Another Saxon Quiver

Another Saxon quiver, this time 7th century. I was going to say something glib along the lines of “I won’t discuss construction as that has already been covered in an earlier post”. I’ve just checked that post, and in it, I left construction for a later post. I guess this will have to be it.

7th century Anglo Saxon quiver with arrows

While of a similar shape and height, this quiver is a little larger in diameter than the previous one. This is deliberate, as while primarily for my younger son, I also want to be able to use it and my bow has a 60# draw weight with correspondingly thicker arrows.

The change of period is mainly done by the decoration and as it wasn’t for an order, I could devote more time and effort to the design and execution without someone keeping asking when it would be finished.

Base

Cut a disk of softwood about 80mm in diameter and 20mm thick. I used a piece of pinus radiata from the wreckage of the First Airborne Viking Tent of blessed memory. You could use ply if you like, but I like to think real wood looks and works better. It will remain in the base of the quiver to protect the leather from the arrow points. Cut a rough circle in 3mm leather that’s somewhat over 120mm diameter – the diameter of the disk, plus twice the height, plus a bit for not quite being aligned properly.

Wet the leather and place the disk on the flesh side in the centre, then press into a 90mm storm water pipe connector and leave to dry. When the base is dry, pop it out of the connector and trim so the edge of the leather is flush with the upper edge of the wooden disk. This is the same way as I make bases for jacks and bombards – more in a later post.

Top

Rather than using a round of willow, this one has a piece of 1.6mm leather rolled until it is a bit over 12mm thick. Bring the rolled ends together to form a ring and secure with stitches. I used edge-grain stitching so all the shows is two neat parallel lines, one either side of the join. Dampen it and work any lumps or puckers out with you fingers until the roll is even. When in place, the tail will extend some distance into the quiver to help keep the round shape at the top. Mine was 370mm wide when it was flat, to fit an 110mm wide opening at the top of the quiver.

Body

This is where the fun starts. The width at the bottom is the circumference of the base cup you’ve made, plus three times the thickness of the leather. This is because the base is the measurement on the flesh side of the leather and you’re cutting for the skin side. You’re increasing the diameter of the base by the thickness of the body on two sides, so if using a non-stretchable material, you’d need to increase the length by 2*pi * the thickness, but the leather stretches sufficiently to meet neatly. Width at the top is the diameter of the tail of the top ring, plus a similar fudge factor. The height is just a bit less than length of your arrow from the back of the head to the base of the feathers.

The body and base with half the embossing done, showing all the tools used

Do any embossing and dyeing now, then start sewing. Remove the wooden insert and sew the base in using saddle stitch. I’ve done two rows because it helps keep the edges clamped in place. Put the wooden base back in, then start sewing the back seam. I’ve used a backing strip of 1mm leather and two rows of saddle stitch, but edge-grain would work equally well. You’ll need to do a bit at at time so you can get your hands in behind the seam. Then sew the top piece in and do the straps. Now you’ll have to do some proper hand bound arrows to match.

Decoration

Front and back of the Stonyhurst Gospel, c AD650.

The design, techniques and dye colours are based on the binding of the Stonyhurst Gospel. There’s still some pigment in the embossed lines. 

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Gospel of St Matthew the Evangelist, initial page. Lindisfarne, late 7th or early 8th century.

The paint colours and the some of the other design elements come from the more-or less contemporary Lindisfarne Gospel. I drew a quarter of the design on graph paper, then scanned it and used Paint software to mirror and fill in the missing bits. This was printed, transferred to the leather with yellow transfer paper and embossed with the back of a butter knife. Once dyed and assembled, I painted the design. As this was for a teenager, I cheated and used acrylic paints for the flats and gel ink pens for the embossed lines. The straps were finished with a suitable buckle and strap end.

Beware the dates

I was in Melbourne last week with a few hours to spare before returning to Sydney, so I visited the State Library of Victoria to get colour copies of the colour plates from Oliver Baker’s Black Jacks and Leather Bottells. Here they are for anyone who is interested in copies.

