evidence would show to have been written in the first years of the XVIth century. The author here says, that to be perfect, the material (pasta), of which it is to be made, should consist of two parts of iron to one of steel. This may have been the Spanish practice at that time, but certainly would not give the hardness found in Italian armour. Tomaso Garzoni, whom I have already quoted, has a chapter on the working of iron and steel for the manufacture of arms and armour, but he does not add anything very material to our knowledge. He insists on the necessity of well cleaning and heating the iron to be worked, with patience and skill, with the hammer, file, or wheel. Then there is an account of welding, soldering with copper and tempering with water, the juices of plants or oils, and of the colours to be given to steel on cooling, as silver white, golden yellow, blue, pavonazzo, called violet, and ash gray, also of the various materials employed for the purpose; of silver soldering a blade, of softening or hardening the metal, of polishing, and finally of etching designs on steel and the materials used for this purpose, but it would need more space than I have at my disposal to transcribe it all. I may say here, that where armour had to be made in large quantities for the equipment of armies, hammer mills worked by water were used for the rough forging, and it is known that they were also largely employed for the fabrication of sword blades. Some old hammer mills are still at work in the Apennines in Italy, and I have seen a lump of metal, cut off the end of an old steel railway rail, converted in a remarkably short time into a perfectly formed spade, with a varied thickness in its different parts and its socket for the handle, merely by shifting the white-hot metal about on the anvil under the blows of the mechanical hammer, the weight of the blows being regulated by a pedal under the foot of the workman. Of course several heatings were needed, and the edges were trimmed with shears. I have always been convinced that the ancient breastplates and crowns of helmets were forged from a lump, not from a plate, and, had the Italian workman I speak of been brought up to making cuirasses and helmets instead of spades, I feel sure he would have forged them with equal skill and expedition.
I will now pass in review the various localities in which we know that armour and arms were made. In the Xth or XIth century swords of steel of singular excellence and sometimes admirably decorated with incrustations of silver and gold were produced in the north of Europe, Scandinavia, or Germany. The late Mr. A. L. Lorange, keeper of the Bergen Museum, considered that the blades at least, of those found in Scandinavia, were imported from some part of Germany. The names of the makers of some of these weapons appear on them, as VLFBERHT, REX, INGELRD, ROMARIC, RANVIC, ECKEHARDVS, which perhaps suggest a German origin.[1] In the second half of the XIIth
- ↑ The names of two Xth-century swordsmiths, Elfnoth and Wulfric, are found in the will of Prince Æthelstan.
