Adam Savage Meets Real Ancient Swords!

[Music] thank you hey everybody Adam Savage in the armor conservation Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside our friend Sean how are you sir how you doing welcome back thank you so much I love arms and armor and one of the things that my association with the Met has brought about is while I love these things I have not touched original examples of very many of them last time I was here they said they they satisfied that by showing me some gauntlets and now Sean you have a selection of original period swords and I have been trying not to look down but oh my God every single one of these makes me a little choked up and I I do apologize I would have loved to have had more but the table is only so big have eight swords here um I I I'm having trouble breathing almost seeing these so these are all period yeah these are all period pieces um so uh what we have here in their raid kind of chronologically Okay so we've got sort of 13th century 13 up to about 1790 at the end uh We've what we ended up picking to do is really just sort of sort of straight double-edged blades European uh obviously there's you know wildly different kinds of edged weapons all over the world and even in within Europe while you tend to think of the double-edged sword being the classic nightly weapon there's tons of single-edged uh swords curved swords all manner of things right but again only so much table space so we're going to start with this so now I know you've built a couple swords too but just for uh for your viewers here so here's our our 13th century sword and what I kind of like here is uh the the guard comes back so you can kind of see how they're constructed so the blade continues you can grab this I can yeah the blade continues Narrows then right at where the guard is it's called the shoulder right and becomes What's called the Tang which one's through the grip through the pommel and then is riveted over the back to to seal everything together peened over the back to rivet the thing together and so you still the grip is long gone but the other bits of furniture are still attached and you can hold that by the by the handle it you really can yeah yeah feel the weight of it this is this right here this is what I've been wanting so badly when you buy a a a I mean replica swords are everywhere yeah and they are incredibly plentiful and they're all stamped out of that 440 and they're way over heavy blade heavy yeah um and I knew that these things had a had a much better balance to them than you expected but I didn't expect it to be this light yeah so this one and you've lost some material was this an excavated yeah it was excavated yeah so so this duration of having been buried yeah you lost a little bit but not much so right now this weighs uh just over a pound and a half uh I would be shocked if this even weighed two pounds right when it was new um so it was a very light sword and this is I think pretty representative um at this time period you've got uh you know your armor is for a fully armored man obviously there's people who are not who are wearing less armor uh but you sort of have head to toe mail helmets and then your torso is protected by something like a called a coat of plates we've got not a solid breastplate but larger plates sort of riveted to a textile or a leather liner uh so you have some substantial armor but you're not like head to toe in plate armor just yet one of the things about mail is well it's great against stopping a sword slash it is a flexible material so it passes that energy onto the person beneath it things hurt when they hit you even if they don't why do they yeah um I remember hearing about it as a skeleton excavated uh near York that has a male ring embedded in the shin it must have driven the clean through yeah that must have ruined his death wow yeah uh so this kind of Sword you'd really is suited to that kind of that kind of armor and that kind of combat so then of course people start armoring up yeah and I think there's a sort of misconception that after you know armor starts as you start having the the thrusting weapons and then it's a smooth progression then to to rate beers and you have cutting swords very much in the same vein as the earlier swords continue because not everyone's wearing the same level of armor and even within sort of Swords designed for thrusting is a tremendous variety so we're gonna look at a couple of those I just like just holding this and feeling its balance I'm finding this really quite really nice yeah just waiting to get to the next one okay of all the feel is probably my favorite so now this is fabulous so here you've got the additional length for a second hand and we've switched from having uh the Fuller so that sort of shallow channels Fuller it's to help lighten the weight without a blood Groove the blood grooving on so this one has the diamond cross section gives a little more rigidity to the thrust but here's what I love all right grab it see how much Flex you have in there these were remarkably flexible we have some where if you hold it out straight it'll actually bent bow a little bit Yeah so this would have still been a nasty cutter despite being um oh yeah it feels fabulous right so uh this piece is uh this inscription here is in Arabic