The request system at SLVIC is completely different from the one I’m used to at SLNSW, so I spent some time talking to a couple of the library staff about what I was doing and they were interested enough to have a look at the plates. Both at different times looked at plate one and made comments to the effect that it had been made in 1712 because the date was on the design. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Not only can you not trust the mueseum placards or guide’s handbook, you can’t trust the dates on the objects themselves. A properly maintained leather jack has a life expectancy of several hundred years. Just because at some point in that lifespan, someone has painted a date or added a coronet to existing arms, doesn’t mean everything is the same age.

Musea often make similar assumptions on origins. After some discussion with a curator of the V&A Museum regarding the origin of a gaming pouch, she revealed that in the absence of a provenance, an object predominately features the fleur de lys as decoration will be identified as being of French manufacture despite the method of manufacture being characteristically English.

Let’s take a closer look at plate one. The step down to a triangular handle means it pre-dates the end of the seventeenth century but the real give away is the double embossed line around the spout. That particular decoration was only done during the second quarter of the seventeenth century. What we’re looking at is a blackjack that was made somewhere between 1625 and say 1645, possibly one of a number for the guild, and then in 1712 someone picked that one and had the arms painted on it. We’ll probably never know the reason, but the moral of the story is to trust no one. Make sure all the aspects of the item support a particular date or origin before making a claim.

Archery Leatherwork Gallery

Just back from holidays, so here’s a completely unrelated gallery of my pictures of medieval and early modern archery-related leatherwork from collections in Blighty. I’ll do posts on making copies of some of these later. I know ivory and tortise shell are cheating, although if challenged, I’ll claim they are still animal-derived materials.

English, early 16th C, British Museum MLA 1922,1-10,1

Tudor period archer’s bracer found in Worship Street, London. Museum of London.

Leather arrow spacer 1400-1500. Museum of London

Archer’s Bracer, Flemish, about 1620. Made from tortoiseshell and edged in silver. Royal Armouries, Leeds. XI.143

Flemish, about 1620. View from right side. XI.143

European, 17th century. Made of ivory, curved and tapered to the shape of the forearm. XI.94

Leather bracer embossed with the royal arms of Henry VIII. Mary Rose Museum, 1545.

Bracer, Mary Rose Museum 1545, similar to the MoL one

Two bracers, Mary Rose Museum 1545. The leather straps have torn away, probably at the rivet holes.

Bracer, Mary Rose Museum 1545

Ivory bracer with leather straps, Mary Rose Museum, 1545.

Arrow spacer, Mary Rose Museum 1545. I suspect this was for use with bodkin points.

Arrow spacer, Mary Rose Museum 1545

Left hand mitten, Mary Rose 1545. I’m going to be a bit contentious and suggest that as there were two, both left hand and bot associated with other archery equipment, these were to protect the bow hand when using fire-arrows.

Making a spectacle of oneself…

When Glenda needed new glasses, in part inspired by an article in The International Routier (back in its Dead-TreeWare days), we thought it would be fun to see if we could make a pair of leather framed spectacles using the old lenses. We enlisted the optician in the project, getting him to turn the lenses as small as he could make them on his equipment. They came to me marked “left” and “right” with a prominent arrow indicating the direction of “up”. They’re still probably 120-130% the size of the originals.

Leather framed spectacles, typical of the 15th century. (Occhiali)

The lenses are sandwiched between two layers of 1.6mm cow hide, with the nose bridge reinforced with hidden bronze wire. The construction method is an approximation at best. I know lenses were held in the horn and bone framed glasses with a spring made from copper-alloy wire but haven’t been able to see a leather framed pair closely enough to work it out. There are a sewn pair similar to this from 16th century Italy, but the stitching may be decorative rather than structural.

Our leather framed spectacles, the pattern with the ties is slightly later than the 15th C pair above.

The tie is fingerloop braided, the other option would be a silk ribbon but modern silk ribbons aren’t as strong as 17th C ribbon due to the thickness and weave. Many 17th century portraits show people with their hands clasped together with a ribbon coming out from between them. This may be a spectacle tie.

Glenda’s worn them a few times, apart from the problems with fogging because the lenses are so close to the face, they frighten the punters at public shows. Not just second glances, we’re talking about grown adults grabbing the kids and pulling them away and screaming. We were just expecting Biggles comments. If you make a pair, keep them for private events.

