Did this Medieval English Falchion have a Side Bar or Not?

Let's talk about sidebars on falchions, or lack of sidebars. Hey folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatorial. Now for anyone who doesn't know, I've been working with the Royal Armouries and Windlass on the second batch of swords. If you don't know what second batch, you don't know about the first batch, I'll stick a link down below, down in the description there. But essentially, two or three years ago, three years ago I think probably now, we started talking, I started talking to Windlass, I started talking to the Royal Armouries, and we essentially came up with an idea to replicate some of the amazing items in their collection. The first batch involved six swords, the second batch is also going to involve six swords, completely different types of swords. But in that first batch was a so-called Wakefield hanger, which I'm holding here. Now, I should mention incidentally, this is not exactly the same as the final version which you buy off the shelf. We're going to see here there's a slight difference in the nagel or extension peg at the side of the grip here, because it went through various changes, and that's what I'm here to talk about. So this is pretty close to the final version, and this has actually been the most popular of all the swords we did in the first batch. It's outsold all other models and has been really, really well received by and large, and I'm very, very happy with how it turned out. But I will tell you, it was not easy to get to the final stage of this sword, because the actual original that it's based on is a surprisingly complex sword. A lot of people think that weapons like this are somehow kind of, you know, poor soldiers' sidearms and therefore much simpler and cheaper than something like a knightly longsword or an arming sword used by a man-at-arms. Not the case at all, okay? This sword is more complex to make than lots of arming swords and longswords out there, for a whole bunch of reasons. The hilt actually is not particularly, although we're going to talk about the hilt here, the hilt's not necessarily more complex at all. It's actually the blade, and the reason is because you've got not only a fuller here, but you've got a hollow ground edge and you've got a hollow ground false edge. Now, other people have made replicas of this sword and swords in this group, known basically as the Wakefield hangers, because one of them was found in Wakefield. But as far as I'm aware, none of the other replicas even really come even close to the original in terms of the complexity of the blade geometry, because you've got two different types of hollow grind here as well as the fuller, as mentioned. So anyway, I won't go into specific other versions that have been made of this sword, but this one was quite tricky to get right. Now, one of the other things that was also tricky to get right about this was the decision of what to do with that projecting thing on the side of the guard, which if it was a German sword, so I just grab a different manufacturer's sword here, so this is a Langmesser with a projecting nagel, or the German word for nail, a lug, if you want to call it that, out of the side. I actually prefer to call it a lug in English, because a nail sounds kind of a bit weird to English people. So this projecting lug at the side, now why is that problematic? Well, all of the other swords, more or less all of the other swords in the first batch in the Royal Armouries Windlass line that we did, we could just essentially copy what was there, okay, we could just replicate what we could see, and sometimes there were little bits missing, obviously grips missing, sometimes things like that, so we had to introduce some interpretation and restoration in a sense. And that was also the case with this projecting lug, because, and this is a really important point to note, on the original sword the projecting lug is broken. Now I have inspected that myself, and the lug, in my opinion, was probably broken during excavation. The reason I say that is because there isn't corrosion on the broken end of the lug. I believe that whatever projected out of there was broken off when the sword was found, and there's a piece of metal in the ground somewhere that belongs to that sword. It might have rusted away by now unfortunately, but we don't know what it was. We don't know what this projecting lug was, but what we do know is that there was something there. Now the question is, was it a nagel, was it a lug, or was it a complete sidebar? So here we have, this is actually the first prototype of this sword that I received, and I've still got it because it's actually still a nice sword, and I actually am still quite fond of it, despite the fact I don't believe it is a good replication of the sword that we were trying to replicate in the Royal Armouries. So I've kept it because it is representative of a certain type of hangers that were being used in the 15th century, late 15th century, into the Tudor period in England, but it's not very close. And the reasons it's not close, we didn't get the complexity of the blade geometry, this is a simple wedge cross section, it doesn't have the hollow grind therefore on the front edge, it doesn't have the hollow grind on the rear edge, it's a way simpler blade so we didn't get the blade right on the first