yeah and it says that this was donated to the mamluk Arsenal in Alexandria in 1419. so the sword has to predate that so this this was donated to a museum in 1419. yeah it was presumably captured in battle and and then donated as a sign of the mountain victory I can't even conce this is maybe a hundred and fifty thousandths thick you know just three millimeters thick with a full diamond cross section which blows my mind and that Peak is really nice this is uh there's another identical one floating around too really yeah I so probably probably a large group oh originally this is [Music] you're right I mean the balance of this you could easily you have two hands but you could easily wield that with one hand very comfortably it bounces quite close to the grip uh I think the size of the pommel the width of the blade right at the base there and the guard really keeps sort of the mass very close to the hand what's up what's the total weight of this so that is uh three pounds 10 ounces okay which is not a lot really no not and again the Palm makes it feel much lighter because of uh the counterweight all right I eventually have to let this one go okay we we can come back so now here's the next 13th century so this is oh this is very probably very early 14th century so the you know our our end date is 14 19. so at some point before then right right um how long it was kicking out before then we're not sure so now this one is pretty much contemporary so this is somewhere between 1400 and 1430 probably made in Germany now what you'll notice this is actually lighter really you will not think that this is actually lighter but get your hands on that oh wow no it doesn't feel like because the balance is quite different right um so you look at the blade difference though so it's the same amount of weight right but all compact events you have sort of this uh flattened hexagon at the base right which then transforms into this really thick diamond cross section so this is meant for piercing through through mail really you and the things you're wearing yeah because by this point you have really head to toe plate armor and so you can't cut or thrust through an actual piece having a live weapon is no longer to your advantage no uh against a heavily armed right right um so the really the option is you have to find the gaps and so those gaps are very often covered with uh either you're having a male shirt on or sort of a set of male shorts or just you know later on you'll have just individual patch of mail might be sewn to your jacket just where the gaps are and so something like this your goal is to get find those gaps and hit those male rings and split them open and so you want something that really this is just a spike with a cross guard on it well I remember looking at some of the old grappling manuals that are the the fighting manuals where this really is specifically you were using this head to guide it into those spaces yeah you're using the sword almost like a spear yeah talking about having male on the inside of the Palm sometimes oh yeah right so you can do that yeah now you can do that this probably wasn't sharp in the way that you normally think of a right maybe just wearing a glove would have been enough um but yeah having having mail on your on your hands certainly would have helped do I see some evidence of gilding I think there's some brass inlay okay inside or on the blade which might have been Maker's Marks little X's yeah and then there's inscriptions down here yeah so there's a stamp uh inside the tang and then on the other side of the pommel it says uh Maria it says Maria yeah a little religious inscription I can't believe that's lighter than its predecessor I know is that just the balance is so different uh and this one as well similar weight and now what I love is this is again one of my favorite pieces in the collection you can pick this up um oh wow you know right wow so this is you know you have all these this is the same time or I think probably later so it's 15th century yeah but again this is not focused on defeating an armored opponent per se okay right this is you've got the Fuller right a much flatter blade clearly sort of cutting is a major factor you can thrust as well of course but uh I don't see this as something you're going after a male splitting male Rings open right may I I can hold them silently yeah just not oh the balance again is really really nice in the hand uh so in uh during the Early Middle Ages the city of Passau starts making these sort of called Running Wolf marks and the they become famous for having high quality blades and so other cities start copying the Running Wolf Mark so like the city of solinkin at some point is actually making more swords with this Running Wolf Mark than Paso is so you see that Mark we say oh solangent or maybe pass out but it really could have been all over because people were literally copying they were of course they were now in these blades the first one and the third one you've shown have incredible petting they were excavated probably this one is an insanely Nice condition was this on someone's mantelpiece for hundreds of years so it's it's been cleaned um okay so uh I was actually just talking with Pierre about that where you can kind of tell that it must have been taken apart because you've