Gone Medieval - The Sword & Its Cultural Significance

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

If one object stands out as synonymous with the Medieval period, it's probably the sword.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Robert W. Jones, author of A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword: Power, Piety and Play, in which he takes the sword beyond its functional role as a tool for killing, considering it as a cultural artefact, and the broader meaning and significance it had to its bearer.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. If one thing stands out as somehow synonymous with the medieval period, it's probably the sword. Symbols of violence, they also represented status, power and control. Dr. Rob Jones is a tutor at Advanced Studies in England, a study abroad program for US students based in Bath. He's a visiting scholar in history at Franklin and Marshall College, and you can also find him on his website at historian

in harness.co.uk. Rob's joining us today to talk about his book, A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword, Power, Piety, and Play, which is available to buy now. Welcome to God Medieval Rob. Hi, thank you. Yeah, good to be here. It's great to have you. I'm very excited to talk about swords. I mean, who doesn't want to talk about swords all day? My first question would be, who in the medieval world might have a sword? Because I think we get stuck between this idea that it was just a knight that would have a sword or a competing vision of everybody in the medieval world carrying a sword and hitting each other? Yeah, it is that typical thing, isn't it?

We do have this image of, I suppose it mixes from our fantasy stories and things like that. It also depends a bit on when you're talking about in the early medieval period. So before, say, for an easy cut off, the Battle of Hastings, swords were really rare, and they were just the weapon of a warrior. and in fact, it might even be just the weapons of a particular elite within the warrior elite themselves. But by the time I'm talking about, and I focus very much on the high middle ages, so that's the period after the Norman conquest through towards the coming

of Renaissance, the arrival of Henry A's. Swords are much more common. So yes, they are the quintessential weapon of the knightly class, the elite, the barons, the kings. But you also find them in the possession of ordinary men from sort of merchants and scholars and even down to sort of Chaucer's Miller. He's probably the lowest of loan. Were there any form of controls at various times around who was allowed to have a sword? Not as such. There's no sort of restriction on ownership. So, for example, in medieval Japan, you get restrictions on who can own swords. There's no indication of that within Western Europe, particularly not within England. I suppose there's a difference between wearing a sword,

carrying a sword, and using a sword. And I think that that's where our gradation needs to lie somewhat. No, basically, if you could afford to own a sword, you could have a sword. And I guess the biggest form of control was simply that these were actually expensive items. Yes, and again, because of the period I'm talking about, they're probably, again, less elite than we might have imagined, and certainly that the popular impression is. So, yeah, we find there are swords in the hands of princes and kings that are beyond any kind of value whatsoever.

They are priceless, literally. But then you get swords down to sort of being valued at, six or ten pence, which is not even days wages for a medieval archer or a labourer. So you're seeing quite a range set. And what did it mean to have a sword in the high middle ages? Did that depend on who you were, what your status was, or why you were wearing it, or whether you were actually able to use it? Did it mean one thing to have a sword, or could it mean many things? Fortunately, and the basis for the whole book is that it means lots of things and different things to different people and different things to the same person. So the obvious one is it's a symbol

of power and authority and status. And it has been thought millennia. Since people first made swords, they've been the mark of the king, the mark of the Lord, because the ability to hit someone over the head with a piece of rather expensive steel is always something that makes you stand out from the common herd. They have, therefore, symbolism in terms of authority, whether direct will pass down through. So you can see kings giving swords to men below them, whether it's barons or the most common one we've recognized today is mares. So they will have a bearing sword that gets caraded before them. And that's a mark of their status and authority that's passed down by the king. So that's the kind of obvious one, is that this is something that shows that

