Why were MEDIEVAL DAGGERS shaped like that?

let's look at medieval daggers and why their blades change so much in design [Music] hi folks matt easton here scholar gladiatoria now for those of you who have got a general interest in medieval weapons you'll be aware that the dagger is a very very important backup weapon in the medieval period obviously when you think of many weapons you think of things like swords and spears pollaxes and maces and things like this but the dagger was super super important and was certainly through a lot of the medieval period that we would look at was a very very important sidearm and backup weapon now contrary to what some of you might think that wasn't because it was a tool utilitarian knives eating knives and um sort of camping type knives were a completely separate thing the dagger is specifically a fighting implement so why was the dagger so important well quite simply because when you come into grappling distance when you come into very close range combat then this is one of the most useful weapons because of its reach if i just put these down for a second so i've got my hands a bit more free if we come to this type of dagger the rondelle dagger which we'll talk a bit more about in a bit it means that you have a blade which is roughly the length of your forearm sometimes they can be shorter sometimes they can be longer but very often they're about this kind of length daggers in the medieval period and it means that in very close range in the type of range you might be wrestling and grappling with an opponent you can bring this blade to bear from many many different angles even obviously if you change the grip up from underneath and all this kind of stuff very very close in in a kind of clinch distance and this incidentally was a very much um universal type of weapon okay so the dagger was found in the civilian world and the military world and is one of the reasons why striking punching and kicking is not so prominent in the unarmed martial arts of the medieval period because if everyone's got a dagger then predominantly the type of very close range fighting that you're going to see is essentially wrestling with a dagger involved now at this juncture before i go on it's also important to note that there were strict regulations about weapon carrying in medieval europe and so law plays a part in this as well in the civilian world so as well as on the battlefield this being an incredibly important backup weapon in the civilian world it was also incredibly important because there were many places you simply could not carry around a main battle weapon like a spear or a halberd and there were many places you couldn't wear a sword around unless you were a knighted member of the nobility and so in those cases the weapon that people could carry around was the humble dagger but before we start looking at the different types of blades in this period and why they evolved and changed in the ways that they did we're going to have a quick look at the sponsors for this video who are husk knife so let's open it up and see what it looks like it's come very nicely packaged in a box is a knife with this characteristic finger hole design this is primarily designed as a kitchen tool as a kitchen knife however it's a knife so you could use it for other things you could absolutely use it for bushcrafting or things like that this is designed to be ergonomic and give you greater control of the knife itself if you are pushing towards the blade there is always the danger that the hand can slide up onto the blade but if your finger is locked in here that can not happen this is made of high quality japanese stainless steel i should mention that right now for viewers there's a 70 discount if you check out the link below and that also comes with a 30 day guarantee the edge bevel is 38 degrees the grips are made of oak it is in total 28 centimeters long and weighs just over 250 grams so let's have a little look at the sharpness of this and yep we can see that it cuts paper very much adequately but seeing as this is my channel you might be interested to know how does this handle wood certainly plenty sharp enough but what we're really looking to do here is find out how the uh how the blade does if i'm repeatedly doing this into a tree with that absolutely fine twist [Music] in twist perfectly fine no damage no loss to the tip so check out the link in the description and also in the pinned comment below now coming back to medieval daggers many of you on this channel will be familiar with the rondelle dagger let's have a look at some of the other types of daggers that were popular in the medieval period so i'm gonna i'm not gonna look at all of the different types but i'm gonna look at the principle types and i have covered these in past videos as well so if you're interested in learning more on this topic do search dagger in my videos so first up um when daggers really start to become prominent as sidearms for certainly for knights and most other types of soldier as specialized implements it's really in the 12th 13th century now in the 12th or 13th century the first type of specialized military dagger that we see is what's now known as the quillon dagger now aquillon if i just pick up a dagger here equilon is one of these it's one extension of the guard so this is the cross guard and each of these is a quillon from the french word kyong so quillons now the quillon dagger is so cool because it has a cross guard much like a sword and it has to be said in the early stages they were like a mini sword and they were worn parallel to the sword on the other side of the sword belt balancing it up and in some cases the style of the hilt on the quillon dagger matched that of the sword not always but sometimes