Secrets of the Wallace: The Rapier in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Hi, I'm Katie and I'm working along with Amethyst who will be interviewing David Edge who is the Head of Conservation at the Wallace Collection. We will be interviewing him about rapiers which is a important sword in the 16th century. Now, what is the speciality of the rapier sword? What makes it different from other swords? The term rapier is quite a complicated one and its history is very complicated but in general a rapier is a sword that has a long thin blade and is predominantly used for fighting in a style that you use the point rather than the cut, although there are cut and thrust rapiers. So this one is much more of an Italian style rapier with the point, long thin straight blade and usually civilian rather than military, although again you do have military rapiers but in general civilian. When the sword was first introduced in the Renaissance how did people learn the skills needed? It's a type of fighting that was very refined and in particular because this was very much a social statement it was no good owning one of these things and showing to the world how grand and important and wealthy and civilized you were unless you knew how to use it. So you would have to be taught special skills and therefore you would go to a fencing academy and a master of fence would teach you various different styles of using the rapier and there were many different academies, many different fencing schools and many different masters and of course as with any expert one set of experts were always more than happy to pour scorn on the other set of experts. So for example in England we had a chap called George Silver and Silver was constantly saying that the Italian style was all very nimby pimby and you don't want to listen and do what they want to do, you know you fight in the English style and different styles of fighting grew up, different fencing manuals were written, it became something that was very very fashionable and very very cultured. So all the noblemen for example would know how to use a sword, would be taught how to use a sword and from a very early age their sons would be taught. So for example you would have some of these rapiers, this one here for example, this was made for a boy and it's actually too too big to get my hand in, it's made for a child, still as lethally sharp as the adult ones but he would be taught from an early age to ride and to fence. What other pieces of clothing or other weapons would need to be carried alongside or worn with your sword? You would have a hanger, a belt and hanger and the sword would hang here quite low so it would be very quick, rather like a quick draw sort of western, quickly for your pistols, quickly for your sword and the longer the blade the more fashionable the sword was during the Renaissance and that meant of course that you still had to be able to draw it so if you went into your correct drawing sort of style position which is like this the scabbard is here, you can't physically have a blade longer than that because you can't draw it so the blade is limited by the distance that you can actually draw out of a scabbard. On the same belt you would also have a left hand dagger and this was called a parrying dagger and often the decoration would match so this would be a pair, you'd buy the two together and you would fight with the sword and also the dagger so you could engage with your opponent's blade, knock it aside in a parry and then go in with the dagger. Okay thank you. We chose rapiers because we thought it was an important part of fashion in the Renaissance period. You can view the rapiers at the Royalist Collection. Keep on watching for the next podcast.