Is there an OPTIMUM WIDTH of Sword Blades? The Victorian Experience

Let's talk about girth, specifically the width of Victorian British officer's swords. Hi folks, Matt Easton here, scholar gladiator and eastern anti-climber. Now I recognise that this is a niche of a niche topic, however if you bear with me we're going to talk about the width of swords and while we're looking at Victorian officer's swords and specifically an exceptional and extremely unusual Wilkinson officer's sword from 1856 we'll look at in a second, we're also going consider the matter of girth which applies to all swords. So first thing to mention is that by the 19th century, by the kind of early part of the 19th century actually, a lot of swords had started to adopt optimal widths regarding whether you were a foot officer, so an officer serving on foot and carrying a sword for self-defence, or whether you were mounted on a horse. Now generally speaking cavalry sabres are a little bit wider, a little bit heavier, usually a little bit longer compared to infantry officer's swords which you want to be a little bit more nimble and handy for use on foot. So when we come to the Victorian period in Britain and obviously this will vary slightly amongst countries and manufacturers and so on and so forth, we do actually have some standard widths. Now this might interest some of you because they found that these widths were the optimal balance between what was the most easily handled and used and good in defence and offence and for fighting with essentially, versus how effective they were as weapons at cutting and thrusting. So what we find is by the middle of the 19th century there were standard widths for an infantry officer's sword versus let's say a cavalry officer's sword, and the standard widths, I'm going to use imperial here because that's what they used the case we're dealing with inches, you can convert it to centimetres, the standard widths are the standard widths for an infantry officer is one and one eighth of an inch and for a cavalry officer is one and a quarter of an inch wide. Now just to confuse matters there were some officers who didn't conform to these standard widths, so a standard infantry is one and one eighth, a standard cavalry is one and one quarter, however some cavalry officers and indeed royal artillery officers went for the one and an eighth width. Why? Well it makes the sword a little bit handier and a little bit lighter, although at the cost of cutting power. Now when a cavalry officer went for the slightly narrower blade, so the one and an eighth instead of the standard one and a quarter, this was known by Wilkinson, the most preeminent makers in Britain at the time, as a medium cavalry. In other words it was very slightly narrower than the standard, and indeed an infantry officer, so on foot, could do the same, they could go for a slightly narrower blade. I'll grab an example from here, here we go, this is a one inch wide blade, so one inch wide is known as a medium infantry. So if we look at the records for Wilkinson sword, if it says medium infantry it means it's an infantry officer sword of one inch wide, if it just says infantry then it's one and one eighth, if it's cavalry and it just says cavalry it's one and one quarter, but if it says medium cavalry it's one and one eighth. I understand this is incredibly fringe and niche interest. Just to show you in comparison compared to that last one inch wide blade, it is a standard Wilkinson cavalry which is one and a quarter inch wide. So now that we've set the scene, so whether you're in the Royal Navy, Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Infantry, Line Infantry, Guards, Foot Guards, if you're any of these people who are on foot your standard width is one and an eighth, or if you go for a lighter version it's one inch, okay. If you're on horseback, if you're a cavalry officer then you go for a one and a quarter inch, or if you want a slightly more nimble and lighter sword you go for one and an eighth. And indeed here's an example of a cavalry officer who went for the narrower blade of the one and the eighth. So the question is here, why would you go for the wider blade, why would you go for the narrow blade, which is simply a trade-off between lightness, mobility, quickness versus cutting power. The broader blade is on average going to weigh slightly more and it will cut slightly better. Now of course we're just talking about Victorian infantry officers here, if we broaden our scope, if we come back to the Napoleonic era for example with this Osborne and Gumby 1796, it's clear to see that this is a fairly broad blade. This is one just under one and a half inches, so this is broader than the later Victorian blades. Now what's interesting is you might assume that broader always means more cutting power. Now in general terms I think we can say that the broader blades on average do tend to be better cutters than the narrower blades. But let's just remember something, big picture here, there are plenty of narrow-ish blades from history that cut superbly. A katana or a wakasashi or a tachi for example from Japan cuts really really well, but it's a relatively narrow blade. There are also types of side sword for example and indeed walloon swords and back swords and basket hilted broad swords which don't have blades as broad as this but do cut very well. So while width can be a function in cutting effectiveness or cutting power, it doesn't mean that a narrower blade necessarily is a bad cutter. Now talking about those one inch, one and an eighth, one and a quarter inch blades, my experience with sharpened examples of them is they actually cut superbly well if they are well sharpened. They cut as well as a katana or a medieval arming sword or a back sword, they cut really really well. That being said some officers wanted a broader blade, so sometimes while the standard width might be let's say one and an eighth inch for an infantry officer sword, a specific infantry officer might go for a one and a quarter inch blade. Now one of my favorite swords in my collection actually to a World War One casualty from the Gurkha Rifles is this sword here. There's an article about this on the Eastern Anti-Comms website actually, link down below if you want to check that out, but this is an example of such. So he was in the rifles, Gurkha Rifles, so he's an infantry officer but this is a one and a quarter inch blade. So he went for a cavalry width blade because he was expecting, he didn't know the first world war was going to come along, he was expecting to be doing service in India, the northwest frontier, perhaps Afghanistan, Persia, perhaps these sorts of areas where he expected himself alongside his Gurkha troops