A Review of Ewart Oakeshott's Sword in Hand

By Dr Stanley Lombardo

If you can afford only one book on the medieval sword, Ewart Oakeshott's Sword in Hand; a Brief Survey of the Knightly Sword should be it. With The Sword in the Age of Chivalry out of print and demanding increasingly higher prices, and Records of the Medieval Sword currently available only in a somewhat fragile softbound edition, Sword in Hand represents a wise long-term investment for your arms and armour reference library. Each chapter of the book offers not only a scholarly discussion of a specific era in the evolution of the knightly sword-couched in Oakeshott's inimitable, congenial style-but also a rousing narrative of a battle in which swords of the type in question were used historically. Note incidentally, the crisp, high-definition black-and-white photographs and drawings provide a magnificent array of medieval swords that are a delight to look at and to imagine the pleasures of handling.

Sword in Hand is not only an appropriate title for this edition of the author's writings, but it also offers a succinct statement of Ewart Oakeshott's lifelong first-person, hands-on study of this noblest of weapons. It is a rare sword indeed, in any of the great European or American collections, that Oakeshott has not handled, documented, and-in his own words -"...fondled and loved." In fact, many of the splendid weapons pictured in this volume are (or were) part of the Oakeshott collection.

Originally written as a series of articles for Gun Report Magazine, in the middle 1980s, Sword in Hand offers a treasure hoard of photographs, descriptions, and lively anecdotes of medieval knightly swords flashing in the fists of the men (and occasionally women) who owned and used them. What makes these articles particularly illuminating is the author's incorporation of archaeological material-such as the magnificent cache of fifteenth-century swords discovered in the River Dordogne--which had been unavailable at the time of his Archaeology of Weapons or The Sword in the Age of Chivalry. Oakeshott himself is adamant about this point: that is to say, new discoveries are constantly forcing a reevaluation of old beliefs about medieval weapons; and the scholar with a true love of his field is willing to accept new evidence and modify his views accordingly.

Sword in Hand is roughly chronological in its organization, but not rigidly so. After two chapters of introduction-"The Medieval Sword" and "An Introduction to the Sword of Chivalry"-Oakeshott conducts the reader through the evolution of the knightly sword from its ancestors in the swords of the Migration Period (Chapter 3) through its highest form in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries ("Cut and Thrust" and "The Age of Foissart"). To a large extent, this chronicle reflects the dynamic conflict between the development of increasingly effective forms of armour--from the iron mail of the Migration Period to the plate harness of the later phases of the Hundred Years' War-and correspondingly effective forms of the sword. Each chapter features a masterfully told narrative of a significant battle (though Oakeshott has often deliberately chosen a lesser-known confrontation) in the author's distinctive style, which absolutely makes the reader feel like an eyewitness if not an actual participant.

Case in point is the Battle of Benevento, with which the author opens Chapter 12, "Cut and Thrust." Fought in southern Italy in 1266, between the invading French forces under Charles of Anjou and a combined German-Sicilian force led by Manfred, King of the Two Sicilies, Benevento represents a cusp event both in European politics and in the evolution of the sword. Mail armour had become increasingly reinforced with plate so that broad-bladed mail-cutting swords were demonstrating decreased effectiveness. Meanwhile, the configuration of the sword had gradually changed from the broad, relatively blunt-pointed blades of the Type X Viking era, to the more radically tapered, "bold kite shape" of Type XIV. At a critical moment of the battle, when Manfred's heavily armoured German knights "...with their great swords, seemed to be impervious to the utmost that the French and Provenal knights could do to them," someone among the French noticed that the Germans' technique of raising their swords high overhead and hewing down at their adversaries exposed an unprotected place under their arms-a place where harness has always been notoriously vulnerable. The French, using the shorter, more acutely pointed swords of Types XIV and XV, took up the cry, " l'estoc, l'estoc!" ("Use the point, the point!") The French knights thrust through the unarmoured spot, into the Germans' chests, and soon the apparently unbreakable formation was destroyed.

Oakeshott provides a much fuller account of the battle, its prelude and its aftermath, but this one incident demonstrates the significance of a radical departure from earlier forms of the sword and their characteristic use. In such a way, the author guides us through the evolution of that most magnificent of weapons, the medieval knightly sword, through the sixteenth century and the introduction of the swept-hilt rapier. Every page sparkles with Ewart Oakeshott's profound knowledge of his subject, as well as personal insights derived from eighty years' hands-on contact with the weapons themselves. Sword in Hand is a splendid contribution to arms-and-armour scholarship and a fine, representative example of the work of a great master in the field.