Imagine banging out a quick sheath 500+ years ago only, forgetting all about it next week as you move onto your next load of work, only to have it found and recorded in a history book and have it roasted online 😂 Great video as always Todd, these videos always get you thinking about the past differently.
What if the person that made it was a highly skilled craftsman and that was his best work.. And Tod just told everyone its crap.. oops.... Pistols at Dawn? :)
@@papalaz4444244 after reading some comments i also noticed some other things. A sheath could also be great for the leatherworker's children to learn something of the craft, let them make a few, it probably saves time for you in the end too. And, it can be possible that these children OR the soldiers who were supplied with the sheaths decorated them, it doesn't have to be the workers job, look how much time Tod spend on even these simplest carvings
Actually, when you think about it - the decoration actually weakens the sheath, you're cutting into the leather and then prying the cut apart with a bit of bone. So it's extra weird that for purely-functional work, they're still doing *something*.
I've owned more than a few totally garbage MODERN knife sheaths and tool pouches. I had an off-brand Leatherman break its pouch the first hour I was using it. - Another area of comparison could be modern luggage/suitcases. You can spend $30-50 on a suitcase that might last two or three flights, or spend thousands on luggage that may outlive you. It's a matter of what you can afford, and how much you want to spend.
Ive been a full time blacksmith for 10 years and the wisdom my teacher had was to always make things 80% as good as you want them to be. No one sees the details that you lose sleep over as a craftsperson .
Learning that the hard way getting into woodworking with hand tools. It is nice that a machine can make a perfectly square board on all side, and that opens up a lot of design possibilities, but a lot of the time that is wasted doing it by hand if it is hidden or it doesn't matter to final design/construction of the product. Things like drawer bottoms, and insides of cabinets are good examples of getting to 80% is just fine.
You have to remember that they're probably also having apprentices do work and the craftsman isn't going to throw away material, because it didn't turn out perfect and many of the everyday items just don't need to be top quality, because every day working people couldn't afford better. Then, if the lord or king needs a whole butt-load of gear made immediately, you can't always afford to churn out the best stuff. It just has to function. I'm just surprised the Mary rose archer's equipment hadn't had more care put into their decoration. Maybe they figured people wouldn't notice from far away. Or maybe, as Todd said, it didn't matter as much.
The Mary Rose had just been freshly outfitted when it sank. A lot of those weapons were brand spanking new, never used. I’d say it’s highly likely that a soldier or sailor who got issued a weapon like that, would have tuned it and done the final finishing work in their off time. Idle hands and all that…. Long Bows would not have been randomly handed out. Their draw weight varied 20-30 lbs as I remember. Archers would have picked one and made it theirs. They just never had the chance.
I just want to say, as a reenactor, from the very start I found it extremely grating that almost everyone I met at an event styled themselves as some sort of nobility, and even if it wasn't built into their actual persona it would be built into their kit. It was all polish and no ragged edges, so signs of wear, tear, or life. I made a few waves when I got active because I styled myself as a conscript. I sold a fair amount of pretty, well dressed iron and leather work on commission while I bumbled around in torn, patched clothes, I made sure none of my kit was perfect, and when pieces of my fighting kit got damaged I'd cherish the memory and do a crude patch job that resembled field repairs I'd seen in books. It's really nice to see you singing from the same book Todd.
@Lithul, that’s because you are an individual thinker. So many people in our society are followers and don’t make the effort to think differently than others. I don’t imagine your individualism is limited to reenacting.
I know that feeling! my job involves reenacting as a roman soldier at a frontier border fort, and lets just say my kit is authentically rusted and pitted by the britannian weather these days XD meanwhile one of my colleagues is going around in stainless steel fancy shiny greaves, feather crested helm and all the rest like he's a tribune on parade duty!
I was blown away by the graphics of video games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2 when they came out. Now ~15 years later they look pretty crude because I’m comparing them to more modern games with way more detailed textures. Your judge of quality is based on the context of what you can compare it with, if the only knives you have access to are what the local blacksmith can make or random peddlers bring in, that’s what you’re going to compare things to. If things are a bit asymmetrical or the lines aren’t straight that’s fine because all blades are like that and it doesn’t impact the function.
great point. when you see the advertisements of games from the 2000s they talk about "lifelike graphics" and "indistinguishable from real life" its hilarious. granted, it is advertisement text, but still..
Modern people are spoiled by the accuracy of machine made products. Something that is a recent invention. They ignored flaws because accurate work was too expensive and rare in medieval products. And if you look at folk craft products today, the flaws are often a selling point. They neither expected perfection or even probably wanted it. A crude scabbard would give it a earthly folk made feel in pre-industrial times.
Leaning into our modern penchant for agreeing upon universal terms... maybe we should actually find one so we can request this grade of work. We don't have to make a new term - and really we don't need to discuss one and make sure everyone uses it. Language functions in such a way that a regularized terminology will rise to the degreee of necessity. Functional? First Cut? Munitions Grade? The rub is, is it worth requesting this kind of work from Todd? Maybe if you already have some finer work coming in but we should also realize our wasteful habit of ordering small things is wasteful of a small seller's time even if it still pays them.
@@brokeandtired i make a lot of stuff out of timber, or used to, a shelf here, a book case there, some cupboards, a bed lots of stuff. None of it would ever sell and it doesn’t look very pretty but it keeps my clothes off the floor and serves its purpose. Thats good enough for me, and i think thats what life was like back then.
The hardest lesson I had to learn when I switch from doing wooden leather as a hobby for myself to doing it as a business, was that I couldn't make every piece to the perfection standards I wanted. However the flip side of that lesson was learning that as the Craftsman that's making a peace you see every minor flaw but the customer doesn't. And some of them that they seized most customers don't even knowing nothing about the process to realize that they are flaws. So the second lesson I had to learn was to stop pointing it out to them. So if the customers happy and the piece is solid and structurally sound that is all the perfectionist needed.
Only those with patrons who have deep pockets can afford to put in the effort to make it perfect and at that point, they're competing with people who might able to do as good if not better in a similar if not less time.
Spot on, that's the difference between hobbyist and professional lot of people don't understand. People often use "hobbyist" as derogative term like it implies lower quality workmanship compared to "professional", but if you are doing something as a hobby you are doing it essentially for yourself for your own reasons and usually main reason is to do best work you can and learn how to do it even better. But professional is doing it for the customer and work quality is defined by what the customer wants, how much is willing to pay for it and how much time you have to spend on it. Professional who can't balance those needs and still make a profit on it won't stay in business for long.
@@IamOutOfNames That being said I have had almost as much time practicing in my first month as a professional craftsman as I had in my first five years as a hobbyist so I am rapidly getting better as a professional even if I don't have time to focus on producing the best quality I am capable of.
Another modern day equivalent that I think most of us would understand: fast fashion. You don't think twice about what t-shirt you're wearing today, basically everything you can find in your regular chain clothing store is made of 2 or 3 panels quickly machine stitched together and they're not meant to last, when they're worn out you throw them away and buy some new ones. People do still make clothes that are high end, perfectly sewn and crafted to be elaborate and beautiful, that get put on display at events and museums. But they're not everyday wear, they're not things that are "useful" in a sense, they just exist to show off and not what the vast majority of us wear. Everyday things get mostly lost in history because they are so mundane and that is something I feel like people often forget when they look back to the past.
This is hilarious. I've made sheaths before, I found it painstaking & difficult, though enjoyable. You're making perfect cuts & stitching (mostly perfect) while casually chatting away. Lovely to see you work Tod.
Agreed ha. I have to wonder though how much degradation occurs with sheaths so that they develop wonky lines like Todd showed (not the patterns, rather the overall shape/lines/stitching). I would have imagined that a veteran craftsperson had the muscle memory and/or templates to produce fairly symmetric work, no? So many unknowns
The video where he makes a rondel dagger is a better example of how good he is at this stuff. But yeah, been making some sheathes, and they take me a weeee bit longer. lol
@@cbjewelz No doubt muscle memory is nearly all. Tod turns his hands to all sorts of things. Imagine if he were solely making these day in day out, he'd be like a machine.
@@riffhurricane totally so then we have to assume medieval leather workers were quite adept as well? Just trying to rationalize why the work looked so sloppy. The decoration I can understand, that’s a separate artistic skill
Another thing to take into consideration is the lack of "competition" in smaller villages and hamlets and within a travelling army. If only one person knew how to do metalwork within miles of where you lived or stayed - well, then their products is what you're going to get. Especially in a time where trade secrets were kept close to the chest, and guilds existed on top of it all. Great video as usual.
I had the same thought. The craftsman is also limited by the wealth of their customer base in the local area. If everyone nearby is relatively poor, they are only going to pay craftsman for quick cheap work.
@@jimmyrustler8983a sword to kill the horse because it’s lost a shoe? No, no mate you don’t need a new shoe. That horse is past it. You need a sword to put it out of its misery mate. Just so happens I can do you a deal and put you onto my cousin who will do you a deal on a new horse.
This is quite an interesting conversation. And that's an important point about payment per piece (and the quality issues it brings)... speed matters most. The work needs to be functional but it really doesn't need to be fancy. There is one thing I have to wonder about though: How much is the age of surviving artifacts coloring our perception? Clearly the state of preservation could make a once beautiful piece look much less appealing now. I'm not even talking about corrosion, that's obvious. Just more subtle things like wood warping, leather cracking and shrinking, etc. The geometry of iron and steel won't be affected by age unless it's badly corroded or damaged but other aspects of the fit and finish might be.
Hi Skall, To be honest as a maker I tend to see through these kind of imperfections to see what the piece would have been, but I also think that many of these pieces were clearly beautifully made from the start and age has not changed that. I would also say that many were badly decorated, but that does not necessarily mean badly made. We as modern people conflate the two and tend to see the two aspects as wholly related whilst they need not be. Anyway thanks for popping by. Tod
@@tods_workshop Right, that makes sense. You're so familiar with the process and material properties that you can "autocorrect" those aging flaws in your mind. The bad decoration is interesting... why even bother? I'd say an undecorated piece would have looked better than some of those hasty scribblings. But clearly people back then disagreed.
@@SkallagrimI'm not at all knowledgeable on the subject, but a possible scenario (based off of how fast tod made it) could be that they would make the stamp decorations right before the sale to the specifications of the buyer, and then take it to a guild who's in charge of painting aesthetic embellishments.
One of the things that always bothers me about a lot of the decorated leather items is that Curators/authors sometimes seem to forget that these were items owned by people. People just like us, people who like tinkering with things. I often wonder how much of the simple decorations were actually on the scabbards when they were sold, vs how much was added by people who were just sitting there with this plain scabbard and thought to themselves "I think I'm gonna draw this thing on it".
The big difference between the stuff they did then and your stuff now is that it was needed back then, they needed a knife or a sword to work and defend themselves , they needed something to hold and protect it. They didn’t need a mantle piece ornament. We on the other hand don’t need a working blade so we can afford to be more choosy.
Sunday clothes were also beautifully made back then. and as a former chef and gardener i have to wonder about your low intelligence about the tools of today's professions
@@TheCrepusculum those knifes werent made for professional users of them. It's like a cheap pot from Ikea someone buys to Cook dinner once a day or some cheap harbor freight garden clippers to trim a Bush once a year. They will not hold up to professional standards and They will not be used permanently but rather be there when you need them and be good enough for ocasional use without breaking the bank
It seems to be the same as today. Most people are just fine with a $20 pocket knife from Walmart. There are people who want the nice and fancy, really well made $500 knife, but most just don't need to bother
Todd knocked out a functional sheath quicker than i could even find my leather knife, _and_ he decorated it too. And the smug "you sure about that?" Gave me a laugh.
I once made a canoe - mostly plywood, very functional and simple - not pretty by any sense of what people buy - but when people found out that I made it myself to them it became Truly Beautiful!
