The Oakeshott Typology

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To understate it: I’m a sword guy. Always have been. Thinking as far back as I can, I can’t quite put a finger on where it first started. He-Man, the LEGO Castle set 6080, and The Legend of Zelda being obvious suspects. Suffice it to say I’m into swords and things sword-adjacent. The typical course of a thinking adult sword-admirer is to learn a little more about their historical existence. An inevitable stop in this journey is learning about the Oakeshott Typology of medieval European swords.

a bunch of swords

In 1960, a Brit named Ewart Oakeshott organized the medieval sword into 13 “types”, X through XXII. This is an imprecise science of taxonomy since the specimens aren’t genetic offspring, but are human productions. Any single piece could buck trends or be a completely unique experiment. Despite any flaws and resulting debates, Oakeshott made a system sufficient enough to be the accepted standard today. It describes aspects such as length, grip length, cross section geometry, main function, and date range of usage. What any particular Oakeshott type doesn’t include is pommel or crossguard, as those aren’t physically part of the blade and can be swapped out after production, even though some were more common than others for any particular blade.

You may be asking why he started at X. His typology is an extension of the Jan Peterson viking sword typology in 1919, later simplified by R.E.M. Wheeler. The irony here is that, while Oakeshott described the blade, Peterson/Wheeler described only the crossguard and pommel. There is yet another typology for viking blades which describes the blade itself by Alfred Geibig.

viking sword topology

Sword typology doesn’t stop there. You have several classification methods for the Roman gladius and spatha, different typologies for European Iron Age blades, and the Elmslie Typology for curved swords, the last of which was made less than a decade ago. This isn’t even to include the classification systems for axes, spears, polearms, maces, warhammers, and non-European melee weaponry. This page is worth a scroll if you’re interested enough to glance.

I’ve seen the typology mentioned a bunch of times and really started to learn about it from a YouTube series created by the sword makers known as Sterling Armory. It was interesting to learn about, but the content is pretty dry and easily forgotten. Still, being who I am and want to be, I’d love to be able conjure an image of a particular sword someone someone mentions Oakeshott XVIa. However, as someone who doesn’t make or work with swords on the daily, the word plus some numerals doesn’t exactly evoke anything particular, even though I’ve consumed multiple hours of lecture on the topic.

This brings me to why I’m posting in the first place. My next post will be about the minimal effort plan to learn and retain the system in my head.

11 thoughts on “The Oakeshott Typology”

  1. Are there particular swords in the typology that are more common across video games with a swordplay focus?

  2. Interesting question. I don’t know if I have the stats on which swords are more common in video games, other than ahistoric/fantasy. The bastard sword in Dark Souls is probably a XIIa and the Sunlight Straight Sword probably XVIIIc or XVIIId? But, it’s kind of maddening to try to put the Greatsword of Artorias or the Master Sword from Zelda into any such group. There are games that lean more to the historic, like Mordhau, but those usually include everything and therefore don’t tip the scale. However, if you look at games with generic shielded knights with a one-hander, you’re probably looking at X/Xa (with with fuller) or XV (if with diamond cross section).

  3. That makes sense. I was thinking specifically about Mordhau, too, since there is some attempt to have fidelity with the past, and then maybe, to a secondary degree, the DS games.

  4. So I was gonna come up here and troll but…this is some heavy shit. You all are really really close to just backing up a bit in time and thinking about the Roman Empire. smh.

  5. Yeah, I felt pretty attacked when the whole how often do you think about the Roman Empire thing came about, mostly because I specifically don’t care about it. In my first semester of college, the “early world history” class I took was literally 95% Roman history. We had a single class session on Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I can still hear Dr. Genvert rattle on about fucking baby Romulus and Remus. I got a B on a beautifully-crafted creative writing assignment centered around Han Dynasty-era China adoption culture with the note: “I’m not familiar with this.”

    Fast forward to today, I’m still not particularly interested in Rome, but the stuff I am interested in (see the above post) always harkens back to military and architecture traditions. I have no romantic (hah) attachment to it, but it’s foundational, so here I am.

    1. I figured, I was just joking. I was in England seeing the Roman sites when that whole thing was going through the media, so I was really stuck thinking about it!

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