I've got power and authority. They can be somewhat mystical or spiritual or link back to a historic passed so that it can be used almost as an heirloom. But for a large part of the middle class, and I think when I was looking at the book, this was the thing I found most fascinating, the book I was found most fascinating, is that for the middle classes, they are very much a tool or even a piece of sports equipment. That's the other thing. I think this is something that has changed from the early medieval period. So there's a really good book by an academic called Sue Brunning on the early medieval sword, where the focus is very much on the sword as a symbol of power authority and a magical thing. By the time I'm talking about that symbolism,

that importance has changed a lot and it's become a much more pragmatic object in many ways, although it still has a deep symbolism. It does also depend on where you wear it. If you're parading it during a formal ceremony, so perhaps the recent coronation of Charles III, the sword is very much a very important symbol there and it was the centre of attention for all sorts of reasons, but it's been the centre of coronations right the way back through to my period and before. And there the symbolism is very much an authority thing. Worn on the hip of a student on a Friday night, it becomes a symbol of anti-authority. It becomes a symbol of chaos and anarchy because it's a mark that they're up to no good. So you can see how the wearing of a

sword sends out messages in all sorts of ways. And I guess for the wearer, they would have been aware of that. So they're deliberately projecting something about themselves. by carrying a sword and perhaps the situations in which they choose to wear that. Yeah, definitely. We're at a doubt. We're used to thinking, and again, this comes from our fantasy realm of fantasy writers, whether it's Tolkien or Martin in Game of Thrones, that's sort of thing, the idea of people going around with swords on their hips all the time. That's not the case in high metal ages, not even knights are wearing their swords with them all the time. It's something that you put on very specifically. So if you're a knight or a baron or a lord,

sword is probably carried in front of you by one of your servants, at which point it's a marker of your authority or status. Very often the students and the apprentices in that sort of young middle class, which have got all sorts of aspirations to the status above them of the knights and the gentry, they're wearing it to make a point about their honour, their status and their authority, something you'll see very much later in the Renaissance when having a sword on your hip, having a rapier on your hip is a clean marker of your status. And were there different types and shapes of sword that maybe meant different things as well?

Yes, I don't think they always intended to build a sword to make a particular point. The exception to that would be some of the bearing swords. So a bearing sword is a sword that's carried before a lord, as I mentioned before, or before a mare or whatever. And usually they're perfectly workaday swords. There's something that you could use and use in a fight. But we do find examples that are huge, that are eight to ten feet long, that are four or five kilos in weight, incredible things.

There are two connected with Edward III at the Tower of London. There's another one at Westminster Abbey, and they are enormous things. And it's clear that they have been built specifically as bearing swords. So to be carried in front of the monarch to make a statement of power, big sword, big man, big authority. Other swords are built for particular functions. So you have, swords which are built specifically to defeat armour. So they are long, thin, narrow swords, rather than having cutting blades, the aim is to use the point, work your way between the place of armour and defeat it that way. Or you get fowchians. So this is a single-edged blade, often has a slight curve to it, maybe has a sort of clipped point or something like that.

If you imagine something like the scimitar, sort of Arabian-style scimitar, you've got that sort of idea. They're thick-bladed, they're very much cutting weapons. They're quite brutal in terms of how they use. They're not heavy and they're not cumbersome, but they have a very different momentum in a fight. And they seem to have a very particular symbolism based around how they look. So when we see them in illustrations, they're often in the hands of the foreigner. So we very often see them in the hands of the Moors or the Saracens, or we see them in the hands of demons and devils. And I think what's going on there is this is a weapon that looks brutal, that looks vicious, looks like a talon or a claw. And so the look of the weapon, the form of the weapon,

which informs the function of it, that is a cutting weapon, also informs the sort of symbolism that it has, and that develops through. So I think it's not necessarily that swords are made with a particular symbolism in mind, but actually the shape lends something to the imagination and therefore we build it. And we see that going through into modern fantasy, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, where he orcs are carrying these Faustian-style weapons, very brutal-looking, very simple, crude weapons, whereas the elves are using very elegant versions, and then the men are using very nightly weapons. So all of these things have resonances that run through to today, in fact. I wonder whether the idea of the Faustian is then that it's a corrupted version of the pure