I love Tod's videos, because he always does research for accuracy, then shows his work. It seems extremely likely (to me) that a working craftsman would need to crank out a large volume of blades and/or sheathes to make a living. They weren't making 'The One Ring', they were making tools for other people trying to make a living in whatever their profession was. Today's collectors are not the fishmongers, farmers, and soldiers of old, and as such, place more value on appearance than necessity. I also think the 'they didn't see the flaws' seems hard for some to accept, because we do see the imperfections so easily - but they had nothing to compare it to. Most farmers would never have seen a perfectly symmetrical blade in their lives, so their asymmetrical one was their norm - and they couldn't have afforded to have a perfect blade made, even if they wanted it. But those imperfect blades were made, and sold, meaning they were good enough to get the job done. Honestly, there are a lot of cheap blades that are mass-produced even today, and they're mostly useless as 'real' tools/weapons. Their 'function' is as decoration, not livelihood or defense. So cut the craftsmen of the past some slack - they were getting it done to put food on the table, and pay their taxes, same as us... :)
A good point in that is the blades and armor that were described as remarkable or exquisite. Even those were generally imperfect, such as the king's armor Todd mentioned. So if something that was obviously flawed can still be considered exquisite, then the context must be that everything else is usually far inferior to it.
"No true craftsman is going to make something below the best of their ability." As someone who makes a living drawing, I can confidently say that's an incredibly dumb take. *Everybody* gets to a point where they say "yep, that's good enough. Any further effort isn't worth the payoff". Not every work is going to be a masterpiece, and that's how it should be. Otherwise you'd just starve to death.
I paint as a hobby, and generally give the paintings to friends and family as gifts- I agree completely, even from a hobbyist standpoint. Even after I tell myself it's finished and give it to someone, I still see things that I don't like. It took about 6 or 7 paintings before I realized that nobody else noticed without me specifically pointing things out, and learned to call the piece done before spending too much time on it just to satisfy my own brain. Also, I couldn't imagine how much I'd hate every piece I made if it was something that I made a living from- though I'd say doing something as a hobby vs doing it as a profession means a completely different view on the piece entirely?
I have that problem of always trying to make something the best... and that's why I make far fewer things than I would like, and I don't get the practice I need to improve, and I'm regularly disappointed by the results... perfectionism is a curse not a superpower. I even saw a research where random students where assigned to focus on quality or on quantity and the end results was better work form the people focused on quantity because of the practice they had...
That's true in a lot of places. There are tree experts who know how to remove branches to get the best look out of the tree and there are people with access to cherry pickers and saws who are just there to cut and it's going to depend most of the time on how much the client is willing to spend. The basic sheaths here were likely not owned by wealthy people, they were functional items for the working class. It's likely the average person couldn't afford a nice sheath given everything else they had to spend money on.
Well, then you don't have the "ability" to make every work a masterpiece. In most cases, you're still going for a pretty high bar of quality, in accord to what you are ABLE to make in a reasonable amount of time. It's usually not a world-class work of art, but it's also usually not a minimum viable product like the examples in the video. His phrasing is off, but his point checks out.
There's a cabinet maker in my neighborhood who advertises "Old time hand craftsmanship." Of course it's all done on machines, but he doesn't plane the boards completely smooth. When the furniture is stained, all the sawmill marks show up. People love it today, but a high end furniture company 150 years ago couldn't have sold something that looks like this stuff. It's all a matter of knowing your market.
I suppose a handful decent sheaths today are better than a single perfect sheath tomorrow. Especially in a year's time, when all those sheaths have been used and worn and personalized by the owner.
The other HUGE factor that you didn't mention is survivor bias. The truly garbage items weren't durable, weren't cared for properly, and haven't survived. This is true for so, so many historical things. When we say things like, "They don't make them like they used to," it's because we're looking almost exclusively at the high quality equipment that was cared for and that has survived.
You struck an amazing chord with me. My father in law grew up in rural post revolutionary Russia. He made many household utensils, repaired shoes and bags and generally kept things working. He lived a very modest life. Most of the things he made we still have and use. They were crude but ever so practical . A simple salt box for the table out of a piece of tree felled in his street , leather for a hinge, a piece of cast off ply for the lid. Everything thing he made seemed crude to me as I tried for perfection in my leather or canvas stitching and I now see that he simply had a pragmatic way of working that suited his needs.Thankyou for giving me pause for thought.
This topic has really got me thinking now haha. Could the cruder marks simply be from the owner as a way to quickly identify their dagger so they didn't pick up someone else's and get in a world of trouble? Perhaps in a pub or a meeting or something like that?
I can easily imagine a leather worker making sheaths like this in the evenings and having his children decorate them and learning the craft. Another thing I find interesting is how they would wear their knifes and daggers because not all sheaths were made with belt loops so many were simply tucked into their belts or stuffed away inside their clothes. I enjoy videos like this and wish I could make a comfortable living crafting things but oh well ;-)
I agree with you and was going to post a similar comment. I understand a lot of the medieval workers worked from their homes and I am sure children joined in the work.
@@widgren87 I think it was some formals smiting guilds would start their apprentices around the age of 10 or so. Old enough to sweep and fill coal, by 12 probably manning pumps and making hob nails, or just minding the tempers while the smith was on other tasks. I could see other trades starting just as early, the daughters learned to stitch and sew, the boys learned to trim and cut leather for sheathes.
Childhood is a modern concept, from an early age they would have had a tiny bit of free time to play. But mostly you followed your mum around helping with the washing, feeding the chooks and preparing meals. Later you'd be following your dad into whatever occupation in 'bring your kid to work day' where he gets his own shovel, bucket and a load of muck to clean up and bring your kid to work day never ends! At some point 20 years later you've followed dad to work and you're still there! Labour for a long time was cheap, its not now unless you're somewhere particularly backwards but back then you really didn't have a lot of mobility upwards in careers and there was always the possibility of going backwards to the poor house or 'work house' as it was known for debtors and the homeless.
I made quick sheathes for a couple quick knives I made our of cardboard and duct tape, it wasnt the best I could do but it worked for the intended use (to keep it from cutting someone in between the forge and a drawer). I was just learning knife making but as I saw a need I met it with the same level of work, it would make sense for the medieval period to have everything from the barest quality to highest quality leather work based on the job.
Very well put. It's one of the joys of studying history in a little bit of depth, you occasionally get that shift in perspective. You see that people's values were different; things that you'd implicitly assumed were universal turn out not to be. Oh, everyone wants, clean, elegant, symmetric design? Nope, medieval people wanted as much decorations crammed into every square inch as possible. Is it really badly made if it fits a different aesthetic and a different set of priorities? As long as it is fit for purpose and matches the taste of its period, I'm not sure it does.
I can't remember who told me, but I was once told "perfection is the enemy of completion". and as somebody who myself struggle with wanting thigs to be as perfect as possible, that's a good thing to have at the back of my mind while working on things. Because if it's something that I need done, then making it to a functioning standard is enough. If it's something I'm doing for fun and not because of a necessity I can put all that extra effort into details.
I think part of it is that sense most stuff is made in factories now the molds and blanks can be perfectly made once and used for thousands of individual items so craftsmen today are competing/comparing to that where as in medieval times most people havnt seen something with that high quality in their entire lives
We live in an age where some thing's are really easy, take polishing we can get a mirror finish in minutes with power tools, try doing that by hand an you can see why polish levels where so low historically.
i love the quickly made, serviceable idea. I found as you get better and better, your early work is hard to replicate in certain aspects. it makes that work super special in that aspect.
As I commented on previous video: Good enough is a thing. It serves purpose and gets it done. Like the leaterworker would be earning less by making things slower and with more care, person buying the piece would be paying more for something more fancy that gets the same job done. I buy a lot of food with discount because it has almost reached the best before date. I also buy big amount of my electronics as customer returns with discounted price. When I buy things, I go with functionality as the first priority because that way what money I have goes longer way. My phone that I have was a customer return and it has couple of dents in it from the first customer (was in their use for less than two weeks) and I didn't even get the original charger. I haven't managed to get any extra dents on it but I got the phone for 1/4th off.
Brilliant - I couldn't agree more..... Machinery has freed us up to give a damn about things that previously just didn't matter. We're all more or less like the guys fussing over business cards in American Psycho 😂
@@beepboop204 Send a letter that would go few moths to ask for price. Wait few months more to receive the answer. Repeat until it at maximum discount possible.
We accept the short comings in modern mass production largely in the quality of material. IKEA/flatpack furniture is glue and sawdust. It's perfectly functional. There's more Billy bookcases in the world than any other bookcase that's for sure. We want our mass produced goods to look great, while being cheaper materials. They sacrificed the finishing work and detail for mass produced goods. They still wanted something nice, but sacrificed the finer touches. I think that's the shift. The materials would be the same, the finish work was less. Nowadays, we have stuff that LOOKS great, but is made out of inferior materials. But if you want a series of shelves to hold all of your Steven King novels, glued sawdust is good enough.
I've been blacksmithing for a living for awhile now. I do alot of piece work. At the beginning I adopted the attitude to find the fastest and most efficient way to make whatever I am working on, so I can keep my wages up as high as possible. I focus on making a good product but quickly as possible. Could I make each piece better, sure I could but then it takes longer and my wages drop. Everything I make is strong and functional just not as pretty as it could be. Unless of course the customer wants pretty then they have to pay extra for my extra work. It just makes sense to me and I'm sure it made sense in medieval times as well.
You say ":Everything I make is strong and functional just not as pretty as it could be. Unless of course the customer wants pretty then they have to pay extra for my extra work. It just makes sense to me". I say "spot on"
This reminds me of the guy who showed that someone who practices a lot could create things pretty quickly . he was hand carving gears to create a working version of the Antikythera mechanism. He did it while being interviewed, every tooth exactly right, because he'd trained to make them
G'day Mate. Chris here. (it's www.youtube.com/@Clickspring I think you are refering to.) - note that the file and other key tools were made using period techniques only. (Also, in case you missed it, bits are sped up :) ) th-cam.com/video/DlN-QFkDkvE/w-d-xo.html
@@rickansell661 looks like the right one. It was just amazing that, after only a few weeks or months of making them, he was doing them like some people knit, not looking, not really paying attention. i used to make muffins at work like that, just scoop and I could tell if the weight was right.
7:55 The image at the bottom is part of the advertisement. It is equivalent to the taglines of our print ads. You have to remember that the vast majority of the Medieval population were illiterate, so that image would correspond to the print tagline "Come put your Bollock Dagger in our Sheaths." Everyone would know then that the merchant made and/or sold sheaths or scabbards.
I like the scabbard with the dreadfull lines than without them. And I just think we forget that these were often things that are daily necessities or are now mostly disposable. When I go to lunch in middle of my work day I don't care that cuttlery is stamped metal or one use plastic I just need it clean and fast. If you are in world where literally everyone have sheath and dagger all day on them no one really care about it. Maybe your friends notice the new one, you mention it a few times and then no one will care for years... Oh you got new work boots or new cheap phone to replace the one you dropped in toilet.... And you are done for next year or two... People use and wear dreadfull cheap stuff every day but it goes unnoticed because it's common.
I really need to come by more often. There is something grounding about a man who works with his hands and can speak so eloquently about it sharing the details about his passion for, interest in, insight into and knowledge of his craft, its context and history. Thank you, sir, from another who worked with his hands. Cheers!
In a way i feel this just makes the distant past feel all more real and not just some story in a book about knights in shining armour. You can just imagine some regular everyday bloke go leave his knife at the leather shop to get a new sheath made, while he goes down to the inn to have a pint with the lads.