Three pairs of German leather and horn spectacles. From top, 1583, Dresden; c1600 Nürnberg; c1600 Nürnburg. (Corson)

Leather spectacles may have been a cause of some friction between the guilds, spectacle makers must have sourced leather from the Leather Sellers Guild, no doubt being blamed for forcing the prices of hides up by the various competing leather guilds.”The SMC [Spectacle Makers' Company] particularly disapproved of leather frames, a forcibly held position that might explain the growth in popularity among the makers for using horn. Leather frames were seized from the noted optician John Yarwell by the Company’s inspection team in 1692.” The College of Optometrists, London, Gallery > Seventeenth Century Spectacles.

There are a number of pairs of leather framed spectacles from 1520 t0 1730 on display at The On-Line Museum and Encyclopedia of Vision Aids http://www.antiquespectacles.com/people/people_earlier.htm

References

Baker, K., Spectacles in the 17th Century: A Short Summary, in The International Routier Vol 13, No4, Summer 1997-98
Blankert, A., Rembrandt — A Genius and His Impact, National Gallery of Victoria 1997
Corson, R., Fashions in Eyeglasses, Peter Owen, London 1967
Occhiali, G., Eyeware, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1997

An almost-right saex scabbard

This post is a warning for young players, going back in time to somewhere in the youth of the Internet. Back in those days, a fast connection was a dial-up connection with a 14.4kbps modem, a big website was anything over 1MB, and 800 x 600 in 256 colours was high resolution. The excellent series of YAT publications weren’t widely known here and and the publications that were available were more of the glossy coffee-table types. Online catalogues and web sales were years away and photos were only used on the most data-intensive sites. The images we had access to in the Antipodes were not of the finest quality, and lead to errors such as this.

I’d been given a combat-grade saex with a forged iron blade, leather bound scale tang hilt (the scales were two thickish slices of a branch with the bark still attached) with held together with rough steel rivets. The point was 10mm in diameter and the “edge” was 3mm thick. It had seen some use in combat and was rough, ugly and I couldn’t get my hand all the way around the hilt, but you don’t look a forged blade in the mouth. It didn’t take me long to reshape the point and file and grind an edge, and there was enough meat on the tang for me to be able to turn it into a whittle tang. I made the hilt from a carved lamb bone from a roast we had, with 3mm brass plates at each end. The tang passes through the backplate and is peened over. The buckles are made from the same lamb leg as the hilt, using opposite sides of the lower end of the femur near the joint. I then needed to make the scabbard.

Saex scabbard, loosely based on one from Jorvik. The original has much coarser knotwork but still shows paint in the same colours.

I knew of an illustration on the Regia Anglorum website and spent a ridiculious amount of time trying to work out the knotwork design. I relied heavily on contemporary manuscript knotwork, and drew the techniques from the MoL Knives and Scabbards book. I got it wrong.

This is the original illustration I was working from. If anything, I've been able to clean it up a bit.

It wasn’t until we got to York in 2003 that I realised that I was too keen to see the manuscript knotwork on the leather and that I’d misunderstood how the scabbard was used. The knife should fit almost completely in the scabbard, with the different knotworks corresponding to the blade and the hilt.  Here’s a photo of two similar scabbards I took in Jorvik:

Two saex scabbards at Jorvik.

The upper one shows similar punch work to this one from the Yorkshire Museum up the road.

Saex and knife scabbards in the Yorkshire Museum

The one on the right is discussed in another post. The one on the left is the one I attempted here. I’m happy with the stamped decoration along the edge of the blade, but the knotwork is completely wrong and the execution is 11th-13th century. I’ll have to remake it one day, but I need to work out if I have to shorten the blade first. The York postcard below shows someone else’s interpretation of a couple of scabbard, they have their own problems but aren’t bad.

Postcard: Replica leather knife sheath from The Jorvik Viking Centre.

I suppose the moral of the story is to make sure your references are clear before you begin anything.

References

 J. Cowgill, M. de Neergaard,  N. Griffiths, Knives and Scabbards (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London), HMSO London, 1987

Regia Anglorum, http://www.regia.org/, accessed 26 April 2006.