got a this is a cool feature too uh this is sort of a rain guard yeah so this it was actually quite common they rarely survived would go over the mouth of the Scabbard while it was in the city in this Cavern so you wouldn't get moisture inside nice if this was for a couple hundred years next to a steel plate you would expect to see some corrosion but you don't you don't so someone has disassembled this and it was cleaned it put it back together and they've done a beautiful job and that could have happened any time in the last 300 years yeah this this sword uh I think it first appears in the 19th century is when we first see it so um I mean this could have been done quite some time ago right and back then they didn't have the same idea of conservation that we do now so they would they wouldn't think much of taking an old sword just scrubbing all the rest like oh this is all wrong it should be bright and shiny and knock it apart you do the same thing with armors rip off all the old Leathers throw them in the trash and get some new stuff so you must be able sometimes to look at a picture and be like uh oh yeah yeah oh yeah uh and what's what's great is like you'll see this the the leather is only on the top half oh so this isn't part of the grip missing it's actually it's actually a metal sleeve uh this is the only one I'm aware of that survives there's I think some depictions in artwork where you can see that uh if we're looking for a function it probably adds much like the pommel it adds some counterweight to it right it's thicker than a Tang yeah it's just a little extra metal a little extra weight uh but really we don't it could have just been a fashion for that time so this is still a sleeve that goes over the Tang of the blade tank passes all through it just like as if this was another block of wood this is lovely and the leather of this grip is original or it looks pretty good to me yeah the original uh I like you got the um uh you've got some cord is set in and then wrapped over it so you have this nice x pattern and then this beautiful braided uh copper it looks like almost yeah it looks like copper you do see Turks head knots on some very old swords I'm not 100 sure about that particular set of wire yeah yeah but we have some excavated swords that I mean they're around you can see them where you have the mineralized remains of a Turk's head on like the base of the blade really cool oh that's cool yeah and what I love is again same weight as these two roughly the same time period but three wildly different examples right now I want you to pick this up and I just want you to look it over and tell me what you notice okay this is weird so it's it's shaped like a tongue depressor um it strikes me there's two possibilities either it was ceremonial so it never came out of it Scabbard or it's it's for uh practice but for someone wealthy it is practice for someone very well yeah so it's completely blunted right all the way around right the tip's completely rounded off so they can't hurt their teacher yeah you know uh or each other it was a match set so we actually have a matching one decorated identically oh wow yeah and uh so this is uh it was made in Munich in 1575 which is really late for this style of Sword like like these um you might call uh sort of long swords or ten and a half swords uh and there's sort of a rich tradition uh of fencing manuals like as you were talking about right right right uh and so in the later period they have these sort of dedicated training swords and you'll see these depicted in the fighting manuals the later fighting manuals these training swords actually stayed in use think of it as really a sport or sort of expectations of a gentleman long after this type of Sword had actually fallen out of functional use really yeah um I I love the fact that the etching is is um way off center here and it's it's it's etched I don't know if it was originally etched to two different depths but they definitely are they definitely have a very different look at them you'll sometimes get uh differential wear just because of let's say how the object was let's say this was hung on a wall and one side's exclamed in one side yeah yeah um but it's beautiful view like all the furniture work is really quite lovely the combination of the file work and then the etching around it is interesting really nice yeah uh someone someone really important had these for and hopefully got good at using using a sword from this yeah so now we're moving over I kind of want to talk about these two at once okay so now we're we're sort of really in the area era of of the Rapier so but I've never seen I haven't off I don't think I've seen a Rapier with a blade that fat so you do get them so this might be called a writing sword would be one term that's used uh in German and uh this is what I I quite like about this one I'll let you hold it is so this is this particular sword uh is what we call like a military issue so this was um purchased and part of the equipment of sort of the personal Army of the elector of Saxony okay so we know this is issued kept in stock in an Arsenal for use by a military person gotcha uh and whereas this here is purely civilian so their identical weight exactly the same way really yeah uh they've just sort of put the mass in different