#practice swords

Hello Peter, I’ve been following you for like six years or something at this point and though I’m not on tumble much anymore, I still enjoy your content 😊 and today, I was glad I still remember you because I feel like you would be the perfect person to ask about these things I’ve seen in the park today. We were guessing that it’s some kind of like old timey weapons but they seem very impractical and honestly I don’t even have the words to google them. Could you help out a curious mind? 😊 best regards from Germany! Caroline

TL;DR - the answer to the original question ends with the first photo.

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Bestens Grüße aus Irland rechts zurück, und ich bin gerne behilflich sein!

They’re a practice weapon called a dusack (various spellings) for teaching how to use short cutting weapons. They were also used for exhibition combats fought to first blood between rival fencing schools, to show off who was best and attract more pupils. These combats were also about winning money, a bit like the prizefights of English swordsmen like James Figg.

The ones in your photo look like these, made by Purpleheart Armoury.

Dussacke were made of wood, leather or a combination of the two, but few (AFAIK no) historical examples have survived since a broken dussack went the same way as a broken bow, broken spear or axe: into the firewood-box. However there are any number of modern repros to take their place.

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Nobody’s quite sure of the dussack’s origins; it may have started as just a cheaper, safer training version of existing short cutty choppy sidearms - Messer, Bauernwehr, falchion and so on - but it (or at least its training version) may also have begun as an agricultural tool.

One candidate is a flax-scutching knife, used for processing hemp and linen all over Europe. Scutching involves beating away rotted outer stalks to free the eventually-cloth fibres inside and a metal knife was too severe, so scutching knives were made of wood.

Here’s one, with more at this Google Image link. There’s a definite dussack look to them.

Here are illustrations from ”Kunst des Fechtens”, a 1570 fight manual by Joachim Meyer which may (there were others) be what the two people in the park were working from.

And here’s a handsome photograph from a seminar hosted by Cork Blademasters a few years ago.

As I mentioned, the dussack was a safe practice version of a real weapon. Those ranged from simple barenaked bladies (cough) which might or might not have had a leather wrapping to cushion the grip...

...right through to elaborately hilted swords (German Düsagge, Bohemian tesak, Scandinavian tessack, Sinclair sabre, cutlass and so on) like these...

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The swords are made of polypropylene, which seems to be good material from what I've seen, but I'm not sure.

The knife is a rubber knife. Not much more I can say about it.