You take us back to the times out of mind, when life was lived in a state of mind we can only imagine. Leather work could be compared to artwork in our time. A few years back I went to an exhibition of art students who had recently graduated from art school. Tod, I could not believe the poor quality of drawing that some students had in the work they had submitted. A girl I was with from the same class defended the terrible drawing as something that was fine, because drawing was out of fashion, she said. So maybe, back when the poor work was being done, it was really considered as pretty good stuff, because maybe they had nothing to compare it to. As long as your shoe stayed on your foot, who cares if it looked patched together. Life was all about making it to the next day, and like you said, they had a day filled with things to do to survive that make our day with pint at the pub would look like we were kings to them
I'm far from an authority or expert, but I have loved ancient and medieval culture and history since I was young. An interesting thing I've come to understand is that decoration was very important through much all of history pretty much all about the world, even the early to classical age of say 800-1300's Europe. despite modern media trying to convince you, everything wasn't all grey and muddied. Texture work has been historically difficult and naturally imperfect, often times consistency requiring stamps or special tools that were expensive and served singular purpose. One of the most important things through history has been functionality first, though. The best works, I believe, were measured on practicality, at least for most. I can't help but imagine the nobleman with the most lovely decorated scabbard for his knife, which couldn't seal it's oil and rusted it's blade or left the tip exposed to poke him in the thigh, would be laughed out of his circle for having a terrible *tool*. What good is getting a tool or utility item, which most things were, that can't perform it's duty? We have the luxury of the modern days where these things are purely collection or status, but to them it was purpose first. To circle back and to note on a point you said early on - people loved to COLOR things! Bright colors, simple shapes to hold that color, blues and yellows and reds, vibrancy! Bright colors to indicate status, laws on certain colors only being allowed to be worn by certain levels of society, whitewashing buildings, paintings on ceramics, color was everywhere, and I believe far more spread than texture work. Perhaps their priorities were just different, or tailored by what was available in their time. Maybe those hundreds of years from now will look back on us and wonder "why?" in the same way we do to them, now.
Another good point is, that you don't have time to waste on a single piece, when you need to make many of them. For example the bracers. If the leatherworkers would get a letter, saying that the king needs 5 000 bracers for his archers, to be done before the end of the week, they would have to make all of them in that time. So they would just go as fast as they can, not worrying if the decorations are perfectly symmetrical, just make sure they are there.
Or even better, go ask his neighbor Bob, who has looser schedule this time of year, to come help him with the decorations so he can focus on actual making of the sheats.
I believe the rough scabbards you point out are homemade. A present from grandmother or something you make to go with your new coat. The scabbard is as much fashion as it is function and most people could work with leather. I grew up in the woods hunting food for dinner. Working with leather was just something we did.
When viewed from today's eyes that might seem reasonable. However, you had access to modern tools of some quality compared to back then when most people couldn't just afford the tools they wanted for this and that. Some could have been, alright, but what are the chances they basically only find such items. Or that they find similarly made scabbards in a substantial part of Europe. Or that the Mary Rose bracers have the same level of quality?
"No true craftsman would do anything but their best work." aw, someone doesn't know the difference between craft and art. You do what your paid for. They want your best work, they can pay for that. Most people are just going to want functional. Think about it, is every knife in your kitchen a $2000+ knife? Or is it from a set you got for less than $200 because you just need kitchen knives?
There is (probably) more to that picture of the knife seller... Knife and sheath were in the (late?) middle ages often used as sexual innuendo. I remember a German/Jiddisch song from a collection of medieval songs I had (in 1980, so no references), where a monk complained about the fact that he had a knife without a sheath, and a jong lady solved the problem for him... Knowing that, the picture of the ladies shopping for knives takes on an other meaning - and the pair on the ground are the logical result... So where in our 20th century view it might seem there are knives being sold without sheaths, it might be that in the medieval view the sheaths are standing on the left of the picture...
I've been a historical re-enactor for neigh on 20 years now. For the last ten or so, I've greived that we can't get our hands on the "real" stuff. I don't want a replica of king Richards' solid gold sigil ring. I want a replica of the shitty, wonky bronze ring found in a quarry, likely owned by a farmer or a serf. In short; I'm absolutely signing up for the news letter. And if I don't win I'm likely to special order a shitty Mary Rose guard anyway. Love your work Tod
Actually no. I have worked very hard to set levels of craftsmanship, quality, detail and authenticity for both Tod Cutler and Tods Workshop and believe from a company like mine you will not find better for the price, and I cam immensely proud of that. Standards will not slip and when things go wrong and of course they do, I have an amazing customer services team in Lou, Lisa and Catherine. What I find fascinating is what is/was going on? I have been pondering this of late simply because they could and often did very good work, but also they could and did work that I cannot fathom how they could. I do wonder if we visit museums, see the glorious stuff as we race around (most people do TBH), go home and extol how wonderful the pieces were and any quality observations seems to get rose tinted and disappear until there is the popular conception that everything was lovely. We whitewash the past and I think it is good to remember we are very much looking at the past through our own eyes, not theirs- we just often forget and this is a reminder
@@tods_workshop I don't think anyone doubts that you put the utmost care and precision into your work. And frankly, I'm actually more interested in an "ugly" knife from you than a "show piece", because you've proven you actually understand what goes into it and what it was made for. There are other "blade smiths", but you are a historian. You're really the only one I've seen address this and I think it's very important. Thank you!
A good modern comparison, I used to work in firearms retail. I often saw people buy a nice handgun, and then get the cheapest piece of crap holster to carry it in. The holster was just an afterthought and they didn't care if it was quality or that it would fall apart (and likely cause serious issues) in a few months.
I love the practical yet philosophical approach Tod takes. He treats medieval people as real people with real motivations. They aren't just something for us, hundreds of years later, to dissect and analyze.
As far as "They just didn't see it" I think that's probably extremely true. Think of the advancements in video game graphics that have come out over the last few decades. A decade or two ago, people were saying graphics were getting extremely realistic. But nowadays, when we compare those games to more modern ones, they appear almost cartoonishly bad. And even today, you can sit down with, for example, Skyrim, and play through it without really noticing that graphics and animations are absolutely atrocious by modern standards. You just have to not think too hard about it, and you won't have any issues. Sure this leather work is technically rather poorly made. But if you aren't closely scrutinizing it, can you really tell? How many people are going to actually pick up a sheath and closely examine it? Probably only the owner, and probably only once or twice. Most of the time, you'll only be glancing at it out of the corner of your eye as you attach it to a belt, or seeing someone else's from across a room. In that situation, who really cares what it looks like on a close inspection?
17:50 Based on the additional scrawling on the top and right, this one gives me the impression that it was decorated all over at one point, but the pattern wore off from interacting with the bow string.
Today we want them to look at, so aesthetics are supreme. Then they knew their weapons would be getting dinged, scratched, rolled and then mended often, so why care so much for looks?
The *did* care about looks. Their swords and scabbards were full of decoration! It's just that symmetry wasn't a part of aesthetics they cared much about. Density of patterns and "bling" was their style.
I never said they didn’t care for the looks, just they didn’t care so much. I was comparing what people look for now and what they looked for then. Now people mostly want something they can display. Then the most important aspect was that the weapon fulfilled its purpose. They decorated, so of course how it looked did matter but function was preeminent, unlike today. That’s the point I was trying to make.
@@pixelambience1767 I think they cared just as much as us. Possibly more. At least, those who could afford more than the bare minimum. People wanted to show off their wealth and status in what they wore - in civilian life and on the battlefield. Half of the point in turning up to a battle was to show off how brave you were and how you could afford the best kit. You get suits of armour that were guilded and encrusted with jewels used for a single tournament! Toby Capwell has a lecture on youtube about how prevalent conspicuous consumption in wearables was in the medieval world. Again - this level of extravagance was only for those who could afford it, but everyone who could afford more than the bare minimum seemed to want to bling up their gear as much as their purse allowed. Or, to put it another way, if they didn't care much about looks, why was so much stuff decorated so extensively? The quality of decoration depended on the value, but almost everything had decoration. Putting low quality decoration on stuff is a clear sign that you value aesthetics hugely, just can't afford it to be done well.
@@QuantumHistorian I'm sure they did care about what their weapons looked like, but i cant get on board with the idea that your every day functional items were made with looks as a primary concern, function was more important. The swords of the nobility may be a different matter but even here we see a difference between ceremonial/decorative/functional. Also symmetry in medieval art is incredibly important and was highly sought after in designs.
Another good video. I agree totally with your observations. I made sheath for a working knife based on findings in the York Dig. I tell people that it is the type of sheath a leather worker could make in an hour or so which would mean he has more time to make more sheaths and hence more money. I also tell those I teach leatherwork to that leatherwork is an art and craft. Craft is how to do it and the art is hiding/fixing your mistakes.
The thing that most people are missing is that what today's craftsmen are doing are collectors items that are expected to be high quality. Back in the day they were everyday use items. Things that today are mass produced in chinese factories. And today such items are also not perfect. Very often designed to be as easy and fast to make as possible, comprimising their properties. Often cheaply decorated as well.
Thanks for the video on sheath construction, and historical examples! On the Let's Ask Seki Sensei channel, Seki sensei says that Japanese sheaths are also somewhat disposable, and even made weakly (better if the sheath falls apart than to get the blade stuck inside it).
This is such an interesting topic to talk about and discuss. I've never really looked at it as craftsmen back then just banging out work to make more money. I thought that there were just different levels of craftsmen and that's it. Another great video Tod, looking forward to more !
Excellent video, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head. One example that springs to mind is from the Staffordshire hoard, where I remember seeing a sword hilt of gold, with great detail in the workmanship and design, that had a knot work motif where the lines just didn’t meet up at the overlaps. How and why they could put so much effort into a piece and yet make it ‘wrong’ is a mystery to me, yet there it is!
Absolutely loved this one - especially the fact that you were making whilst you were talking. More of that! It's also an issue I have thought about a lot, as I tend to be more interested in the lower echelons of medieval society, and clearly much of what they would have had would have been pretty poor quality. Usable, but not pretty. And, of course, most of what is made today is a) based on what has actually survived, which favours both quality and status, and b) made using modern methods, with modern materials, to modern standards. I think it can sometimes be quite hard for re-enactors to get their hands on stuff that reflects 'ordinary' medieval quality - at least, when it comes to metalwork. Clothes, they tend to make themselves and so that can sort itself out, but most people aren't equipped to make a blade. One experiment when I was looking for a pretty bog standard sword for an archer was to buy the cheapest, worst, generally correct sword I could find - which was beautifully finished, but horribly proportioned and balanced - and then distress the crap out of it, including sawing some bits off the quillons. It ended up looking pretty good (by which I mean quite bad) but would certainly still do the job. Which, in essence, was the point you're making. That's all that is needed from it as far as this archer is concerned.
I worked in manufacturing engineering for 53yrs & a lot of time was on bonus schemes,would often work 3,4 or 5 machines @ once to make more money,& the limits on tolerances would often be a bit over or under,but when your producing perhaps 1,000 items the same,not all would be inspected,often 10% were checked by an inspector. Now if you worked in defence work or aircraft industries,you couldn't get away with it because everything would be 100% inspected.
I work in control circuits wiring, and it always is a struggle between innate perfectionism and deadline restrictions. Sometimes good enough has to be good enough.
I'm an engineering student, we have a saying: "as good as it NEEDS to be, and as bad as it CAN be". As tod said himself, any time you spend on making it better than it has to be, you are loosing money
that was really food for thought, I wonder if the decoration would have been given to the kids to complete while dad got on with the important bits? great show as always, thank you.
We do that today also, just in a different way - you can buy cheap off the shelf Chinese suit and it will be fine for a few months, or you can go to a tailor and get a bespoke suit. Same with appliances, you can buy something super cheap because they put cost cutting measures in design, or you can buy something top shelf.
