ous’, in that the upturned sword now mimicked a cross.
No grip from this period survives, so we can infer that it was of organic composition ; usually of shaped wood, although bone, horn and leather would also have been used. There is no evidence from England of any sword having a wire-bound grip in this period. The grip would have normally been of oval cross-section, inferred from surviving silver binding strips. Very occasionally, the whole grip was encased in metal (as in the Fetter Lane sword - although this beautiful example is early, being dated to the 8th Century CE.)
From the 9th Century onward, the flat composite Upper Guard and triangular pommel-cap was replaced by a simpler, very functional iron pommel-guard and pommel-knob. From the 9th Century, many pommels were lobed; shaped with three or five lobes, the central one usually being slightly taller and being separated by indentations. These were sometimes accentuated by strands of twisted silver or gilt wire.
|Viking Sword Xray|
Slightly earlier, some ‘Viking’ swords were equipped only with a simple bar pommel and it has been fancifully suggested that the lobed pommel originated in the practice of tying an amulet of some sort in a bag onto one of these. Lobulated pommels on a straight pommel-bar are more a feature of ‘Viking’ swords. English swords, as has been alluded to earlier, most often had an upward-curved pommel-guard and so the pommel-knob base needed to be curved also. These most often were three-lobed and often decorated with silver and niello. Another smaller group (10th Century) have a more dome-shaped pommel.
Later still come the pommels which R.E. Oakeshott called the ‘tea-cosy’ and the ‘brazil-nut’. These, though, are true pommels and totally lack any pommel-bar. This former is first found in 10th Century Norse graves but is found widely across central and eastern Europe. It was popular as it was more comfortable to hold than the tea-cosy (as the author can confirm). By the 11th Century, the simple heavy disc pommel became the fashion.
|Brazil-nut Pommel ( Pb*)|
|Domed Pommel (Pb*)|
Unlike the obvious riveting of the early period sword-hilts, it is not always obvious what is holding the hilt together. As finds have proved, sometimes hilts came apart. If this happened during combat, the effects can only be imagined. Even a loose, rattling hilt would have been a huge disadvantage. As the entire upper hilt structure; pommel-bar and knob were made of iron, most methods of attachment relied on sweating the bar of the pommel on to the tang and then attaching the pommel-knob by (a) peening the end of the tang over the knob or (b) riveting the pommel and pommel-guard together, or occasionally (c) riveting a semicircular strip of soft iron to the pommel-bar through a hole in each side. This then served as a support for the hollow pommel-knob (see illustration). The first method (a) was most common with Petersen’s Type ‘L’ swords.
The ugly peened-over end of the tang was occasionally covered by a silver cap. Method (b) is seen in the ‘Westminster Sword’. Method (c) would seem to have been common in ‘Viking’ swords. None of these techniques seem to have been perfect, for there are plenty of swords found from the 8th to 10th cent, with no pommel cap, just the curved upper guard still on the blade, the pommel cap having fallen off.
|Late Anglo-Saxon and Viking Sword-hilt construction methods|
The brazil-nut and tea-cosy shaped true pommels were fixed directly to the tang. One presumes this was done by heating the pommel, hammering it gently onto the cold tang then allowing the pommel to cool and shrink onto the tang, hopefully fixing it firmly in place.
|Skerne Sword (c10th). Deposited in River Hull|
Although some Viking swords have been recovered from inhumations, by this time the English were no longer being buried with weapons. Most late Anglo-Saxon swords have, in fact, been recovered from rivers. This is true all over Europe; large numbers of swords and other expensive weapons have been found preserved in anoxic river silt. This has been good for us, a 