Victorian Highland officers' broadswords - Width of blades

Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatorian. Now I recently put up, in fact a couple of days ago, put up a video about the 1828 pattern Highland Infantry Officer's broadsword and one of the, that's a mouthful that's why I was looking up in the air, and one of the points that comes up often in discussions about these Victorian era broadswords is they're not very broad, and that's totally true. The fact of the matter is that by the 19th century, you know, swords had changed a little bit, they weren't being used as often perhaps, we can get into a long conversation about that, by the mid 19th century actually you could argue that swords were used a lot more than they were at the beginning of the 19th century for various reasons, partly the nature of warfare and the type of wars, particularly that countries like Britain and France were finding themselves engaged in, and if we look at something like the Sikh Wars or you know the campaigns in Nepal for example, you actually see quite a bit of hand-to-hand combat and obviously things like the Indian Mutiny and some of the campaigns in Afghanistan, equally the French in North Africa, there was in certain campaigns more hand-to-hand combat than in others. In the Napoleonic Wars there was very little, relatively speaking, hand-to-hand combat except really between cavalry, and even then only very specific examples as far as we can tell. However, there's another way to look at this, it's not that the Victorian Highland Officer's broadsword is no longer a functional weapon, it is! They're well made, they're made by you know top sword making companies of the day that were also making things like cavalry swords, sabres and bayonets and lances and things like this, you know things that were intended to be used and were used, and cutlasses and such like, and they were very much still made as weapons, but there are two main points to make. First of all, by the 19th century the way that swords were predominantly used by officers was defensively, so they were a last-ditch defence, a way of them defending themselves from someone with a bayonet for example, or a spear or a towa or whatever. So number one, they're defensive weapons, but they are of course also offensive. Now there's nothing inherently unoffensive or inoffensive about a blade that's narrower. Think for a second about side swords, rapiers, spadroons, or indeed certain types of lighter sabre. Now the fact of the matter is that actually whilst this broadsword by broadsword standards is relatively narrow, it's about an inch wide, it isn't particularly narrow compared to some sabres and spadroons of the day. In fact it's broader than some of them, it's certainly broader than some of the spadroons, and so therefore they were functional weapons. You don't need an especially broad sword to wound and kill someone. The fact of the matter is you can do that with what we would call a side sword, you can cut effectively with certain types of rapier which are narrower than this, and indeed you can cut moderately effectively with certain types of spadroon as well. So whilst this is no longer really a broadsword because it's not very broad anymore, at least not by our perspective, it is nevertheless broad enough to still deal out some pretty serious cuts, you know, to cut some of the way through people's limbs and chop into their heads and this kind of thing. So really how much broader do you need? Yes indeed 18th century basket hilts were generally broader and in fact, you know, if we go back earlier, if we look at 16th century to 18th century which is really the heyday of the basket hilted sword, then indeed usually they do have broader blades than this. However just to compare with sabres of the day, so we accept, and I have cut with Victorian, I have a couple of sharp Victorian sabres that I cut with fairly regularly, you can find in my cutting videos on this channel examples of that, and they cut very well. The fact that they are narrower than a medieval sword or narrower than an 18th century broadsword doesn't seem to make an awful lot of difference to their cutting capacity. The fact that they're narrower does mean you've got some challenges involved with getting the edge geometry right and making them stiff enough and all this kind of thing, but in actual fact if they're lighter for example, if a weapon weighs two pounds instead of two and a half pounds, then you can move it quicker and cutting efficiency largely comes from speed as well as the characteristics of the sword, and speed is really really important. So if you can move a weapon quicker it doesn't necessarily need to be broad anymore. So let's just compare this quickly with some other officer's swords of the day. So this is a Victorian example that dates from between about 1870 and 1880-ish, okay. Now let's take a Wilkinson-made infantry officer's sabre of the day. Is the sabre broader? At the cutting portion of the blade, yes it is very slightly broader. The Wilkinson example is one and an eighth inch wide at the cutting portion of the blade. The broadsword is only one inch wide. Now we move to a different example here made by Thirkle in this case, and again they're very very close this time. Remember we're just looking at the cutting portion of the blade, the base of the blade is more or less irrelevant. That gives you structural strength and sometimes stiffness and changes where the point of balance lies and things like this, but in terms of hitting people the important part is the part you're hitting them with, okay. So the centre of percussion, which is essentially