to side bars and finger rings and the the bar on the side which
sort of protects your thumb, usually we don't have further basket down here because it can
interfere with the grip, of the two-handed grip, but that being said there are there is a family
of complex hilted longswords where you have a basket around the lead hand.
Now why it only covers the lead hand uh is open to interpretation and opinion so Ive
always assumed if you're on horseback using it as a one-handed sword you've now got a basket hilt
around your lead hand which is a good thing to have. Possibly you could also argue that the lead
hand is more vulnerable and that's certainly true in longsword fencing we get hit far more in the
lead hand which for me would be my right hand than you would in your rear most hand
because it's nearer to the opponent's blade, it's nearer the....Tod mutters something.
Wow that's a bit nice, that's very very nice, it's got beautiful distal taper on it so it feels
really lively in the hand. It it is about 40 or 50 grams lighter than the original one it must be
okay, but it's it is very difficult when you are even working from measurements, but it's
very difficult unless the piece is actually on your bench, to nail every aspect perfectly. It
is that classic you know sabrey type thing that it's starting about nine mm thick at the hilt
and then comes right down, so i mean at the end here you know it's it's sort of two mm ish. I
mean it might even be less I can't remember. So you can demonstrate that quite nicely just
by flexing it and you can see how the first half of the blade stays stiff and straight
and all of the flex pretty much happens in the second half a bit like a bow limb, and that's
got mechanically good advantages for fencing because when you bind against an opponent's
blade it means that you've got a lot of stiffness and stability in the first half of the blade which
increases your ability to bind through and push through against an opponent's blade and thrust
them for example, but also it means that sword handles really nicely because by taking your mass
you'll give a mass and having it down back down near the hand, it means that that bit that's far
from your hand which requires more energy to move around is lighter. The other thing to mention of
course is by being thinner up here you've got a thinner cross section which is therefore better
at passing through flesh or whatever you're cutting through, tatami mats or anything else,
because it's thinner so it's got all of the, you know distal taper as as I call it. Anyway
it has got all of the good advantages it makes the sword feel better it makes it handle better,
the only slight disadvantage arguably is is a flexible blade uh is less forgiving in the thrust
if you meet a resistant target. So if we look at swords which are specialised for thrusting
through maille for example or indeed daggers like your rondel daggers, they have to be very very
stiff and this therefore tells us something about this blade. This isn't like type 17 or type 15
thrusting long swords that you'd find in the 14th century for stabbing into maille gussets
and stuff, it's a sword that's very much a cut and thrust blade, isn't it? It's a I mean you
know you could you can see from that I mean it's not against armour it just it just isn't, it
and I mean focusing on the blade as well, it's a very very interesting design and quite a new
relatively new design to most people in most parts of Europe at this time. It is a sabre
blade which looks like later period scabre blades in many ways and it's got this raised false edge
or yelman. Yeah I mean again that's quite quite interesting. I mean if I look at the blade myself
and in my head this is always a curved blade and it is actually, but if you put a straight edge on
it it's not very much at all no it really isn't, yeah and it reads visually, it reaches a curved
blade I think. So there's maybe three things to look at here. I think one is the cultural
influence and so when we get into the 16th century and this is from the first
half of the 16th century and when we get into the 16th century we have a
lot of Ottoman Turkish influence coming into fashion, weapons all sorts of things, and um
I think there's a secondary thing for that as well in that there's particularly in central
and eastern Europe there is the sabre is growing in popularity which itself is also partly related
to the spread of the Ottoman Turkish empire, so bearing in mind if this is from Switzerland
that's next to the Austro-Hungarian empire basically so Hungarian sabres are influencing
the if we call them native kind of messer and falchion type swords leading to what we would now
call the dussac, but we also have to bear in mind that sabres with somewhat curved blades, slightly
curved blades of this kind had actually been in Europe way, way earlier back in the uh 700s
um in seven,eight hundreds early early sabres yeah up here at the eastern edges of the Carolingian
empire and so one of the swords associated with Charlemagne is actually an early saber.
