Loading...
Loading...
Four hundred years of edged weapons came out of a handful of valleys and a handful of families. These pages are about those places and those firms — what they made, how they marked it, and what a mark on a blade does and does not prove.
Each page lists the pieces in this archive whose own records name that maker or town. A name in a record is not an attribution, and it is not treated as one here.
Who made these things, where, and what their marks are worth as evidence.
How one valley in the Bergisches Land came to make Europe's blades: the water that drove it, the brotherhoods that split the work between them, the marks that outlived the men, and what the word Solingen is allowed to mean today.
48 pieces in the archive name it
Two Solingen sword houses merged in 1883 to form WKC, but Weyersberg on its own is not WKC — several unrelated Solingen firms carried that surname, and two of them made edged weapons into the 1940s.
14 pieces in the archive name it
How a Massachusetts cutlery shop became the United States government's principal sword contractor, and then cast the bronze doors of the Senate wing of the Capitol.
10 pieces in the archive name it
France built a royal blade manufactory in Alsace to stop buying swords from Solingen, then staffed it with smiths poached from Solingen, who named the place in German.
5 pieces in the archive name it
A russian state arms works in the southern Urals, staffed at the outset by imported German masters, and the etched-and-gilded blade decoration its russian pupils turned into something separate.
4 pieces in the archive name it
A Solingen firm founded in 1865 whose squirrel mark changed six times in thirty-five years — which is what makes its blades datable, and whose largest years were its worst ones.
7 pieces in the archive name it
Mauser built rifles at Oberndorf and marked bayonets there in only one narrow window, which is why most objects sold as "Mauser bayonets" were made by other firms in other towns.
4 pieces in the archive name it
Toledo had no single sword factory until 1761, which is why the city's name on a blade is a claim rather than a provenance.
5 pieces in the archive name it
What an army actually specified when it adopted a model — and how to tell one from the pattern next to it.
Two different German swords carry the number 1889 — the cavalry Kavalleriedegen 89 and the Prussian infantry officer's degen — and the guard is what separates them.
5 pieces in the archive name it
The Seitengewehr 98 is the long quill-back bayonet issued with the Gewehr 98, and most pieces offered under the name M1898 are one of the shorter German patterns that share its rifle and its mount.
4 pieces in the archive name it
A decree of 19 March 1872 gave the Third Republic a family of officers' épées on one hilt; the version for junior officers of all arms and the administrative services is identified by the oak-and-laurel wreath in relief on its shell and by a counter-guard that latches folded and releases on a sprung steel ball.
3 pieces in the archive name it
What this catalogue's own paperwork does and does not establish.
Announced on 4 August 1881 by War Ministry Order No. 222, the M1881 gave the dragoon and the Cossack near-identical blades in two unrelated hilts, and swept the sabre out of the russian cavalry — and almost every question a buyer has about it is a question about the hilt.
4 pieces in the archive name it