to potentially be in hand-to-hand combat, particularly in Afghanistan at this time incidentally. So he went for a broader more choppy blade, some went for more narrower thrusting blades, he went for a broader choppier blade and he was expecting coming up against things like Tulwars and Pulwars and perhaps even if they went down to Persia then maybe things like Shamshir. So he was expecting to come up against weapons like this and he went for a broader blade. However, what I'm about to show you is in a whole different league. So this is a new acquisition of mine and this is a Royal Navy officer's sword, I'll tell you a little bit about the person in a second, but this is a whopping, whopping one and a half inch blade. Now just for comparison, I'll just pick up the standard width blade. Royal Navy officers used the same width formula as others so you can see the difference between this whopping great wide almost cutless, well it is cutless width blade, compared to the blade above which is the normal width that other Royal Navy officers took. So bear in mind this is one and a half inches wide, this is a Wilkinson, one and a half inches wide, this was made in 1856 and this is wider than a standard cavalry sword, in fact it's wider than just about most standard swords. The only sword of its time which is as wide as this is a cutless. Now in a sense the fact that this is a Royal Navy officer's sword therefore might not be so surprising that they wanted an officer's sword that was more like a cutless and also there's another detail, the guard is completely solid and one piece, it has no folding section as standard Royal Navy officer's swords have. So we've got a cutless type solid guard and we've got a cutless like blade. It still follows the 1845 pattern, it has a midrib and a spear pointed tip and it has a fullered blade with a ricasso, so it's still the Wilkinson 1845 pattern blade but a gargantuan proportions, it's 32 and a half inches long which is slightly longer than most Royal Navy officer's swords, they tend to be more like 31 and a half, so this is an infantry officer's length blade but super super wide, standard than a normal cavalry sword. So who was this person and why possibly were they choosing this sword in 1856? Well the person was a certain Lieutenant Walter Arthur Keppel Craven, okay so Lieutenant Craven and Lieutenant Craven was from a very wealthy family, a very landed family, he actually married also, he married an Italian Countess as well so he ended up with property in Italy, so he was very kind of high social status and he spent a lot of money on this sword in 1856. Now he served on several ships, now putting it into historical context, what is interesting about the Royal Navy in 1856 is the Crimean War was just ending, okay so first of all Britain and France allied had been at war with Russia in the Crimea, quite topical I guess probably things going on now as well but anyway enough of that, so in the Crimean War there was actually a fair amount of close combat, most famously during the charge of the Light Brigade and the Heavy Brigade in fact, but there had been quite a lot of high profile hand-to-hand combat and quite a lot of people, it was the first major war where people were awarded the Victoria Cross and many of those examples were for people in close combat, so people's attention had been drawn to close combat weapons and close combat in the Crimean War, that's the first thing. The second thing is there were certain other conflict zones in 1856 of interest, now one of the things was the British were starting to again look towards their colonial expansionist interests in India, Persia and China at this time and in fact at the beginning of the India Mutiny, which was only the year after in 1857, there were British forces which were intended to go to Persia and which were in some cases intended to go or were already in China that were re-diverted to India to deal with the uprising, known in India as the First War of Independence or over here as the India Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857. So putting all these things together we've got Persia, China, India, Russia via the Crimea, we've got lots of things going on in 1856 that might make a Royal Navy officer who was going to serve essentially in gunboat diplomacy and look up the Opium Wars if you want to know about them and actually this officer ended up going to China and fighting on board a ship called HMS Pearl, which you can look up, that was involved in part of the Taiping Rebellion, suppression of and essentially a stage of the Opium Wars or the War in China in 1860. So this sort of server sharpened and would have been carried with Lieutenant Craven in China in 1860, so there we go. Now it is also important to state that while there was less hand-to-hand combat in European wars at this time because of firearm technology and the developments in artillery and everything else and rifles, in Asia for example or the Middle East or North Africa, different kettle of fish, okay, and if we look at the campaigns in India, less so in China, in Afghanistan and even Persia, then we do see plenty of hand-to-hand combat accounts. So in that context this person, Lieutenant Craven, from his aristocratic background, for reasons known only to him now and lost to the mists of time, decided I need a freaking big great sword instead of the standard size type and I'm going to go to the best manufacturer of the time, Wilkinson, to buy it and I'm going to get a solid guard, something known by some as a fighting guard rather than the standard folding one, better hand protection, bigger blade, although it is, you would say, he was obviously a chopper, this is actually a very effective point and it's been server sharpened on both front and false edge as well, so still a very effective thrusting weapon. So there we go, hopefully you've learned a little bit more about the standard widths and obviously we're talking about British swords and British history here but this does translate to French, Italian, Prussian, Spanish swords as well. We're tending to talk about the same kind of ballpark of widths, so cavalry swords for use on horseback tend to be a bit wider but there were always some people, especially engaged in wars in Africa or Asia, in some cases the Americas, who went for bigger, beefier, more impressive weapons and this is a fantastic example and I'm extremely happy to have added it to my collection recently. Anyway, thanks a lot for watching, I hope I'll see you back on the channel really soon. I have been Matt Easton, I will of course be next time and make sure you're subscribed, please give me a thumbs up and take care 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!