What is the STILETTO DAGGER & was it used by ASSASSINS & WOMEN?

This is the legendary stiletto. But is this also a stiletto? Who used stilettos? And how were they used? Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiator and Eastern Antique Arms. Now this is one of the new lovely stilettos from the Todd Cutler line and it just so happens I was doing some filming with Todd about a week ago and the subject of stilettos came up. Now very often online if you look for the word stiletto you will come up with things like this the Fairbairn Sykes dagger or in fact the V42 or various other types of much much later periods of dagger as opposed to the should we say original or is it original stiletto of the 17th century. This is what most arms and armour dealers would describe as a stiletto. But is it therefore incorrect to call this a stiletto? So we're going to look in this video at what were stilettos, where did the term originate and where did it end up? What can we now call stilettos? And are some of the cliches, were they actually used by assassins? Were they actually sometimes carried by women? Let's find out. So let's start at the beginning. This is indisputably a stiletto. You'll notice it's got an incredibly narrow blade, it's quite a dainty small type of dagger. In fact I've pointed out in previous videos with an antique example that actually very often the grips on these stilettos are actually so small that you can't necessarily always comfortably hold them with a full hand and you sometimes want to put an index finger over the guard which gives you a more secure hold on this type of dagger. And they are quite small, they are quite dainty, they're not usually the sort of thing that you would for example use in the left hand with a rapier. Those are a bigger, what sometimes referred to as mangosh which just means left hand, left hand dagger, parrying dagger if you like. These are smaller than that, they are thinner than that, usually more fragile as well, but therefore they're more easily concealed. But actually was that the original stiletto? This is a 17th century design which was still around in fact in the 19th century, but where did the term actually come from? Well it's somewhat obscure, we don't exactly know, but there is a clue because if we go all the way back to 1536, so you know relatively early in the 16th century, we actually find the term used in Achille Morozzo's and he uses the term for a type of dagger. Let's look at an example here which translates as I am strong in giving the principles of the first presa, that's technique in this case, against the stilo or daggetta. Now stilo, let's just talk about that word for a second, it originates in the small pointed object used, a stylus, to write on a tablet. So in this specific case Morozzo is actually using stilo or daggetta, which daggetta means small, it's the diminutive feminine of dagger, okay, so he's describing this term which is interchangeable stilo or daggetta, so it's a small dagger or a stilo or stylus if you prefer, and in fact Morozzo repeatedly throughout his treaties uses the word stilo or daggetta, so he's talking about a small dagger or a stylus. However in one technique he actually uses the word stiletto, so I read it says which translates as grabbing it, grabbing the stiletto with your right hand, you take it away essentially. So he actually uses the word stiletto there, so we've got daggetta, stilo, stiletto, so it's very clear that already by the early 16th century not yet a dagger like this, in fact we can see in the pictures in Morozzo's treaties it looks like a fairly large dagger. Funnily enough it actually looks a little bit more like a Fairbairn Sykes, even a bit bigger than that, and he's showing techniques against this and he refers to it as a daggetta, small dagger, or stilo or stiletto. So we conclude that already by the early 16th century there was a type of relatively small, perhaps largely civilian and conceivable, perhaps that's implied, small dagger that's used in civilian attacks and therefore also self-defense, which is already called the stiletto. Now this immediately brings into challenge one of the assertions that's made around stilettos and that is that they are not edged, they are only pointy. Yes they are very pointy, very slim, however it's very clear that if we look at Morozzo as an example, edged versions of these small pointy daggers are referred to as stiletto or daggetta and they do have edges on them. In fact already by the time we get to the 17th century very many types of stiletto don't have edges, they have for example triangular or even square, and I have even heard about circular so they are just literally a spike, a bit like a knitting needle essentially. However some, like this example here which is based on an example in the Stibet Museum which Todd has certainly inspired this Todd Cutler version, does have edges on it. So despite the fact this is very very thin and needle-like, we couldn't say that this is a chopping or cutting or slashing dagger, but it does have some form of edge on it. Now at this point it's worth questioning why were these daggers so slim? Well there's a couple of reasons, one is even once they're in a scabbard they become very light, very concealable, but also there's the implication here that they go through layers of clothing and possibly even hidden armour relatively easily because of their narrow diameter. So where a broader blade might stop or struggle to get through thick layers of clothing, or indeed hidden mail aka chain mail, so it is known that in this period some people who feared assassination or just generally were overly cautious, wore hidden mail or other forms of armour underneath their clothes. This might bypass that type of armour, either slipping between rings or bursting one ring and going through, or indeed going between gaps if it's something like a brigandine. Now