[Dan D'Silva]

Last year I bought a Tod Cutler Bruegel messer from John Dunn. It should be a simple matter to make a belt for it, but I've been looking at Bruegel's paintings and the way he shows these blades being worn strikes me as a little odd. Most often there is a belt going through the back of the scabbard, for which the production model has a pair of slits in the scabbard's outer layer of leather. The belt appears to be worn loose so the side with the messer hangs low, presumably for ease of movement and comfort.

I've tried this, and it seems to me that when the belt is loose enough for the messer to sit low, it's also loose enough to eventually settle around my butt with continued walking, sitting, etc. unless it's somehow fixed to the opposite side.

So is this something that people in the 16th century just put up with? Is Bruegel using artistic license -- maybe the belt wasn't that loose, or the strap holding the sword up was attached to another, tighter belt strap that he didn't illustrate? Or is there something I'm missing?

[Victor R.]

Two suggestions for this particular version: 1) the belt is more snug around the hips than the illustration suggests or, 2) the messer belt actually loops through (or is otherwise affixed to) a waist belt under the top most garment, and that belt also carries the purse, and possibly a small utility/eating knife often seen in other illustrations. Many illustrations I noted from the front show the top garment is a bit open and could allow the belt to pass through. While not precisely this, something akin to the second suggestion can be seen in the illustration below.

You can also see certain figures wearing a baldric in many illustrations. It is my understanding that this was another method that would have been used at the time - what may slide down the waist should not slide off the shoulder.

[Ryan S.]

Bruegel did several dance scenes and in some of them, such as this one, knives and belts can be seen from different angles. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Pieter_Bruegel_d._%C3%84._014.jpg

[Mikko Kuusirati]

I don't think you actually need anything extra to keep up such a belt as pictured.

I recently made a scabbard and single knot belt for my H/T Longsword. It looks very similar to the first image, except that the belt is tied around the sheath. When worn, the belt hangs from the top of my right hip, and the sword rests against the top of my left thigh about six inches lower.

The belt is loose enough that if I want to I can slip it off without undoing the buckle, but it does take a deliberate effort; in normal wear, it seems the friction of the leather against my clothes is more than enough to keep it put. So far it hasn't slipped off or even shifted around to any noticeable degree while standing around, walking, jogging or training. (It does let the empty scabbard flop around quite a bit, which is a minor distraction at best and a serious tripping hazard at worst, but with the much shorter messer that shouldn't be a problem.)

PS. I think the key is just patiently fine tuning the length of the belt to your body and the way you want to wear it.

[Dan D'Silva]

Thanks, everyone.

I'll try the parsimonious way with just a normal belt first. If neither wearing it loose nor tight seem to work, I'll flip a coin between making a baldric instead (which I don't really like) or adding a probably-unhistorical extra strap to the belt.

[Alex Indman]

[Mark Millman]

Dear Mr. Indman,

Not only is it not always true that left-handed people were trained to be right-dominant in the past, it's not even mostly true. The retraining you mention began as a nineteenth-century phenomenon in Europe and America. Before that, lefties could largely make their own choices. Several historical fencing treatises discuss how to deal with left-handed fencers, and there is an early-seventeenth-century pike manual that presents the entire drill twice: once for a unit of right-handed soldiers, and again in mirror image for a unit of left-handed ones. It's from the English-Scottish Borders, which had (and has) an unusually large percentage of lefties. The manual says that everybody in the unit has to be of the same handedness, but if there are enough lefties to make up a company, there's no impediment to their fighting with their naturally dominant hands.

It is the case in other parts of the world that naturally left-handed people are nearly always trained to be right-handed. Japan is a well-known example. In contrast to the Scottish Borders, Japan has an unusually low number of people born left-handed, less than ten percent by some estimates. Many societies in which people eat with their hands mandate right-handedness at least for eating, as the left hand is used for personal hygiene. But in the Western world, the practice was only briefly important.

I hope this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman

[Chad Arnow]

Some of this may depend on, shall we say, personal geometries. My waist-to-hip ratio doesn't favor a single belt like that staying in place... For me, I'd likely attach the sword belt to a waist belt over my right hip so it hangs properly on my left.