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They may just be mummer’s masks which are seen in some other plates in the Freydal, but there are a few specific things about this scene which make me wonder.
Big article here
Frisian lady (virgin!) Freedom fighter from the region
Olivier gave me some additional data for Strasbourg. There were at least five regulations on weapon length issued by town council (or council of 21, a kind of defense committee) in Strasbourg in the 15th and 16th Century. One, in 1418 right after an uprising, specifies the maximum blade length of a knife to be a ‘span’ – the distance between thumb and pinky finger with the hand stretched out, maybe 10 cm. So at that time you could only carry a small knife. A second one from the later 16th Century specifies one and a quarter ellen, or about 60 cm at that time. The other three (one in the 15th and two in the 16th Centuries) refer to a restriction of blade length a marked span on the Munster, the giant cathedral in Strasbourg. This still exists, and it is two ells in length (at that time about 103 cm, or roughly 40-41 inches). That’s for blade length, not the whole sword.
I need to find a good contact in Nuremberg because I know they have a lot of surviving records there too.
I heard back from Olivier and he agrees, that law is about regulating the length of the weapons.
One other nuance to all this you might find interesting, in Augsburg they were repeatedly confiscating weapons that were ‘too sharp’ or ‘too pointed’ which they sometimes referred to as ‘degen’, but with a length of up to 1 and 1/2 ells, all the way back to the early 15th Century. These seem to have maybe been dueling weapons almost like smallswords.
Interesting, thanks for linking the sources there. There was a strict ban in Nuremberg for a while, I believe this has to do mainly with the 1349, craft-guild uprising (Handwerkeraufstand – basically all the crafts except the butchers), which resulted in a somewhat unusual situation in which the craft artisans were aligned with a hostile princely family (the Wittelsbach) and the patrician faction had the full support of one of the strongest emperors (Charles IV). The outcome was a total patrician victory sanctified by Imperial edicts, resulting in strict control by the patrician oligarchy which lasted many generations. And I think those kinds of regulations were part of that.
These uprisings were not unusual, in other towns sometimes the patricians won, sometimes the craft artisans and middle ranked merchants won, most often it ended up a kind of compromise situation.
It’s an interesting emerging picture of this very complex social, political and military landscape.
But we have to be careful with these little snapshots that records like that give us. I noticed on the (your?) blog you linked, it mentioned “The Strassburg ban on bearing long knives or daggers from 1452”. I wanted to double check this, so I pinged my friend Olivier Dupuis who has access to the archives there, but this was not actually a ban on carrying swords and knives. It was a regulation on the LENGTH of swords and messers, specifically, based on an official size they had established for both types of weapons that was available to check in the Rathaus.
This is very similar to laws passed in Frankfurt am Main and in Augsburg around the same time. The citizens remained armed, but they were repeatedly putting restrictions on the size and types of swords, and sometimes precisely which estates (such as servants, apprentices and journeymen) who could carry them in public. The overall impact was somewhat questionable as you can still see both from records of ongoing incidents and period artwork that people were still carrying all kinds of sidearms including longswords well into the 16th Century.
This article gives some prices for specific things in the marketplace in Krakow in the 15th-16th Century, and notes that crafts people were often quite wealthy, citing a female bricklayer who had several luxury dresses and other items to the point that she was technically in violation of the towns sumptuary laws
There is a good (more thorough and more lucid) explanation of the battle here
For mid-range, a lot of HEMA people I know highly recommend these guys
Yeah the exact number of blades you can effectively maintain varies by the individual. I find i get a little lost when I’m spread too thin, but for some people they could handle far more.
And certainly, I think you can probably find some ‘diamonds in the rough’ out there. I like to look for them in the smaller workshops though with the true believers rather than the big outfits which mostly cater to the non-fencers and people only superficially interested in history (which after all, is a much bigger market).
Getting back to my original point though, there is nothing wrong, by the way, with keeping a sword just to look at and wave around once in a while. I have a couple of antiques and that is all I do with them, and these days my sharps are pretty much just to look at and occasionally hold and dream warrior dreams…
My hesitation on a “good” $100-$200 sword would only be if you were going to use it for test cutting, training, or if you planned to give it some emergency self defense role.
My overall perception about low cost swords is basically this:
It comes down to what you want to do with it.
