Is this the SURPRISING REASON Roman Legionaries REALLY wore the SWORD ON THE RIGHT?

The Romans quite rightly get an awful lot of attention in the study of military history, and this week on social media I asked on our Facebook page what battle people would go back in time to observe if they could do from a safe distance, and understandably a lot of the battles which came up were Roman ones. In the study of Roman military equipment there's one thing which I feel has never really had a satisfactory answer, and that is why did Roman legionaries wear their swords on the right hand side? Greetings! Scholar Gladiatoria here, Matt Easton. Right, so we're going to be looking at Roman military history. I'll dispense with the coolers or helmet there for a second. Specifically we're going to be looking at why did Roman legionaries wear their swords on the right hand side? Now obviously regular viewers of this channel will know, but you might not be a regular viewer of this channel, will know that swords are usually worn throughout the world, throughout history, on the left hand side. This isn't universal, but it's absolutely the most common way of wearing a sword. I'm not even arguing that it's necessarily the best side to wear a sword, but it's the most natural. It's what people seem to just naturally do, and a lot of people will point out, quite correctly so, that if you have a sword of a certain length you can draw it across your body from the left hand side, and that enables you to get a longer blade out. Something like a rapier, or even a medieval knight's sword, you could not draw it from the right hand side because frankly it's just too long. You need to be drawing across your body to get it out in order to clear that blade of the scabbard. It's the same issue with back scabbards, so beloved of movies and video games. The problem is unless you invent some special type of apparatus, which they didn't do for the large part in history, to get it out, the problem is you have a maximum extension to your arm and the top of the scabbard is too close to your hand and you can't get very much blade out. You can do it with a short blade, but not a long blade. So most swords throughout history, even shorter swords, and this is the important part to point out here, is I think a lot of people go well they wore it on the right hand side because it was a short sword, but the fact is if we look around the world and throughout history, if we look at other types of short sword, the hoplite sword for example, which is also fairly short, might be slightly longer than your typical gladius, but if we look at short swords from across the world like the langmesser or various types of tribal weapons, for example types of barong and porang and morocris and all of these things which are as short or in many cases shorter than a roman gladius, they are also conventionally worn on the left hand side. So it seems regardless of length, while yes you do need to draw across your body for a long blade, even with short blades people instinctively wore them on the left hand side because that was normal. So the question is why did the roman legionary wear it on the right hand side? And there are some standard answers which are given to this. Now I should just mention briefly that I'm between gladii at the moment, so I don't have a gladius, but I do weirdly have a gladius blade which hasn't been mounted in the hilt, and it's safe to hold because it's got a blunt tang on it, so I'm going to be using that. But this is indicative incidentally of a mainz gladius, but we could be talking here about the fulham type or the pompey gladius or whatever, okay, or the semispartha or hemispartha, various other things, we won't go into the depths of roman swords. I have done videos on that in the past, I'm sure we'll do more in the future, but basically it's a sort of medium-sized sword. Now some roman gladii, the gladius, could be quite small. This is a large-ish example, but they could be anywhere really between about 17 inches and about 24 inches in length depending on where and when and the type and that kind of stuff. So one of the standard answers that comes up is the reason it's worn on the right hand side, and if you google this question I think it's the first answer that comes up, and lots of reenactors will tell you the same thing, the reason it's worn on the right hand side is so that it doesn't get tangled up with the shield. Well, there are some issues with that. The biggest issue is why would it get tangled with the shield? I mean quite simply, shields have been around used by everybody in history pretty much, and by people wearing swords on their left hand side. They clearly didn't, you know, the anglo-saxons and vikings didn't have a problem with their swords being worn on the left hand side and the shield wall. Various tribal people from around the world that had short swords wore them on the same side as the shield, and even contemporaries, if we look at the hoplites and, you know, the greek armies or we look at other contemporaries of the romans, certainly the early romans, then they also wore their swords on the left hand side and they were all, very many of them anyway, were using large shields. So if you've got a large shield, I can understand why someone might come to this conclusion, because wearing it on the left puts it on the same side as the shield, but the simple fact is, I'll just get rid of that sword for a second, you are drawing it away from the shield, you're drawing it across your body and it doesn't get tangled with the shield, it just doesn't. We know that because countless other civilizations and cultures throughout history have worn their swords on the left hand side and used large shields of various types, including medieval palaces, and they all draw their swords fine and it's just not really a problem. Now another weird reason that I've seen come up online is for safety. Because of being packed in with lots of other soldiers with large shields and you not wanting to wound the people standing next to you, it's safer to have it on this side. Again this makes no sense to me, it doesn't align with any of the other cultures that were also standing in formation with shields and wore their swords on the left hand side, but moreover just functionally doing it, drawing it from this side however you want to do it, and yes you can do it with a twist of the hand or you can push the point forward and pull backwards, there's various ways of doing it, or drawing it from the left hand side doesn't really make any difference to safety. Moreover, the Romans didn't necessarily stand shoulder to shoulder, a lot of the time they actually stood with a bit of a gap around them that allowed a cyclical movement of soldiers from rear lines into the front and this kind of stuff, again something for a future video, but the fact is they weren't necessarily shoulder to shoulder, so the safety argument doesn't make any sense to me either through personal practice and training and experience or talking to re-enactors or just looking at history. And the third and final example I'm going to give of a point which you often see people explain why it was worn on this side was to do with drawing it because it leaves the point on line, so if you for example push, I've dispensed with the shield incidentally so you can see more clearly what I'm doing here on camera, if you push the handle backwards and pull out that way then you're naturally aligned for a thrust, that's one way of doing it, another way that