Military Swords - Why Were They Made & Issued Blunt?

Hey folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatoria. Now, recently I did a video where I talked about the fact that in lots of my videos I say, and I'll discuss that in a further video, and then I don't get around to doing it. But of course, hopefully I'm going to be alive for a little bit longer, so I will get around to answering most of those questions in the future of my life and of this channel. But one of the questions that apparently I have, or one of the points that I have alluded to, sambus90, username obviously there, rather than real name, I hope, said, this is one of the points that I've raised a few times, that 19th century swords were often, or are often, blunt, and were made blunt, and were issued blunt. Why was that? Well, I have actually covered this, I think, in other videos in the past, so I'm not going to belabor the point too heavily, I'm not going to make this into a very complex video. This, incidentally, is a US Model 1860 Cavalry Sabre, dated 1865, I think, yes, and made by C. Robey of Chelmsford, Massachusetts. So this isn't actually a European Cavalry Sabre, but of course the United States and Mexico and various South American powers and Canada and Australia were very much within the European sphere, they were culturally European by this date. So the weapons they were using were, of course, very much of a European type, as opposed to Asian or African or whatever. So why were these swords usually made blunt and issued blunt? Well, first of all, which swords are we talking about? Well, I think what we can say is, generally speaking, from about the middle of the 18th century, so 18th century is the 1700s, so roughly 1730s, 40s, 50s onwards, most swords that were made were then, that were issued, not necessarily that were sold to private purchase, and I'll deal with that in a second, not in a future video, but swords that were issued. So I've spoken about this in previous videos, bear in mind an officer or a gentleman was expected to buy their own equipment, someone who was a private soldier or a cavalry trooper, so, you know, a working class person who was essentially just signed up a contract to join the military or the militia or whatever, they would have been issued their weapon, they were expected to buy their own weapon, although it has to be said in some cases, perhaps in the case of certain volunteer units in the further out from central power bases or indeed in the case of American militias during the war of independence, things like this, there may have been situations where sometimes people were required to bring their own sidearms, but that aside, that's a kind of residual factor. By and large, issued weapons, that is, they're purchased either by the central government or in some cases a localised government or like a state, for example, or even sometimes an individual town or city or sometimes at an extreme end of the example, by a private individual who had taken it upon themselves to raise a local militia. That happened, for example, in America during the American war of independence where sometimes wealthy individuals did outfit local units and indeed it happened in another random example, there are many many examples, but another example is in Britain during the Napoleonic wars when there was a genuine fear of invasion by France and France's allies, primarily under Napoleon, there were local yeomanry units, for example, were often raised by by local aristocrats, landowners, comprising of people from their estate and they were equipped from the private pocket by and large of the individuals that raised those yeomanry or militia units. So generally speaking, provided weapons were often provided blunt and that goes for swords, for hangers, very often for bayonets, for all sorts of bladed weapons. Now I think we can say the two main reasons for that being the case are number one, maintenance, and number two, safety. Now there is a third factor which came in later which I'm going to come to in a minute. So the first factor is maintenance. If you have a sharp edge, that sharp edge has to be maintained. It goes in and out of a scabbard, particularly if a scabbard is made of steel but even if it's a wooden or a leather scabbard, the edge will eventually get blunt and it will require sharpening. So if you don't maintain the edge it will become a blunt edge anyway but additionally if the edge is sharp and you're degrading it and then sharpening it and then degrading it and then sharpening it, you're essentially doing damage, progressive damage, you're wearing down that weapon and it is something that requires maintenance and therefore effort and cost and things that you don't necessarily want and of course in peacetime that weapon doesn't need to be sharp per se. So maintenance is one reason. The second reason is safety. So there are various sources that refer to cavalry swords particularly being given to recruits and them then injuring themselves, their comrades in barracks and their horses during training with their swords and therefore the source says that you should therefore make sure the swords are blunt when they're not actually on campaign because they'll do themselves and their friends and their horses less injuries that way. So those two things together I think are fairly influential but there is a third final factor which comes in I think a little bit later, I think as a result of those two. So those are the egg and this is the chicken. By the 19th century, by the time that this sword was around and by time most of the Victorian swords that I'm showing were around and indeed by the Napoleonic era and the war of 1812, so the beginning of the 19th century, it seems that a sword being sharpened was almost, it almost achieved a ritual significance such that by the end of the period that I normally talk about, by World War I, at the beginning of World War I in the British army when war was declared in 1914, the order to sharpen swords went right around the British empire. I think roughly a third of the world's population was living under the British empire in 1914 and the order was sent out to sharpen swords amongst His Majesty's armed forces, be that in Canada or Australia or Britain or Kenya or India or wherever. So that didn't only apply to swords, that applied to naval cutlasses, army bayonets, lances, everything. Now that in itself you think well that makes sense, war's being declared so they're going to make sure the weapons are sharp but the point is the weapons were blunt, not completely blunt, as blunt as this. So you'll notice that fundamentally it still comes to an edge, it's just that the edge isn't quite sharp and that it still has a point on it but the point isn't quite, it's not going to stick in my finger although that does hurt a little bit. So the weapon needs to be finally given its final honing in preparation for action and bearing in mind that weapon has now been relatively safe to be issued out to your troops because they're not going to cut themselves open accidentally with them when they're constantly on parade drawing them sheathing and drawing and sheathing them and additionally you're not having to pay money to maintain those edges when you don't need an edge on the sword. So there we go, I think by the 19th century the sharpening of weapons, and we see this repeatedly in personal accounts for example from the Crimean War where people talk about the sharpening of their weapons and we have photographs even from the 19th century going