In a small English blade (5 inches) of the same character there are no rivet-holes at the base.
A blade from the Thames[929] of an ordinary rapier shape is shown on the scale of one-fourth in Fig. 311. It is provided with two rivets, and there are notches at the side of the base as if to allow of two others being passed through the hilt to steady the blade.
A blade of the same form (10 inches), but with only two rivet-holes at the base, was found at the foot of “the Castle Tump,” Newchurch,[930] Radnorshire.
Rapier-shaped blades from 8½ inches to 12½ inches long, found at Auchtermuchty, Fife; at Fairholm, Dumfriesshire; and near Ardoch, Perthshire, are preserved in the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh.
Fig. 312 represents a small blade of this character dredged up from the Kennet and Avon Canal, between Theale and Thatcham, Berks, and given me by Mr. W. Whitaker, F.G.S. The two little notches at the side of the base are peculiar.
A number of blades of this character, but without these small notches, have been found in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Mr. Fisher, of Ely, has four, varying in length from 8 inches to 9 inches, about 2 inches wide at the base and 1 inch in the middle of the blade. They all have two rivet-holes, in some of which are rivets ⅝ inch long.
Two blades found at South Kyme,[931] Lincolnshire, seem to have been of this character. Another (13½ inches) was found at Corbridge,[932] Northumberland, in company with a leaf-shaped spear-head. One from Burwell Fen, in my own collection, has three rivet-holes, in which are still two of the rivets, of which one is formed from a nearly square piece of metal. A long blade of this kind (16½ inches), but with the blade tapering more gradually from a rounded base, was dredged from the Thames[933] near Vauxhall. Other rapier-shaped blades (18⅝ inches and 14-3/10 inches) have been found in the Thames near Kingston.[934]
The base of these blades appears sometimes to be disproportionately broad with regard to the blades themselves. An example from Coveney, near Downham Hithe, Cambridgeshire, is in the collection of Mr. Fisher, of Ely, and is shown in Fig. 313. This widening was no doubt intended to aid in steadying the blade in its hilt.
I have a dagger of the same form (8 inches), but with a more tapering blade, found in Waterbeach Fen, Cambridge. Another (11½ inches), from Harlech, Merionethshire, is even narrower in the blade than the Coveney example, but it has lost its edges by corrosion.
Some blades, from 12½ inches to 15½ inches long, and rapier-like in character, from Maentwrog in the same county, are engraved in the Archæologia,[935] and are now in the British Museum. The rivet arrangements vary. A spear-head, with loops attached to the blade, was found with them. One of them has notches at the sides of the base, as in Fig. 311.