sword. So you've got the pure sword a king might use, and that the Faustian is almost projecting a corruption if it's in the hands of demons or in the hands of enemies. And as you mentioned in Lord of the Rings, you know, it's the orks who are corrupted elves, who carry a corrupted version of the elvish weapon. Yeah, but certainly something that's been suggested before. And also the idea that the knightly sword has two edges. And there's a lot made of the symbolism of the two edges of the sword in terms of it being, having a spiritual function and a secular function,

that sort of thing. So a sword which has a single edge might make a very big difference. I've not come across anywhere it particularly says that outright, but all of these things are hinted throughout. So there's a great Chavarotel called Robert Diabla. And there's an English version called Sir Galwright. think. And this is where the child of the Lord is born out of the pact with the devil. Basically, the Lord can't have a son. So his wife, in desperation, makes a pact with the devil. The devil provides

him with a son, but the son is half demonic himself. And one of the things he does is he grows as a demon, he builds his own sword. But he doesn't build a knightly sword. He builds a fowt, which he then uses for all sorts of evil deeds before recognizing his diabolic nature and renewing himself through God in the end by rescuing a fair maiden, saving Diorior. Jerusalem and Constantinople and becoming emperor. But by the heart of it, there's this symbolism of this single-edge, brutal. And as you say, diabolic, slightly broken sword. I wonder as well whether there's something in the idea that a two-edged sword reflects the dual nature of knighthood that you're supposed to have, you're supposed to be brutal and you're

supposed to fight, but you should also have mercy, you know, your championing justice as well, that there are kind of two sides to what a knight is there to achieve or a king is there to achieve, whereas if you've got a scimitar, you've got one clear edge. You know, you're a one-dimensional person. You're there to hack and chop. Yeah, again, that's true. And again, the sword takes on that symbolism and they latch on to the symmetry of the sword in order to do that, as well as they latch on to the fact that sort forms a cross. So often you will get that connection back to religious aspect. So again, yeah, I think this English does help that. I wonder also that we also probably shouldn't go too far in this. So there are plenty of images of knights,

perfectly Christian, sensible, nothing demonic about them at all the Hulminites, carrying fowchians and using them. And they're certainly in the inventories of men who you would not consider diabolic. So I think it's this idea that not every fowchon is diabolical or one-edged or showing a lack of chivalric virtue. I think there's always a danger when we look at the symbolism of objects, we can take those things just that little bit too far. So we have to guard ourselves somewhat. And how important and how widespread was learning to fight with a sword? Because presumably this isn't something you would tend to want to just pick up and try and use. You would want to learn to use it.

You can pick up and swing a sword and hit someone with it perfectly adequately. But it's a weapon. If you want to use well, you do need to train with and you do need to practice with. So the Knightley class, it's certainly part of their martial training alongside everything else. They're learning to joust and learning to ride, that sort of thing. quite how to do it is not so clear to us. So we have some references to them being taught. We have references using something called a Pell, which is basically a large post stuck into the ground about man-hite, which you practice making cuts against and defending yourself against. And we'll see

that coming through in some of the mirrors of princes. So the advice for princes and lords who are looking to train their sons up, one of the things they're taught to do is to fight at the Pell. To be fair, they're borrowing a lot of that from Fagetius, who is the classical Roman writer on military matters, and he talks about using a Pell for training and how the classical Roman soldier used a Pell as a training tool. So I think part of it is they're drawing on that, but we do see images of Knight's training at the Pell. So for the knight, yes, training is clearly important. Using a sword effectively requires practice. And the same would be true for those further than the social hierarchy. For them, it has a slightly different feel. So for those of the sort

of middling classes, so we're looking at the apprentices, the clerks, the students, that sort of thing. For them, sword play and sword practice is as much a sport in a pastime as it is of vital need. So they're less likely to find themselves toe to toe to toe with someone as having to protect themselves with a sword, although it's not impossible. But for them, a lot of that is about sword play, with the emphasis on play. they learn in a slightly different way. For them, there are clearly urban sword schools, and there are masters. So there are men whose career is made out of training people to use swords. And so they're working with people like that. Those sword schools have a kind of mixed reputation in the

