32 CHAPTER 1
weapons,169 while straight bladed examples with false edge are simply called
single-edged swords. The term ‘proto-sabre’ is not used in the present study,
since it does not refer to formal attributes but only suggests a transitional stage
in the evolution of sabres.170
The term ‘seax’ is rather archaic in English, used only in the literature on
the armaments of the Anglo-Saxons, and mainly used in the German archae-
ology of the Merovingian and Early Carolingian period as ‘Sax’,171 the original
meaning of which is a short single-edged sword. From early medieval written
sources it is mainly known as ‘scramasax’ which is not common in the archae-
ological literature, where metrical terms are used for distinguishing short, nar-
row, broad and long seaxes (‘Kurzsax’, ‘Schmalsax’, ‘Breitsax’ and ‘Langsax’ in
German literature). Terms borrowed from Merovingian archaeology will be
used in the text for further distinctions.
Edged weapons are composed of two main parts: the blade and the hilt. The
hilt is usually formed of a hilt-thorn (of quadrangular cross section) or a hilt-
tongue (of flat, rectangular cross section) made of iron or steel, and its wooden
covering of oval cross section generally riveted to the hilt-tongue.172 In some
cases its end was covered with a hilt cap in the form of a tube made of gold,
silver or copper alloy sheets.
Edged weapons can be equipped with a crossguard cast of copper alloy or
hammered out of steel placed between the hilt and the blade. The length of
the crossguard does not usually exceed the blade width, therefore it could play
little role in fencing.
The most important functional part of a sword is the blade, which can be
straight, curved, single- or double-edged or in some cases equipped with false
edge. The main parts of the blade are the blade stem, the back, the edge and
the point. The blade stem is located near the hilt and was often covered by an
iron sheet as a spacer for fixing the crossguard (fig. 2).
A groove or fuller running down the face of the blade was often used to
lighten and provide greater solidity to the double-edged sword, the cross-
section of which is normally lenticular, but in the case of blades with fuller its
169 The curving of the blade is the ratio between the segment height between the back of the
blade and a straight line from the blade stem to the point and the segment length.
170 The term proto-sabre spread due to David Nicolle (1992, 304) who used it for single-edged
swords with narrow blade, while Csanád Bálint described straight sword blades with false
edge as sabres (Bálint 1992, 338–343; Bálint 1995a, 67–69).
171 For Anglo-Saxon seaxes: Gale 1989, 71–85.
172 The riveting of the wooden hilt was not characteristic of double-edged swords of western
type (spathae).