Aseax (Old English pronunciation:[ˈsæɑks]; alsosax,sæx,sex;invariant inplural,Latinizedsachsum) is a smallsword,fighting knife ordagger typical of theGermanic peoples of theMigration Period and theEarly Middle Ages, especially theSaxons. The name comes from anOld English word for "knife".[1]
Inheraldry, theseax is acharge consisting of a curved sword with a notched blade, appearing, for example, in the coats of arms ofEssex and the formerMiddlesex.[2]
Old Englishseax andOld Frisiansax are identical withOld Saxon andOld High Germansahs, all from aCommon Germanic*sahsą from a root*sah, *sag- "to cut" (also insaw, from aPIE root*sek-).Scramaseax orscramsax (lit. 'wounding-knife') is sometimes used for disambiguation, even though it is not attested in Old English, but taken from an occurrence ofscramasaxi inGregory of Tours'History of theFranks.[3]
The name of the roofer's tool, thezax, is a development from this word.[4]
Amongst the shape and construction of seaxes, there is a great deal of variation. The most frequent characteristics are:
In the continentalGermanic area, the following types are defined for seaxes between roughly 450 and 800 AD, in chronological order:[5]
The general trend, as one moves from the short to the broad seax, is that the blade becomes heavier, longer, broader, and thicker. Long seaxes, which arrived at the end of the seventh century, were the longest of the seaxes. These were narrower and lighter than their predecessors. Initially, these weapons were found in combination withdouble-edged swords and were probably intended as a sidearm. From the seventh century onwards, seaxes became the main edged weapon (next to afrancisca), sometimes in combination with small side-knives.[5]
The rest of Europe (except for parts ofScandinavia) followed a similar development, although some types may not be prevalent depending on location. In England, long seaxes appear later than on the continent, and finds of long seaxes (as opposed to knives) remain very rare in comparison to finds of swords throughout the period.[6][7]
Another typical form of the seax is the so-called broken-back style seax. These seaxes have asharp angled transition between the back section of the blade and the point, the latter generally forming 1/3 to 3/5 of the blade length, exactly like a large version of a modernclip-point blade. These seaxes exist both in long seax variety (edge and back parallel) and in smaller blades of various lengths (blade expanding first, then narrowing towards the tip after the kink). They occurred mostly in the United Kingdom and Ireland, with some examples in Germany around the eighth to eleventh centuries. Some examples have pattern-welded blades, while others have inlays ofsilver,copper,brass, etc.