I am a trained calligrapher and illuminator and studied medieval manuscripts. Apart from the very grand books most medieval books are pretty rough for the same reasons you stated. Also in many books if they made mistakes they just crossed out the word and wrote the correct one in the margin. Holes in vellum stitched up. Cats paws prints. All kinds of things which today my patrons would never accept. Also there were pattern books for scribes and illuminators to copy.
I would also add that most commoners/serfs had to settle for what they could afford, not buying bespoke tools, but as good a quality as could do the job. I also imagine there was a lot of recycling of leather- coats turned into sheaths and strops, etc... Great video!
Tod's Workshop thanks so much for the videos you do. Secondly, I so have to reach out to you and your shop, because as a newly semi-retired public housing worker I so need one of your blades for my new man cave. (:
10:23 I say that decoration brings to mind the term "Ricer" Weren't sheaths "wear items"? That might explain why there's so many *exceptionally* crude ones: If it's going to wear out in X months, why make it looks nice?
I’d like to expand on the point you made about people not seeing it. I’ve found in my own experience the more you know about the craft and the more you know about how you would make an item the more likely you are to spot a mistake or lack of precision. For example I work in the print industry and most of the time when you have color in an image there are 4 overlays of ink (commonly yellow magenta cyan and black) if all 4 colors are not perfectly lined up you can see a bit of one color peeking out the side of the image. How ever it’s not usually noticeable unless your eyes focus specifically looking for it. There’s also a thing called tone where there will be excess ink that didn’t get totally washed away and it can be hard to see unless you know to look at where the plate gap would be. These things jump out at me like crazy every time I look at a news paper or a pamphlet where they care less about quality and more about quantity. But i also know that my eyes are trained to look for those things but the common person probably wouldn’t notice. Much like a medieval person who’s only ever seen imperfect swords and has never worked as a black smith would not be looking for perfectly crisp lines or that time scratch on the blade.
|Tod , Thanks for so much this and the sword video . This is something I have been banging on about for years in my own little way . Particularly with regard to wooden stuff . We make and sell around 250 to 300 wooden spoons a year , Something we have always found interesting is that the just a little bit asymmetrical and a free form ones sell first .
* Regarding filling in empty space: we have to remember, these scabbard would be worn basically every day (or at least, multiple times per week probably). So any 'pristine' looking piece of leather scabbard, is quickly going to get scratched, etc. So this patterning, can 'hide' some of the wear 'damage' these pieces automatically pick up just from being worn. I think a great comparison is a shovel, or your vacuum cleaner or a bucket and mop (I don't mean the cloth, but the stick :p ). People would bring their own cutlery, and yes silverware had a status symbol etc. But how carefully do you examine the quality of a mop you're buying? How much does one know about shovel quality? These are 'usage' items. * There's also a parallel to the shoe parable: the poor buy 'poor' quality stuff, and thus it needs replacing often, so overall they may well be spending more. The richer person buys the reinforced 2 mm+ thick piece, and it lasts longer. Especially as he may get involved less often in scrappy situations or working in poor conditions. * The 'clouds': could be clouds, or a river flowing, or... * Fleurs de Lis indicating high status: fully agreed. For recognizing sides, shields would all be coloured according to the colour of the owners' lord. Shields were very much 'disposable' and would be replaced very often. And infantry is hardly high status. And yet, there would be coloured shields with 'high status' heraldry. It could be as simple as the leatherworker having a limited amount of stamps, but always bringing along the 'lord's herardly' stamp. And since we have this stamp right here anyhow, and this stamp is usable... Plus again, identifying that this bow is associated with this noble family. * Thin/low quality leather: just look at today: 'ooh, genuine leather'. ... That's the *lowest* grade of leather quality. But people really don't know that. Or all the 'leather' belts that really have a rubber filling inside. And we can know these kind of things very easily. We truly don't see quality today, despite having access to the internet, education etc. Could be medieval people saw soft leather and thought 'ooh, soft, higher value'. Could also be according to availability. Sheeps & pigs should be more common in medieval times: wool, and pigs eat everything. But you're not going to slaughter a milk-giving cow for the leather if you can help it. And the thinner skinnier leather was probably far easier to work with: tanning/leatherworking was a nasty, nasty job.
This was very interesting Tod. And I would add that it might not be necessary to go back in time that far to have that mindset about quality, maybe just before the invention of railroads? I love visiting museums, down here in France, we have beautiful historical stuff, and also, not so beautiful.. crude even. And it makes perfect sense. Have a nice end of the week!
We got this kind of quality today also. Think of one-dollar shops. Cheap and badly made items sold for not much. But it sometimes is enough. A worker does not need a beautifully made sheath for his tool. But a functioning one. Great video 😊
I can imagine it was a case of "if you need it now I have this quick work that'll do the job" and "if you want something nice, half up front, and I'll spend tomorrow making it." So really good quality work existed, but it was probably rare and commanded a premium.
Pretty much the same today still. Take rings for example. You can get a custommade beautiful piece of art but it will take a few weeks and cost pretty much or you get a mass produced plain one for the price of material and bit of labour right now from the bargin bin
This gives me another point of view on the medieval life. Something I never thought about, but you are correct, perfection were not their aim. It couldn't be.
Love the vid, it's fun to see work being done with a bit of personality in it. I have a bit of personal experience that might add to the conversation. I grew up in a fairly rural part of the Northern Rockies where a lot of people keep horses for both work and recreation. Amateur leatherwork was everywhere. A small degree of competence with leatherworking is almost necessary for the non-wealthy that keep stock, but the rough stuff lasts just as good. I could only imagine that back when leather was more of a common household good and everyone grew up around sewing; well why wouldn't the common man or woman be making the sheath for their knife or this or that with some frequency? Also interestingly, all of the amateur stuff is covered in ornamentation. That said, even here, everyone likes how convenient the production stuff is as I'm sure they did then too.
As a sculptor, I can agree with everything you said. Specially about not always doing the best work I can do. I mainly sell small figures at about 10€ to 15€, and I have to keep that in mind when I produce the pieces. If I spend a whole day painting a single figure, it's a disaster because I won't be getting enough money to cover that, so I either make a rough and quick paint (few and flat colors) or a simple spray-painting. That way, it's less work and it means I can keep a low price and thus sell more, but it also means I can produce more in less time. I can do a better job than that, but it's not going to be worth it. Sure, if someone pays me a lot of money to make an amazing piece, I will make the best work I can because it's worth it, but that's not the common item I sell every day. If I spend a whole day painting a single figure so that it's perfect and I price it at 80€ nobody is going to buy that, even though it may be the right price for the item, or even a low price, if you think about all the work behind it. If you do the best job you can and people don't buy it because it's too expensive, it's not worth it.
Really intersting! I bought a Beagnoth sax replica and it came with a plain leather scabbad but it just doesn't look correct when you look at the workmanship of the blade
It is always a pleasure watching you work, thanks for sharing! We see a similar thing today between artisanal work vs industrial. If you're making a sword for a noble who's giving you time and budget to make a higher quality weapon, you'll spend extra time to get it right. If a king asks you for 1000 swords urgently because a neighbouring kingdom declared war, you'll ensure the blades are forged and tempered well, but won't care so much on the aesthetics. You'll try to output as many swords as quickly as you can because 1000 soldiers with ugly functional swords are better than 3 soldiers with intricately designed swords. Same happens in Hollywood today, where a movie might require 100s or 1000s of swords, but will only ask for 2-3 of them to be "Hero swords" that will get a close-up shot. I'm sure Gandalf's Glamdring would take as long to make as 50 or 100 orcish rusted chunks of steel roughly shaped like a sword.
I mean, it makes sense even today: you just want a tool that works for the cheapest most effecient price. Who obsesses over the quality of their screwdrivers?
This is true in many industries even today. For instance in software we will sometimes speak of MVPs or "Minimum Viable Products". Meaning it is something that just barely meets the needs of the customer / user and nothing else, no "bells and whistles", no nice graphics or flashy user interfaces, just what the customer needs, wants, or asked for and absolutely nothing more. The philosophy or reasoning for why this is done is a bit different than in manufacturing, but a lot of the same principles can still be applied to avoid wasting time, money, and effort.
Enkoyed the video. It reminds me of my second home (Kenya) you find a lot of similar (not historical) work, crudlely done, quick and with simple tools. On the otehr side you find really quality work if you can afford it. But better having something you need affordable and cheap then saving for a "quality item" you might not enjoy in a short lifespan 🙂 All a matter of perspective!
The dynamics you describe here still can be found today. Pick up a knife, or anything really, made by a craftsman in a back alley shop in Peshawar for example, and you'll find many of the same loose fittings and imprecisions. They're working in suboptimal conditions by modern factory standards, often with ancient tools that have been repaired over and over, or with improvised tools. They're working fast for the same reasons you've explained. Customers are happy to own them because it's the best they can get, and they still cut and poke just fine.
Also the apprentice/master business model was the norm during the medieval period Apprentices would have been doing a lot of the piece work using their masters patterns and tools. Anything repetitive like a bracer or knife sheath would have been perfect work for an apprentice. Great couple of vids thanks.
As a craftsman who made holsters and some other leather goods, I completely agree with you. I made several things "below my capability" because they paid me. Simple things that I was nearly embarrassed to say that I crafted yet they were in moderately high demand. They were simple and they were cheap. They also did the job they were expected to do.
Todd, we’re never going to make quota if you keep stopping to show people pictures out of books
lol
That's what they lacked, a QualityAssurance department and a shift manager.
Come on, Todd, time is money! We got a whole army we need to equip by monday!
Mh-yeah, I'd need you to...
I like seeing the pictures of what he's talking about.
Imagine banging out a quick sheath 500+ years ago only, forgetting all about it next week as you move onto your next load of work, only to have it found and recorded in a history book and have it roasted online 😂
Great video as always Todd, these videos always get you thinking about the past differently.
I just feel good knowing that Ea-Nasir has some company. :)
What if the person that made it was a highly skilled craftsman and that was his best work.. And Tod just told everyone its crap.. oops.... Pistols at Dawn? :)
@@WhiteDieselShed my money's on Tod!
-You are without a doubt the worst craftsman I've ever heard of.
-But you have heard of me.
@@bleachedink Obviously, even he wasn't that great of a shot, he at least knows what a pistol is
A sheath must fit a blade in it and protect the user from said blade.
Does it do that?
Yes. Perfect. How kind, you've even decorated it
This. It's a dust cover and keeps damp off it.
@@papalaz4444244 after reading some comments i also noticed some other things.
A sheath could also be great for the leatherworker's children to learn something of the craft, let them make a few, it probably saves time for you in the end too.
And, it can be possible that these children OR the soldiers who were supplied with the sheaths decorated them, it doesn't have to be the workers job, look how much time Tod spend on even these simplest carvings
decorated at about the same level as 2021 Sound Clound Rapper face tattoos
Actually, when you think about it - the decoration actually weakens the sheath, you're cutting into the leather and then prying the cut apart with a bit of bone. So it's extra weird that for purely-functional work, they're still doing *something*.
I've owned more than a few totally garbage MODERN knife sheaths and tool pouches.
I had an off-brand Leatherman break its pouch the first hour I was using it.
-
Another area of comparison could be modern luggage/suitcases.
You can spend $30-50 on a suitcase that might last two or three flights, or spend thousands on luggage that may outlive you.
It's a matter of what you can afford, and how much you want to spend.
Ive been a full time blacksmith for 10 years and the wisdom my teacher had was to always make things 80% as good as you want them to be. No one sees the details that you lose sleep over as a craftsperson .
Learning that the hard way getting into woodworking with hand tools. It is nice that a machine can make a perfectly square board on all side, and that opens up a lot of design possibilities, but a lot of the time that is wasted doing it by hand if it is hidden or it doesn't matter to final design/construction of the product. Things like drawer bottoms, and insides of cabinets are good examples of getting to 80% is just fine.
