Over successive years common sense and a small amount of research prevailed and prompted the fashion to change away from 'eating daggers' to knives. Re-enactors are an odd bunch - at any meeting of more than two of us, you'll hear the word "Authenticity" bandied about with great authority. This word refers to the historical accuracy of costume and equipment, with the desired aim of having one's kit as 'Authentic' as possible. Oddly, though, there is very little research done by re-enactors as a whole; what usually happens is that in every group there will be a couple of history nuts who enjoys digging through books and researching items, who will interpret what they've researched and create it, then the rest of the group will go "Oh, that's really cool!" and make some as well, without doing their own research into it or forming their own opinions or interpretations. Most re-enactors seem to be very happy to follow the fashion of the time without questioning whether the person who did the groundwork for it actually got it right, or did a thorough job - which explains the 'eating daggers' and leads me into the next stage of my current gripe...
One of the C12 groups I belonged to was adamant that knives should be 'seax-shaped' - see the picture - as they'd found some in an archaeological dig, and that the 'modern' shape
was all wrong and An Anachronism and Not Authentic... true, there were (obviously, from the dig) seax-shaped blades about in the period, but they weren't the be-all and end-all of blade shapes (as a search for 'seax' on Google images will show). A lack of internet and a comparative paucity of books available in Brisbane on the subject in the mid 1990s lead to a lot of tunnel-vision as to what was 'right' and what 'they had'... Nowadays we'd say that a lot of the research back then was half-baked, but in a lot of cases it was simply a matter of "I've looked at everything that's available to me and I can't find any more on the subject". May the Deities of Re-enactment bless the internet...So... I dug around and found some blade shapes that I liked (from the York dig - see pic); leather sheaths were a little more difficult, as leather doesn't usually survive 800-odd years well but there are still some around; I'm guessing about the colours (and going
on the premise that since 'they' decorated the living **** out of everything else there's a good chance the sheaths were also coloured). I had some deer antler lying around so made short-tanged knives with antler handles - antler is great for that purpose as when you boil it the inner part goes spongy and soft and you can just shove the tang into it; then as it cools and dries out it shrinks around the tang (and rusts it to the antler) and holds the blade and handle together quite well.The blades are highly polished as they rust less that way, cut easier, and don't trap food particles - which leads me to another gripe (or two): why do modern re-enactment blacksmiths make knives with pitted, blackened blades (except for the sharpened part), when swords have blades that are polished (all over) to within an inch of their life? I gather it's because they look more Authentic... What a load of rubbish - an unpolished blade rusts easily, makes slicing through food difficult, and why would one sort of blade be polished and another not? And why do re-enactors let their knives go blunt? Granted,
some of the ones I've seen are nearly 5mm thick on the non-cutting side of the blade and are difficult to cut with even when very sharp, but surely one of the basic re-enactment skills is knowing how to sharpen a knife?"Oh, I'm a Lady so I'd get my servants to do that", I was informed by one young woman... I started to explain to her about Ladies running households and having to know how to do something yourself before you supervised others doing it (or how would you know if they were doing it right?) and her pretty li'l eyes glazed over and I gave up in disgust - she was happy to re-enact and fantasise about being a Lady and dress up and look pretty as long as someone else would tell her what to wear, what to use, what her persona name was, yada yada yada... She was representative of a number of re-enactors who, if they can't buy something (with a guarantee of it being 'period') or get it made for them, are not interested in having it. The concept of researching something and getting their hands dirty making it is totally out of the question - which begs the question: how, then, are they re-enacting? Putting on a costume and semi-assuming a fairytale persona once every couple of months doesn't quite seem to qualify...