try, and additionally, initially we had decided to have a sidebar guard on the sword. Now, why did we decide to have a sidebar? Well, first of all, because looking at the lug on the original, it's clear that something has broken off, and there is another hanger in the Royal Armouries which does have a sidebar, and in fact we know that other members of this grouping, the weight-filled hangers, some of them do have sidebars. So initially what we did here was we copied the sidebar from the other sword in the Royal Armouries collection, which is in my opinion about 20 years later sword, and we applied it to the earlier sword, and I decided it didn't work, and in fact talking with Henry Yallop, Keeper of Edge Weapons at the Royal Armouries, he also agreed that it didn't work, and so we decided to remove it. Why? Well, first of all, if you look at the shape of this bar that we added here and the general look of it, this is copied from the later one from the circa 1500 hanger and applied to this one, and it doesn't fit and doesn't match with the style of the knuckle bow on this sword. So quite simply we decided that just by grafting on like plastic surgery, grafting on something from another sword onto this one, it didn't look right aesthetically. Then also Henry was of the opinion, and convinced me actually, that there probably wasn't a full bar projecting on the side. So initially I thought that there was a full bar projecting on the side because of that broken off lug, but looking at James Elmsley's research and typology and looking at other examples in the group, it's clear that not all of them had a bar, and in fact the bar seems to be a later innovation. They all had a knuckle bow, but they didn't all have a side bar, and it seems to me on looking back in retrospect that the side bar is a later thing that comes along as we get closer to 1500, and the earlier example, the example we're replicating is probably more like 1480-ish, probably didn't have a full bar yet. They had something else. Now, full disclosure, we don't know what. It's entirely, if I pull out this other messa here, it's entirely possible that what broke off, it actually had some sort of shape to it. It's possible it was a little plate, it might have had a round bit, it may have come around slightly like in a curve like some nagels do, we just don't know. The fact is all we know is that it's broken off. So in the end, we elected to do like some langmesser in Germany do and certain hangers and just have a straight lug, so we've left a neutral decision point. We've left something which is, in my opinion, plausible. It's definitely possible that what was there was just a straight lug. Equally, it's possible there was something else bigger or longer projecting, but we just don't know. But what we've done is we've ended up with a solution which looks relatively close to what is on the actual museum original and is also plausible in itself and I don't think on balance, I don't think on balance that that particular example from this group, from the Wakefield hangers, that particular example, I don't think it had a full bar on it. And there are also other little subtle and more detailed reasons why I don't think it had a full bar on it to do with the length and the shape of the pommel, the length of the grip and things like this. When you put a side bar on, this particular sword doesn't work very well, in my opinion, unless you change the shape of the pommel or elongate the grip. And if we look at the later side barred version, it does have a different grip on it to this one. So in my opinion, I think that we made the right decision to essentially limit that lug to a small nubbin sticking out the side and not very much more than that. And like that, this works as a super effective little hanger and we absolutely know that some of the hangers in this group didn't have much or anything projecting on the side. It's just interesting when you look at other applications of the swords from this group because some people have elected to go with a full bar, some people have elected to go with nothing at all and it's completely flat, and what we've done is between those two we've got a lug on the side much like a German Langmesser. Anyway, I hope that's been a moderately interesting topic. I noticed that this conversation came up recently about why we decided to go with that on this sword, so that's why I decided to make an interesting topic to make a video about. In terms of the new batch, we are working on it at the moment. In fact, the first prototypes of the second batch are going to be on their way to me pretty damn soon. We were actually talking just some of the finer details the other day. I was in India back in April, I think it was end of April. There will be a video coming out actually because I did a lot of filming while I was in the Windlass factory, just a mind-bogglingly amazing place, so there will be a video coming up about that, but I have got about two and a half hours of filmed footage so it's a lot to get through and edit down into a manageable video. And yeah, there will be more about the second batch as they start to be announced. There are basket hilts in there, there's rapiers, there's all sorts of stuff, interesting things coming daggers as well. So yeah, keep watching and I hope I'll see you back on the channel really soon. Cheers folks!