The Most Successful Sword Hilt in the British Empire?

Let's look at just about the most popular hilt in the whole British Empire. Hi folks, Matt Easton here of Scholar Gladiator and also Eastern Antique Arms. Now this is what's commonly referred to, certainly on this channel, as a three bar hilt. Minor caveat there, actually in the records they're normally known as two bar hilts because they've got two bars projecting out of the side of what would be a standard knuckle bow. And regular viewers of this channel, or indeed anybody who collects antique swords, will be very familiar with this style of hilt. It should also be mentioned, this is a British sword, but French style cavalry swords for the light cavalry share a very similar hilt but made in brass. Now this model of hilt first appears in Britain by regulation anyway. It appeared prior to this as non-regulation, but by regulation appears on the light cavalry sword of 1821, the 1821 pattern. Now this is a slightly later one, this is a Wilkinson from the middle of the 19th century, and this features a fullered blade. So technically this is an 1821 pattern light cavalry officer's hilt mounted with an 1845 or post-1845 pattern blade. Now this type of hilt isn't just found on light cavalry swords, it's also famously found on Royal Artillery officer's swords and a whole bunch of other swords as well, and that's really what this is about. Now a lot of people when they see these two-bar or three-bar, whichever you prefer to call them, hilts, will immediately think well that's either a light cavalry sword, like cavalry officer's sword in this case, or an artillery officer's sword. But there are many other branches of service that use these types of hilts, some of them quite surprising. And actually over my years of dealing with antique swords, researching antique swords, I've become more and more aware of how popular these hilts were and actually the diverse range of people that actually used these hilts. Now the question in this video that I want to address is possibly why and was it a better hilt in some way? I should also just briefly mention that this model of hilt is still produced today and is still carried in the British Army for parade purposes, dress purposes by Royal Artillery officers. So they have a sword very similar to this, a little bit shorter, a little bit straighter, but fundamentally similar to this with a three-bar or two-bar hilt and that is still the regulation today for Royal Artillery officers and even a couple of other associated branches of the service as well, but most famously for Royal Artillery officers. So what other hilts were used at this time by other branches of the service? Well heavy cavalry, who fulfilled at least on paper a different function in war than light cavalry did, had a more complete hand protection. And we can sort of see a logic there and I've talked about that in previous videos, so if you search through my playlist for those you'll find this light cavalry versus heavy cavalry topic addressed previously. But essentially this is a lighter hilt, it is one that is, yes it is less protective, but it's lighter and easier to wear, makes for a slightly lighter and in theory a slightly lighter and more nimble sword, although most of that's dictated really by the blade than the hilt. But nevertheless the more complete hand protection of the heavy cavalry is something which at least in theory goes back to basket hilts. Now on the subject of basket hilts, I have a Highland Officers basket hilt here from the Victorian period, mid-Victorian again, and this is a basket hilt and this you'll see offers completely symmetrical and full hand protection. But despite that we do find that some Highland Infantry officers instead went for one of these and that's right. So you'll notice the blade of this is the so-called, what they called at the time, the Claymore blade, in other words a broadsword blade, it's double edged, double fullered with a prominent ricasso, just have a little look at the ricassos there, and you'll see that the blade, whilst they're not identical because they're made by different companies and at slightly different times, they are fundamentally the same model of blade but on completely different hilts. And I happen to know that the officer that purchased this sword, because it's a Wilkinson and it's numbered and identified, was actually purchased by someone who'd served during the Indian Mutiny, including in the Siege of Lucknow, Second Siege of Lucknow, and had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat, in fact he nearly had his head taken off with a tolwar, and for whatever reason he decided to go for a two-bar hilt. Now you might think that was an individual decision by the officer for some personal preference, but actually no, it goes further than that, because when we look at records from Wilkinson for swords made for highland officers in the Crimean War, as well as the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s, we do find quite a lot of them ordering light cavalry hilts. Now, the question is why? Well, there's a few possible reasons. Number one is that if you are trained in sabre fencing and you want to use your sword like a sabre, the basket hilt, at least in its conventional setup, can be a little bit restrictive to the bottom of the hand here, okay? It can conflict with the sort of heel of the hand, as they termed it at the time in various books, the play of the wrist. So if you want to place your thumb up the back of the grip, as you would do with a sabre, it's a little bit too short, it's a little bit too confined. Now you can, in fact, use one of these swords like that, but it's not super comfortable. So if you want to use a sabre grip and use it like a sabre, surprise, surprise, a sabre hilt is probably your best bet. So there we go, that could be one reason. Another possible reason that's been touted is that certainly some of the officers, we don't know if all, but some of the officers ordering these were of a rank where they were going to spend most of their time on a horse. And so maybe for some reason they thought if they're going to be on a horse, then the sabre hilt