Swords

A receipt from the Royal Armouries of reference 1, which I think must have fallen out of a recently purchased second-hand book.

I puzzled about what it was a receipt for. 'R. A.' clear enough. The 'S' can be deduced from Smith above. But what about the last letter. In the end, I settled for 'Royal Armouries Sword Collection'. 

Note the form number MOW 2224 bottom left, MOW presumably for the then all-important Ministry of Works. And the detailed provenance of the form bottom right. And the antique formatting of the date of issue. And last but not least, the fine clerical hand of the Master of the Armouries.

Note also the absence of any kind of sword identifier.  Perhaps Mr. M. A. A. Smith (?) was a trusted person who could be relied on to bring the same sword back as he took out.

But all in all, a fine specimen of the early 1970's bureaucratic style.

From there I moved onto the fine collection of swords held by the Armouries. Reference 1 was not as easy to get into as, for example, the paintings at the National Gallery, perhaps because I don't know the right search keys, say the sword equivalent of 'Leonardo da Vinci'. But having got to reference 2, I was able to wander around a bit. Landing at one point at reference 3 (with a sword identifier), a successful French cavalry sword from the Napoleonic wars. Which reminded me that the point of all this design, care and craftmanship going into swords (and their scabbards) is to kill people, in the case of cavalry, by slashing at them, rather than the in more gentlemanly duelling style of Lovelace at the end of 'Clarissa'. Presumably drill sergeants used to drill their recruits in exactly how to go about this. And I think I have read in the good soldier book, last mentioned at reference 5, about a drill sergeant who told his recruits not to shove their bayonets between peoples' ribs as they were apt to get stuck therein and quite  possibly snap - which might get you onto defaulters' parade in the morning.

I also came across a type of sword called a mortuary sword, with the caption of the sword in question starting: 'This Mortuary Sword is reputed to have been used by Oliver Cromwell during the siege of Drogheda in 1649, in which he led the storming party to the final assault...'. From the days when generals led storming parties in person, storming parties known as forlorn hopes by the time of Sharpe, more than a hundred years later. 

But I failed to get to the bottom of why they were called mortuary swords. Because the basket hilt bore resemblance to a skull?

References

Reference 1: https://royalarmouries.org/. Sadly, for a once dignified organisation, they are today using their front page to advertise a festival of fun at Fort Nelson. Fort Nelson being one of a chain of forts built along the top of Portsdown Hill, overlooking Portsmouth, during a mid 19th century fit of paranoia about the perfidious French. Perfidious French who didn't understand that they had lost the battle of Waterloo.

Reference 2: https://collections.royalarmouries.org/object/rac-object-137.html.

Reference 3: https://collections.royalarmouries.org/battle-of-waterloo/arms-and-armour/type/rac-narrative-493.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=clarissa. Probably more than you need to know about Clarissa.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/08/military-secrets.html.