now what i'm holding here incidentally has a side ring on it and we'll talk about that at the end of this video um and this is a type of 16th and 17th century type of dagger that we find as used with rapists and stuff now this is therefore after the medieval period so it's outside of the scope of this video but the principal basis for this if we take away the side ring and we change the style of the pom a little bit and things like this is essentially a quillon dagger so a quill on dagger of the say 13th century as shown in the makievsky or morgan bible essentially has a double-edged blade usually very sometimes they're single edged but usually double edged blade with a point at the end so you've got edges and you've got a point and it's essentially like a miniature sword blade and then you have a cross guard a grip obviously and a pommel and the style of the hilt is very much like a miniature sword like a miniature arming sword so in a sense they are like mini arming swords and it makes some degree of sense if suddenly daggers become important then you're going to think well let's make a miniature sword okay so it kind of makes sense you can see how they came up with that design but in some ways it's not specialized they've just made a miniature sword for close in fighting why did they need it in the 13th century so much why did we suddenly start seeing military daggers in the 13th century when we hadn't really seen them for example in the 11th century and most of the 12th century so there are many ideas about this but the probable reason is because of armour so armor was developing quite a lot in the 13th century and generally speaking without going into too much depth armor became more comprehensive and complete in the 13th century still predominantly what you see in the artwork is mail aka chainmail um but they start wearing great helms they start wearing something called a coat of plates which is overlapping plate garment worn over the mail but underneath the surcoat you can't always see it in art but it's there and additionally sometimes a steel skullcap underneath the male coif sometimes towards the end of the 13th century we start to get plate defenses on the arms and legs as well um so it seems that as certainly knights got more heavily armored they started carrying daggers more because if you're wearing more armor you're more likely to come into wrestling distance because the standard weapons that for ages before that swords and spears were now no longer so effective anymore so it was more likely you're going to end up in grappling range so for that reason they started carrying daggers that were pretty much like a miniature sword now we're going to look at a few other types of more specialized agars that then evolved it makes sense that once you've introduced a dagger then it's going to evolve within itself to be even more specialized within its new role but what i want to point out is that the quillon dagger really never went away okay so the standard cross-hilted quillon dagger we find it in the middle of the 13th century and it's still around in the middle of the 17th century we could say it's never gone away because daggers with um crossbar guards like this have gone all the way through to world war ii and modern commando type daggers so they kind of never went away but i want you to um i want to really emphasize the fact that they do exist right the way through the medieval period you can find in the 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th century right away across the whole of the later part of the medieval period however there were other types of hilts and blades that came along so one of the first specialized types of hilts which seems to come out of certain types of quillon daggers and you can even see these in the morgan bible that actually have a pommel that is almost like a crescent at the back and these develop into by the 14th century a type of dagger called a basilar now a basilar has essentially like a capital i okay so a t junction at top and bottom of the hilt now we have talked about basilars in the past in fact a long way in the past many years ago on this channel i haven't spoken about them for quite a long while and there are many questions as to why the hilts are like this okay now we can see what the cross guards like that the cross guards are like that for the same reason as cross guards like here it's a good hand stop and it provides some hand protection as well from the opponent's weapon sliding down your blade if it's in contact with your blade or anything else that's in contact with your blade like a spear shaft for example so it keeps your hand protected but why would you have this type of junction at the top well again i've spoken about this particularly when fighting an armor but in any situation if you want to access a knife or a dagger quickly in a combat situation then being able to fumble around and get your hand against a stop rib there in order to pull it out enables you to have a very secure grip and essentially hook it out and pull it out of the scabbard when you need to if you have a smaller pommel at the end and you're trying to pull it out certainly in a nice pick grip there is a risk that your hand can slide over the pommel or not quite find it this becomes particularly notable in armor if you're wearing any kind of gauntlet now in the initial stages this would have applied to male chain male mittens but as we go into the 14th century it starts to apply to plate armored gauntlets plate steel gauntlets which are usually fingered but nevertheless you lose some degree of dexterity and when you're in armor perhaps with a visor down perhaps with a helmet on and you can't actually see your dagger being able to feel it is quite a useful thing