If you want to hang it on the wall, wave it around once in a while, and maybe occasionally do some very light test-cutting, a $100-$200 sword is probably fine, so long as you do a little homework. The cheaper swords HAVE gotten much better since I first started buying them 20 years ago, we no longer have so many welded tangs, many more are actual carbon steel rather than stainless steel, they LOOK a lot more like actual antiques (there aren’t so many bat wings, stingers, horns etc. on the hilt or strange barbs and lightning shapes on the blades)
But I’ve noticed over the years, having been to something like 30 HEMA events, and maybe 15 or 20 test-cutting parties and the like, that the cheaper replicas often fail even the easiest kind of tests. Like test cutting plastic water bottles, pool noodles, cheap straw mats and so on. Even just waving them around.
I’ve seen blades break, bend, turn at the edge, chip.. I’ve seen tangs and hilts break multiple times. I have seen injuries result!
One factor which took me a while to realize, is once you start getting into carbon steel swords (and please, don’t get a stainless steel sword, SS is far too brittle for a long blade and the risk of a blade snapping goes way up) there is a certain level of maintenance. If you live east of the Rockies in the US, humidity is going to be an issue. For me, counting both large knives and swords, replicas and antiques, I think about half a dozen is as much as i can handle. That includes both sharps and fencing swords.
As I start to surpass that number, I find I’m starting to end up with blades that are getting rusty and that is another major problem you don’t want to have as it can weaken blades and make them more susceptible to breaking.
From my various fencing / HEMA / sparring swords, I can say that your point about the quillions is another important one. If there was any chance you were planning to use your sword for sparring or (God forbid) in any kind of real life situation, and if it’s anything like a longsword, a late medieval arming sword, or anything in the sidesword / rapier family, you are going to rely HEAVILY on the quillions to save your fingers.
Now this might be a bit different if you are using an earlier type of sword where the default scenario is to rely heavily on the shield to protect your hand. But I can tell you for sure, all of my training weapons including relatively small knife-sized ones (like my Bauernwehr) have taken a huge amount of abuse on the quillions, which are HEAVILY bent, scored, dented, scratched etc. (i’ll post a pic on the Discord if I get around to it). All that damage would have been to my hand if the quillions had failed.
Finally, the quality of mid-range swords has also gone up quite a bit. Albion or some of the very high end replica makers in Europe are getting into the thousands of dollars now. But there are also many European and some American makers with a good reputation for quality who are making swords in the 400-600 range which have been tested by a lot of people and have well established reputations among HEMA folks and others who are very well informed.
So given that I don’t want 10-15 swords laying around, and the quality of a $500 sword that is made by somebody who really did their research, loved these kind of weapons and has a verified reputation for good quality and reliable workmanship, as opposed to a company (Hanwei, DEEPKA, CAS-IBERIA, Windlass) that is churning out large numbers of more or less identical swords for $100 or $200… but with who knows what going on under the surface…
I’d rather stick with the mid range, from an outfit I trust like Regenyei, Ensifer, Krieger, Chlebowski, Darkwood, Kvetun etc. where i might not be able to impulse buy a sword these days, it’s worth it to me to save a little longer and get something I can feel more confident about and that (in terms of a training weapon) I can be sure will last longer.
A lot of the Windlass, Hanwei, Cold Steel etc. swords I or guys in my club bought over the years promptly broke or failed in some other way (edge turned etc.) as soon as we started testing them. A couple did hold up I’ll admit but had other problems (the Windlass 15th Century longsword cut pretty well and never broke, but it was too ‘floppy’ to remain in a strait line if you held it out, it would always ‘droop’). Whereas by contrast, my Albion and Regenyei, Ensifer etc. seemed to hold up really well. I have some that have gone through multiple tournaments or tons of abuse test-cutting for example.
So while I wouldn’t rule out a cheapy one, and there are some that at least seem like a good basis for something you could customize (like that Windlass qama) I’d really do your research and not just go by one or two reviews. People pay reviewers. For me I’d rather get something I’m confident I can rely on.
I’m a fan of Landsknecht Emporium, they do messers and bauernwehr. Not ass cheap as Deepka or their ilk, but I think a lot more reliable and predictable in terms of what you get, and actually not too expensive. Like this little messer, which you could get for about $250
https://landsknechtemporium.com/products/standard/messer/Gottfried-M3C-Messer