some people have asserted that these originate with the rondel dagger. Now I strongly don't really believe that that's the case, because the earliest examples we've got of things which are described as stiletto from the 16th century as we've seen in marozzo, but as we come forward to the 17th century always, as far as I've seen, always have cross guards on them. So actually they're a closer relative to the so-called quillon dagger or cross-hilted dagger, rather than the rondel dagger which is a very specialised armoured fighting weapon, sometimes used out of armour but essentially it was developed for fighting in armour with a disc guard fundamentally. So I think these are more related to quillon daggers which evolved into the left-hand dagger used with rapiers and then some of those were shrunk down, I believe, and turned into the types of quilloned stiletto that we see from the 17th century for example. And there are other versions of these, the famous gunner stiletto and things like that. I won't talk about those here because we'll talk about those in a video with Todd. Now before we go forward in time let's look at some historical sources because some people have asked me in the past, were these carried by assassins? Is that just a modern myth? Were they actually assassin's weapons? Were they concealed weapons? Well basically the answer is yes they were. It's very clear that they were carried in sleeves, in clothes, hidden away, and they were used in both street violence, street crime, and sometimes in assassinations. And I've got a couple of historical examples here to read you. So here's an example from the early 1600s and this refers to Sir Thomas Temple of Stowe, County Buckingham, and it says it refers to Temple's clash with Sir William Andrews of Lathbury, also of County Buckingham, who had married his sister Anne and quarrelled with Temple over an unspecified matter which had been settled by the Earl Marshal in 1621-22. And it was outlined in Temple's petition to the Privy Council on the 21st of November 1634. Andrews, who'd been trying to provoke him into fighting a duel for years and failing, chased him into the fields near Lincoln's Inn, into court, and assaulted him with his stiletto. And it mentions the stiletto. He would have killed him had not some bystanders intervened. So there we go, a perfect example of what's being described as a stiletto being used essentially in a crime where the person had failed to provoke this person into an honourable duel. And in fact further sources actually describe this from a different angle and different perspective and they say that with his stiletto he wounded him in the shoulder and knee and would have killed him if he hadn't been stopped. We also have an account here from June 1620 from the calendar of state papers domestic under James I where it describes an assault striking him, a severe blow on the head with his stiletto which confined him to bed for a fortnight. Sounds like he got off lightly. Here's an example from 1629, so we're still solidly in the 17th century, under Charles I. October the 19th and it says that at St Giles's in the fields, So again it's clarifying it is a type of dagger called a stiletto, probably a very narrow and diminutive dagger, so that he there and then died instantly. Roland Bevan incidentally pleaded not guilty. It would be interesting to know what his excuse was. But anyway so it's very much clarifying again that, and this is probably actually this type 1629, that this is a probably small type of dagger but it is a subset of dagger. And this is the final one I'm going to read but it's quite an interesting one so I'll read the whole bit of text. This is from James I I think around 1610 if I've got this right. So it's 1610 and it says the king is in still in some anxiety about his safety. Now in context there had been assassination threats. No one is allowed to approach him with petitions nor are foreigners admitted to the galleries. Last Saturday Salisbury was informed by an armourer that he'd manufactured some small daggers. Small daggers, there we go, there's a big clue. Suitable for concealment in the sleeve of a jacket. Yep that would work. And that he had orders for more. Everybody's ordering these concealable daggers. When the intended for some evil purpose against himself and great diligence was used to come by knowledge of the person who had ordered them. This is like something out of the three musketeers. Several people have been examined by the council on the matter and orders given that no unknown person be permitted inside the courtyard of the palace. Finally however they were convinced that the daggers were in the hands of loyal servants of the king. But nevertheless they were still buying these concealable small daggers. The queen has today dismissed a lady of the bedchamber. So a maid essentially. As yet we do not know the cause unless it be that she was wont to carry a stiletto in her pocket. She was gently reproved for this on other occasions. So there we go. So a maid of the royal bedchamber was known to carry a stiletto hidden in her pocket and therefore she'd been told stop doing this because obviously you're in royal you know you can do it in the street but don't do it in the royal bedchamber. And possibly this was the reason she was sacked and lost her job fired. In fact there are other sources which refer to this as well and they say that this was it could have been hearsay but they say that this was the reason it's because she was known to carry a stiletto in her pocket and she'd been told not to do that but she kept doing it anyway. So to answer the question did women carry these? Boom! We have a brilliant period example there. Yes women did carry these. It seems like loads of people carried these. Probably concealed. So these were the concealed weapon of the 17th century. Carried about the person and they were used in