now i have got a 15th century style gauntlet here which is a mitten type so it's not fingered although i've got fingers on the inside and indeed when trying to grab this type of hilt it's made very much easier by having a hilt that sits into the gauntleted hand quite easily and you don't have to fumble around too much it will just naturally come out in the hand so i think this is a major important point but what's interesting is we see in the 14th century basilars being worn massively by civilians and we see it on two methods we see it in manuscript illuminations so these were very popular civilian daggers and military daggers now it's my assertion that these were primarily designed for military purpose and we don't really see many specialized civilian weapons in the 14th and 15th century civilian specialized civilian weapons seem to be something that become more of a thing in the 16th century so post-medieval in the 14th and 15th century we what we see is we see weapons battlefield weapons that are carried in civilian life so if you were a gentleman and you wanted to show you maybe you didn't have the legal right to walk around with a sword but you wanted to carry a dagger around you may well carry one of these because it represented your status as a gentleman so um this is a battlefield weapon that was also carried in civilian life but we should also mention there are perhaps some slight tendencies to adapt these to civilian life so one of the things is we sometimes find very long bladed versions of the basilar and it has been surmised this isn't confirmed it has been surmised that this was a way of getting around the weapon laws prohibiting the wearing of swords in certain places so if the laws said you can't wear a sword unless you're a knight but you can wear a dagger then you'll go okay i'll wear a dagger but i'll make it really big so it does seem that particularly large battle arts were probably a civilian thing so we see the beginnings of a specialised civilian weapons perhaps in the 14th century so these were popular with civilians with military basically a military type dagger now let's talk about the blade quickly you will notice this has exactly the same type of blade as found on quillon daggers of the 13th century it's still an a general purpose double-edged fairly broad cut and thrust blade in this case with a fuller some of them have multiple fullers now this type of blade is a jack of all trades it is um you can obviously stab with it and you can cut with it into unarmored or lightly armored targets and certainly in civilian life very versatile cut and cross with it to your heart's content however it's not specialized to either cutting or thrusting and that's what we're going to look at next as some daggers did become specialized in the blade so in the 14th century alongside the basilar although we could say the basilar developed first out of the quillon dagger a little bit later in the 14th century we start to see two types of dagger which come along with distinctive hilts and one of them is known as the rondell dagger which i've talked about a lot in this channel and it's called that because it has a roundel or rondel a disc for a guard sometimes it has a disc for a pommel as well not always and again what i've said about basilars and accessing things in armor easily easily indexing the weapon and getting it out of its sheath whether if you're wearing a helmet or arm or anything else i think that applies to the hilts of um rondelle daggers and then the other type of hilt we see here which looks rather phallic inten intentionally these are known as bollock daggers or bollock knives uh or if you're a prudish victorian balak daggers um in actual fact they were called bollock daggers they're sometimes by even more british people known as kidney daggers but they were called bollock daggers and it is no mistake that this is supposed to look like male genitalia okay so and these are two types of hilts that come along in the kind of middle of the middle to later part of the 14th century and this type is definitely specialized uh towards the armored fraternity so knights men at arms people fighting in armor i've talked a lot about this if you want to know more specifically about rondel dagger health just searching my videos for it this type of dagger seems a little bit more versatile and are generally associated more with the more middle and working class soldiers and indeed civilians so if we look at civilian art we see rundle um bollock daggers are probably worn slightly more often than rondelle daggers but ronald daggers were also born in civilian life probably to indicate that you were a very serious soldier or a knight so there was a degree of social difference between these two hilts there was probably also a degree of professional difference as well now this is again this is speculation to some degree but it does seem to be supported by the evidence now we do occasionally see knights wearing ronald dagger hilts absolutely um and equally we see civilians wearing uh sorry bollock dagger hills we see knights wearing bullock dagger hills and we do see civilians wearing rondelle dog hills so there's a big crossover either of these could be worn in war or civilian life but generally speaking i think we could say that this hilt is more specialized towards armored fighting now the blades don't always go hand in hand with the with the hilts sometimes we find a specialized stabbing blade on both of these and that's what we're going to look at now so if i pull out this bullock dagger you will see it is long and pointy and yes indeed it does have an edge that can cut but they become really thick really thick bars so this is no longer a slashing implement and just for comparison you have to