areas so this you is clearly primarily for thrust but you have a stouter blade right um You can really cut with it given the the name it's given the riding sword it may have been used for cavalrymen right right as well but I liked the juxtaposition of uh you know a Rapier for war and a Reaper for civilian use and I think those things tend to get blurred a bit right and the the the for war it's going to be much less adorned because it doesn't need that decoration yeah though you will see gentlemen of that era with civilian wildly beautifully decorated civilian rapiers hanging off and the Armor Man pick this up you may pick this up so you'll notice immediately when you put your finger around the fingering there it's not terribly comfortable is it no no it's not yeah you can totally there's a lot of there's a lot of going a lot going on right so um this is uh although I think as far as I'm aware unique you have similar chain motifs on different um swords rapiers but this is the only one where I'm aware of where you have inlaid silver chain and then inlaid silver jewels as well so we don't really know much about this um it's it's a it's a bit unusual uh I think it's possibly Italian but I don't think anyone's really sure but clearly you've got well you've got a perfectly functional blade and yeah this is something that's a beautiful blade you know would really be for civilian it was incredibly long by the way the hilt is really predominantly for show you could use this but it wouldn't even be particularly comfortable to use and this is where you start seeing the shift from swords being you know a weapon thing of personal defense and really start becoming a part of the fashion now always people had jeweled beautiful swords that had a great purpose but uh sort of on mass you really start seeing the sword becoming less about the martial aspects of it and more that a gentleman was expected to have one and here's our last one and so this is this is a small sword made about 1790. oh and oh yeah very light nothing yeah uh and forget it was in your hand and that was partially the point because we've reached the the this is purely really a costume item you just don't get me wrong you could do something yeah you felt like you could harm uh but sort of we've crossed the threshold with a primary purpose is sort of it is a piece of jewelry um and what I love is the beautiful blade and they're really well designed as thrusting uh weapons go so you have this sort of triangular process that also has a fuller on the other side so very very light but also very very Stout yeah um and then what the reason I picked this one in particular this one it's beautiful uh but it's uh the whole Hilt is the whole Hilt is steel and these are chiseled it's blue steel they're beads that rotate yeah no individual little beats every single one of these in the entire Health some of them of course are stuck yeah uh but every single one of these is designed to spin and the reason we think it is blueed in this manner is that it's a it's a morning sword uh when someone has passed away and you're mourning them you can't wear a flashy well a gold flashy sword yeah so you would have a more somber built to go with your black morning clothes amazing yeah I can't believe this is steel I thought it was some sort of glass at first because the blue is so lovely um funnily enough about the shorter blade when I uh had my Enigma Montoya sword I had a regular blade made for it to the correct length of the Rapier blade and then found out that's like seven inches longer than the ones they used in the movie because for fight choreography yeah the one I had made was this long and in the movie they're much closer to this long yeah just easier I'm sure to get the shot yeah you don't need you don't need the distance I mean I would argue you don't need this long in combat indeed I can't believe how light this literally do you know how much this whole thing weighs uh yeah that's I uh I think that's I think that's like a pound and a half as well oh no it's less that's uh that's 16 ounces that's just one pound or sorry 14 ounces it really it feels like it feels like nothing I've drunk sodas that were lighter than it's heavier than this um Sean what a thing I mean you know we make stuff we build stuff for a living we we have our hands wrapped around materials there's just nothing like holding something that someone made yeah yeah and of course you you should get one more oh yeah you give me this is how we finish oh I just can't thank you for bringing me back to this one and this is again 14th century that's right late 14th century uh late 15th century sorry very early 15th century for okay amazing all right I think it's as good a place to stop is that thank you sir thank you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 653,908

Keywords: tested, adam savage, tested adam savage, adam savage tested, king arthur, adam savage armor, terry english, adam savage (tv producer), metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum of art, metropolitan museum of art tour, arms and armor sword, arms and armor, MET, tested adam savage armor, terry english adam savage, best museum exhibits, conservation, adam savage sword, adam savage MET

Id: wJypHnsEn8o

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023