LONDON SWORD MAKERS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3813, 25 September 1936, Page 9

LONDON SWORD MAKERS

Mr W. H. Fenton, the dealer in and collector of old armour and weapons, who died last Mach, lived in Hounslow, so that it was natural that he should concern himself particularly with the sword makers of that | district, says the “Manchester Guard- ' ian.” In his collection, which was sold at Sotheby’s in July, there are ten or more mortuary swords, “hangers,” short swords, and town | swords of the seventeenth century, with inscriptions of “Me fecit Hounsloe,” or, in one case, “Hounsloe 1636 ion n Kinndt,” which indicate the flourishing state of the Hounslow sword makers of that time. Yet even then, much less before, London was thought no rival to Spain, Italy and South Germany for sword making—as is shown perhaps by the defiant

1 claim of a London sword maker of the time that he made blades “as good as any in the Christian world.” But the Greenwich armourers were well known before that—there is a fine sixteenth-century helmet made by Jacobe of the Greenwich school, in the collection—and afterwards in the eighteenth century, if one may judge from the collection, the Charing Cross district became a large sword-making centre. There is a rapier inscribed “Edwardus Younger, Strand,” a court rapier bears a locket marked “Bock, Cockspur-street Charing Cross,” and there are others from the Strand and from Newportstreet. ‘ The hilts of these eighteenthcentury swords, are delicately and finely wrought, and one can see the deterioration in the art of hilt decoration that set in soon after the eighteenth century by comparing these specimens with a heavily ornate sword cutler with an ivory hilt—presented to Mr R. Young, commander of the Entreprenante at Trafalgar—which was part of a collection of Nelson relics sold at Sotheby’s last June.