on campaign, the Boer War, the Sudan campaign, these sorts of things, the Crimean War, where regiments swords are sent off to be sharpened by professional cutlers or they're sharpened within the regiment usually by the armourer who's usually a sergeant, usually a fairly sort of middle-aged sergeant who's been with the regiment for a certain amount of time and has become the armourer and that seems to have a ritual significance, it's like the final polish on their you know they've been fully trained, fully drilled, fully equipped, fully prepared and the final polish on preparing them for combat is to sharpen their weapons and I think by the 19th century I strongly believe based on everything I've read, original source material, that it had achieved an almost ritualistic sort of symbology behind sharpening the weapons. So final thing I'll finish off with saying is generally speaking and I do have collectors come to me and go Matt I've just bought my first antique sword and it's blunt, why is it blunt, I don't understand, it's a sword, it's supposed to cut things and I can understand that but most 19th century swords or even even late 18th century swords that you will encounter don't have a sharp edge on them but many of them have been sharpened okay and if they have been sharpened it doesn't always, not 100% of the time, but probably 90-95% of the time indicates that they were taken on active service, that is that the person that that particular sword was either with a regiment because it was an issued weapon or with an officer if it was a personal weapon and it was taken to a war zone so it could be for World War One, could be for the Boer War, depending which country you're in, obviously the US Civil War. There are some exceptions and we do know for example that very occasionally army military units in various countries got into conflict before they had the chance to sharpen their weapons and this is definitely a disadvantage to having blunt weapons and then only sharpening them when war is declared because sometimes war is declared on you before you have a chance to declare war on the enemy and so in a situation for example like the Indian Mutiny where suddenly the troops are rebelling against you or in a situation for example the Franco-Prussian War when the Prussians suddenly invade you might not be ready and your swords might be sharp and that's the downside to keeping blunt swords and there are accounts of people going into combat with blunt weapons and in fact I know that this happened during the US Civil War and there's some things being written about it, some people have said oh the blunt sword gives a nastier wound than a sharp sword, I mean this is just complete BS I'm afraid, clearly swords are not great bludgeoning weapons they are, a mace is a great bludgeoning weapon, a hammer is a great bludgeoning weapon, a sword isn't and they are meant to be cutting weapons and so clearly if the weapon was sharp it would do a lot more damage than if it was blunt because you're still hitting them with the same inertia, the same energy whether it's sharp or blunt so having a sharp edge clearly is going to do more. So there we go really, there were occasions when people were forced to use blunt swords. Now final thing I mention which I meant to mention a few minutes ago is therefore because swords were kept blunt, yes this is a secondary question related to it, yes that does absolutely affect the type of edge that you find on 19th century and 18th century military swords. Do they often have a secondary bevel? Yes they do. Is a secondary bevel bad? No, not per se. There are many places in the world where swords were kept sharp or even periods of history in Europe where swords were kept sharp where the swords have a secondary bevel. You can find secondary bevels on medieval swords, you can find secondary bevels on swords from the Middle East, you know Turkish swords and Middle Eastern Arabic swords, Persian swords, you can find secondary bevels on tulwars, you know some of the sharpest swords in the world sometimes have secondary bevels on. Even on things like katars, jambayas, kanjars, these kinds of daggers and knives that are usually sharp, they sometimes have a secondary bevel on. There is a perception in the knife and particularly sword world that the secondary bevel is somehow inferior, it's not necessarily, it's a more robust edge. However, 19th century military swords when they were sharpened weren't only sharpened with a secondary bevel, they were usually sharpened with a secondary bevel. For anyone who doesn't know, so say your edge comes like that and it's not quite sharpened here, when you hone the final edge on, much like most people's kitchen knives, you hone at a slightly different angle to put the final sharp edge on, which means that you end up with a change of angle and that's the secondary bevel, you've got a primary bevel and a secondary bevel. 19th century military swords were sharpened in a number of different ways, probably 80% of them were sharpened with a what I would call a secondary bevel, perhaps 10% of them were apple seed edged, so in other words you put a secondary bevel on and then you smooth off the change of angle between the two bevels. And finally, some swords, and I have examples right here in fact, I can't show them on camera because it would be too small for you to be able to see on screen unfortunately, but some of them they completely re-profiled the whole bevel, so you end up with a single bevel and it was completely known in the 19th century that this produced a sharper edge, it's the type of edge you find on most medieval European swords and it's the type of bevel you find on most Japanese swords for example, usually it's a single bevel and many tolwars as well and some, particularly British and particularly in Indian service, Anglo-Indian service, did have a single bevel put on them so that essentially they re-ground that whole bevel, but that does make, whilst it does make for a sharper edge, it makes for a more fragile edge because the angle, the meeting angle at the final cutting edge is a smaller angle than the secondary bevel type, so secondary bevel is less sharp or less, yeah we can say less sharp, perhaps slightly less effective at cutting but it is a stronger edge if you're parrying and hitting bone and hitting harder targets and it is worth saying as well that when people sharpened swords like lead cutters in the 19th century for cutting through sheep carcasses, they put a secondary bevel on it, so you can cut through pig or sheep carcass with a secondary bevel, no problem at all, when they made handkerchief cutters for cutting through silk then they put a single bevel on because there is a sharper edge but it's a more fragile edge. Anyway there we go, I hope that kind of covers probably the whole topic, that's more or less why many 18th and 19th century swords are blunt or why they were kept blunt, why they were made blunt, also remember the ritual significance of sharpening a sword before campaign and I think that there was probably an unspoken rule about it not being proper to sharpen your sword if you hadn't seen real service kind of thing, and finally you find a variety of different edges on 19th century and 18th century swords, very often a secondary bevel but not always. I hope that answers your question Sam, I guess your name probably is, and I hope that was interesting for everyone else as well. Thanks for watching and I will see you guys soon, cheers! 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!