So Matt what are your thoughts on this I mean swing it around a little bit, tell me how how
it feels because I've pondered that grip you know how it works because it's not a two hand, it's not
it's not hand and a half grip on a regular sword. So it's it's not a particularly long grip for the
length of the blade uh the blade doesn't feel at all unwieldy because it's got a really good distal
taper in it so it feels right the whole piece is relatively light. Yes uh one and a half kilos,
so three and a half pounds-ish. Okay yeah and but it is quite um it's quite a small grip for me
um and because of the angle that the knuckle bow meets the pommel at it does restrict some of the
motions I can go through um so for example if I was to try and do uh scheitel hal that's fine I
can lift the hands up so a conventional cut which is coming at this kind of angle no problem at all
if I were to try and come over someone's guards to hit them on the top of the head
with something called a scheitel hal or scheitel and then the knuckle guard does start to create
a hotspot bit of kind of bind on the hand if we're using the false edge for something like his
verch. We can do it but again, because I have to rotate my left hand around the bottom of the grip
it starts to collide with that knuckle bow. In regards to the um the finger ring at the front,
I can put my finger over there but what I do find is my first knuckle my right hand gets a
bit jammed into that side ring so if I wanted to use that finger ring I'd want the side ring to be
a bit bigger, Yeah I mean looking at it from this angle my first reaction would be and I might have
made a mistake, my first reaction would be well the original probably wasn't like that,
but I'm actually looking at it from here and and I think the original pretty much was like that.
I can't see how you could get your finger through there unmolested. And the other thing we have to
say is in this period you know finger rings became very standard uh complex hilts of various sorts um
were in vogue and they most of them have a form of finger ring on there and i don't think all of them
were intended to be used. Sometimes we find the blades too wide and it's blocking the finger ring,
sometimes just the placement of the finger ring even basket British basket hilts early basket
hilts where you can't physically get your finger through have a finger ring, so I do think there
was a degree of convention in there as well. Oh we've got to have a finger ring on it even if
it wasn't actually functional. Yeah coming coming into the renaissance you might imagine that they
got over that, you know it's a time of education and learning but they still seem to do it just
putting weird things in, but we still do, we still have flares. Yeah, but yeah it's interesting in
terms of the guard positions, um so going through the low guards all around it doesn't really make
having the basket there doesn't really make any difference to any of those, the medium guards,
long swords in my system by Corno doesn't make any difference to the um so in the system I teach,
one which is Italian, fenestra can do that absolutely happily
with this type of hilt so and I do think the fact that we've got such a deliberate big false edge
on this sword does imply that it was intended to be used with the full section in various ways.
Every time I make that blade I do find the full stage surprisingly long, I have to recheck my
drawings, yeah I got it right. And to me that implies someone wanted a saber that they could use
kind of like a long sword, so so someone who perhaps previously had had a double-edged sword
so they still you know, if you're cutting with the false edge you're really only cutting up
here anyway the rest of it is superfluous. I do find there's a little bit of a hot spot in this
angle in here so if I was getting this sword made for me, I would change the angle slightly that
that knuckle bow met the pomel at, so it came up less shallow and a little bit more outwards,
yeah because just that little change would give a lot more rotational potential to that bottom hand
um which is I think fairly important when it's quite a short grip. That being said, I do wonder
if this was also intended to be used quite a lot as a one-handed sword, it feels like it could be,
yeah because, because uh. And that was a question I was going to ask because the weight would allow
it. Yeah absolutely. Even though it looks like a monster it's not. No it's not a light sword but
it moves quick enough and especially if you're on horseback so if this belonged to someone who
they want a long sword on foot but they spend most of their time on horseback then absolutely,
on horseback you've got good reach for delivering the point, it's easily wieldable enough to
cut from and recover. And importantly it makes swishing noises when you move. Yeah, yeah it does.
