OK All,
can any body give me a rough date on a dagger blade, 13 inches long with hollow ground blade. When did this type of blade first appear.
Many thanks Tony...

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At a guess, I'd say that that's a spear head. I could well be wrong though.

Well theres this in the albums here http://www.myArmoury.com/albums/photo/913.html and I found a few others with similar blades. I've seen ballock daggers with blades of this sort to.

I'm with Allen,

It could by a spear head, but most were socketed and not tanged so I lean toward knife and the heavy rib suggests to me the requirement for a tough blade so I would go for rondel rather than quillon dagger and it would really be a quite elaborate blade for a bollock dagger. I think you will never know, but my money would be on rondel.

Tod

"It could by a spear head, but most were socketed and not tanged so I lean toward knife"

That sums it all for me. I can't recall any example of tanged spear head either and fitting that at the end of a pole woudn't make much sense to me. The blade seems wider than most rondels I've seen in museum but variations such as these were common after all.

J

Is there any sort of context to these items that could be helpful?
Where they come from, or where and how they have appeared and so on?

Tanged spear heads were quite common in the middle east during the bronze age. The end of the tang used to be bent in 90 degrees to prevent an accidental remove of the head after it had been lashed to a split-end wooden shaft.
This item is clearly iron so probably of later age and possibly different location. Middle ages arrow heads from Israel were both socketed and tanged (dug by their thousands at excavations of crusader sites), some of them show resemblance to this particular head but much smaller of course.

For me too it is a spear head. The wing is too flat to be a dagger's edge.

There is however a small bevel the the beginning of the rib where an hilt's cavity could sit, however the profile of the wings is flat, not hollow ground.

Recent studies have led to a conclusion that during the crusades both sides used all types of arrow heads. There was no "national" kind of arrow head.

Believe it to be a spear. Agree with Bruno, the area for fitting the hilt is the major clue.

Dan

The sharply angled shoulders on this piece would be a poor design choice for a spear, and I see no means of securing the head to the shaft. Looks more like a dagger for piercing maille to me.

Many thanks for your views but I definately think this a dagger blade circa 1500 and not a spearhead.
Tony...

I'm going with dagger. Might be of a bollock type, where the hilt would fit over the shoulders.

M.

Some 18th c. spontoon heads were tanged rather than socketed, with a ferrule around the end of the haft to prevent splitting and possibly a rivet through haft and tang. But IIRC those heads tended to be made on the cheap from flat stock rather than elaborately formed like this. Consider, also, the shape of this 15th c. head:
Note how in this and the piece in question the rib tapers out into a long point of square section. The pieces are about the same size, too. Also note that the tang of the posted weapon is not peened. I think it's a variety of spear.

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Until we know where it was from the answer is going to be hard. Tanged spears or arrows are fairly uncommon in western europe. Until we know where it is from though regionalisms are of little help though. You do see in the late medieval period daggers with such blades. They could be grouped often into the ever unhelpful baselard class in English period texts. Looks like a german dagger from the 15th I saw not long ago on an auction site online. Sadly I did not get pictures of it.

RPM