[Michael Beeching]

I wonder about this - did falchions simply not last that long in comparison to cut & thrust swords?

If the cross-section of a typical falchion is so apparently thin regarding thickness, and the edge is often quite fine, you may have had a hard time keeping the swords in useable condition after a fight on an armored battlefield. Being a sidearm, they likely ended up in such a state, and considering that thrusting seems to be quite secondary for (at least) the early falchions I've seen, a bout between two armored men would not have treated the swords well. A cut & thrust weapon would offer a lot more utility in that context on the grounds of being a better armor piercing weapon and as an effective lever much more easily grasped from the blade.

In short, perhaps during the age of heavy armor in Europe, a cut-centric sidearm was just not that effective in comparison to polearms which would serve the same cutting function better, or a cut & thrust sword which was simply more versitile and could also cut very well? Perhaps the falchion wore itself out faster than it could propagate.

[JG Elmslie]

I must say, this was interesting reading, and a number of good points have been put forward.

As part of the ever-ongoing research work I've done into single-edged arms, I've looked at the subject a few times. One area I've used was manuscript evidence, while going through searching for occurrences of single-edged arms. While it is of course impossible to prove a negative, I feel that it is telling that, from about 10,000 digitised manuscripts, from religious to secular, depicting such activities as martyrdoms to books of hours with farmers, of those with falchions, there is not a single image which I've found that seems to depict a farmer using one in the fields.

there's a tiny number of images which show farmers, or peasants fighting, where messers or falchions are depicted. But in use for farming activities?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Nowt.

Not one image.

Likewise, I've not managed to find any sort of reference to it as an activity. The closest I've found is reference to later 17th C sailors who were armed with cutlasses, using them to cut their way through heavy undergrowth in the New World.

So... my thought and opinion?

I have no doubt it was done. In exactly the same way that you'll find more than a few news reports of daft people using a handgun as a hammer for some job or another, or darwin awards of them doing other daft stuff with it as a tool.

Lets face it, people are idiots and misuse equipment. No different then, as now. Only the choice of equipment to misuse has changed.

Was it done regularly and extensively? No. I do not think for one moment they were.
(I'd like to hope that when Walter De Lummox did pull out the old family falchion to try to lop some branches down, his cousin Richard The Sensible was looking aghast, and saying "what're you using that for you halfwit? Take this bill-hook!" )
That is not to say they never were. But we must really consider the wider range of how often all weapons were (mis)used for domestic activities, than attempt to look at the falchion in isolation there.

As Tea Kew has previously mentioned, the broad cleaver-form falchions may be similar to a machete in overall profile, but in cross-section, entirely different. Its a bit like someone who's never driven a car saying VW beetles and Porsche 911's must perform the same just because they have similar side profiles.... So while its a very easy assumption to make, the reality is very different. More significant of course, is the fact that they are incredibly short-lived: they appear about 1230, they're gone by 1350 - perhaps by as early as 1325. just 100 years or so of the broad machete-shaped type 1s. by 1300, they're already being replaced with the clip-pointed type 2 and 3 forms. Type 2's are even more short-lived - just 50 or so years, and then its almost 100% type 3's, of the various sub-types. So attempting to make any suggestion of the usage of all falchions, based on a brief period of them is a difficult assumption too. I'm very sceptical that the 13th C conyers/cluny falchion type 1's were used in the same fashion as the late 15th C castillon type 3c's on the battlefield, yet alone using them in other applications.

I think there's no doubt that it was done - but in equal measure to the amount that symmetrical swords were also used to cut down branches or the likes. I expect the usage of Messers was more common in civilian domestic carry - particularly those with by-knives which could've been of practical usage outdoors, while the main messer itself remained in the sheath - and may well be one of the root origins of the idea of "peasants with falchions" - particularly in some of the eastern European regions where there is little to no distinction between falchion and messer linguistically, and the two terms are interchangeable (for example Polish academics regularly refer to weapons which are characteristically messer-like, as falchions very regularly to this day.) - the other being the English "Wakefield Hangar" types of single-edged arm popular with the lower-class archers, because of its asymmetric hilt, conferring better hand protection, which seem to have also been referred to as falchions in their period of use - that has helped cement the idea that the falchion was a "peasant's weapon". The reality is, we have just as many spectacular and high-quality examples, as we do simple ones. the evidence simply doesnt stack up convincingly that falchions were a "poor-man's weapon". Incidentally, from my own experience as a craftsman making these, forging them is not easier - they have distinct difficulties a conventional sword doesn't have. unlike a Japanese single-edged sword, they dont normally have any evidence to indicate a softer back, and so when quenched, they tend to bend, in the "wrong" direction, as the thin edge cools and contracts faster than the spine. it takes a lot of work to make a falchion shaped right, really. When they do have softer spines, in the tasak types of messer which are common enough that metallurgical analysis has been done on some of them, and wrought iron spines are found, you get a distinctive S-shaped warping in their profile, that's very subtle to spot.