You have to remember that they're probably also having apprentices do work and the craftsman isn't going to throw away material, because it didn't turn out perfect and many of the everyday items just don't need to be top quality, because every day working people couldn't afford better.
Then, if the lord or king needs a whole butt-load of gear made immediately, you can't always afford to churn out the best stuff. It just has to function. I'm just surprised the Mary rose archer's equipment hadn't had more care put into their decoration. Maybe they figured people wouldn't notice from far away. Or maybe, as Todd said, it didn't matter as much.
The Mary Rose had just been freshly outfitted when it sank. A lot of those weapons were brand spanking new, never used. I’d say it’s highly likely that a soldier or sailor who got issued a weapon like that, would have tuned it and done the final finishing work in their off time. Idle hands and all that…. Long Bows would not have been randomly handed out. Their draw weight varied 20-30 lbs as I remember. Archers would have picked one and made it theirs. They just never had the chance.
I just want to say, as a reenactor, from the very start I found it extremely grating that almost everyone I met at an event styled themselves as some sort of nobility, and even if it wasn't built into their actual persona it would be built into their kit. It was all polish and no ragged edges, so signs of wear, tear, or life.
I made a few waves when I got active because I styled myself as a conscript. I sold a fair amount of pretty, well dressed iron and leather work on commission while I bumbled around in torn, patched clothes, I made sure none of my kit was perfect, and when pieces of my fighting kit got damaged I'd cherish the memory and do a crude patch job that resembled field repairs I'd seen in books.
It's really nice to see you singing from the same book Todd.
I cringe when i see viking age events where everyone is either Jarls or History Channel Viking knockoffs
@Lithul, that’s because you are an individual thinker. So many people in our society are followers and don’t make the effort to think differently than others. I don’t imagine your individualism is limited to reenacting.
@@stuartstuart866I think that’s a very wankery way of saying people like looking cool because looking cool looks cool and is cool
@@pyrrhusofepirus8491 Perhaps, but looking cool usually means copying others
I know that feeling! my job involves reenacting as a roman soldier at a frontier border fort, and lets just say my kit is authentically rusted and pitted by the britannian weather these days XD meanwhile one of my colleagues is going around in stainless steel fancy shiny greaves, feather crested helm and all the rest like he's a tribune on parade duty!
I was blown away by the graphics of video games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2 when they came out. Now ~15 years later they look pretty crude because I’m comparing them to more modern games with way more detailed textures. Your judge of quality is based on the context of what you can compare it with, if the only knives you have access to are what the local blacksmith can make or random peddlers bring in, that’s what you’re going to compare things to. If things are a bit asymmetrical or the lines aren’t straight that’s fine because all blades are like that and it doesn’t impact the function.
You've brought up a great point. They lived in a time where very few things are perfectly straight or symmetrical; almost the inverse of today.
@@OutOfNamesToChoose Seems like we had the same problem with usernames.
@@IamOutOfNames Oh, for sure! I remember it being a last ditch effort after spending ages trying to get the names I wanted, but they'd all been taken.
great point.
when you see the advertisements of games from the 2000s they talk about "lifelike graphics" and "indistinguishable from real life" its hilarious. granted, it is advertisement text, but still..
@@OutOfNamesToChoose so happy that i was in time to get this one
Some would say “crudely made”. Others would say “extra historically accurate”. It’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose.
imagine the hipster cred youd get from an ultra rustic, rustic knife
I would say "sufficient unto the purpose or need."
Modern people are spoiled by the accuracy of machine made products. Something that is a recent invention.
They ignored flaws because accurate work was too expensive and rare in medieval products. And if you look at folk craft products today, the flaws are often a selling point. They neither expected perfection or even probably wanted it. A crude scabbard would give it a earthly folk made feel in pre-industrial times.
Leaning into our modern penchant for agreeing upon universal terms... maybe we should actually find one so we can request this grade of work. We don't have to make a new term - and really we don't need to discuss one and make sure everyone uses it. Language functions in such a way that a regularized terminology will rise to the degreee of necessity. Functional? First Cut? Munitions Grade?
The rub is, is it worth requesting this kind of work from Todd? Maybe if you already have some finer work coming in but we should also realize our wasteful habit of ordering small things is wasteful of a small seller's time even if it still pays them.
@@brokeandtired i make a lot of stuff out of timber, or used to, a shelf here, a book case there, some cupboards, a bed lots of stuff. None of it would ever sell and it doesn’t look very pretty but it keeps my clothes off the floor and serves its purpose. Thats good enough for me, and i think thats what life was like back then.
The hardest lesson I had to learn when I switch from doing wooden leather as a hobby for myself to doing it as a business, was that I couldn't make every piece to the perfection standards I wanted. However the flip side of that lesson was learning that as the Craftsman that's making a peace you see every minor flaw but the customer doesn't. And some of them that they seized most customers don't even knowing nothing about the process to realize that they are flaws. So the second lesson I had to learn was to stop pointing it out to them. So if the customers happy and the piece is solid and structurally sound that is all the perfectionist needed.
So true.
Only those with patrons who have deep pockets can afford to put in the effort to make it perfect and at that point, they're competing with people who might able to do as good if not better in a similar if not less time.
Spot on, that's the difference between hobbyist and professional lot of people don't understand. People often use "hobbyist" as derogative term like it implies lower quality workmanship compared to "professional", but if you are doing something as a hobby you are doing it essentially for yourself for your own reasons and usually main reason is to do best work you can and learn how to do it even better. But professional is doing it for the customer and work quality is defined by what the customer wants, how much is willing to pay for it and how much time you have to spend on it. Professional who can't balance those needs and still make a profit on it won't stay in business for long.
@@IamOutOfNames That being said I have had almost as much time practicing in my first month as a professional craftsman as I had in my first five years as a hobbyist so I am rapidly getting better as a professional even if I don't have time to focus on producing the best quality I am capable of.
Another modern day equivalent that I think most of us would understand: fast fashion.
You don't think twice about what t-shirt you're wearing today, basically everything you can find in your regular chain clothing store is made of 2 or 3 panels quickly machine stitched together and they're not meant to last, when they're worn out you throw them away and buy some new ones.
People do still make clothes that are high end, perfectly sewn and crafted to be elaborate and beautiful, that get put on display at events and museums. But they're not everyday wear, they're not things that are "useful" in a sense, they just exist to show off and not what the vast majority of us wear.
Everyday things get mostly lost in history because they are so mundane and that is something I feel like people often forget when they look back to the past.
This is hilarious. I've made sheaths before, I found it painstaking & difficult, though enjoyable. You're making perfect cuts & stitching (mostly perfect) while casually chatting away. Lovely to see you work Tod.
Agreed ha. I have to wonder though how much degradation occurs with sheaths so that they develop wonky lines like Todd showed (not the patterns, rather the overall shape/lines/stitching). I would have imagined that a veteran craftsperson had the muscle memory and/or templates to produce fairly symmetric work, no? So many unknowns
The video where he makes a rondel dagger is a better example of how good he is at this stuff. But yeah, been making some sheathes, and they take me a weeee bit longer. lol
@@dogmaticpyrrhonist543 14 minutes 30 seconds for that sheath, including the chat!
@@cbjewelz No doubt muscle memory is nearly all. Tod turns his hands to all sorts of things. Imagine if he were solely making these day in day out, he'd be like a machine.
@@riffhurricane totally so then we have to assume medieval leather workers were quite adept as well? Just trying to rationalize why the work looked so sloppy. The decoration I can understand, that’s a separate artistic skill
Another thing to take into consideration is the lack of "competition" in smaller villages and hamlets and within a travelling army. If only one person knew how to do metalwork within miles of where you lived or stayed - well, then their products is what you're going to get. Especially in a time where trade secrets were kept close to the chest, and guilds existed on top of it all.
Great video as usual.
I had the same thought. The craftsman is also limited by the wealth of their customer base in the local area. If everyone nearby is relatively poor, they are only going to pay craftsman for quick cheap work.
@@MrAfghanjones If you're a swordsmith, but the locals only need nails and horseshoes, then guess what you're gonna be making...
@@jimmyrustler8983 Nails formed like swords of course 😂
@@jimmyrustler8983a sword to kill the horse because it’s lost a shoe?
No, no mate you don’t need a new shoe. That horse is past it. You need a sword to put it out of its misery mate. Just so happens I can do you a deal and put you onto my cousin who will do you a deal on a new horse.
@@murph8411 How about we make a sword out of horse shoes for that very occasion?
This is quite an interesting conversation. And that's an important point about payment per piece (and the quality issues it brings)... speed matters most. The work needs to be functional but it really doesn't need to be fancy.
There is one thing I have to wonder about though: How much is the age of surviving artifacts coloring our perception? Clearly the state of preservation could make a once beautiful piece look much less appealing now. I'm not even talking about corrosion, that's obvious. Just more subtle things like wood warping, leather cracking and shrinking, etc. The geometry of iron and steel won't be affected by age unless it's badly corroded or damaged but other aspects of the fit and finish might be.
Hi Skall, To be honest as a maker I tend to see through these kind of imperfections to see what the piece would have been, but I also think that many of these pieces were clearly beautifully made from the start and age has not changed that. I would also say that many were badly decorated, but that does not necessarily mean badly made. We as modern people conflate the two and tend to see the two aspects as wholly related whilst they need not be. Anyway thanks for popping by. Tod
@@tods_workshop Right, that makes sense. You're so familiar with the process and material properties that you can "autocorrect" those aging flaws in your mind.
The bad decoration is interesting... why even bother? I'd say an undecorated piece would have looked better than some of those hasty scribblings. But clearly people back then disagreed.
@@SkallagrimI'm not at all knowledgeable on the subject, but a possible scenario (based off of how fast tod made it) could be that they would make the stamp decorations right before the sale to the specifications of the buyer, and then take it to a guild who's in charge of painting aesthetic embellishments.
Skallagrim also watches Tod. Perfect :D
Buy a plain sheath to decorate at home? (Not the stamped ones, I agree with Tod's explanation of those)
One of the things that always bothers me about a lot of the decorated leather items is that Curators/authors sometimes seem to forget that these were items owned by people. People just like us, people who like tinkering with things. I often wonder how much of the simple decorations were actually on the scabbards when they were sold, vs how much was added by people who were just sitting there with this plain scabbard and thought to themselves "I think I'm gonna draw this thing on it".
I hear Tod's daggers are bollocks.
Are you sure they're not the dog's bollocks?
HA
Nice one
I'm lucky enough to have one of his bollocks hanging on the wall here :)
Aye, but they're the _dog's_ bollocks!
The big difference between the stuff they did then and your stuff now is that it was needed back then, they needed a knife or a sword to work and defend themselves , they needed something to hold and protect it. They didn’t need a mantle piece ornament.
We on the other hand don’t need a working blade so we can afford to be more choosy.
Sunday clothes were also beautifully made back then. and as a former chef and gardener i have to wonder about your low intelligence about the tools of today's professions
probably didnt want to stand out either, if everything else you own is ultra rustic, why would you want something shiny and attention grabbing
@@TheCrepusculum those knifes werent made for professional users of them. It's like a cheap pot from Ikea someone buys to Cook dinner once a day or some cheap harbor freight garden clippers to trim a Bush once a year. They will not hold up to professional standards and They will not be used permanently but rather be there when you need them and be good enough for ocasional use without breaking the bank
It seems to be the same as today. Most people are just fine with a $20 pocket knife from Walmart. There are people who want the nice and fancy, really well made $500 knife, but most just don't need to bother
@@beepboop204 are you talking about the church robe? if so, it's a church robe and you wear it to Sunday mass- that's why
Todd knocked out a functional sheath quicker than i could even find my leather knife, _and_ he decorated it too.
And the smug "you sure about that?" Gave me a laugh.
I once made a canoe - mostly plywood, very functional and simple - not pretty by any sense of what people buy - but when people found out that I made it myself to them it became Truly Beautiful!
