[Roger Norling]

Actually, if you look closely at the "federschwert" in the first Gladiatoria image from 1435, there is a small chappe covering the cross. The chappes come in very different size though, and may have served different purposes. Some may have been rain guards as is commonly believed. Others may have protected the hands somewhat and others may have protected the blade from rust when you reinforce the blade in the bind by putting your thumb onto it. I have put one onto my Pavel Moc Violet but haven't really evaluated it as finger protection yet...

[William Carew]

[Bill Love]

After looking at the trainers depicted in the ARMA web documentary and studying quite a few pictures, I have a theory as to where at least some of them came from. I believe that they may have been used up and reworked Type XVIII A, B or C longswords rather than purpose built weapons, if for no other reason than cost and availability. Hashed out swords would still be expensive and technologically advanced pieces of forged steel, and it would definitely have been far less costly and more practical to convert them than it would have been to build identically hilted blunts from scratch. It's my guess that the handling characteristics of such conversions would be pretty close to those of purpose-built trainers (Although to be fair, I'm basing this solely on the "feel" of one I did up-see "Del Tin Federschwert?") Any thoughts?

[Roger Norling]

Thanks for contributing with your thoughts here!

I am not so convinced that this is specifically related to the federschwert though. I would assume it was just as common for "regular" training longswords. And I don't really see why the federschwert would have such an atypical ricasso, simply because they presumably would be reworked sharp longswords.

In fact, Oakeshott's typology doesn't properly include the federschwert or complex hilts at all (apart from XVIIId), which is not so surprising, since only a rare few feders are preserved. This may be explained by them being used very hard and likely being melted and reused when they were completely used up. It would also seem likely that training swords took more damage than real sharps.

Furthermore, I sincerely believe that the handling characteristics of many federschwert are closer to that of a sharp sword than what many blunts are. And looking at illustrations of "ridged" feders, they may have been even closer to sharps than what several modern feders are. And interestingly enough, like I said previously, Peter Johnson mentioned sharp federschwert when i spoke to him the other day. So, to me it looks like these swords are purposely designed like this, for reasons we can only speculate to.