It is nearly impossible for studies of medieval military history
not to encounter mention or lengthier discussion of one of the primary
contemporary weapons, the sword. Indeed, the sword itself has been
the topic for studies as diverse as Ewart Oakeshott's typography
studies and, more recently, Kelly Devries' examinations of medieval
military technology. Edged weapons have long captured the interest
and imagination of serious scholars, collectors, antiquarians, and
the casual military or history buff, in part because of their centrality
to world cultures for millennia, and in part because of their tangible
nature. In 1972, Wilkinson-Latham published a short book on edged
weapons, which now has been reprinted by Shire Books. Wilkinson-Lathan's book nominally covers a huge topic at an exceedingly
introductory level; in a brief sixty-four pages, the author has attempted
to trace the development, forms and use, and even at times the creation
of edged weapons from the stone age through the ceremonial and presentation
swords of recent times. What is not discussed is any sort of contextualization;
the "how's" and "why's" of these weapons in their
respective cultural, societal, economic, and political contexts is
completely absent, as is the significance or utility these weapons
had even in the more limited arena of war. The author undoubtedly
is skilled at describing the physical properties of edged weapons
and how they were wielded—indeed there are even discussions
about certain of these weapons' manufacture—but the role these
weapons actually played in the context of war remains for the reader
to extrapolate.
Wilkinson-Lathan has divided the short
book into eight chapters, the first four of which are chronological
investigations of the evolution of different types of edged weapons,
such as axes, swords and lances. The author is obviously much more
well-versed with and comfortable discussing modern periods, such
as the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries; chapter four, entitled "The
Era of Regulation Military Weapons," is the only one that incorporates
details that place edged weapons into their larger context of war,
and discusses reasons that dictated the development and changing
forms of such weapons during that period. The remaining chapters
cover topics such as non-Western edged weapons, identifying marks
of sword-makers, and tips for the weapons collector. In terms of
the weight placed on information concerning educated collecting of
weapons, as well as the lack of any scholarly apparatus, such as
notes, citations and a bibliography, this book plainly is designed
to appeal most to the collector rather than the scholar.
Dotted throughout the book are line drawings of different sorts
of edged weapons, which provide a helpful visual complement to the
written description of the weapons, clearly illustrating the distinctions
between various types. For example, figure 5 displays six examples
of medieval staff weapons, showing the variety of head shapes.(15)
Even though the image is well labeled, the author has also referred
to the individual sub-images in his text so that the reader absolutely
understands what is being described. Another effective figure demonstrates
the components of a typical Japanese sword blade. (50) In addition
to his line drawing figures, Wilkinson-Lathan has
also included sixteen pages of black and white photographs of swords,
bayonets, and other edged weapons dating from the thirteenth to the
twentieth centuries. (33-48) Although these images are only briefly
mentioned (as plates) but not discussed or explored further in the
text, they do offer another method for visualizing the physical appearance
of the weapons described in the book.
The book ends abruptly without any sort of conclusion, as is suitable
for a guidebook rather than a more academic work. Wilkinson-Lathan's book
is simply a manual for those interested in understanding the world
of weapons from a collector's perspective. The book's cover description
itself specifies that
"prominence is given to those weapons that are most likely to
be encountered in antique shops of even in the attic," implying
that the book's goal is to help collectors to identify and recognize
collectables when they are found. For the scholar, therefore, this
book will be of fairly little use, and, as military history of all
periods and geographic regions continues to attract a growing number
of experts, the corpus of more valuable texts likewise continues
to increase.