Found this photo of mine, when I looked back at the photos from my trip to Vienna Imperial Armoury. Heavily tooled scabbard of Maximillian I. messer. Sword (and scabbard?) made by Hans Sumersperger in Tirol, 1496.

Nice shot, Blaz! Thanks for that detail!

Lots of tooled sheaths in my Ireland thread: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t...ght=dublin

And although we tend to think of Viking decoration as very elaborate, here's a scabbard with very simple tooling--thick vertical lines the length of the piece. I'd love to see somebody recreate that. Maybe this was painted as well (?).

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Mary Rose scabbards and belt. These are on the + side of your dates, Chad, being second quarter of the 16th c., but these are very useful drawings. They show relatively crude decoration. The scabbard with the star at top might even have been decorated/personalized by its owner as a pastime, as soldiers have often done over the centuries (my observation, not the Mary Rose Trust's).

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Here are some photos of a surviving painted scabbard, probably from the 13th century. As you can see from the old illustration, the scabbard was originally much longer, and only after a "repair" received its actual shape, apparently in modern times.

Regarding tooling of scabbards:
There are numerous finds of leather fragments from sword scabbards from Schleswig, Germany, and Leiden, Holland, mostly from the late 13th and 14th century, that had been decorated with impressed lines or ornaments and ocassionally stamping. The artistic quality is nowhere near as elaborate as that seen on contemporary funeral brasses, but that does not mean that the latter did not exist. The archeological finds are believed to be pieces of older scabbard leathers that had been cut from the wooden core and discarded, in order to re-use the wooden corpus and eventual metal fittings.
It seems plausible that more appeallingly ornamented leather may eventually have been re-used for other purposes, although this is just speculation.

In any event, the afore-mentioned finds show that tooling was by no means rare, although the bulk of scabbard leather finds was plain and without any decoration.

Here is a reconstructed scabbard decoration I made for one of my swords. You can see a drawing of the original find from Leiden next to it.

All the best,
Roland

Since this topic stumbled back into my line of sight, it seems an appropriate place to say that an English translation of an article about a large number of scabbard remnants found at Leiden has been made available from the local university. I don't know how to link the file because it just keeps loading as PDF when I click Sean's link, so I'll direct interested parties to the appropriate thread at the Armour Archive:

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewto...p;t=187300

As Roland suggests, a majority of these finds bear relatively simplistic decoration in the form of carvings, but the more elaborate ones can be appreciated as inspiration for some of the finer scabbard reproductions that are being made by craftsmen today.

Cheers!

-Gregory