The other day we realized that our "new" website (alright, it's been a few years) recently broke the one million visitor sessions threshold. That's a lot of folks visiting our website, perusing our wares, and reading our blogs. When we rolled out this site one of our main goals was to reach out and engage with more of the online sword community, and to educate folks about the medieval and renaissance pieces we make and the historical context in which they developed. Our blogs have been a big part of this initiative. Digging through the data we noticed that folks who watch our Youtube videos might not be aware of some of our blogs that don't include video, but that still have a lot of interesting content, pictures of custom and historical pieces, and the relevant and fun information.
Therefore today we present, the three non-video blog posts you should definitely check out if you like what we do.
#1: Longswords vs Bastard Swords vs Hand and a Half Swords, in which argue that these are all basically the same thing, but with names that derive from different places.
#2: Flame-bladed Swords...Why?, in which we examine the history and use of serpentine, flamed, or flamberge swords in the European tradition -- including a bunch of sexy pics of custom pieces we've made over the years.
#3:Types of Spears, in which we examine the attributes that set a variety of European spears apart from each other. From hewing spears to lugged spears to javelins, we explore their variety and functions.
Nathan Clough, Ph.D. is Vice President of Arms and Armor and a member of the governing board of The Oakeshott Institute. He is a historical martial artist and a former university professor of cultural geography. He has given presentations on historical arms at events including Longpoint and Combatcon, and presented scholarly papers at, among others, The International Congress on Medieval Studies.
Craig Johnson is the Production Manager of Arms and Armor and Secretary of The Oakeshott Institute. He has taught and published on the history of arms, armor and western martial arts for over 30 years. He has lectured at several schools and Universities, WMAW, HEMAC, 4W, and ICMS at Kalamazoo. His experiences include iron smelting, jousting, theatrical combat instruction and choreography, historical research, European martial arts and crafting weapons and armor since 1985.