Middle Ages. So in the 12th century, they're being shut down. And there's legislation to shut down the sword schools in London on a regular basis. In the 13th, there are master's. There are master's as a fence, there's one called Roger the Skirmisher, and he's brought before the courts for running a sword school. And it's seen as being a waste of the young men's energies and efforts and distracting them from more proper engagements. But also, that's a very cool name for someone who's running a sword school. Oh, it's most definitely, this is what he does. And the term skirmisher is certainly one that's being used to that kind of sword play. Quite who they are, quite what their background is not so easy to pick up. They sit in that sort of lower. The only time they appear in

the sources is when they're in trouble, which is often the case. But yeah, so there really and he's clearly a professional. This is what he's doing for a living. It's interesting that people were learning swordsmanship for play. I think it's something we tend to overlook about the medieval period. We assume that everyone is doing everything, either to make food, to make a bit of money, or because they have to fight. But the idea that people were essentially fencing as a sport in the Middle Ages is quite interesting, I think. Yeah. And it's something. I think that is less commonly recognized. There are fencing schools. There are very particular types of fencing that are being used for this. So generally the most common one is what's referred to as

buckler play. So this is the use of a single-handed sword and a small round shield called a buckler, which is about the size of a dinner plate. And it's that style of swordsmanship that seems to be the most popular in the sort of midsection of my period. So in the 12, 13th, 13th centuries, it's buckler play that's coming through. But it's that. It's clearly for sport. They are playing at swords. Again, we get glimpses of it. So there is the story of Percival, the Arthurian knight. He's born the son of a knight, but his mother is really frightened that he's going to go into the trade. So she spirits him away into the forest and keeps him away from all nightly influences, except, of course, that he ends up meeting a knight in the forest, realizes that's what he wants to do. That's his calling. And so his mother sort of goes, yeah, okay, go on, do your thing. And he finds a knight to train him. And the knight says, well, look, I'll train you in riding, and he has to show him how to ride, and I'll train you with the lance. He has to show him how to use the lance. He says, well, I'll also train you with the sword, and Percival comes back going, no, it's all right. I know how to do that, because

I played at the Pell on a regular basis. So I thought that was really fascinating, that the one thing we'd expect to be a high status, very rarefied thing, is something that commoners, and even people that are being hidden from Nighthood are clearly something they're playing with all the time. So I thought that's quite interesting. So, yeah, so they're playing in schools, they're playing in the street. There's reference in a coroner's case where two gentlemen are playing in one of the back streets of London and it goes wrong. And the chap arrives in the coroner's records because he's been killed during a bout of buckler play. It's a sport. It's a game, but it can be quite serious and quite easy to get hurt. Health and safety was conspicuously missing sometimes,

isn't it? Yeah, not very much defensive equipment for training. You take your risks, but that's rather different times. And how much can we learn from medieval kind of fighting manuals. There are some manuscripts around, aren't there, with lots of really interesting illustrations of people fighting in different styles? Yeah, these are in German and known as textbook, fight manuals, or fight books. The first one is a really wonderful manuscript called Number 133. This is a manuscript that's in the Tower Armory, so in the Royal Armouries collection. And it takes about the 1340s, 1350s, although as always, historians differ by about 20 years or so either way. It's very much a fight manual for sword and buckle fencing. And there you have a priest

teaching a scholar how to fight. Towards the end, it has another interesting figure. I'll come to her in a minute because that's quite telling in and of itself. But basically what happens is the priest shows a move, the scholar responds, and then you're taught this sort of tip for tat. If I do this, you can do that, and that's how you defeat that move. If this person does that, then you should do the other, and that's how you defeat. So you've got to, strike to the counter, etc. What they teach us is probably not how to play with swords. The temptation is to think of them as fencing manuals as teaching aids, but 133 and the 40, 50 or so manuscripts that follow in the next 100, 150 years and beyond, they're complicated. They can be really obscure,

