(Spain), in the land of the Franks, the swords of which place are celebrated." In Froissart alone there must be about twenty references to these famous weapons. "Short swords of Bordeaux, stiff and taper," were used in the famous Combat des Trente (1351). At the battle of Poitiers the Lord of Bercler "seized his sword, which was of Bordeaux, good, light and very stiff." In another place a lance (glaive) is described as having a Bordeaux blade, "broad and more sharp and cutting than any raisor." In a course run between Jean Boucmel and Nicholas Clifford, they used lances well made of Bordeaux steel, and the Englishman's lance head, slipping off his adversary's breastplate, pierced his camail, which was of good mail, and entering his neck, cut the jugular vein, killing him. In a joust at Badajos, the Bordeaux lances "pierced the steel piece (pièce d'acier), the plates (les plates), and all the armour right to the flesh." At the jousts at Vannes in 1381 the combatants were armed at all points, with visor bascinets, glaives of good Bordeaux steel, and swords of Bordeaux. For a feat of arms in 1386 swords were provided, "which said swords were forged at Bordeaux, the edges of which were so sharp and hard that nothing could excell them." Again, in a fight with the Flemings, the long lances with sharp and cutting Bordeaux blades impaled the Flemings, notwithstanding their coats of mail. In 1370 Eustache Deschamps[1] speaks of "De males dagues de Bordeaux," and, about 1364, Cuvelier, a trouvère who wrote a metrical chronicle of Bertrand du Guesclin,[2] says, "Un escuier y vint, qui le conte lanca, d'un espoit de Bordiaux, qui moult chier li cousta." In 1378 the Infante Don Luis of Navarre pays six florins for a Bordeaux sword, a large price for those times;[3] and in 1398 Sir Thomas Ughtred bequeaths by will one short and one long Bordeaux sword.[4] The only name of a Bordeaux bladesmith of those days preserved to us is one Guilhem de Sauveterre faure d'espadas, working in 1382,[5] and, after the beginning of the XVth century, all references to these much-prized and formidable weapons cease. The last we are acquainted with date from 1401, when a Bordeaux sword was supplied to the King for 108 sols parisis, and seven big Bordeaux swords in the armoury of Charles VI in the Louvre were cleaned, polished, and put in good order,[6] and 1409, when a Bordeaux sword was cleaned by Mathys the "furbisher" to the Duke of Burgundy at Brussels.[7] My regretted friend, the late M. Giraud, himself a native of Savoy, basing his argument on a passage in Michel Montaigne's account of his travels in Italy in 1580-81, attempted to show that the famous Bordeaux swords and lances were made at Bordeau, near the lake of Bourget in Savoy. That passage says: "After Chambéry is the Mont du Chat . . . at the foot
- ↑ Ed. Crapelet, p. 133.
- ↑ Ed. E. Charrière, Paris, 1839.
- ↑ Archivo de la Camara de Comptos de Navarra.
- ↑ York Wills, p. 243.
- ↑ J. B. Giraud, Les Epées de Bordeaux, Lyon, 1895.
- ↑ Comptes de l'écurie du Roy (V. Gay, p. 647).
- ↑ E. van Vinkeroy, Catalogue des armes et armures du Musée royal, Bruxelles, 1885.