some people twist and put the hand around the back and pull up there and they're aligned for a thrust that way. I can understand why people practicing with this particular manner of wearing it on the right hand side might come to that conclusion, but again it doesn't really marry up and there's a very important reason why, that is because, I'll pick the shield up again, when you're holding the scutum, the large roman shield, put it back down again, when you're holding the large roman shield you are left foot forward, okay, so quite simply if your sword is on this side and you draw it out, it naturally comes into a point forwards position anyway, or you can draw it out there and obviously you immediately go for a cut as we would do with other swords, so you can pull out, you can pull out from the left hand side and you are left foot forward when you're holding a large shield, you wouldn't be right foot forward because then your shield would be behind you, so it doesn't make any sense, the weapon's now behind you, it's further away from the opponent, you've got to do a sort of awkward thing to pull it out and to thrust, the whole kind of quick draw concept or tangling with the shield or safety, none of them seem to make sense to me at all and why didn't other people do it if any of those answers were actually the correct answers? And there are two other really big elephants in the room when we're talking about the roman soldier, the typical roman soldier wearing the sword on the right and those two facts undermine the other arguments for why you would wear the sword on the right hand side instead of the more conventional left hand side, the first is that later on the roman army switched to wearing them on the left hand side, now the standard explanation of that is they switched from the gladius to the spartha in the sort of, well around the third century I guess, maybe late second century, so and there's this idea of essentially a long gladius or a short spartha and then the spartha kind of gets longer, that's the theory, it doesn't always pan out like that when we look at the archaeology, but the simple fact is yes with a longer blade you can no longer wear it on this side, so I think people have come at the question looking at it from that point of view and they've said well the blade got longer so they had to switch from wearing it on the right because they couldn't get it out to wearing it on the left, however that would suggest there was nothing wrong with wearing it on the left, some people might point out that the shield design changed, we moved away from these very curved scuta to kind of flatter shields or in some cases circular shields, possibly I grant you that could be part of the explanation and it could be that the curvature of the scutum has some role to play but the simple fact is that the Roman army kind of thought there was any disadvantage to wearing it on the left because they literally switched to wearing it on the left, and here's the other, the second elephant in the room I mentioned, during the time when Roman legionaries wore the sword on the right, the officers wore the sword on the left, so what does that tell us? I mean clearly the officers didn't think it was a problem wearing it on the left, so it must have been something peculiar to the common soldiers and them wearing it on the right, and I think this is why lots of people have said oh well you know they fought in formation with the large curved scutum, large shield, and so they had to wear it on the right because it was only them doing it, the officers on the other hand didn't need to do that, but the thing is we know Roman officers did sometimes fight lead from the front in the formation, so there's something funny going on here, and so I got to thinking and I got to looking at some of the artistic sources, now one of the most famous artistic sources showing Roman soldiers wearing laurica segmentata, the lamed steel or iron rather, cuirasses essentially with shoulder defences, the typical idea of when we think of a Roman soldier from Asterix or whatever, this is what they look like, but is Trajan's column, okay so now Trajan's column also shows copious numbers of sword wearing soldiers wearing the sword on the right hand side, now when we look at Trajan's column there is one thing which the common soldiers are doing a lot of, it's not slaying Dacians always, it's sometimes it's a specific activity which you don't see the officers doing, but which you do see the common soldiers doing, and I think some people are going to hate me for proposing this as a theory, and the reason why I think Roman soldiers wore the sword on the right hand side, digging, yeah I know it sounds crazy but hear me out, so I'll put the sword down for a second, if you are digging like this okay, then having a sword on the right hand side gets in your way a lot less than the left hand side, because when the sword hilt is sticking out on the left hand side it is exactly in the way, and what would you have to do, you'd have to take the sword off, and yet repeatedly in fact throughout Trajan's column we see Roman soldiers digging in their armor wearing their swords, they don't take their armor off, they take their helmets off I think, but they don't take their cuirasses off, they don't take their swords off, so they are ready to fight potentially at any time if they're attacked, and what did Roman soldiers famously and uniquely do compared to all other or pretty much all other military forces in the ancient world, they dug, if there's two things that the Romans did more than anyone else, it's march and dig, march and dig, that was the typical Roman soldiers day, it wasn't fighting, it was marching and digging, marching and dig, every single day they'd build a fortification, so if you've created a military force who is obsessed with marching and digging, marching and digging, they're literally digging all the freaking time, things like Alessia and various other huge Roman victories, owe a lot of their success to digging either defensive forts every day or making fortifications around opponents, besieging people by building fortifications around the fortification, this is one of the things that Romans were absolutely famous for and defined their military doctrine, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it was just an element of it, maybe there are other things at play and I'm sure that's always the case, but digging I think has been widely overlooked by most people talking about Roman swords and why for so long the legionaries wore swords on their right hand side, I think a big part of it is because they had to dig in their armor wearing their sword and if you're going to dig a lot, I mean they literally had digging tools as part of their kit they were carrying all the time, if you're going to dig a lot then having the sword on the right hand side I would argue is more convenient than having it on the left hand side because we tend, right-handed people tend to dig like this and having a sword in the way is absolutely horrible whereas having it on this side where you can kind of push it around the back is far more convenient, what do you think? Do you think I'm crazy? All I can say is you look at Trajan's column for yourself, there's Roman legionaries wearing their armor, wearing their swords on the right hand side digging a lot, anyway let me know in the comments down below what do you think? I have been Matt Easton and I will continue to be and 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!