Yeah and I think you know with modern training weapons and reenactment weapons the
mentality behind designing a hilt is that it should last for years of recreational bashing,
whereas the real sharp swords you might only you might only use them once or twice in earnest
and if they got damaged you get them fixed you get a new hilt you know um well it's actually...You
know what, I'm just going to bring something out and show you because this is an interesting
point we were just talking about comfort and this is actually going to the same customer as
that he's bought it as part of the same set and it's dated around about the same time actually
whole bone dagger, but the thing about this is, grab that, but the thing about it is it
is about show and tell, what you're just saying it's really he gets that out maybe once a month,
once every two months to use it or threaten it or whatever it is, if it lives a hard life,
otherwise it stays in this scabbard all his life looking darn good and that it's a real knife, but
it is presumably mostly its function is just to look swanky as anything. I think there's also an
element as well about grip retention and I think sometimes in the modern world soft-handed people
like something to be super, super comfortable they don't necessarily think about the fact that when
you're covered in blood and sweat and fighting for your life you need something to just stay
in your hand. Well it's like that studded grip rondel that I do on the Tod Cutler line, comfort?
No. Do you know it's in your hand when you're holding it? Yeah, yes you do, especially if you're
wearing gauntlets or you know gloves of any kind and I mean I actually find that quite comfortable
but yeah absolutely like you say there is a difference between
something for wearing, something for using and there's always an interplay between those
priorities. It's not a hammer that you use for six hours/eight hours a day you know.
Okay good Matt yeah so this will definitely cut, it's a lovely cutter actually very, very smooth
it tracks beautifully, one of the details I love actually about this and something I always
look for in in my swords is a relatively flat grip really helps with indexing the edge, yeah
and I especially find that's important if you've got any kind of complex help because there's a
degree of asymmetry in the balance to a complex hilt so having that flat grip very, very nice. I
must confess it's a shorter grip than I'm used to and that takes some uh adapting to and you kind of
you want to keep the hands quite close together which I know some people prefer to do anyway.
I'm personally used to having my hand further down at the pommel end which I can't do because
the basket hilt here, so I have to modify how I hold the sword. It actually makes the grip a
little bit more similar to a Japanese grip on a sword, but lining up the wrists and the knuckles
keeping the hands close together and it tracks beautifully through the target, it's very light
and nimble in the tip very little resistance going through the target because of the cross section
it's thin and because it's got quite a lenticular um curve to the to the cutting gradient it's very,
very smooth through the target it feels absolutely lovely I can see why uh in Switzerland
sabres and you know its and derivatives of them got more and more popular right the way through
the 16th century and even you know into the 17th century because they're very good cutters, they
handle very well and they do what they're supposed to do. Right but before we put this one away man
is I'd like to show you the scabbard because the chape here was one that came from Bern museum,
copy came from Bern museum and I've not seen a chape on a Swiss sabre scabbard before, so
I love that but it was it was Roland Warzecha who sent me the photos of it, so thank you very much
Roland that was great, but i just love that shape, 25 centimeters/ eight inches something like,
that coming up the front of the scabbard and I... just for me... it's just a really i'll grab sword.
Really nice uh way to finish the end of it yeah and so so in many ways if you if you just look
at the top half of this scabbard it's a bit like a long sword scabbard of the time isn't it, um it's
in the same way that the hilt of that is similar in construction to many longsword hilts but by
necessity that chape has to be a different design doesn't it to accommodate that, that different
shape of tip and it's really um individual and i've not seen i've not seen the like of it but
i mean it makes sense but yeah it's funny because in a way it looks it looks historical but it it
almost looks like some fantasy designs doesn't it where people have designed scimitars or whatever
and they have to have a chape. It's interesting on the original one the end the finial here
actually sort of flicks up almost around the corner and I didn't nail that detail on it.
It's it's quite, it's very artistic and it's very individual. I really really like it um and and I
also like the detail that it's longer on the the sort of main cutting edge than on the false edge
because that's where there's going to be the most friction and sort of dragging and knocking yeah
and where the point might dig into the wood on the inside so it's it's got a functional
reason for that particular design. But yeah right let's put this thing away and uh Matt it has been
an absolute pleasure. Yeah well thanks a lot i'll do that now thanks yeah and uh at last. Thank you
very much, but I've got a storta, you want to come back for that one? Yeah, yeah definitely.