the third quarter of the blade, they're getting pretty close. I would say the sabre, the Thirkle, is very slightly wider than the broadsword. In terms of cross section, the broadsword is oval cross section and at the cutting portion of the blade the sabre is essentially flattened diamond section. There's not a huge amount of difference in the way those two cross sections perform compared to each other. Now let's pick up an example probably made by Mull for Hamburger and Rogers, and well you know what I reckon it's actually slightly narrower than the broadsword. So essentially whilst the broadsword might not be as broad as 18th century Culloden era broadswords in general, it is more or less as wide still as an infantry officer's sabre of the day and it weighs more or less the same. Now some of you mentioned the point of balance and the fact that it balanced very closely to the heel. This is true, that doesn't necessarily reduce cutting capacity. It often is linked to reduced cutting capacity but it's not necessarily a kind of straight line relationship. The fact is that the way that a sword blade cuts is very very complex and it comes down to a lot of factors and actually this blade weighs about the same as these sabre blades but the sword's got a heavier hilt on it. Taking two identical blades and sticking a heavier hilt on one doesn't inherently mean that it's going to cut worse. It does mean that the tip will feel a little bit more nimble because you brought the point of balance back. It does often relate to, it does often go hand in hand rather with reduced cutting capacity but not always because the physics of hitting someone with a sword is actually relatively, some might argue it's relatively simple, but it's got certain aspects to it to bear in mind and if you increase the overall weight of the weapon then the momentum is increased of the weapon and also if you bring the point of balance back you might move the tip more quickly. So if you've added speed to the tip and you've added mass to the total object that when you swing is now moving with greater momentum then despite the fact that you've brought the point of balance back they might balance out. Anyway it's a complex set of physics equations there so I'm not going to go into pseudoscience but essentially it doesn't inherently mean that you're reducing the cutting capacity of the sword by bringing the point of balance back. Right the final thing I want to say about the broadness of these blades is first of all whilst I've shown that they are often of equivalent width and cross-section to infantry officers sabres of the day these themselves vary and it has to be said this is a one inch wide example and there are wider ones if we go particularly in the later 19th century and if we get into the early 20th century sort of world war one era officers broadswords they usually have a one inch wide blade so this is fairly typical of the later 19th century. If we go a bit earlier to kind of 1860 1850 and further back and into the Napoleonic period they have broader blades again but even in the late 19th century some broadsword blades were broader than this and it just so happens I have one here. Here we have a broader broadsword blade so there we go the example below which is an even nicer condition than the one above is another one from from my collection and we'll talk about the hilt in a minute because you will have instantly noticed you would have said that's not a broadsword because it doesn't have a basket hilt on it well actually it is a broadsword blade but it's on a different kind of hilt I'll just mention that briefly in a minute but the blades are essentially the exact same type that is the 1828 model or pattern okay and they do vary in width the the one below is one inch and an eighth I believe wide so if we go back to the Wilkinson we looked at before which was the broadest of those sabres you'll notice now they're the same width okay so we've got the relatively broad infantry officers sabre above for the period and a relatively broad late victorian officers broadsword below so there was a variation between victorian broadsword blades you could get a wider one you could get a narrow one or you could get a long one or a short one or a thicker one or a thinner one there was uh you could order the blade that you wanted essentially okay now just very briefly to finish off I will do a dedicated video talking about the highland officers swords but why does this one below have a different hilt than the one above but the same or very similar blades quite simply because all of the criticisms aimed at the basket hilt the things you can't do with it resulted in so-called field officers that is officers of major rank and higher asking for these and one of the reasons was because they spent a lot of time on horseback if you spend a lot of time on horseback and might have to use your horse you don't really want a basket hilt in general or at least they didn't want a basket hilt so they wanted a sabre hilt so quite simply they took a style of hilt that I'll talk more about in in the future video and that was associated with cavalry use and they took a sabre type grip and all of a sudden you can hold it like a sabre but you've still got a broadsword blade and I think the combination of the sabre like guard with a broadsword blade is super beautiful and that's why I've hung on to this one. So there we go folks some things about the breadth or width of Victorian broadsword blades. Cheers! Thank you for watching please subscribe follow us on Facebook you can buy t-shirts through Spreadshirt, support us on Patreon or follow us on Pinterest. Thank you