and they can actually set out to be obscure. The most famous one we have is actually a reprint. It's copies of the original by later fight masters around the work of a man called Lichtenauer. We're told he's a German fencing master, but no one's been able to track him down and some people wonder if he ever existed and whether he's an invention of this later group. But Lichtenhauer's teachings are recorded in a series of rhyming couplets, which if you just had the rhyming couplets, you would have no concept of how to fight with a sword. And they're clearly written originally as an aid memoir. But a number of the men who write these down later and provide explanations and sort of the further expansion that makes them more useful to us today.

Well, the reason these are rummy companies is because we don't want this information getting out. Okay, the middle class is the gentry, yeah, fine. But we don't want the peasants learning how to fight with swords because that's when things get really tricky. And so there's a kind of sense of this learning being quite controlled and quite contracted. And, of course, for us looking back, that means that we're not getting everything we need to know to use a sword in an authentic manner. It does hint at what sort of people use sorts. So the manuals themselves, although they refer to fighting in a chivalric way, fighting in a nightly art, that sort of thing. What they're actually aimed at is a group of people who can read.

And their style is didactic. Their style comes out of a sort of educational establishment that is based around disputation, sort of Aristotleian disputation. So basically it comes out of the heart of the university system of the medieval period. So that would suggest that the masters themselves, or at least the men who are writing down what the masters are teaching, have come out of that university system because they know how to write in that way. But also that the people who are using these manuals in whatever form, whether it's because they're using them as actual manuals or whether they're using them as aid memoirs, having lessons, and then you go back and you read the book afterwards, pressure memory. But the teaching is very much from a university tradition. And that suggests that most of the people that are using and are coming out of that same university tradition,

which fits with what we know of the majority of fences coming out of that upper middle class. They're an educated middle class. They're a literate middle class. So these are sword manuals not for the great elite, not for the nightly classes necessarily, but actually for that next level down. And I think that's one of the key things.

The other interesting thing, And this is a real tricky one. 133 includes a woman fighting. So there is a figure known as Wild Pergis or Wild Perger. And she appears in the last few plays, so the last few moves within the manual performing particular moves that are particularly special. Again, this is another one of those enigmas.

Does that mean that women were using swords in the Middle Ages? Possibly, nothing to stop them from doing so in terms of physical ability, but probably not. I think it's an indicator of this is a book that is teaching and it's couched in those sort of university terms. So you have a priest, a teacher, and a scholar, a student. And then the woman has a whole set of meanings behind that

that I'm not sure we've really ever managed graphs fully. And I think that's one of the great things about these manuscripts. We're still just scratching the surface off to really understand them. Yeah, it's interesting to think of them coming out of that university disputational tradition so that the fencing becomes the physical representation of that intellectual argument, the back and forth, make a point and counterpoint and argue and counter-argue and strike and counter-strike. Yeah, the university disputation is captioned those terms, and these fencing manuals at least

are doing that. And I think one of the other things to think about is the manuals are set out in this format. That doesn't necessarily mean that the classes that these fencing masters were leading were set out in that format as well. and it's always possible that the reason they have that academic disputational look is actually because that's how books are written. So if you're doing a book of learning, what you do is you turn it into that form. It doesn't mean that you're actually doing that in that way. It's a bit like writing a recipe book.

The format of a recipe book doesn't actually necessarily reflect the reality of my kitchen any time. So I think there's probably those sorts of my kitchen is much more chaotic than any recipe book. And I suspect to push the thing. It's possible that the class on swordsmanship is much more chaotic. then the manual might suggest. I'm going to ask a question now that I'm hoping lots of listeners are wondering about as well

and it's not just me. A swords ever considered magical? If I was talking about the early middle ages, and again, I'd point people to Sue Brunning's work on this because it's brilliant. I'd go, yes, they're considered magical, they're considered to have a power, they're considered in many ways to have a life of their own.

