Hand-Forged Quillon Dagger, Barrel Pommel

Because that is what most of them were, and because plain work is worth seeing. Decorated daggers dominate museum collections for reasons that have nothing to do with how common they were: ornamented things get inherited and kept while ordinary ones get used up and discarded. The everyday knightly dagger was a plain cross, a plain grip and a plain blade, and it was made by the thousand. There is also a maker's reason. Ornament covers a multitude of sins, because the eye goes to the decoration and stops looking at anything else. On a piece with nothing on it there is nowhere to hide: an asymmetric guard, a ridge that wanders off centre, a gap where the cross meets the shoulder, all of it shows immediately. That is why plain pieces are the honest test of a workshop, and it is why we are happy to put ours up against anyone's.

Three builds of one hilt tradition, separated by how much is on them. This one is undecorated: a straight square-ended cross, bare rosewood, a plain barrel pommel and a blade with nothing but its ridge, at 12 inches. Our Wheel Pommel build is the longest at 17 inches, with flared quillon terminals, a leather grip over a shaped core, a peened wheel pommel and an etched foliate panel down the blade. Our Fishtail Guard build is the most worked of the three: notched fishtail quillons with incised borders, a raised central block, brass wire in a waisted grip, and cast and chased brass mounts at both ends of the scabbard. Take this one for reenactment, for a sword companion, or if you would rather look at shapes than at ornament. Take the wheel pommel for length and a single decorative flourish. Take the fishtail if the decoration is the point.

It is the medial ridge, the spine of a flattened diamond section, and it is what makes a thrusting blade stiff in every direction rather than only one. Two flat surfaces fall away from it on each face down to the edges. What is worth knowing is how hard it is to get right, because a ridge is ground from both sides and the two halves have to meet exactly. If one face is ground a fraction deeper than the other, the ridge drifts off centre; if the pressure changes along the stroke, it wanders. On a blade with nothing else on it, that is the first thing anybody looks at. The buyer's test takes five seconds on any seller's photograph. Sight down the blade from the point: the ridge should run dead straight and dead centre from the shoulder to the tip, and the flats either side of it should be equal in width the whole way along. On a hand-ground blade there will be very slight variation. There should not be a visible curve.

Not what most people assume. On a sword the pommel is a counterweight, sitting behind the hand to balance a long blade and bring the point of balance back where it can be controlled. On a dagger there is not enough blade for that argument to carry much weight, and a pommel this size would not balance twelve inches of steel even if it were meant to. What it actually does is give the heel of your hand something to bear against. A thrust that lands and stops hard drives everything backwards into the palm, and without a pommel the grip would simply try to leave your hand through the bottom. A barrel shape is a good answer to that because it presents a broad flat face to the heel rather than a point. Its secondary job, on this construction, is holding the hilt together: everything is drawn up tight against the pommel, so nothing can rattle.

Two things, and both explain the shape. First, it was the ordinary sidearm of anybody who already carried a sword: the thing you had on your belt when the sword was elsewhere, used for everything from a genuine fight to eating dinner. Second, and this is what accounts for the length and the stiffness, it belongs to the age of plate armour. A cutting weapon does very little against a man in plate, but a stiff narrow point driven into a gap between plates, at the armpit, the groin, the back of the knee or through a visor, does a great deal. That is why fourteenth and fifteenth century daggers get longer, stiffer and more sharply pointed as armour improves, and why the section here is a diamond rather than a flat. The blade is arranged around getting a point somewhere small with enough rigidity behind it not to fold.

Both edges as standard. The blade is broad at the forte, where it needs the most material because that is where the leverage is greatest, and tapers evenly from there to a fine point. The section is a flattened diamond throughout, which resists bending in every direction rather than only in one plane, and that is why a blade like this carries no fuller: there is no material in the middle of the section to remove, because the ridge is the middle of the section. If a double edge is a problem where you live, we will sharpen one side and leave the other blunt at no extra cost, and the piece looks identical.

We cannot answer that for you, and you should be wary of any seller who claims they can. Two separate provisions tend to apply. Many jurisdictions treat double-edged daggers as their own restricted category regardless of size, and blade length thresholds apply independently on top. At 12 inches this sits above the ordinary knife allowance in most places, which means it may be regulated as a sword or a bladed weapon rather than as a knife, and import rules are frequently different again from possession and carry rules. Check all three for your own address before ordering. If length is the obstacle, a 9 or 10 inch build costs no more and is closer to the commonest historical proportion anyway.

More so than anything else in our dagger range, and that is largely because there is so little on it to get wrong. A straight cross of rectangular section, a waisted timber grip and a solid pommel drawn up tight are all entirely orthodox for a fourteenth or fifteenth century quillon dagger, and the construction follows the period method rather than imitating its appearance. The blade at 12 inches is at the long end but well inside what survives. What we cannot claim is that it reproduces a specific documented find, because it does not; it is built to the type rather than copied from an example. If you portray a particular region and date, tell us and we will adjust the cross and pommel to suit, at no extra cost.

5160 high-carbon spring steel, the same stock our smiths use for kukris and swords, forged down from leaf spring in the Nepali tradition. It is oil-quenched and then tempered back, producing a blade that holds an edge but stays tough rather than brittle. Toughness is the point on a thrusting blade: a thrust that lands off-line loads the blade sideways, and that is exactly where a hard, brittle steel snaps and a properly tempered one flexes and returns. It is not stainless and it will take a patina with use.

Yes, and on this piece more than most, because the polish is the only finish there is. A mirror polish is bare steel taken through progressively finer abrasives until the surface stops scattering light, so a fingerprint left on carbon steel will etch itself in within days. On a decorated blade there is other work for the eye to land on; here there is not. The satin finish costs the same, hides handling almost entirely, and on a plain dagger is arguably the more honest look, since a genuinely working piece would never have carried a mirror. Our wheel pommel dagger page explains the finish itself in more detail.

If you send us the sword, yes. Quillon daggers were routinely made as companions to arming swords, sharing the cross profile and the pommel shape so the two read as a set on the belt, and a plain hilt is the easiest of all to match because there is no decorative vocabulary to reproduce. Send photographs, the cross length and section, and the pommel dimensions, and our smiths will scale the dagger furniture to echo them. There is no extra charge for matching to a sword we can see clearly; if it is an antique or a piece we need to work from a drawing, we will quote before starting.

Closer than on most of our pieces, and that cuts both ways. There is no ornament to vary, so the profile, the cross and the pommel repeat accurately from one to the next. What does vary is what always varies in hand work: the blade is drawn out by eye against a pattern, the ridge is ground by hand, the cross is filed individually, and rosewood differs board to board in colour and figure. On a plain piece those small differences are more visible than they would be on a decorated one, simply because there is nothing else to look at. What does not vary is the specification: length, steel, section, heat treatment and sharpness are held to the same standard on every piece.