Tod Cutler and Matt Easton talk Swiss Sabre

Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and Matt Easton of Skola Gladiatoria. So it's been two or three years since we did the last video together so I felt it was about time. Yeah and thanks for having me over. No it's a pleasure. It's great to be over here again and I'm obviously watching your channel regularly so I still feel spiritually like I've seen you plenty. 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 a sword. So he's not seen them. So the first up as I 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. Yeah. I grew up knowing this sword from pretty much the Wallace Collection going for Wallace Collection as a kid. I grew up in London. It was one of my first kind of hooks I guess to getting addicted to arms and armor so 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? Yeah. And compared ones you've made of these so. Yeah that was a really interesting process putting the one that I originally made next to the original original.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. Yeah. 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 in 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. 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 isn't it and that's the weird thing isn't it a basket hilt with a longsword and I think a lot of people don't realize that there are basket hilted longswords. 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 longswords which have a basket on just the first half of the of the grip as it were our 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 these Swiss sabers which as we call them now but at the time they I think they were called a schnepf or something like that which possibly alludes to a bird's beak and so this term Swiss saber 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 longswords 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 is open to interpretation and opinion so I've 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 rearmost hand because it's nearer to the opponent's wow that's a bit nice that's very very nice it's got beautiful distal tape on it so it feels really lively in the hand. It is about 40 or 50 grams lighter than the original was okay but it's it is very difficult when you are even working for 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 sabery type thing that it's starting about nine mil thick at the hilt and then comes right down so I mean at the end here you know it's sort of two millish I mean it might even be less I can't remember. So you can demonstrate that quite nicely just by flexing it 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 nearer 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 I call it anyway has got all of the good advantages it makes the sword feel better it makes it handle better the only slight disadvantage arguably is a flexible blade is less forgiving in the thrust if you meet a resistant target so if we look at swords which are specialized for thrusting through mail 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 mail gussets and stuff it's a sword that's very much a cut and thrust blade isn't it it's a saber I mean you know you can you can see from that I mean it's not against armor it just it just isn't 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 saber blade which looks like later period saber blades in many ways and it's got this raised full sedge or yeoman 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 reads as 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 I think there's a secondary thing for that as well in that there's particularly in central and eastern Europe there is the saber 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 sabers are influencing the if we call them native kind of messer and falchion type swords leading to what we would now call the dusak but we also have to bear in mind that sabers with somewhat curved blades slightly curved blades of this kind had actually been in Europe way way earlier back in the 700s in 7 and 800s early early sabers yeah appear 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-handed it's not it's not a 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 the blade doesn't feel at all unwieldy because it's got a really good distal taper in it so it feels relatively the whole piece is relatively light yeah uh one and a half kilos so three and a half pounds ish okay yeah and but it is quite a 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 um try and do a Scheitel Hau that's fine I can lift the hands up so a conventional uh 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 Hau um or Scheitel and then the knuckle bow does start to create a hot spot a bit of kind of bind on the hand if we're using the false edge for something like a Zwerch um we can do it but again because I have to rotate my left hand around the 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 on 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 blade's 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 people 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 yes yeah yeah 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 short in my system by corner doesn't make any difference to the um so in the system I teach one which is Italian uh finestra can do that absolutely happily um 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 false edge in various ways every time I make that blade I do find the false edge surprisingly long I have to recheck my drawings yeah 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 um angle in here so if I was getting this sword made for me I would change the angle slightly that that knucklebone so it came up less shallow and a little bit more yeah now I get 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 and that was a yeah absolutely even though it looks like a monster it's not no it's it's 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 um it's easily wheel wieldable enough to to cut from and recover and importantly it makes swishing noises when you yeah yeah it does yeah and I think you know with modern training weapons and reenactment weapons the the mentality behind designing a hilt is that it should last for years of recreational bashing yeah whereas the real sharp swords it was you might only you might only use them once or twice in earnest and if they got damaged you get them fixed or 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 uh Holbein time but the thing about this and just grab that but the thing about it is it is about show and that's 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 he lives a hard life otherwise it stays in the scabbard all his life looking darn good and that's 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 um 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 studded grip rondel that I do on the Todd Cutler line comfort no yeah do you know it's in your hand when you're holding it 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 um it's a lovely cutter actually very very smooth um it tracks beautifully one of the details I love actually about this and something I always look for in uh 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 hilt 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 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 of 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 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 curve to the to the cutting gradient it's very very smooth through the target yeah feels absolutely lovely I can see why in Switzerland sabers and you know Dussacks 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 Matt is I'd like to show you the scabbard because the shape here was one that came from Byrne Museum copy came from Byrne Museum and I've not seen a shape on a Swiss sabre scabbard before so I love that but it was it was Roland Borchetta who sent me the photos of it in the link so thank you very much Roland that was great but I just love that spot 25 centimeters eight inches something like that coming up the fore of the scabbard and I just for me it's just a really I'll grab the 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 it it's a bit like a longsword scabbard of the time isn't it it's in the same way that the hilt of that is similar in construction to many longsword hilts but by necessity that shape 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 cimeters or whatever and they have to have a shape design it's interesting on the original one the end the finial here actually sort of flicks up almost around the corner all right and um I sort of didn't nail that detail on it it's it's quite it's 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 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 all right let's put this thing away and uh Matt it has been an absolute pleasure yeah well thanks a lot we can do that now thanks yeah and uh at last thank you very much but I've got a starter you want to come back for that one yeah yeah definitely