remember that in the same period we've got utilitarian knives used for cooking or you know any kind of tools used for bush crafting woodwork stuff like that so this is an example of obviously a replica of a 14th to 15th century cooking knife and surprise surprise it looks very much like a chef's knife today doesn't it i mean there's some minor differences but generally speaking it looks basically like a big chef's knife or kitchen knife because that's exactly what it is now you'll notice this blade is very thin exactly like the knives in your kitchen this doesn't have to be durable for stabbing into um you know resisting opponents or stabbing into chainmail or padded gambesons or anything like this this doesn't need to put up with that kind of abuse what this needs to do is to slice fish and meat and vegetables and fruit really well so it has a thin blade with a very sharp edge so yes indeed these were used as weapons and could be used as weapons just the same way as today kitchen knives are worldwide the most common type of knife used in any kind of crime they were in the medieval period as well because these were the most ubiquitous and common knives around you can throw them away and no one knows who that knife belonged to because there's lots of kitchen knives around so kitchen knives are always around and they you could say are specialized cutting implements they are thin and sharp and usually more or less wide now if we contrast that with the blade you see here it is clearly not a specialized cutting implement yes it does have a sharp edge i'm not going to run my finger on it because i've sharpened it but it is thick in terms of slicing this is not going to slice anything like as well as a kitchen knife as that knife we've just looked at because it's a much thicker blade however when it comes to stabbing a whole different game this is nearly a centimetre thick at the base of the blade this is a sharpened rod and that's what the primary purpose of these blades are now these specialized stabbing blades seem to have been something that come along in the 14th century and in fact this is a fairly moderate example you do find examples that have triangular blades even square blades and obviously the square blades and some of the triangular blades don't really have any cutting edge to speak of now i actually have that knife and this knife are both from todd incidentally uh todd workshop and todd cutler this blade here you will see actually has a ridge on one side and is flat on the other ergo it's a triangular section blade and this has no edge to speak of this is purely a stabbing weapon now this is actually post medieval this is a 17th century style bollock dagger because the style persisted beyond the medieval period but just really to show the blade it's a utterly specialized stabbing implement whether it's point up or point down it's purely a spike okay the the edges are really only there to assist um penetration yes indeed you could cut with these and we do see armor treatises where the edges are used to cut the straps on armor for example when you're fighting wrestling with someone in armor and you're trying to get a part of their armor off you put it underneath the strap cut the strap off and then you can stab into the gap but these are primarily a stabbing implant so why were stabbing blades suddenly become so popular in the 14th century and this runs all the way through the 15th century as well i think there are several things at play here firstly these are now specialized fighting daggers um they are not cut and thrust they are purely stabbing implements moreover we see a parallel in for example spear design spears become much more spike like in this area we see the same with sword swords become generally pointier and more tapered sometimes reducing their cutting abilities by quite a lot to become more specialized thrusting implements and this is partly to do with armor no question okay so when you start to get people in full plate armor and you're having to stab between plates or into gaps like in the armpit where there might be male a chain mail and trying to burst through rings even if you're stabbing into gambeson cutting just doesn't cut it so to speak you've got to stab so essentially partly because of armor of the day thrusting specialized thrusting blades become more common but interestingly they're also carried in civilian life so it's not like civilians are all walking around with kitchen knives instead civilians also are carrying these specialized thrusting blades so the question is why well i think again it's partly because they're not necessarily carrying specialized civilian daggers they just carry the dagger now if the dagger evolves for war then the people in civilian life who want to carry dagger just carry whatever the current day weapon of war is so you could liken it to modern pistols if we decide that um you know in the 1980s the beretta 92f becomes the the de facto pistol of the police and the military then civilians a lot of them will buy the beretta 92f not because it's necessarily specialized for their purposes but because well that's what the military use that's what the police use so i think there's a social pressure and social convention involved here also just what's available if all the knife makers and dagger makers are mostly making stabbing blades now and you go to buy a dagger that's mostly what's available we do see a return to more cutting knives post medieval and i think again it's probably connected i think there's two things here probably partly connected to armor but also in the 16th century we start to see knives swords and other things catered more for civilians so we do see swords that are primarily civilian swords the cinque de for example or early rapey