I love Tod's videos, because he always does research for accuracy, then shows his work. It seems extremely likely (to me) that a working craftsman would need to crank out a large volume of blades and/or sheathes to make a living. They weren't making 'The One Ring', they were making tools for other people trying to make a living in whatever their profession was.
Today's collectors are not the fishmongers, farmers, and soldiers of old, and as such, place more value on appearance than necessity. I also think the 'they didn't see the flaws' seems hard for some to accept, because we do see the imperfections so easily - but they had nothing to compare it to. Most farmers would never have seen a perfectly symmetrical blade in their lives, so their asymmetrical one was their norm - and they couldn't have afforded to have a perfect blade made, even if they wanted it. But those imperfect blades were made, and sold, meaning they were good enough to get the job done.
Honestly, there are a lot of cheap blades that are mass-produced even today, and they're mostly useless as 'real' tools/weapons. Their 'function' is as decoration, not livelihood or defense. So cut the craftsmen of the past some slack - they were getting it done to put food on the table, and pay their taxes, same as us... :)
A good point in that is the blades and armor that were described as remarkable or exquisite. Even those were generally imperfect, such as the king's armor Todd mentioned. So if something that was obviously flawed can still be considered exquisite, then the context must be that everything else is usually far inferior to it.
"No true craftsman is going to make something below the best of their ability."
As someone who makes a living drawing, I can confidently say that's an incredibly dumb take. *Everybody* gets to a point where they say "yep, that's good enough. Any further effort isn't worth the payoff". Not every work is going to be a masterpiece, and that's how it should be. Otherwise you'd just starve to death.
Yeah, as the philosopher Rossmann once said, "perfect is the enemy of good"
I paint as a hobby, and generally give the paintings to friends and family as gifts- I agree completely, even from a hobbyist standpoint.
Even after I tell myself it's finished and give it to someone, I still see things that I don't like. It took about 6 or 7 paintings before I realized that nobody else noticed without me specifically pointing things out, and learned to call the piece done before spending too much time on it just to satisfy my own brain.
Also, I couldn't imagine how much I'd hate every piece I made if it was something that I made a living from- though I'd say doing something as a hobby vs doing it as a profession means a completely different view on the piece entirely?
I have that problem of always trying to make something the best... and that's why I make far fewer things than I would like, and I don't get the practice I need to improve, and I'm regularly disappointed by the results... perfectionism is a curse not a superpower. I even saw a research where random students where assigned to focus on quality or on quantity and the end results was better work form the people focused on quantity because of the practice they had...
That's true in a lot of places. There are tree experts who know how to remove branches to get the best look out of the tree and there are people with access to cherry pickers and saws who are just there to cut and it's going to depend most of the time on how much the client is willing to spend.
The basic sheaths here were likely not owned by wealthy people, they were functional items for the working class. It's likely the average person couldn't afford a nice sheath given everything else they had to spend money on.
Well, then you don't have the "ability" to make every work a masterpiece. In most cases, you're still going for a pretty high bar of quality, in accord to what you are ABLE to make in a reasonable amount of time. It's usually not a world-class work of art, but it's also usually not a minimum viable product like the examples in the video. His phrasing is off, but his point checks out.
There's a cabinet maker in my neighborhood who advertises "Old time hand craftsmanship." Of course it's all done on machines, but he doesn't plane the boards completely smooth. When the furniture is stained, all the sawmill marks show up. People love it today, but a high end furniture company 150 years ago couldn't have sold something that looks like this stuff. It's all a matter of knowing your market.
The channel really makes me question what I think I understand about history. Love the science and the discussion.
I suppose a handful decent sheaths today are better than a single perfect sheath tomorrow. Especially in a year's time, when all those sheaths have been used and worn and personalized by the owner.
The other HUGE factor that you didn't mention is survivor bias. The truly garbage items weren't durable, weren't cared for properly, and haven't survived. This is true for so, so many historical things. When we say things like, "They don't make them like they used to," it's because we're looking almost exclusively at the high quality equipment that was cared for and that has survived.
You struck an amazing chord with me. My father in law grew up in rural post revolutionary Russia. He made many household utensils, repaired shoes and bags and generally kept things working. He lived a very modest life. Most of the things he made we still have and use. They were crude but ever so practical . A simple salt box for the table out of a piece of tree felled in his street , leather for a hinge, a piece of cast off ply for the lid. Everything thing he made seemed crude to me as I tried for perfection in my leather or canvas stitching and I now see that he simply had a pragmatic way of working that suited his needs.Thankyou for giving me pause for thought.
This topic has really got me thinking now haha. Could the cruder marks simply be from the owner as a way to quickly identify their dagger so they didn't pick up someone else's and get in a world of trouble? Perhaps in a pub or a meeting or something like that?
I can easily imagine a leather worker making sheaths like this in the evenings and having his children decorate them and learning the craft.
Another thing I find interesting is how they would wear their knifes and daggers because not all sheaths were made with belt loops so many were simply tucked into their belts or stuffed away inside their clothes.
I enjoy videos like this and wish I could make a comfortable living crafting things but oh well ;-)
I agree with you and was going to post a similar comment. I understand a lot of the medieval workers worked from their homes and I am sure children joined in the work.
@@tinmanx2222 I imagine a lot of kids back then probably started learning the "family trade" through play time with their parents or grandparents.
@@widgren87 I think it was some formals smiting guilds would start their apprentices around the age of 10 or so. Old enough to sweep and fill coal, by 12 probably manning pumps and making hob nails, or just minding the tempers while the smith was on other tasks.
I could see other trades starting just as early, the daughters learned to stitch and sew, the boys learned to trim and cut leather for sheathes.
@@littlekong7685 I think you'll find that the boys learned to stitch and sew. That particular sexist division of labour is a modern thing.
Childhood is a modern concept, from an early age they would have had a tiny bit of free time to play. But mostly you followed your mum around helping with the washing, feeding the chooks and preparing meals. Later you'd be following your dad into whatever occupation in 'bring your kid to work day' where he gets his own shovel, bucket and a load of muck to clean up and bring your kid to work day never ends! At some point 20 years later you've followed dad to work and you're still there!
Labour for a long time was cheap, its not now unless you're somewhere particularly backwards but back then you really didn't have a lot of mobility upwards in careers and there was always the possibility of going backwards to the poor house or 'work house' as it was known for debtors and the homeless.
I made quick sheathes for a couple quick knives I made our of cardboard and duct tape, it wasnt the best I could do but it worked for the intended use (to keep it from cutting someone in between the forge and a drawer). I was just learning knife making but as I saw a need I met it with the same level of work, it would make sense for the medieval period to have everything from the barest quality to highest quality leather work based on the job.
I have an M1898 Dutch Naval Cutlass that has a duct tape and waxpaper sheath. 🤣
Very well put. It's one of the joys of studying history in a little bit of depth, you occasionally get that shift in perspective. You see that people's values were different; things that you'd implicitly assumed were universal turn out not to be. Oh, everyone wants, clean, elegant, symmetric design? Nope, medieval people wanted as much decorations crammed into every square inch as possible. Is it really badly made if it fits a different aesthetic and a different set of priorities? As long as it is fit for purpose and matches the taste of its period, I'm not sure it does.
I can't remember who told me, but I was once told "perfection is the enemy of completion". and as somebody who myself struggle with wanting thigs to be as perfect as possible, that's a good thing to have at the back of my mind while working on things. Because if it's something that I need done, then making it to a functioning standard is enough. If it's something I'm doing for fun and not because of a necessity I can put all that extra effort into details.
I think part of it is that sense most stuff is made in factories now the molds and blanks can be perfectly made once and used for thousands of individual items so craftsmen today are competing/comparing to that where as in medieval times most people havnt seen something with that high quality in their entire lives
We live in an age where some thing's are really easy, take polishing we can get a mirror finish in minutes with power tools, try doing that by hand an you can see why polish levels where so low historically.
This series has been really eye opening to me, I hope you continue it even further!
i love the quickly made, serviceable idea. I found as you get better and better, your early work is hard to replicate in certain aspects. it makes that work super special in that aspect.
As I commented on previous video: Good enough is a thing. It serves purpose and gets it done. Like the leaterworker would be earning less by making things slower and with more care, person buying the piece would be paying more for something more fancy that gets the same job done.
I buy a lot of food with discount because it has almost reached the best before date. I also buy big amount of my electronics as customer returns with discounted price. When I buy things, I go with functionality as the first priority because that way what money I have goes longer way.
My phone that I have was a customer return and it has couple of dents in it from the first customer (was in their use for less than two weeks) and I didn't even get the original charger. I haven't managed to get any extra dents on it but I got the phone for 1/4th off.
Brilliant - I couldn't agree more..... Machinery has freed us up to give a damn about things that previously just didn't matter. We're all more or less like the guys fussing over business cards in American Psycho 😂
good reference. makes me wonder about medieval kings trying to order the latest throne from Ikea
@@beepboop204 All the kings horses, and all the kings men....
@@beepboop204 Send a letter that would go few moths to ask for price. Wait few months more to receive the answer. Repeat until it at maximum discount possible.
We accept the short comings in modern mass production largely in the quality of material. IKEA/flatpack furniture is glue and sawdust. It's perfectly functional. There's more Billy bookcases in the world than any other bookcase that's for sure.
We want our mass produced goods to look great, while being cheaper materials. They sacrificed the finishing work and detail for mass produced goods. They still wanted something nice, but sacrificed the finer touches. I think that's the shift. The materials would be the same, the finish work was less. Nowadays, we have stuff that LOOKS great, but is made out of inferior materials.
But if you want a series of shelves to hold all of your Steven King novels, glued sawdust is good enough.
I've been blacksmithing for a living for awhile now. I do alot of piece work. At the beginning I adopted the attitude to find the fastest and most efficient way to make whatever I am working on, so I can keep my wages up as high as possible. I focus on making a good product but quickly as possible. Could I make each piece better, sure I could but then it takes longer and my wages drop. Everything I make is strong and functional just not as pretty as it could be. Unless of course the customer wants pretty then they have to pay extra for my extra work. It just makes sense to me and I'm sure it made sense in medieval times as well.
You say ":Everything I make is strong and functional just not as pretty as it could be. Unless of course the customer wants pretty then they have to pay extra for my extra work. It just makes sense to me". I say "spot on"
This reminds me of the guy who showed that someone who practices a lot could create things pretty quickly . he was hand carving gears to create a working version of the Antikythera mechanism. He did it while being interviewed, every tooth exactly right, because he'd trained to make them
G'day Mate. Chris here. (it's www.youtube.com/@Clickspring I think you are refering to.) - note that the file and other key tools were made using period techniques only. (Also, in case you missed it, bits are sped up :) ) th-cam.com/video/DlN-QFkDkvE/w-d-xo.html
@@rickansell661 looks like the right one. It was just amazing that, after only a few weeks or months of making them, he was doing them like some people knit, not looking, not really paying attention. i used to make muffins at work like that, just scoop and I could tell if the weight was right.
7:55 The image at the bottom is part of the advertisement. It is equivalent to the taglines of our print ads.
You have to remember that the vast majority of the Medieval population were illiterate, so that image would correspond to the print tagline "Come put your Bollock Dagger in our Sheaths."
Everyone would know then that the merchant made and/or sold sheaths or scabbards.
I like the scabbard with the dreadfull lines than without them. And I just think we forget that these were often things that are daily necessities or are now mostly disposable. When I go to lunch in middle of my work day I don't care that cuttlery is stamped metal or one use plastic I just need it clean and fast.
If you are in world where literally everyone have sheath and dagger all day on them no one really care about it. Maybe your friends notice the new one, you mention it a few times and then no one will care for years... Oh you got new work boots or new cheap phone to replace the one you dropped in toilet.... And you are done for next year or two... People use and wear dreadfull cheap stuff every day but it goes unnoticed because it's common.
