Double-edged swords and edge preference

Hi folks, Matt Easton here. So I'm back from my travels. It's good to be back in my normal filming venue. It might be a little bit more echoey in here than usual because I'm having a bit of a clear out. Nothing I can do about that, sorry. Also, a lot of people mention about a mic. It's actually a mic to myself. I use a relatively cheap camcorder, so there is no feature to have an external mic, so apologies for that. But Grim Riffer, one of my subscribers, posted a very good question. And I want to remind people that the questions and comments that you post are very much appreciated by me. And in actual fact, your comments provide the majority of ideas now for future videos. So the more you comment, the more I can make videos on because it gives me good ideas. And there's really useful feedback and I really appreciate it. If you post a really good question, there's every likelihood that I will post or film a specific answer to it at some point. If it piques my interest. So the question that Grim Riffer posted was about double-edged swords. And if there is evidence that if one side of a blade became dull, if a person would flip around the blade and use the other edge. Well, is there any strong evidence? Essentially, I don't know. However, I have read various reports. I'm being careful with the sword, incidentally, because I've just sharpened it for a cutting party I've got coming up. So it's really super sharp. And the reason why I'm holding this sword specifically and mentioning that is because this blade is much sharper on one edge than the other. Why is that? Well, very simply because I've only had a limited amount of time to sharpen all of my swords. This does relate to the question that Grim Riffer posted. Generally speaking, if you have someone to sharpen your swords for you, which if you're a knight or a noble or someone who has staff and servants. Then obviously someone else will sharpen your sword for you. However, if you're on campaign or if you're just a regular soldier, you might have to sharpen your sword yourself. And in that circumstance, generally speaking, you'll often find that one edge is slightly sharper than the other. Either for a use or just because you managed to get it slightly sharper. You sharpen it slightly better than the other one. So, for example, I know that that edge, I mean, I can feel just by touching with my fingers lightly. That edge is much sharper than that edge. Both edges will cut, but therefore I will favour one edge. And I'm sure this was true historically. And I know that there is archaeologically some evidence for this on original surviving medieval and dark age swords. Because we can see that on the antique swords themselves, sometimes one edge has more honing to it. You can actually tell when an edge has been honed because essentially you can see that it has been worked on that side more. And often you'll start to get an almost a sort of convex or bold in edge on the blade itself. And in some cases, and Ewart Oakeshott mentions this in the Archaeology of Weapons, I think it was. Also maybe Records of the Medieval Sword. He mentions that some type 18 swords, in his typology, Oakeshott's typology, could, with repeated sharpening, become type 15 swords, for example. Of course it could happen. So if you've got bowed out edges originally and you sharpen, sharpen, sharpen, eventually they'll end up being straight edges. And at some point, if you kept sharpening them, you'd end up with bowed in edges. And some of you, if you've maybe got or seen an old kitchen knife that's been sharpened over the course of many years or even decades or generations, often they end up with this bowed in edge. And at some point they become useless because you can't use them properly. But nevertheless, it is a thing that if you sharpen a lot, you are, when you sharpen, removing material from the edge. So you are taking metal away and you are, you will create this, you know, sort of receding edge, as it were. So there are definitely antique weapons from even going back to the Bronze Age where you can see one edge has been repeatedly sharpened more than the other. This isn't always necessarily because that edge is used more than the other. It could simply be that one edge was damaged slightly, for example, in defending or the opponent defending, and they take some damage to the edge. And so the person re-sharpening the blade has taken away more material to hide that damage to the edge. So there are many ways that that can happen. But essentially I think it's likely, very likely, that historically people did, when they had a two-edged sword, did favour one edge over the other. For this simple fact that in that moment you might notice that this edge is cutting better than the other one. Or because you know it's better sharpened than the other edge. Or indeed because one edge is maybe slightly damaged and so can't be sharpened as well. So there we go guys. Not a huge amount of evidence there for you to go on. But certainly there's some anecdotal and some sort of clues archaeologically, and indeed in the texts as well, that sometimes one edge was favoured over the other if you had a two-edged sword. But an obvious advantage of a two-edged sword, as well as being able to cut up and down without turning the blade, is also that if one edge becomes screwed up or just blunt, you can of course turn the sword around and continue to use the sword easily and effectively with your other sharp edge. So it is clearly one advantage, one good advantage, of double-edged swords. Cheers guys! Click subscribe now and also follow us on Facebook.