BRITISH BASKET-HILTED SWORDS

This is a fully illustrated, descriptive catalogue with typology of a British sword type with a five hundred-year history. The phrase "basket-type hilt" refers to a large group of hilts which provide a degree of protection to the hand and wrist. Basket-hilted swords have featured prominently among British military edged weapons over the past five centuries, from the Wars of the Roses in the mid-15th Century to the period immediately after the Boer War of the early 20th Century. In setting out to give a full account of the hilt type, and the many variants within it, the first necessity has been to provide an appropriate terminology to employ in cataloguing and describing individual examples. The book falls into several sections, dealing successively with general aspects of various hilt types and discussion of typological methodology, the three major groups of basket-hilted swords, the diverse group of incomplete basket hilts, "mortuary" hilts and hilts closely related to "mortuary" hilts.