I really need to come by more often. There is something grounding about a man who works with his hands and can speak so eloquently about it sharing the details about his passion for, interest in, insight into and knowledge of his craft, its context and history. Thank you, sir, from another who worked with his hands. Cheers!
In a way i feel this just makes the distant past feel all more real and not just some story in a book about knights in shining armour. You can just imagine some regular everyday bloke go leave his knife at the leather shop to get a new sheath made, while he goes down to the inn to have a pint with the lads.
You take us back to the times out of mind, when life was lived in a state of mind we can only imagine. Leather work could be compared to artwork in our time. A few years back I went to an exhibition of art students who had recently graduated from art school. Tod, I could not believe the poor quality of drawing that some students had in the work they had submitted. A girl I was with from the same class defended the terrible drawing as something that was fine, because drawing was out of fashion, she said. So maybe, back when the poor work was being done, it was really considered as pretty good stuff, because maybe they had nothing to compare it to. As long as your shoe stayed on your foot, who cares if it looked patched together. Life was all about making it to the next day, and like you said, they had a day filled with things to do to survive that make our day with pint at the pub would look like we were kings to them
I feel like when you live in a tough environment, cost and effectiveness are everything and aesthetics are just for “fun”
also lack of standardized prescription eye wear probably meant loads of people couldnt see details anyway
^ thats a valid and interesting point as well.
Well, for fun and to show hat you can afford.
I'm far from an authority or expert, but I have loved ancient and medieval culture and history since I was young. An interesting thing I've come to understand is that decoration was very important through much all of history pretty much all about the world, even the early to classical age of say 800-1300's Europe. despite modern media trying to convince you, everything wasn't all grey and muddied. Texture work has been historically difficult and naturally imperfect, often times consistency requiring stamps or special tools that were expensive and served singular purpose. One of the most important things through history has been functionality first, though. The best works, I believe, were measured on practicality, at least for most. I can't help but imagine the nobleman with the most lovely decorated scabbard for his knife, which couldn't seal it's oil and rusted it's blade or left the tip exposed to poke him in the thigh, would be laughed out of his circle for having a terrible *tool*. What good is getting a tool or utility item, which most things were, that can't perform it's duty? We have the luxury of the modern days where these things are purely collection or status, but to them it was purpose first. To circle back and to note on a point you said early on - people loved to COLOR things! Bright colors, simple shapes to hold that color, blues and yellows and reds, vibrancy! Bright colors to indicate status, laws on certain colors only being allowed to be worn by certain levels of society, whitewashing buildings, paintings on ceramics, color was everywhere, and I believe far more spread than texture work.
Perhaps their priorities were just different, or tailored by what was available in their time. Maybe those hundreds of years from now will look back on us and wonder "why?" in the same way we do to them, now.
I agreed vivid colour and crammed decoration was often the norm for long periods
Another good point is, that you don't have time to waste on a single piece, when you need to make many of them. For example the bracers. If the leatherworkers would get a letter, saying that the king needs 5 000 bracers for his archers, to be done before the end of the week, they would have to make all of them in that time. So they would just go as fast as they can, not worrying if the decorations are perfectly symmetrical, just make sure they are there.
Or even better, go ask his neighbor Bob, who has looser schedule this time of year, to come help him with the decorations so he can focus on actual making of the sheats.
Today we call that mil-spec. Does it meet the minimum spec, ship it to the government buyer.
Worked a decade in manufacturing, very much quality is defined as consistently meeting customer requirements - not exceeding them.
I believe the rough scabbards you point out are homemade. A present from grandmother or something you make to go with your new coat. The scabbard is as much fashion as it is function and most people could work with leather. I grew up in the woods hunting food for dinner. Working with leather was just something we did.
also lack of standardized prescription eye wear probably meant loads of people couldnt see details anyway
When viewed from today's eyes that might seem reasonable. However, you had access to modern tools of some quality compared to back then when most people couldn't just afford the tools they wanted for this and that. Some could have been, alright, but what are the chances they basically only find such items. Or that they find similarly made scabbards in a substantial part of Europe. Or that the Mary Rose bracers have the same level of quality?
@@Kraakesolv you need a needle and an awl
We 100% need a video on medieval dagger sport fighting!!! What, we have to know more!
"No true craftsman would do anything but their best work." aw, someone doesn't know the difference between craft and art. You do what your paid for. They want your best work, they can pay for that. Most people are just going to want functional. Think about it, is every knife in your kitchen a $2000+ knife? Or is it from a set you got for less than $200 because you just need kitchen knives?
There is (probably) more to that picture of the knife seller...
Knife and sheath were in the (late?) middle ages often used as sexual innuendo. I remember a German/Jiddisch song from a collection of medieval songs I had (in 1980, so no references), where a monk complained about the fact that he had a knife without a sheath, and a jong lady solved the problem for him... Knowing that, the picture of the ladies shopping for knives takes on an other meaning - and the pair on the ground are the logical result...
So where in our 20th century view it might seem there are knives being sold without sheaths, it might be that in the medieval view the sheaths are standing on the left of the picture...
Thanks- a very interesting perspective
I've been a historical re-enactor for neigh on 20 years now. For the last ten or so, I've greived that we can't get our hands on the "real" stuff. I don't want a replica of king Richards' solid gold sigil ring. I want a replica of the shitty, wonky bronze ring found in a quarry, likely owned by a farmer or a serf.
In short; I'm absolutely signing up for the news letter. And if I don't win I'm likely to special order a shitty Mary Rose guard anyway. Love your work Tod
I have a very small business making shields and other wood goods...it is so nice to hear someone making this point with your platform. Thanks!
"That's awl it is!"
Absolutely loved this one. Something I think is hardly thought about when people look back on history; how different their lives / priorities were.
20 minutes of Tod conditioning his customers to expect lower quality standards from his work in the future haha
Actually no. I have worked very hard to set levels of craftsmanship, quality, detail and authenticity for both Tod Cutler and Tods Workshop and believe from a company like mine you will not find better for the price, and I cam immensely proud of that. Standards will not slip and when things go wrong and of course they do, I have an amazing customer services team in Lou, Lisa and Catherine.
What I find fascinating is what is/was going on? I have been pondering this of late simply because they could and often did very good work, but also they could and did work that I cannot fathom how they could. I do wonder if we visit museums, see the glorious stuff as we race around (most people do TBH), go home and extol how wonderful the pieces were and any quality observations seems to get rose tinted and disappear until there is the popular conception that everything was lovely. We whitewash the past and I think it is good to remember we are very much looking at the past through our own eyes, not theirs- we just often forget and this is a reminder
@@tods_workshop I don't think anyone doubts that you put the utmost care and precision into your work. And frankly, I'm actually more interested in an "ugly" knife from you than a "show piece", because you've proven you actually understand what goes into it and what it was made for. There are other "blade smiths", but you are a historian. You're really the only one I've seen address this and I think it's very important. Thank you!
A good modern comparison, I used to work in firearms retail. I often saw people buy a nice handgun, and then get the cheapest piece of crap holster to carry it in. The holster was just an afterthought and they didn't care if it was quality or that it would fall apart (and likely cause serious issues) in a few months.
Even precision needed to be invented, and quite recently too. We just take it all for granted because it's been with us our whole lives...
I love the practical yet philosophical approach Tod takes. He treats medieval people as real people with real motivations. They aren't just something for us, hundreds of years later, to dissect and analyze.
As far as "They just didn't see it" I think that's probably extremely true. Think of the advancements in video game graphics that have come out over the last few decades. A decade or two ago, people were saying graphics were getting extremely realistic. But nowadays, when we compare those games to more modern ones, they appear almost cartoonishly bad. And even today, you can sit down with, for example, Skyrim, and play through it without really noticing that graphics and animations are absolutely atrocious by modern standards. You just have to not think too hard about it, and you won't have any issues.
Sure this leather work is technically rather poorly made. But if you aren't closely scrutinizing it, can you really tell? How many people are going to actually pick up a sheath and closely examine it? Probably only the owner, and probably only once or twice. Most of the time, you'll only be glancing at it out of the corner of your eye as you attach it to a belt, or seeing someone else's from across a room. In that situation, who really cares what it looks like on a close inspection?
17:50
Based on the additional scrawling on the top and right, this one gives me the impression that it was decorated all over at one point, but the pattern wore off from interacting with the bow string.
Today we want them to look at, so aesthetics are supreme. Then they knew their weapons would be getting dinged, scratched, rolled and then mended often, so why care so much for looks?
The *did* care about looks. Their swords and scabbards were full of decoration! It's just that symmetry wasn't a part of aesthetics they cared much about. Density of patterns and "bling" was their style.
I never said they didn’t care for the looks, just they didn’t care so much. I was comparing what people look for now and what they looked for then. Now people mostly want something they can display. Then the most important aspect was that the weapon fulfilled its purpose. They decorated, so of course how it looked did matter but function was preeminent, unlike today. That’s the point I was trying to make.
@@pixelambience1767 I think they cared just as much as us. Possibly more. At least, those who could afford more than the bare minimum. People wanted to show off their wealth and status in what they wore - in civilian life and on the battlefield. Half of the point in turning up to a battle was to show off how brave you were and how you could afford the best kit. You get suits of armour that were guilded and encrusted with jewels used for a single tournament! Toby Capwell has a lecture on youtube about how prevalent conspicuous consumption in wearables was in the medieval world. Again - this level of extravagance was only for those who could afford it, but everyone who could afford more than the bare minimum seemed to want to bling up their gear as much as their purse allowed.
Or, to put it another way, if they didn't care much about looks, why was so much stuff decorated so extensively? The quality of decoration depended on the value, but almost everything had decoration. Putting low quality decoration on stuff is a clear sign that you value aesthetics hugely, just can't afford it to be done well.
@@QuantumHistorian I'm sure they did care about what their weapons looked like, but i cant get on board with the idea that your every day functional items were made with looks as a primary concern, function was more important. The swords of the nobility may be a different matter but even here we see a difference between ceremonial/decorative/functional. Also symmetry in medieval art is incredibly important and was highly sought after in designs.
Another good video. I agree totally with your observations. I made sheath for a working knife based on findings in the York Dig. I tell people that it is the type of sheath a leather worker could make in an hour or so which would mean he has more time to make more sheaths and hence more money. I also tell those I teach leatherwork to that leatherwork is an art and craft. Craft is how to do it and the art is hiding/fixing your mistakes.
thanks
The thing that most people are missing is that what today's craftsmen are doing are collectors items that are expected to be high quality. Back in the day they were everyday use items. Things that today are mass produced in chinese factories. And today such items are also not perfect. Very often designed to be as easy and fast to make as possible, comprimising their properties. Often cheaply decorated as well.
Thanks for the video on sheath construction, and historical examples! On the Let's Ask Seki Sensei channel, Seki sensei says that Japanese sheaths are also somewhat disposable, and even made weakly (better if the sheath falls apart than to get the blade stuck inside it).
This is such an interesting topic to talk about and discuss. I've never really looked at it as craftsmen back then just banging out work to make more money. I thought that there were just different levels of craftsmen and that's it. Another great video Tod, looking forward to more !
Excellent video, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head. One example that springs to mind is from the Staffordshire hoard, where I remember seeing a sword hilt of gold, with great detail in the workmanship and design, that had a knot work motif where the lines just didn’t meet up at the overlaps. How and why they could put so much effort into a piece and yet make it ‘wrong’ is a mystery to me, yet there it is!
Because they just spent three days carving it and they had a choice......
Love this real time example! 👍
Great video Tod and thank you very much for the history class. I was able to tour the HMS Mary Rose and she was a wonderful ship in her time.