would be more appropriate than a basket hilt, maybe for reach, for delivering point, this type of thing. We don't know, that's one idea. There is another reason which gets overlooked. In fact, there's a couple of other reasons which get overlooked. One could simply be fashion. It could just be that they, for some reason in those regiments, wanted to mark themselves out as a bit different. They wanted to have a light cavalry hilt. Maybe they liked the look of them, who knows. And the other one is quite simply that they thought it was a better hilt for some reason, for whatever reason, maybe simply because it was lighter or easier to wear or whatever. So, and there is one other detail as well I should mention about this particular hilt. From the Wilkinson record for this particular sword, we know that it didn't look exactly like this. It actually had a buff leather lining. So, essentially kind of like a rawhide lining, but white. Now, a lot of basket hilts have leather linings in them, and a lot of people go, oh, what about the holes? Can't you thrust through those holes? Yes, you can, but not when it's got a leather liner in it. The leather liner offers, it's like wearing a leather thick rawhide gauntlet, essentially, but it's a whole bowl inside the guard. Now, what's interesting is the records for this sword show that this originally was furnished with a leather liner. So, whilst it had the three-bar or two-bar light cavalry setup, those gaps or holes were filled by a leather liner, just like in a basket hilt. So, we've seen that sometimes people, officers from a regiment that normally had a basket hilt sword, sometimes took the light cavalry hilt. But in addition to that, through researching photographs of the period and seeing officers, and I can tell what regiment they're in from their uniforms, or just because it's an identified person and we know what regiment they were in, sometimes infantry officers, and here's a Wilkinson infantry officer's sword, and these hilts are made of brass. Now, these hilts actually, in terms of their shape, are very protective. There are no major holes, really, to cut through. They offer a full knuckle bow. They offer some degree of shell guard to the top. But the one flaw to them, and you can actually probably just about see on camera that this one is a little bit bent, is that they get deformed. Now, obviously, brass is not as tough as steel, and it's more likely to bend, it's more likely to break. And there are criticisms in period texts that basically say the problem with these brass guards is they can get damaged. Even if you just lean your sword against a wall and it falls down and hits something hard, it might break some part of the brass if you're unlucky. Probably won't, probably just bend it slightly. But certainly, if it's being hit by an opponent's bayonet or cutlass or sword or tolwa or cascara or whatever spear that you're fighting against, if it hits that, it is far more likely that this guard will deform and squish and bend. Okay, so to that end, some officers, and this is a completely non-regulation sword with a so-called Toledo pattern blade that I'll probably look at in a future video, had that model of guard made in steel instead of brass, but to meet dress regulations, because the dress regulations said that the guard had to be of gilt metal, in other words, gold-coloured, so that it matched your buttons on your jacket and your, you know, epaulettes and all other details of your uniform. They actually had these gilded, so these were gilded steel. So this is called a gilt steel guard. Now, none of the gilding remains on here. This is a hundred and something year old sword, 140 years old, something like that. It dates to the 1880s, actually. And so this originally would have been brass-coloured, but actually gilt-coloured, so gold-coloured. But that is over the steel. So functionally, mechanically, this is now a steel guard. Great solution, okay? How does this relate to the three-bar hilt that we're talking about in this video? Well, quite simply, by looking at period... This is a very expensive option, okay? I'm just going to show the brass guard. You might be thinking, why didn't they make them all in steel? Well, this brass guard is cast, okay? You literally, by lost wax, make one model of one of these, you make a mould, and then you can just cast loads of them. Dead easy, okay? If you're a sword manufacturer. These steel guards have to be individually cut, filed, decorated. Look at that VR decoration in there. That is all hand-worked. The amount of man-hours that go into making one of these is far more than goes into making a brass one. So these were not very economical. Obviously, if you wanted to pay lots of money, you could get one of these, but they were very expensive to make. So, say you didn't have that much money, and these swords were pretty expensive when they were new in the time. So if you didn't have that much money, what did you do? Well, we know from photos from India and Afghanistan from the 1850s through to 1880s and beyond, in some cases, that what they did was they went and bought, in some cases, a cavalry sword. And so we have pictures of infantry officers and rifles officers. Now, rifles officers did actually carry a steel hilt, and I'll come back to that in a minute. But we see photos of infantry officers and rifles officers with cavalry swords with three-bar hilts. Why? Well, we've already seen a steel hilt is more protective than a brass hilt. Mechanically, even if it's got big gaps in it, in terms of it being hit by another sword, this steel guard is going to take a lot of punishment. You could use it in weekly sparring, and it would be fine. With a brass guard, you couldn't. So they were stronger. But is that the be-all and end-all? Is that the only reason why they were choosing light cavalry hilts? We don't know, is the straight answer. But I mentioned rifles. Now, there are photos of Gurkha rifles officers, and one example I saw the other day from the 1880s, where sometimes, instead of the rifles hilt... Now, what was a rifles hilt like? Well, actually, a rifles hilt was more like this non-regulation steel guard here. They