The Quiet Armoury · Episode 1 · 42 min

The Sword, from Bronze to the Rapier

Fuller: the long groove down a sword blade. Often called a blood groove; it is nothing of the kind. A night walk through a museum hall of swords, case by case, from the first bronze blades of five thousand years ago to the officer's sword of the last cavalry... Inside: a planted myth about the Gauls' bent swords, the patterned steel of the migration age, a fake Ulfberht, a knight's sword weighing as much as a bag of sugar, a smith reading the colours of hot steel, the murder stroke, a Zweihänder taller than a man, and a katana that was never folded a thousand times. Ewart Oakeshott will be there too. Chapters: Before the sword · The first swords · Iron · The Romans · The patterned blades · The Viking sword · The knight's sword · The smith · The longsword · The giants · The sword leaves the battlefield · Elsewhere · What a sword is. Sources: Royal Armouries and Wallace Collection notes, Oakeshott's and Petersen's typologies, studies of the Ulfberht blades, Polybius, the Arslantepe finds. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

A sword is a long knife that somebody refused to stop improving.

For more than five thousand years, smiths in every corner of the world kept changing it... a little longer, a little lighter, a little stiffer, a different curve, a different grip. Each change answered a question. What metal do we have? Who are we fighting? What are they wearing? Are we on foot, or on a horse?

And so, if you lay the swords of history side by side, in order, they tell the story of everything around them.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode one... the sword, from bronze to the rapier.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is late. You are in a museum, after the last visitors have gone.

It is a long hall with a high, vaulted ceiling, and the lights have been turned down for the night, all but the small lamps inside the glass cases. Outside, the wind moves in the trees of a park. Inside, it is very still. Your footsteps are the only sound on the stone floor.

Along both walls of the hall, in glass cases, in a long row, are swords. Hundreds of them. The oldest are at this end, near the door. The newest are at the far end, in the shadows.

You have the whole hall to yourself tonight. And there is no hurry at all. So let us walk along it, case by case, and look.

Chapter one. Before the sword.

The first case holds no swords at all.

It holds knives and daggers of stone... flint, chipped carefully along both edges into long leaves, some of them beautiful, as thin as a biscuit. People made blades like these for hundreds of thousands of years.

But you cannot make a sword out of stone. Stone is hard, and it is sharp, but it is brittle. Make a flint blade as long as your arm, and the first time it strikes anything, it snaps. A sword needs to be long, and it needs to bend a little without breaking. For that, you need metal.

The first metal people learned to work was copper. It is soft... a copper knife bends and blunts quickly. Then someone, somewhere, found that copper mixed with a little of something else became much harder.

At first, the something else was arsenic, which comes naturally in some copper ores. Later, and better, it was tin. Copper with about one part in ten of tin is bronze. It is harder than copper, it can be cast in a mould, and it melts at a much lower heat than iron... so a simple clay furnace and a pair of bellows are enough.

Tin is rare. It is found in only a few places... in what are now Cornwall, Brittany, Spain, Central Asia. So for two thousand years, there were trade routes across the whole ancient world carrying it, just so that people far away could make bronze.

Chapter two. The first swords.

The second case holds the oldest swords in the hall. Their colour is green and brown now, not gold. Bronze turns that colour over thousands of years in the ground.

The oldest swords anyone has found come from a hill in eastern Turkey called Arslantepe. They were made about five thousand three hundred years ago, of copper with arsenic, and they are short, perhaps half a metre long, with the hilt cast in one piece with the blade. Some are inlaid with silver.

Nobody quite knows why these first ones were made. They are a little long for knives and a little short for anything else. Some think they were symbols of rank more than weapons. But they are the beginning.

Over the next two thousand years, bronze swords grew longer.

Some of the first long ones, in Greece and Crete, were very long and very narrow... more like a long spike than a blade. Scholars sometimes call them rapiers, though they have nothing to do with the later rapier. They were for thrusting. But a long, thin bronze blade has a weakness: bronze bends. Strike sideways with it, and it may simply fold.

So the smiths changed the shape. Around three thousand two hundred years ago, a new kind of bronze sword spread across Europe and the Mediterranean... a leaf-shaped blade, widening a little before the point, with a strong central ridge, and a hilt made in one piece with the blade, with plates of bone or wood riveted on for the grip. It could cut, and it could thrust. It was a good, sturdy shape, and it was copied for centuries, from Scandinavia to Egypt.

Bronze swords were cast, not forged. Molten bronze was poured into a mould of stone or clay, and when it cooled, the blade was taken out, filed, hammered along the edges to harden them, and polished.

That has one curious result. Because the moulds could be used again, archaeologists sometimes find swords that are almost twins... made in the same mould, perhaps by the same hands, and found hundreds of kilometres apart.

And it has another. In the hands of a working smith, an old broken bronze sword was never truly finished. It could be melted down, and poured into a new one.

Chapter three. Iron.

The third case changes colour. The swords here are dark, almost black, some of them crusted with rust.

Iron is everywhere. It is in the soil, in the rocks, in bog water. Unlike tin, you do not need a trade route for it. But iron is hard to work. It needs a far hotter fire than bronze. And it does not melt in an ancient furnace at all. Instead, the furnace yields a spongy lump of iron, mixed with slag... and the smith must hammer that lump, heat it, and hammer it again, for hours, to squeeze the slag out and make it solid.

Here is a surprise. The first iron swords were not better than the bronze ones. Often, they were worse.

Pure iron is soft. A plain iron sword bends more easily than a good bronze one. What makes iron strong is a little carbon worked into it... which turns it into steel. And steel becomes harder still if, when it is red hot, you plunge it into water and cool it suddenly. That is called quenching.

The early smiths learned all this slowly, by trial, without knowing why it worked. For a long time, the quality of iron swords was very uneven. Some were excellent. Some were little better than a bar.

There is a famous story about this, from a Greek historian named Polybius.

He describes a battle between the Romans and the Gauls, at a place called Telamon, in Italy, in the year two hundred and twenty-five before Christ. The Gauls' long iron swords, he says, were so soft that after the first blow they bent, lengthwise and sideways, and the warriors had to stop, put the blade against the ground, and straighten it with their foot before they could strike again.

It is a good story. Archaeologists are not sure they believe it. The Gauls, in fact, were very fine smiths, and many of their swords that survive are excellent. Polybius was writing for Romans, about their enemies. He may have heard the story from someone who liked to tell it.

Chapter four. The Romans.

The fourth case belongs to Rome.

The most famous Roman sword is the gladius... from which we have the word gladiator. The Roman soldier's gladius was short. The blade of the best-known kinds was only about half a metre long, broad, with a long, sharp point.

It was made for one particular way of fighting. Roman soldiers fought in close order, shoulder to shoulder, behind large curved shields. In that crush, there is no room for a great swinging cut. So the gladius was used mostly to thrust... out from behind the shield, short and quick, and back again.

The Romans may have taken the idea from Spain. Roman writers called the early version the Spanish sword... the gladius hispaniensis.

Beside it in the case lies a longer sword: the spatha.

At first, it was a cavalry sword. A rider needs reach... a short sword cannot reach from a horse's back to a man on the ground. Over the centuries, more and more of the Roman army fought in looser order, or on horseback, and the long spatha slowly replaced the short gladius, until, by the late empire, it was the usual sword of the Roman soldier.

Remember the spatha. Everything that comes next in this hall... for a thousand years... grows from it.

Chapter five. The patterned blades.

When the Western Roman Empire faded, the peoples who came after... Franks, Goths, Saxons, Lombards... kept the long, straight, double-edged sword. And their smiths did something extraordinary with it.

Look closely at the swords in this case, at the middle of the blades, and you will see patterns. Ripples. Wavy lines, chevrons, like the skin of a snake, or the grain of a polished piece of wood.

This is called pattern welding.

It began as a solution to a problem. The iron of the time was uneven: some pieces had more carbon in them, some less. So smiths took thin bars of iron and steel, laid them together, twisted them, like a rope, hammered them together in the fire until they welded into one, and then twisted and welded more of these bars side by side to form the core of the blade. Then they welded hard steel edges on either side.

The result was a blade with a tough, springy middle and hard, sharp edges. And when it was polished and lightly etched, the twisted layers showed on the surface as a pattern, flowing down the blade.

It took enormous skill and many days of work. A sword like that was worth a great deal... by some accounts, as much as a small farm. It was not a weapon a poor man owned. It was passed from father to son, given as a gift between kings, buried with its owner, or thrown into a lake as an offering.

The poems of the time are full of these swords. In the old English poem Beowulf, swords have names, histories, and ancestors. A good sword is described by its wavy patterns, its gleam, the serpents in its blade... which may be the poet's way of describing exactly this kind of steel.

Chapter six. The Viking sword.

The sixth case is a long one. These are the swords of the Viking Age... from about the year eight hundred to the year one thousand and fifty.

A Viking sword is about ninety centimetres long, a little less than a metre. Its blade is straight and broad, double-edged, with a gentle taper, and a wide, shallow groove running down the middle of each side. It weighs, usually, a little over a kilogram... about as much as a bag of sugar.

That surprises people. In paintings, films and games, swords are often imagined as enormous, crushing slabs of iron, weighing as much as a small child. Real ones, almost all of them, are light, lively and quick in the hand.

And here is another common mistake, about that groove down the middle of the blade.

It is often called a blood groove, and you may have heard that it was there to let the blood run out, or to let air into a wound, so that the blade could be pulled free. None of that is true.

The groove is called a fuller. It works the same way as the shape of a steel girder in a bridge. Take metal from the middle of a blade, and you make it lighter, but hardly any weaker... in fact stiffer, for its weight. It is engineering, not cruelty.

Beside the blades in this case lie the remains of their scabbards... thin strips of wood, darkened, with scraps of leather and a metal tip, called a chape, to protect the end.

Scabbards like these were often lined, inside, with sheepskin, the wool facing in. That was clever. The natural grease in the wool kept a thin film of oil on the blade, so that it did not rust in the damp northern air. And the wool, lying all one way, held the sword gently in place, so that it would not slide out when the owner bent down, but would come out smoothly when he drew it.

A sword was worn on a belt, or hung from a strap over the shoulder, on the left side, so that the right hand could reach across and draw it.

The hilts are where the Viking swords differ most. A short, straight guard. A grip of wood or bone, wrapped in leather, short... just long enough for one hand. And a heavy pommel at the end, often shaped like a tea cosy, or a cocked hat, or a row of lobes, sometimes inlaid with silver, copper and brass in twisting patterns.

The pommel is not only decoration. It balances the sword, bringing the weight back toward the hand, so that the point feels light and easy to move.

A Norwegian archaeologist, Jan Petersen, sorted these hilts, more than a hundred years ago, into types, each with a letter. Scholars still use his letters today.

In this case, there is one sword with letters on its blade, inlaid in iron wire. They spell a name. Ulfberht.

About a hundred and seventy swords marked with this name have been found, scattered across northern and eastern Europe, made over two or three hundred years. Nobody knows who Ulfberht was. Probably a workshop, in the land of the Franks, rather than one man.

Some of them are made of remarkably pure, high-carbon steel... better than almost anything else in Europe at the time. Others are not. Their steel is ordinary, and the name on the blade is misspelled.

It seems that even then, a good name was worth copying. A thousand years before anyone sold a fake watch, someone was selling a fake Ulfberht.

The sagas, written down later in Iceland, are full of named swords. One is called Leg-biter. There are swords that sing, swords that must never be drawn in front of women, swords that cannot be put back in their scabbards until they have tasted blood.

Whether the old warriors really believed these things, nobody can say. But they did give their swords names. And many of those swords were laid beside their owners in the grave.

Chapter seven. The knight's sword.

Further along the hall, the swords begin to change shape again.

From about the year one thousand, the hilts grow longer and lighter. The guard... the crossbar between the blade and the grip... grows long and straight, reaching out on both sides, so that the whole sword, held up, makes the shape of a cross. A knight could hold it up that way, and pray to it.

This is the sword that everyone pictures when they think of the Middle Ages. The arming sword. Straight, double-edged, about a metre long, held in one hand, with a shield in the other.

A modern collector named Ewart Oakeshott, who spent his life studying these swords, sorted them into types by the shapes of their blades... broad and flat for cutting, narrow and stiff for thrusting, and many in between. Those types still hang on the labels in many museum cases. If you look closely at the cards here, you will see roman numerals on them. Type ten. Type thirteen. Type eighteen.

He wrote about them not as weapons only, but as things made by craftsmen, with the care you would give to a piece of furniture or a cathedral.

The knight's sword weighs, again, about a kilogram, perhaps a little more. It is quick. It is balanced. And it is, by itself, not the knight's main weapon.

That is another thing that surprises people. On the battlefield, the knight's first weapon was the lance. The sword was what you drew when the lance was broken or lost. Many soldiers on foot fought with spears, axes, bills, and maces... cheaper weapons, and often very effective ones.

But the sword was the weapon that meant something. A young man was made a knight by a touch of a sword on his shoulder. Oaths were sworn on the cross of its hilt. Its blade was often inlaid with letters... prayers, in Latin, like in the name of the Lord... and sometimes with strings of letters whose meaning nobody can now read. Historians have been arguing about some of those inscriptions for over a century.

Chapter eight. The smith.

Halfway along the hall, there is a small case with no sword in it at all. It holds the tools of the people who made them. A pair of tongs, worn smooth. A small hammer, and a heavier one. A rough grey lump of iron, the size of a loaf, full of holes like a sponge. And a half-finished blade, dark and unpolished, with no hilt.

So let us leave the hall for a little while, and go to a smithy, in a German town, in the thirteen hundreds.

The forge is a raised hearth of brick, with a bed of glowing charcoal. An apprentice works the bellows... a great leather bag, pumped by a handle... and every time he pulls, the coals brighten from red to orange to yellow, and a soft roar rises from the fire.

A sword is not made by one person. In a large town, the work is shared between trades. One master forges the blades. Another, a grinder, finishes and sharpens them on great stone wheels turned by a mill stream. Another makes the hilts. Another, the scabbards, of wood covered in leather. Some towns are famous for their blades: Passau and Solingen in Germany, Toledo in Spain, Milan in Italy. Passau's smiths stamped their blades with a running wolf. The mark was so prized that smiths elsewhere copied it too.

The smith takes a bar of steel, already cleaned and worked from the spongy lump, and puts it in the fire. He watches its colour. There are no thermometers. The colour is the thermometer: a dull red, a cherry red, an orange, a bright lemon yellow. Each colour means a different heat, and each heat is right for a different job.

At a bright orange, he takes it out, lays it on the anvil, and draws it out, blow by blow, longer and thinner. He shapes the point. He forms the tang, the narrow strip at the end that will go through the grip. He sets the blade into a shaped tool and hammers the fuller into it. He puts it back in the fire. Again. And again. A good blade takes days.

Then the most dangerous moment. The quench.

The finished blade is heated evenly along its whole length to the right colour... too hot, and it will crack; too cool, and it will stay soft. Then, in one movement, it is plunged into a trough of water, or oil, or brine. A hiss, a cloud of steam. In a second, the steel has become very hard.

Too hard, in fact. Hard steel is brittle, like glass. So the smith warms the blade again, gently this time, and watches the colours that creep along the polished steel... a pale straw, a darker gold, a bronze, a purple, a blue. When the colour he wants appears, he stops. This is called tempering. It gives back a little softness, so the blade will bend and spring back, instead of shattering.

A sword that has been quenched and tempered well can be bent, and will return to straight. A sword that has not can snap at the first hard blow. That is the whole difference, and the buyer often could not see it. He had to trust the smith... or the mark of a good town on the blade.

Back in the museum hall, the half-finished blade lies in its case, dark and plain. In a few more days, it would have been ground, polished, fitted with a guard and a pommel and a grip, and sold. It never was. Somebody, centuries ago, put it down, and never came back to it.

Chapter nine. The longsword.

Further down the hall, the grips grow longer still. Long enough for two hands.

This is the longsword... sometimes called the hand-and-a-half sword, or the bastard sword. Its whole length is around one metre and twenty centimetres. It weighs, usually, between one and a half and two kilograms. It can be used with one hand, at a pinch, but it is meant for two.

Why did it appear? Because of what people were wearing. By the thirteen hundreds, knights were adding plates of steel over their mail. By the fourteen hundreds, many were in complete armour of plate. A knight in a full suit of plate no longer needed a shield. So both his hands were free. And against plate, he needed a weapon with more force behind it.

Something else appeared at the same time. Books.

They are called fight books. The oldest one that survives was written around the year thirteen hundred, probably in Germany. It is a small manuscript, now kept in the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and it shows, in drawing after drawing, a priest teaching a student how to fight with a sword and a small round shield called a buckler. Near the end, a woman appears, also fighting with sword and buckler. Nobody quite knows who she is. Her name is written beside her: Walpurgis.

In the fourteen hundreds, the fight books grew more numerous. In Italy, a master named Fiore dei Liberi wrote one he called The Flower of Battle. In Germany, the followers of a master named Johannes Liechtenauer wrote down his teachings in short, mysterious rhyming verses, which their pupils then explained, line by line, in long commentaries.

These books show something the films rarely do. Fighting with a longsword was not a matter of great swinging blows. It was quick, precise, close and clever... cuts that also defend, thrusts at the gaps, binding the blades together and feeling, through the steel, which way the other man would move.

They also show what happened when both men wore full plate armour.

A sword cannot cut through good plate. So the fighters changed their grip. They held the sword by the hilt with one hand, and by the middle of the blade with the other, gloved, and used it like a short spear, to drive the point into the gaps... the armpit, the inside of the elbow, the slit of the visor.

This was called half-swording.

And sometimes, they did something stranger still. They turned the sword around, held it by the blade with both hands, and struck with the hilt, using the heavy pommel and the crossguard as a hammer. The Germans called this the murder stroke.

The sword, in other words, had become so good at fitting the hand that it could be used three different ways round.

Chapter ten. The giants.

At the far end of the medieval part of the hall, on the wall above the cases, hang the largest swords of all. They are taller than a person, from the floor to well above your head.

These are the true two-handed swords of the fifteen hundreds. In German, the Zweihänder. Their total length is often around one metre and seventy centimetres. Their blades are broad, with a second, smaller pair of hooks above the guard, and a section of the blade below them left blunt and sometimes wrapped in leather, so that a man could hold the blade there and move the great sword more easily.

And yet, for all their size, most of the fighting ones weigh only three kilograms or so. Large, but not monstrous.

They were carried by German foot soldiers, the Landsknechts... mercenaries famous for their slashed and puffed clothes in clashing colours. The men who carried the two-handed swords were said to be paid double, and so were called the double-pay men.

What they did with the swords is still argued over. The old story is that they hacked through the enemy's long pikes. Most historians now doubt it... pikes were made of tough ash, and often armoured with strips of steel near the head. More likely, the great swords guarded the flags and the officers, fought in the gaps and the flanks, and were very useful indeed for anyone who needed space around them in a crowd.

Some were never meant for fighting at all. They were carried in processions, at the head of a guard or a city's ceremony... grand, heavy, and decorated, made to be looked at.

In Scotland, there was a two-handed sword too. The Highlanders called it the claidheamh mòr... the great sword. In English, it became the claymore. Its guard sloped down toward the blade, and at the end of each arm of the guard there was often a little decoration of rings, like a four-leaf clover.

Later, to confuse everyone, the same name was given to a quite different Scottish sword... a one-handed broadsword with a great basket of steel around the hand. Both are called claymores. Both are in this case. Collectors have been gently correcting each other about it ever since.

Chapter eleven. The sword leaves the battlefield.

Something changes in the last cases. The swords get thinner.

Firearms were becoming common on the battlefield in the fifteen hundreds, and armour was slowly being set aside. At the same time, in the cities, a new idea of a gentleman was taking shape... and a gentleman wore a sword every day, the way he wore a hat.

In Spain, they called it the espada ropera. The sword of the robe... the sword you wear with your clothes. In English, it became the rapier.

The rapier is long... often more than a metre in the blade alone... and narrow, stiff and sharp-pointed. It can cut, a little. But it is made, above all, to thrust. And because its owner wore no armour and carried no shield, the hilt grew a cage of curling steel bars and rings and cups to protect the hand. Some of these hilts are so fine they look like the work of a jeweller. Some are.

The rapier was not a weapon of war. It was a weapon of the street, of honour, and of the duel. And with it came a new art of fencing... schools in Italy and Spain and France, and books with diagrams of footwork drawn as circles on the floor, as precise as geometry.

From the rapier came, in the seventeen hundreds, the smallsword... lighter, shorter, elegant, a gentleman's sword worn at the hip with a silk coat and a powdered wig. And from the smallsword, at last, came the sporting foil and épée of fencing today.

On the battlefield, meanwhile, the cavalry kept their swords longer than anyone. The horsemen of the steppes had long used curved blades... a curve that draws the edge along what it strikes, so that it slices, as a rider sweeps past. By the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds, every army in Europe had cavalry sabres.

In the First World War, the machine gun ended the age of great charges by horsemen with swords, though a few were still made, here and there, even later. The sword became a thing for parades, ceremonies, and the walls of museums... like this one.

Chapter twelve. Elsewhere.

There is a second hall, off to one side. You can see into it through a tall archway. It holds the swords of the rest of the world, and it would take many nights to walk through it properly. But a few of them deserve a look tonight.

There is the Chinese jian... straight, double-edged, slender and light, with a long history of more than two thousand years. In China, it was called the gentleman of weapons. Scholars wore it. Poets wrote about it. Beside it lies the dao, single-edged and curved, the soldier's sword, which did most of the work on the battlefield.

There is the Japanese katana... curved, single-edged, with a long grip for two hands.

You may have heard that its steel was folded a thousand times. It was not. It was folded perhaps ten to fifteen times. But each fold doubles the layers, so fifteen folds give more than thirty thousand of them. The folding was not magic. It was a way of mixing and cleaning a difficult, uneven steel.

The famous curve comes from a clever trick. Before the blade is quenched, the smith covers it with a paste of clay... thick along the back, thin along the edge. When the hot blade goes into the water, the edge cools fast and becomes very hard, and the back cools slowly and stays tough. The two parts shrink differently, and the blade bends itself into its curve. Along the edge, a misty wavy line appears, where the hard steel meets the soft. It is called the hamon, and Japanese sword polishers spend years learning to make it show.

And there are the swords of Persia, India and the Middle East... the curved shamshir, the talwar... some of them made of a steel the Europeans called Damascus steel... perhaps after the city where they bought it, perhaps after its pattern; scholars still argue. Its surface shows a pattern like flowing water, quite different from the pattern welding of the north. It was made in small sealed crucibles, in India and Sri Lanka, and traded across half the world as small round cakes of steel. The exact way it was made was lost, and for a long time people thought it was a secret that could never be recovered. Scientists and smiths have since come close.

Chapter thirteen. What a sword is.

You have come to the end of the hall now. The last case holds an officer's sword from the early nineteen hundreds... polished, straight, with a bowl of steel around the hand, its blade engraved with the badge of a regiment. Probably it was never used for anything but parades.

And behind you, at the far end of the hall, near the door, is the little green bronze sword from Arslantepe, five thousand years older.

Between them is the whole story. Bronze, then iron, then steel. Short, then long, then very long, then thin, then gone. Each change came from a reason. A new metal. A new armour. A new way of fighting. A new kind of person who carried it.

But something else did not change. People made swords beautiful. Far more beautiful than they had to be. They inlaid them, engraved them, named them, prayed over them, and handed them down to their children.

Perhaps that is because, for most of history, a sword was not only something to fight with. It was a sign... of who you were, of what you had promised, and of the people who had carried it before you.

The lamps in the cases glow softly. The wind moves in the trees outside. The swords lie in their long row, in the half-dark, each one perfectly still, as they will lie all night.

A sword is a long knife that somebody refused to stop improving.

And there is one word that walked, almost unchanged, all the way down this hall. The Romans called their long sword the spatha. That word went with the spatha into every land where it was carried. In Italian, a sword is still a spada. In Spanish, an espada. In French, an épée.

Spatha. The long sword... and the oldest name on the walls tonight.

Also from the late hours: Embers of History · Slow Orbit · Myth and Score