as it has to be said so um i think once you see specialized civilian weapons then the needs of a knife or a dagger changes and i think it's that kind of world when you start to see things like the bowie knife start to evolve the bowie knife is a fantastic knife fantastical round knife rubbish for fighting in armor with for fighting in armor you want a great big stiff thick spike um now i want to also mention that rondelle daggers are famous stabbing implements and our in many ways i mean even the design of the hilt is catered towards stabbing and he's not well suited to using in a cutting sense at all because the hand is too restricted really to do that very effectively so as a stabbing implement hugely effective but you'll notice this blade is quite broad now funnily enough you do sometimes just to show that some people don't always go with the flow and some people have their own way of thinking you do sometimes find broader cutting blades mounted on rundle dagger hilts for whatever reason because the person buying it just wanted something a little bit more multi-purpose maybe or maybe they were fighting in a different environment where their opponents weren't wearing much armor so you might be wearing lots of armor but if your opponents are not wearing much armor you might want a more versatile cut and frost blade who knows there might be multiple possible reasons so sometimes even with relatively specialized thrusting blades we science find more that are more committed to the thrust this is very thick and relatively narrow and this one is pretty much as thick but it's a lot broader for no particularly apparent reason some people just prefer one and some prefer the other so as we draw a close on the medieval period i think the takeaway here is that at the beginning of daggers become really really popular in the 13th century they were kind of multi-purpose cut and thrust mini swords with a cross guard that type of dagger did continue in use but it dropped in popularity and was replaced by essentially more specialized stabbing daggers they could either be more specialized in their hilts or more specialized in their blades or specialized in both okay so you can find more specialized thrusting blades on any of these hilts or sometimes and more rarely cut and thrust blades on any of these hilts there is however a general tendency that rondle daggers tend to have the most stabby blades sometimes even square section just completely non-edged at all and there is a general tendency for baselines and bollock daggers which were carried arguably more in the civilian world than ronald daggers were for them to have more general purpose cut and thrust blades so indeed i think we can we can infer that there was an assumption that if you were carrying a knife in a civilian world for self-defense you were more likely to need the edge and the point and perhaps on the battlefield certainly if you were one of the guys wearing armor really you only needed the point but as we come into the 16th century and the middle ages fade behind us we find that the good old quillon daggum makes a return as i've mentioned and it makes a return in the form of these daggers which are essentially quillon daggers usually with double-edged um straight cut and thrust blades they're predominantly stabby but they have some cutting ability as well and you'll notice that this one has a side ring on this became quite a popular addition to these daggers but it has to be said this wasn't specific to daggers most swords or many many swords got side rings on sometimes multiple side rings and sometimes a knuckle bow as well so this was a time when hand protection was starting to rise probably because many soldiers on the battlefield were wearing less armor not wearing gauntlets anymore because they were increasingly using things like firearms but in addition to that in the civilian world civilian weapon carrying was seems to have gone up and sword carrying seems to become more common as well as we go into the age of the side sword and the rapier and so if civilians are wandering around with swords and occasionally using them for deals then they want more hand protection because they don't wear gauntlets so side rings and such like become more common but fundamentally if we flip the side ring to the back this is essentially a quillon dagger still so essentially this had existed right the way through the medieval period and survived it and we should also mention the other reason why these became particularly popular and why the quillons became very very useful was because these often started being partnered with a sword everybody knows about rapier and dagger but actually these were used alongside swords before the rapier was even really a thing we start to see sword and dagger being used together really at the beginning of the 1500s in a dueling situation and if you imagine you're living in a city where it's legally fine for you to walk around with a sword well then you may as well carry something to go with the sword and that was usually either a dagger or a buckler okay so in the early 1500s sword and buckler or sword and dagger were the standard civilian certainly gentlemanly armaments and the quillons of course are super useful for blocking and catching an opponent's thrust or blow and so quilon daggers became pretty much one of the most useful types of dagger that you could use in this period so that's been interesting and entertaining to watch i hope i see you back on the channel really soon i've been matt easton i will continue to be and i'll see you soon cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 105,823

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Id: NJU8kCtjXVI

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022