were more simple design than this. They didn't take quite so much effort to make. But nevertheless, they were steel guards. So the rifles officers' swords have more protective guards, at least mechanically, in strength than the infantry officers' ones. So if you were in the rifles and you already had a steel hilt, why would you then go and get a three-bar hilt? Because it's got bigger openings in it, and it's steel, so is it any stronger than a rifles officers' guard? Probably not. We don't know. We don't know the answer. And it could be coming back to, again, that it was a case of some people wanting to mark themselves out as different, some people thinking that maybe this is a bit of a lighter guard, maybe, and they think maybe it gives a nicer feeling to the sword. There is another option, another possibility. And that other possibility actually came to me on reading someone's diaries from the Indian Mutiny, where he mentions that he lost his regimental sword and he replaced it with a cavalry sword because that's what was available. This is the other possibility. Sometimes the other possibility is they ended up with these swords because that was all they could get. So if you were serving out in Burma or Afghanistan or, you know, China or somewhere far, far away from anywhere that you could re-equip yourself, if you lost, broke, damaged your regimental sword, the typical sword you were expected to have for that branch of service, you've got to replace the sword. Certainly in that period, you won't have a sword because firearms aren't particularly easy to reload, not particularly reliable or accurate. So swords were still super important. You want to replace your sword. What do you do? You either get a local sword, and this happened a lot where people started carrying talwars or, you know, Bornean swords, all sorts of things, you know, local swords they could find in the area. Or you get another British sword of whatever is available and you might have a mate in the cavalry who's got a spare sword or you might know a cavalryman has recently been killed or died of disease or something. And so you can go to his commanding officer and go, do you mind if I buy his sword? Because he won't be needing it anymore. You know, that kind of thing. We know this happened from the records. So sometimes you might end up with a cavalry or we have to say a Royal Artillery officer's sword, even though it doesn't match your branch of service. Finally, I want to say, in terms of the three-bar hilt, so there are numerous reasons why you might end up with one, but they are a pretty good compromise. They're relatively light, they're relatively protective and tough against being impacted. Yes, they've got large gaps in them, but so do lots of swords in that period. The standard French cavalry sword does as well. But if you could really afford it, then much like the steel guard we looked at here that would be very expensive to produce, the other option was what's called a scroll-hilted guard. And these were very, very popular, but also fairly expensive. So these, again, this is a Wilkinson, this is a pre-numbered Wilkinson with a scroll hilt, to an officer of the Bengal Engineers. And these were expensive to buy. These were very expensive swords. You're talking about in the region of twice as expensive as a standard infantry officer's sword. So again, we come back to finances. And sometimes you might think, well, I'd really like a scroll hilt, but maybe I'll buy one of those when I become a captain or a major, when I've got a bit more money. At the moment, I'm a lowly second lieutenant and I've got one of these infantry officer's swords, but my friend Gordon, who serves in the light cavalry over there, I know he's got a spare sword that he doesn't need anymore, so I'm going to end up carrying one of those. That's one possibility. Or you might think I'm going out to Afghanistan and I've heard about these Ghazis charging down out of the hills trying to take our heads off with kyber knives. I want something a bit better than a brass hilt. I might buy one of those light cavalry swords because they're only a little bit more expensive than the regimental infantry officer's sword. And I can afford that and it will have a bigger blade, be a little bit heavier, a little bit longer. I can thrust people from further away and it's got a stronger guard as well. And so you might keep this sword for parade and have this sword for campaigning. So I hope that gives you a few things to think about. The humble three-bar or two-bar light cavalry hilt, still in use today by the Royal Artillery Officers. It often gets overlooked and underappreciated, I think. But I have to say, it's one of my favourite guards. Whilst it's not as glamorous as the scroll hilt or the steel gilt hilt or the equi-balance of the various other hilts that are available, whilst it's not as glamorous and even as protective as those, these were probably the most popular guards on British Empire swords between the 1820s and all the way up basically to the end of the 19th century, in the 1890s. These were hugely popular hilts, used by light cavalry as standard, used by the Royal Artillery as standard, used by various other people who chose to use it as well, used by various other people who wanted a go-to standard hilt that was good for all-round purposes. And it provides you with a knuckle bow, it provides you with two sidebars, it provides you with protection on the thumb side as well, and a rear quillon. So really, it is a good basic hilt, and as I say, you can find its parallels in many other countries, French swords, American swords. If you go to Russia, all over Eastern Europe, you can find similar hilts to this. And indeed, it probably has its origins actually in France, but it basically remained as a type of hilt until, well, until modern day and parade use, but as a battlefield sword right the way through World War I also. So an underappreciated hilt that you should appreciate more. I hope this has been thought-provoking. Give us a like and a subscribe, and I will see you back on the channel again soon for another video. 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.