crime and probably also in self-defense as well. Now as I mentioned these stiletto although they changed in design very much stayed around into later centuries as well and the term stiletto stayed even longer. We'll get through to that in a second. But here's an example from a newspaper the Caledonian Mercury of November 1728, 1st of November. It says here arrived again last week several chiefs of money from Spain. The Prussian general Van Gotta sent last Saturday for Berlin by the post under the direction of the officer three tall fellows one of whom had received 800 florins, lift money, and intended to make his escape by the way for which purpose he had concealed a stiletto in his pocket. But having been discovered at the first stage this project, his project sorry, was spoiled. So he was caught with his concealed weapon. Now 1728 it could have looked like this and in fact there were stilettos looking quite similar to this maybe not quite as fancy as this still around in 1728 and in fact this continues through the 18th century and into the 19th century. So by the time we get to the 1800s and in fact this example I'm going to give is quite late it's from 1890 stilettos probably well they didn't really look like this anymore unless someone happened to be using an antique stiletto. Of course we still have antique 17th cent stilettos today ergo they were still around in the in the 1800s they were still around and could be used but for the most part there were other types of dagger. We haven't yet got to something that looks like the Fairbairn Sykes but not that different there are a lot of um should we say more organically handled grips on blades very very similar to this already in the 19th century. The Fairbairn Sykes and the V42 and the other famous World War II daggers that come about aren't entirely new inventions they're based on things that went before. So this is from the Rippon Observer on 2nd of October 1890 and it's talking about a robbery. The actual robbery was committed by Reynolds who knew exactly from information received where to find anything of value. The silver had been melted down and the guilty pair had left England for a short time until after the affair had blown over. They'd quarreled not perhaps for the first time. The elegant gentleman burglar had tired of his companion and not wishing to give her opportunity of denouncing him to the police had stabbed her to the heart and escaped little dreaming that the murder would ever be brought home to him. He'd served the stiletto in the same way as the as other silver he might have been saved from committing a cowardly murder sorry had he served so in other words if he'd melted down the silver in this case. He paid the full penalty of the law for his crime a punishment he richly deserved and for me I am fond of collecting silver as of as of old but I do not think I shall ever buy another stiletto. Anyway it's a long it's a long story I won't go into the details of it essentially the stiletto gave him away as the as the criminal but the fact is they're still using this word stiletto. Now as it so happens stilettos continue to be used widely and perhaps even famously in particularly in southern Italy most famously perhaps in Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia but also just Naples and the whole south of Italy. They were also used in France as well and we find the term stiletto very often referred to or rather used for daggers being used in crime in the 19th century. So now we come through to the 20th century and we find in the trenches of World War One and then the battlefields of World War Two various types of combat knife come to the fore. I've made various references so far to the Fairbairn-Sykes dagger which was developed partly based on daggers made for the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 19, well probably 20s and 30s but this ended up being the first pattern second pattern this is a third pattern from late war. Commando dagger now this was emulated obviously it's a British dagger but it was emulated by various others including the Americans the B42 was probably mostly based on it but also if we go all the way back to World War One there are various types of trench knife as they were then referred to which essentially were stilettos they were not particularly big narrow bladed stabbing implements some of which didn't have an edge on them and even obviously some bayonets didn't have edges on they were just spikes. So to say in modern times I have perhaps criticized some people for using the word stiletto to apply to modern narrow bladed daggers but the fact is that they have been referred to as stiletto both before the time of the famous 17th century stiletto all the way back in Marozzo's time in the early 1500s narrow small daggers were already referred to as stilo or stiletto or daggetta small dagger and then all the way through the 16th 17th 18th 19th centuries narrow stabbing blades have been referred to as stiletto and even today things like certain types of flick knife and switch blade and any type of narrow dagger can be referred to as stiletto completely correctly so if anyone says to you that a stiletto has no edges they are wrong stiletto had edges in the 16th century had edges in the 19th century had edges in the second world war and the word stiletto fundamentally just means narrow relatively small stabby dagger. Anyway I hope that's been interesting and useful to you watch out for that video coming up on Todd's channel where we're going to be looking at some stilettos I won't spoil you any more than that and thanks a lot for watching please give me a like if you've enjoyed or perhaps even learned something from this video and I hope I'll see you back on the channel really soon cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on Patreon please give our Facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks