The Why of Weapons: The Great Sword of War

[Malik]

Apparently I don't understand your question.

The sword wasn't blunt. It was a very specific type of sharp.

Armor exists to protect from weapons. Swords with razorlike edges and thin secondary bevels cannot penetrate the armor of the time. You can find a hundred YouTube videos on this - all of which are wrong for one reason or another (steel armor, secondary bevels, poor technique, butted mail, etc.) - but they get the point across.

Greatswords from the time that have been recovered are in poor condition. We don't know for sure what the edge was like. We can only speculate.

A bevel like we find on cleavers, mauls, and some recovered katanas, on a steel edge, will wreck armor but not penetrate it consistently. Wrecking armor neutralized opponents on a medieval battlefield as effectively as killing them. A durable edge was a beefy edge; a beefy edge with a wedge-shaped or appleseed-shaped bevel would bite armor. Such an edge was easy tech -- it's far easier to make a wedge-shaped edge (or, on an ovoid cross-section like the gran espee de guerre, an appleseed edge) than a long, razor-thin edge -- and such an edge on a heavy sword is an effective solution to dealing with all the guys running around a battlefield in armor.

To give the sword any other kind of edge and any other purpose would make it useless. In mortal combat, you don't reach for something useless. No one who fights to the death for a living would spend huge amounts of money on a non-ornate, heavy sword that didn't work, and then carry it into battle.

There might be research out there on this. I haven't seen it.

The only way the sword would work is as an armor-wrecker. The only way the sword would wreck armor is with a stout edge that we wouldn't recognize as sharp by our modern (and fantasy) definition.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Blech; I forgot we were talking about the pre-printing press era. (I hate dealing with European history before the Renaissance.) Still, I know some arms manuals have survived from this time. Are there really none left that describe the use of this sword against armored foes?

 

[Malik]

There are plenty of manuals on longsword combat, but the actual design and purpose of the weapon is lost to history as far as I know. The greatsword shows up in artwork and writings from the time and examples have been recovered. We know it existed.

I specifically wrote about the great sword of war because it is rarely mentioned even though, to me, it seems like an obvious and workable solution to the biggest problem that a soldier of the time would face.

The designers and smiths of the day may not have realized what they were doing the way that we see it, now; smiths weren't experts in mathematics and metallurgy and engineering, and most were illiterate. There would have been an accepted body of knowledge among the artisans of the time that this is how you make a greatsword that will keep your customers alive. Dead customers don't generate referrals.

 

[Guy]

Both Hank Reinhardt and John Clements have done experiments of cutting mail, the predominant armor type of the period Malik is referring to. You can read article from both here: Essays - Swords & Swordsmanship Additionally, they have numerous video demonstrations. Reinhardt's book The Book of Swords is a very readable and entertaining source. Neither Reinhardt nor Clements have any scholarly credentials, as far as I know, but they've both spent a great deal of time cutting things with swords, both reproductions and originals. Reinhardt was able to hack through mail and damage pork shoulder underneath it with one handed swords, so it's reasonable to conclude a greatsword would do at least as well. In those cases were he didn't penetrate the mail that was placed over meat without any kind of padding, he still did significant damage to the meat, busting it open instead of cutting it open and making it look like it had been run through a cheese grater, but the wound would have almost certainly been incapacitating.

The period manuals for longsword covering armored combat are for plate armor and focus on jamming the sword's point in the gaps and joints of the armor. Many of the wounds probably wouldn't have been fatal, but they would've ended the fight. For example, one shows the point of the sword being forced up under the cuff of a gauntlet and piercing the back of the man's hand or wrist. This would've crippled the hand and likely ended the fight.

My master's thesis was on the forces behind the rise of the rapier. My schooling had trained me to evaluate a source for the scholarly or historical material used, which is why I asked about Malik's sources. However, and I made sure my professors understood this when I wrote my thesis, practical experience is as important as scholarly research when it comes to the history of weapons. This is why the writings of guys like Reinhardt, Clements and Malik are just as significant as the writings of professional historians and other scholars. Researching the historical sources is crucial, but in the case of the history of weapons, so is practical experience. Ewart Oakeshott was the first to combine the two. Until he started writing in the 1960s, the Victorian notion of the heavy, clumsy medieval sword reigned supreme, and it's proven to be a very stubborn myth. Oakeshott actually picked up swords, and when you do the first thing you notice is most of them aren't nearly as heavy or clumsy as people think.

Anyway, I'm rambling. It's a topic I'm quite passionate about, so it's easy for me to go blathering on and on. The point is in this particular subject, practical experience is as important as scholarly research.