--

Regarding the theories of why falchions are uncommon, I would disagree most strongly. We have a vastly skewed archaeological record, regarding the numbers of surviving falchions - but most importantly, that includes some particular archaeological context finds, like river finds, which can be used to get interesting statistics, as they are more likely to be simple losses, than for instance, grave goods, where we can assume that particular swords would be chosen for deposition. Simply put, if falchions were more popular, we would find more that were lost than we do. A good proportion of swords are water-finds - rivers, lakes, bogs, dropped in crossings, or similar accidents. Either Falchions were stored, transported and worn in ways which significantly differed from the conventional two-edged sword, and prevented loss - which doesn't seem to be the case, though the evidence is pretty scant (and if they werent lost, why would that method of transport not be applied to 2-edged weapons? that makes no sense - so it must be assumed there is no such difference), or they had blinky lights and life-vests on top for people to find them again by when dropped accidentally (Which I've yet to spot in any of the ones I've had my rotten hands on... )

To give a sort of statistical analysis, lets assume that 1% of swords are lost by their owners each year, by accident or incident. and of those, 10% are into watery places, like rivers, over the side of boats, into a wet peat-bog when the horse stumbles, etc. And so the sword is never found. what we have there is a pretty even 0.1% "slice" of whatever was popular at that date. That's very simplified, of course, but, good enough for making a statistical point. 500 years later, we pull them out, randomly when people go dog-walking, when old river courses get dredged, or divers find them, and so on. Now. If the falchions were widespread, then they would be being carried in exactly the same circumstances as swords in every other application. and therefore, logically, be lost equally as often as two-edged swords, they would be all part of the 0.1% of all swords used, that get lost. lets assume for simplicity that about 1 in 5 swords are falchions by one possible idea of their popularity. That's roughly the figure that you get if you go through a few thousand manuscript images, and collate how many of those with swords have a falchion depicted. Assuming that 1 in 5, then logically, for every 4 two-edged swords found, around Europe, in rivers, in bogs, etc, 1 falchion would be pulled out too. sometimes like buses, two will come along at once. sometimes, you'd get a barren patch and you'd get no single-edged ones in a dozen finds. but it would average out, over time, to be about that 1 in 5. That's simple facts of statistics.

Well, if that were the case, I wouldn't be writing the book - someone else would've got there years ago, because there would be hundreds of the damn things!

Thousands of river-finds are stored in museums, collections etc, in every single European nation. Yet when it comes to falchions, we have less than 40 that pre-date the end of the 15th C. Its not 1 in 5. not even 1 in 50. I suspect overall, it might be less than 1 in 100 was a single-edged weapon.
In the 85 or so in the Castillon hoard, 2 are single-edged weapons. one the now well-known falchion, a type 3c, one a type 5b, and that, I suspect is a best-case scenario for the statistical commonality of the single-edged arms in general circulation, at least in western Europe. (Central Europe, the tasak and messer skew the archaeological record quite noticeably toward something resembling a high er figure, maybe as high as 1 in 10, so I think that it is more likely that they were more commonplace there, but that's more looking at messers than falchions, so I'll try not to muddy the already impenetrable waters even further by looking at them right here.). The plain simple fact is, if the falchion were as widespread, we wouldn't have just those 40, of which about a dozen are river-finds. We'd have hundreds of river-find falchions - and we don't.
We simply do not have them. We know they are identical steel, they don't simply melt away. We know they're sometimes thinner - but we don't find partial blades either. they didn't have blinky strobe lights to find them when lost. so they'd be lost equally often. They are identical in all aspects of their nature transport, and the likes. The only logical conclusion can be: they were not lost in appreciable numbers, because they weren't being carried around in the numbers assumed, to be lost. .

Which in turn moves the entire focus to a much more interesting question: Why were they uncommon? I think I'll leave that one for the book. Mainly as I've still to find the smoking gun to prove my theory, and don't want to be an idiot till I have proof. And its ohgod'oclock in the morning here.

Hope that rather overly-long braindump is of use, however.