They fit very closely to the sort of what we'd expect from fantasy novels. There's one so Tyvinger, which is a sword that every time it's drawn, every time it touches someone, it kills them, but it can only ever be drawn three times, and the last time it will end up being the death of its owner. So there's this kind of whole magical to it that smacks of swords which have a destiny of their own, almost independent of their wielders. I'm sorry to say that when it comes to the high Middle Ages, they're a lot more prosaic. They're far less magical. And I think it's one of the disappointing things

when you start looking closely at the supposedly great magical sorts that actually, no, they don't have magic in the same way, I'm afraid. We're not into a magical realm. Oh, well, it's worth a try. Do they take on a more spiritual element then? Do they separate the magical idea and become something a little bit more spiritual? Yeah, I think that's probably the shift. I'm always wary of saying, oh, the coming of Christianity changes things dramatically. But I think in this case, it is one of the things that shifts people's perception of what magic is and what magic does. And I think when it comes to the sword, that definitely shifts. So, Scalibur, the great sword, the famous sword, who we'd all expect to be incredibly magical,

really isn't. Other swords appear magically. So you might find the sword of a great Christian hero, Roland's sword, for example, which he tries at the end of his defence, tries to break, and it just won't break, and he's trying to break it so that the Saracens don't take it. And in the end, he falls on it and then the angels take it up to heaven and remove it from existence. Those things happen.

Again, the sword is sort of going to be careful about. the sword being spiritual because Christianity has a real problem with objects having a power in and of their own right. So what I found again when I was looking into this and trying to work out exactly what it was that was important is that the sword becomes a conduit for the spiritual power. So we find swords with these really complex inscriptions on the blade, a whole series of letter strings and symbols. And the work that's been done on translating those and understanding them, decoding them, literally decoding them, suggested a lot of them are connected to passages from revival, religious invocations. So they might start, for example, with OI, OI, OI,

which is an invocation to Jesus, I, also being a J. So it's an invocation to Christ and then perhaps a series of letters that might well link to a passage about protection, a passage about God's strengths, that sort of saying. There's one now in a private collection that we're pretty certain belong to Edward III, which have a little piece of crystal in the pommel, behind which was a piece of cloth, and that's almost certainly a relic. Again, go back to Roland's sword, Durandale, that has all sorts of relics. It's got about five or six different relics embedded in the hilt. Now, that doesn't impart power to the sword itself, but of course those relics acts as a conduit of God's power acting through the sword to protect the wearer and give the

Weirer victory. So I think that's where we've got a shift. So rather than, as we might have found in the Icelandic sagas, where the sword has a power all of its own, and the wielder, if you like, is just holding the sword whilst it does its thing. In the case of the high Middle Ages, those instructions are acting as a conduct through which God will work to help and preserve the wearer, but the object, the sword itself is much more of just a tool. It's such an interesting shift. And just on a couple of things that you said there, and obviously taking my inspiration from the fantasy world again. How much of a thing was it to name swords? We get lots of them in the romances. So there are lots of named swords in the romances. And all of the famous ones come through. So you've got

Excalibur, which is Arthur's sword. You've got Duranda, which is Roland's sword. You've got Claren, which is another one. Arthur's got about half a dozen different swords in the various different versions. And actually, Excalibur isn't always the most famous one in those or the most important one. And you've got Joyeus, which is the famous one for Charlemagne. So the great, Heroes have swords. When it comes to reality, again, there's not the same evidence. We don't actually see the naming of the sword necessary on many blades in the early Middle Ages, but they certainly don't in the later. Did someone give their sword a name? Possibly. I'd be surprised if they didn't want to take inspiration from the great Arthurian heroes. Knights and lords and nobles are very keen to do that

in other ways. I think it's just very difficult to spot in any other case. And again, swords are much Well, common, so a great nobleman might have 20, 30, 40, 50 swords in his collection. Would he name his favourite? Why not? Could I give you a name? No. Yeah, you don't necessarily write them down, do you? What you call it in the quiet of your own bedroom at night is between you and your sword, I guess. It's been very interesting to find out how ubiquitous swords were, particularly amongst the middle classes, and that idea of them being used for play and sport, I think is fascinating. How easy or difficult did you find it to connect with a medieval mindset around a sword compared to where we are today?

