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The clause that “you may naturally bring a sword or long knife when you go to and from the taverns at night, as long as you bring a lamp or other source of light with you” suggest to me that the law was meant to restrict the wearing of sword-sized weapons. The use of tegen in an earlier clause implies that those giant 15th century daggers with a blade over 12″ long were probably also excluded (tegen can refer to two-edged straight swords or daggers, but in this context a “dagger” makes more sense than a “tuck / estoc”).
I literally transcribed and translated the laws from Strassburg https://ageofdatini.info/fontes/laws-weapons-strassburg.html From other medieval laws and art I strongly suspect that the proper length was no more than a 30 cm / 12″ blade ie. that the law allowed daggers or big knives but not huge daggers or full swords or sabres.
Painting recipes also involve optics, because light passes through some layers and reflects off others.
When I experiment with tempera painting I will use some of the ferrous oxides reds and yellows, calcium based whites, carbon blacks, and copper blues and greens. I won’t touch any of the scary high number of late medieval pigments with lead, arsenic, or mercury in them.
Usamah also has a good example of parrying with the blade of your knife resting on your forearm going horribly wrong because of preindustrial steel
Jost Amman has a lot of pictures of basket-hilted swords from the 1560s and 1570s eg. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-21.325 or https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-21.407 or https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-21.402
Meanwhile this camp peddler has a rapier blade on a hilt with cross, knuckle-bow, and siderings like Meyer’s Rapier https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-21.427(V)
If I wanted to research this, I would start with encyclopedias of medieval art and books on the Gothic style in France and look up the names in the index.
There is a good article by Thomas Green on how legal documents often describe an assault in whatever language was necessary to give the desired result. In England after the late 13th century, the legal definition of murder was much broader than the popular understanding, and coroners’ juries often found a way to square the circle and save people they liked from the gallows.
Regardless, it shows that you don’t mess with a Bürger or a citoyen!
Until then the link to the high-resolution scan is https://wellcomecollection.org/works/y52ug5tb
I can’t edit posts more than 5 minutes old. If I copy and paste the link it works, if I click it it brings me back here.
He also has a pair of fencers with dussacks, and a pair with staffs. There was a 1968 Dover reprint of the Künstbuchlin with the title “293 Renaissance Woodcuts for Artists and Illustrators.”
Its also an interesting description of norse Greenland just before its abandonment! Supposedly one of the things Jared Diamond got wrong in Collapse was that the archaeologists think the Norse had switched to a meat- and fish-based diet towards the end of their settlement. They were not rigidly stuck on farming and cattle-raising.
Feel free! There are so many old law books from central Europe that we don’t have to treat the law from London and the coroner’s reports from 14th century London as our go-to example of ‘medieval law on carrying weapons.’ Maybe things were different in other places, maybe not, if someone spends enough time reading old script the evidence is out there.
There is another law in that book about members of the militia carrying a sword or langes Messer when on duty in the streets.
The memoir has a very film-friendly opening with Schiltberger captured after Nicopolis and the Turks separating him from the others and then starting to kill all the men over the age of 20. He was almost 16.
An English translation from 1879 by Commander J. Buchan Telfer, R.N., and Professor P. Bruun, Imperial University of South Russia (Odessa) is on Project Gutenberg at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52569
I’ve actually got a little magazine article on concealed mail, headpieces, and brigandines in the Archivo Datini di Prato (only two pages I think, I put the Italian up here).
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