Absolutely loved this one - especially the fact that you were making whilst you were talking. More of that! It's also an issue I have thought about a lot, as I tend to be more interested in the lower echelons of medieval society, and clearly much of what they would have had would have been pretty poor quality. Usable, but not pretty. And, of course, most of what is made today is a) based on what has actually survived, which favours both quality and status, and b) made using modern methods, with modern materials, to modern standards. I think it can sometimes be quite hard for re-enactors to get their hands on stuff that reflects 'ordinary' medieval quality - at least, when it comes to metalwork. Clothes, they tend to make themselves and so that can sort itself out, but most people aren't equipped to make a blade. One experiment when I was looking for a pretty bog standard sword for an archer was to buy the cheapest, worst, generally correct sword I could find - which was beautifully finished, but horribly proportioned and balanced - and then distress the crap out of it, including sawing some bits off the quillons. It ended up looking pretty good (by which I mean quite bad) but would certainly still do the job. Which, in essence, was the point you're making. That's all that is needed from it as far as this archer is concerned.
I worked in manufacturing engineering for 53yrs & a lot of time was on bonus schemes,would often work 3,4 or 5 machines @ once to make more money,& the limits on tolerances would often be a bit over or under,but when your producing perhaps 1,000 items the same,not all would be inspected,often 10% were checked by an inspector.
Now if you worked in defence work or aircraft industries,you couldn't get away with it because everything would be 100% inspected.
3:00That welder was an MVP (minimum viable product).
I work in control circuits wiring, and it always is a struggle between innate perfectionism and deadline restrictions. Sometimes good enough has to be good enough.
I'm an engineering student, we have a saying: "as good as it NEEDS to be, and as bad as it CAN be". As tod said himself, any time you spend on making it better than it has to be, you are loosing money
My god sir , I always feel spoiled watching your vids,you answer questions I didn't even know I wanted answered
that was really food for thought, I wonder if the decoration would have been given to the kids to complete while dad got on with the important bits? great show as always, thank you.
We do that today also, just in a different way - you can buy cheap off the shelf Chinese suit and it will be fine for a few months, or you can go to a tailor and get a bespoke suit. Same with appliances, you can buy something super cheap because they put cost cutting measures in design, or you can buy something top shelf.
I am a trained calligrapher and illuminator and studied medieval manuscripts. Apart from the very grand books most medieval books are pretty rough for the same reasons you stated. Also in many books if they made mistakes they just crossed out the word and wrote the correct one in the margin. Holes in vellum stitched up. Cats paws prints. All kinds of things which today my patrons would never accept. Also there were pattern books for scribes and illuminators to copy.
I would also add that most commoners/serfs had to settle for what they could afford, not buying bespoke tools, but as good a quality as could do the job. I also imagine there was a lot of recycling of leather- coats turned into sheaths and strops, etc... Great video!
Tod's Workshop thanks so much for the videos you do. Secondly, I so have to reach out to you and your shop, because as a newly semi-retired public housing worker I so need one of your blades for my new man cave. (:
10:23
I say that decoration brings to mind the term "Ricer"
Weren't sheaths "wear items"? That might explain why there's so many *exceptionally* crude ones: If it's going to wear out in X months, why make it looks nice?
I’d like to expand on the point you made about people not seeing it. I’ve found in my own experience the more you know about the craft and the more you know about how you would make an item the more likely you are to spot a mistake or lack of precision. For example I work in the print industry and most of the time when you have color in an image there are 4 overlays of ink (commonly yellow magenta cyan and black) if all 4 colors are not perfectly lined up you can see a bit of one color peeking out the side of the image. How ever it’s not usually noticeable unless your eyes focus specifically looking for it. There’s also a thing called tone where there will be excess ink that didn’t get totally washed away and it can be hard to see unless you know to look at where the plate gap would be. These things jump out at me like crazy every time I look at a news paper or a pamphlet where they care less about quality and more about quantity. But i also know that my eyes are trained to look for those things but the common person probably wouldn’t notice. Much like a medieval person who’s only ever seen imperfect swords and has never worked as a black smith would not be looking for perfectly crisp lines or that time scratch on the blade.
"it's just a sharp spike. That's awl it is."
I'll show myself out
Brilliant analysis and demonstration. I’m proud to own your blades and bring attention to your channel. Keep it up Tod ✊
|Tod , Thanks for so much this and the sword video . This is something I have been banging on about for years in my own little way . Particularly with regard to wooden stuff . We make and sell around 250 to 300 wooden spoons a year , Something we have always found interesting is that the just a little bit asymmetrical and a free form ones sell first .
* Regarding filling in empty space: we have to remember, these scabbard would be worn basically every day (or at least, multiple times per week probably). So any 'pristine' looking piece of leather scabbard, is quickly going to get scratched, etc. So this patterning, can 'hide' some of the wear 'damage' these pieces automatically pick up just from being worn.
I think a great comparison is a shovel, or your vacuum cleaner or a bucket and mop (I don't mean the cloth, but the stick :p ). People would bring their own cutlery, and yes silverware had a status symbol etc. But how carefully do you examine the quality of a mop you're buying? How much does one know about shovel quality? These are 'usage' items.
* There's also a parallel to the shoe parable: the poor buy 'poor' quality stuff, and thus it needs replacing often, so overall they may well be spending more.
The richer person buys the reinforced 2 mm+ thick piece, and it lasts longer. Especially as he may get involved less often in scrappy situations or working in poor conditions.
* The 'clouds': could be clouds, or a river flowing, or...
* Fleurs de Lis indicating high status: fully agreed. For recognizing sides, shields would all be coloured according to the colour of the owners' lord.
Shields were very much 'disposable' and would be replaced very often. And infantry is hardly high status. And yet, there would be coloured shields with 'high status' heraldry. It could be as simple as the leatherworker having a limited amount of stamps, but always bringing along the 'lord's herardly' stamp. And since we have this stamp right here anyhow, and this stamp is usable...
Plus again, identifying that this bow is associated with this noble family.
* Thin/low quality leather: just look at today: 'ooh, genuine leather'. ... That's the *lowest* grade of leather quality. But people really don't know that. Or all the 'leather' belts that really have a rubber filling inside. And we can know these kind of things very easily.
We truly don't see quality today, despite having access to the internet, education etc.
Could be medieval people saw soft leather and thought 'ooh, soft, higher value'.
Could also be according to availability. Sheeps & pigs should be more common in medieval times: wool, and pigs eat everything.
But you're not going to slaughter a milk-giving cow for the leather if you can help it.
And the thinner skinnier leather was probably far easier to work with: tanning/leatherworking was a nasty, nasty job.
This was very interesting Tod. And I would add that it might not be necessary to go back in time that far to have that mindset about quality, maybe just before the invention of railroads?
I love visiting museums, down here in France, we have beautiful historical stuff, and also, not so beautiful.. crude even. And it makes perfect sense.
Have a nice end of the week!
We got this kind of quality today also. Think of one-dollar shops. Cheap and badly made items sold for not much.
But it sometimes is enough. A worker does not need a beautifully made sheath for his tool. But a functioning one.
Great video 😊
I can imagine it was a case of "if you need it now I have this quick work that'll do the job" and "if you want something nice, half up front, and I'll spend tomorrow making it." So really good quality work existed, but it was probably rare and commanded a premium.
Pretty much the same today still.
Take rings for example. You can get a custommade beautiful piece of art but it will take a few weeks and cost pretty much or you get a mass produced plain one for the price of material and bit of labour right now from the bargin bin
This gives me another point of view on the medieval life. Something I never thought about, but you are correct, perfection were not their aim. It couldn't be.
Love the vid, it's fun to see work being done with a bit of personality in it. I have a bit of personal experience that might add to the conversation. I grew up in a fairly rural part of the Northern Rockies where a lot of people keep horses for both work and recreation. Amateur leatherwork was everywhere. A small degree of competence with leatherworking is almost necessary for the non-wealthy that keep stock, but the rough stuff lasts just as good. I could only imagine that back when leather was more of a common household good and everyone grew up around sewing; well why wouldn't the common man or woman be making the sheath for their knife or this or that with some frequency? Also interestingly, all of the amateur stuff is covered in ornamentation.
That said, even here, everyone likes how convenient the production stuff is as I'm sure they did then too.
As a sculptor, I can agree with everything you said. Specially about not always doing the best work I can do.
I mainly sell small figures at about 10€ to 15€, and I have to keep that in mind when I produce the pieces. If I spend a whole day painting a single figure, it's a disaster because I won't be getting enough money to cover that, so I either make a rough and quick paint (few and flat colors) or a simple spray-painting. That way, it's less work and it means I can keep a low price and thus sell more, but it also means I can produce more in less time.
I can do a better job than that, but it's not going to be worth it. Sure, if someone pays me a lot of money to make an amazing piece, I will make the best work I can because it's worth it, but that's not the common item I sell every day. If I spend a whole day painting a single figure so that it's perfect and I price it at 80€ nobody is going to buy that, even though it may be the right price for the item, or even a low price, if you think about all the work behind it. If you do the best job you can and people don't buy it because it's too expensive, it's not worth it.
Really intersting! I bought a Beagnoth sax replica and it came with a plain leather scabbad but it just doesn't look correct when you look at the workmanship of the blade
This pieces are beautiful. They are doing their function and even have some decoration - it is more than enough for working instruments.
It is always a pleasure watching you work, thanks for sharing! We see a similar thing today between artisanal work vs industrial. If you're making a sword for a noble who's giving you time and budget to make a higher quality weapon, you'll spend extra time to get it right. If a king asks you for 1000 swords urgently because a neighbouring kingdom declared war, you'll ensure the blades are forged and tempered well, but won't care so much on the aesthetics. You'll try to output as many swords as quickly as you can because 1000 soldiers with ugly functional swords are better than 3 soldiers with intricately designed swords. Same happens in Hollywood today, where a movie might require 100s or 1000s of swords, but will only ask for 2-3 of them to be "Hero swords" that will get a close-up shot. I'm sure Gandalf's Glamdring would take as long to make as 50 or 100 orcish rusted chunks of steel roughly shaped like a sword.
I mean, it makes sense even today: you just want a tool that works for the cheapest most effecient price. Who obsesses over the quality of their screwdrivers?
This is true in many industries even today. For instance in software we will sometimes speak of MVPs or "Minimum Viable Products". Meaning it is something that just barely meets the needs of the customer / user and nothing else, no "bells and whistles", no nice graphics or flashy user interfaces, just what the customer needs, wants, or asked for and absolutely nothing more. The philosophy or reasoning for why this is done is a bit different than in manufacturing, but a lot of the same principles can still be applied to avoid wasting time, money, and effort.
Enkoyed the video. It reminds me of my second home (Kenya) you find a lot of similar (not historical) work, crudlely done, quick and with simple tools. On the otehr side you find really quality work if you can afford it. But better having something you need affordable and cheap then saving for a "quality item" you might not enjoy in a short lifespan 🙂 All a matter of perspective!
The dynamics you describe here still can be found today. Pick up a knife, or anything really, made by a craftsman in a back alley shop in Peshawar for example, and you'll find many of the same loose fittings and imprecisions. They're working in suboptimal conditions by modern factory standards, often with ancient tools that have been repaired over and over, or with improvised tools. They're working fast for the same reasons you've explained. Customers are happy to own them because it's the best they can get, and they still cut and poke just fine.
Also the apprentice/master business model was the norm during the medieval period Apprentices would have been doing a lot of the piece work using their masters patterns and tools. Anything repetitive like a bracer or knife sheath would have been perfect work for an apprentice.
Great couple of vids thanks.
I really love when you get into the practical mindset of the old times.
As a craftsman who made holsters and some other leather goods, I completely agree with you. I made several things "below my capability" because they paid me. Simple things that I was nearly embarrassed to say that I crafted yet they were in moderately high demand. They were simple and they were cheap. They also did the job they were expected to do.