One of the things I love about medieval history, it's one of the things that drew me to the subject was that they can seem so familiar. The things people do, the way they sing, the way they act, their behaviours can seem so familiar. And then suddenly they'll do something completely bizarre, completely outrageous, and you just can't quite get your head around it. And that sense that the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. It's true, but they also do lots of stuff the same. And it's always been my feeling that we can grab something off that. I think what was really interesting for me in the book to twist your question slightly was one of the things I wanted to do was because I come from a background of,

so as well as being a medical historian, I've been a costume interpreter and reenactor. I do historical European martial arts, which is basically learning to hit people in an authentic fashion. So we take those fight manuals and use those with modern fencing swords that have the same heft as a medieval sword or similar heft to try and understand how to do swordsmanship in the medieval period. I think it's the way in which we've tried to understand the middle ages from our modern perspective that I think gives us probably our better insights in that if you swing a sword, if you look at the manuscripts and try and swing it in the same way they teach, you can learn a lot about how a sword works. You can learn a lot about how a fight might have

works and that might help you to learn better how they thought. But it can also lead us down some garden paths as well. And I think one of those things, you're talking about the sword as not being magical, talking about the sword as being quite prosaic, talking about the middle classes, having swords and not necessarily wearing them all. All of these things are undermining the expectations of knowledge that we have in the modern world because we've been looking back through a lens of Hollywood movies and fantasy novels and all of that sort of thing. And I think it was great to look back and get a sense of the practicalities of swordship. And in many ways, that was almost easier. But at the same time,

I mean, that pose some real problems because you're constantly second-guessing yourself. Well, no, surely he's not wearing a sword there. He's having to go back. There's a case where some students have a fight in a pub, they go home to collect their swords and come back. Oh, so they're not carrying their swords then. Am I right? Are they doing that all the time, or is this an unusual occurrence? And so you start second-guessing yourself. When it comes to the spiritual side and it comes to the symbolism, actually in many ways, that feels like it should be more tricky because it's more foreign to our modern understanding. But, actually because it's laid out for us, whether it's in the sort of instructions on how you do a

coronation where the symbolism of the sword is marked out, or whether it comes through in a churchman's writings about the sword as a spiritual weapon. It's laid up for us and therefore it's much easier to get to grips with. It's much easier to handle that sort of written source material and that sort of exposition rather than trying to get your head around the stuff where they don't tell you because it's automatic to them. Everybody knows you don't go out with your sword on your it. Why would you bother writing it down? I suppose it's the equivalent of there aren't many manuals out there for how to use your smartphone in your pocket.

Everyone knows how to do it, so you don't need to write it down. Yeah, unless you might doubt. But yeah, so you're right. You don't write down the obvious stuff. And that's always the thing that's going to trick historians up in the future is to get to grips with things. Obviously, in the modern world, we've got so much more material out there that's being recorded and they save that providing that stuff survives, they will have a much better indication

of what ordinary life looks like for ordinary. people than we have of the medieval world. Yeah, I often say that medieval writers and stuff hated future historians. They weren't very good at giving us the information we really want, were they? No, they weren't interested in giving CIFT really wanted. Defensive masters of some of the worst, they're actively against us, and I'm sure they're looking down at our attempts at medieval sword play and laughing

hysterically. Brilliant. That's been so fascinating, Rob. It's been really interesting to take a tour around the idea of a sword and that's place in medieval culture. so thank you very much for sharing that with us. My pleasure. You can find Rob on his website at historianin-harness.co.uk, and you can grab a copy of his book,

A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword, Power, Piety and Play to find out more. There are brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from

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