Fox

Agreed Hawkyns, Bailiff blades are also top of the heap, though a bit on the heavy side. Alas Bailiff appear to be heading towards closure if they haven't closed already. I gave away my last Bailiff blade (WHY OH WHY?!), so if you see one for sale snap it up! My Armour Class falchion has had 6 years of very heavy use and is still completely burr free despite the fact that I have NEVER taken a file to the blade - I'll run the edge down the bit of skin between my thumb and forefinger it's so smooth. How many other swords can you say that about? Badger, do Last Legend have a website?

Think I'll stick to me Armour Class weapons

18? I missed that! The thin bits of me armour are 18! Great for armour, pants for swords, surely that's a mistake?

Cire! Sorry me darling, how could I omit you? I didn't forget I'd met you, I just forgot you post here. Now, how can I make it up to you?

nice lookin' weapons but a bit...um pointed for my liking and er...1917?

If "London Bridge" is anything more than a nonsense rhyme (ie. not inspired by real events at all) then it possibly originated after the 1014 battle of London between Olav's vikings and Ethelred the Unready's Anglo-Saxons - that being the last time London Bridge fell down. Equally likely is that the song dates from the Elizabethan period when the bridge was in such bad repair that major works were necessary. I'm pretty sure that the rhyme is older than 1823 when the bridge required such repairs that an entirely new one was built. Never in the history of London Bridge has it collapsed because of a naked chick, sorry. You might be thinking of the phrase "peeping Tom". Legend has it that Lady Godiva objected to her husband's treatment of the poor, and he agreed to treat them better if she rode through Coventry naked. As a mark of gratitude the people of Coventry all shut themselves indoors while she did it, except for a man named Tom who peeped, and was struck blind.

"Brazil Beds" certainly begin to appear on English documents in the late 16th century, but by the mid 17th century they seem to be fairly standard on English warships. I would presume from that that by the late 17th century most English and colonial sailors would have slept in hammocks - particularly in the Caribbean where they originated. "Cots" also appear in documents relating to the possessions of seamen, but usually in the context of officers or senior seamen. These may have been proper beds or swinging cots, like a solid hammock, or both. Similarly we quite often come across references to "beds" in sailors' wills and suchlike, which probably indicate stuffed mattresses, perhaps meaning that hammocks were less popular than we suppose. From the 17th century we begin to come across hammock in dockyard stores, suggesting that they were issued to the ships for the seamen to sleep in. Mattresses on the other hand appear to be more personal items, perhaps for those who didn't like hammocks, or perhaps to line their hammocks. Prior to the widespread use of hammocks examination of surviving shipwrecks like the Mary Rose and the Wasa show little sign of cots or beds except in some of the officers' cabins leading one to suppose that men slept wherever they could find room on the decks, perhaps made more comfortable by mattresses, but probably often not.

Fine clobber Jack, here's one of me favourites from aboard HMS Victory

Cordingly is generally pretty good, certainly he's well respected, and he does have a pretty good list of primary sources (the ONLY criterion for being classed as a good historian in my book). In fact, it's quite gratifying and smug-making to have found such a clear hole in his research. The bird mask was quite common wear for doctors and surgeons in time of plague, there are quite a number of pictures of English doctors from the 1660s wearing them. I ought to point out (*reaches for responsible hat*) that the fact that various plagues happened doesn't mean that the nursery rhyme is anything to do with them, certainly the existence of the plague in Frnace probably has very little bearing on an English rhyme. On the other hand the association between the plague and the rhyme goes back a long way and certainly pre-dates the modern fad for making everything fit nicely.

So often we read on bulletin boards and news-groups "I read on this website that... so it must be true", drives me insane! The trouble is that so many websites simply plagiarise from others - mistakes and all. Books are a little better because in theory you need more integrity to get properly published, whereas anyone is free to web-publish. In practical terms though there is also a lot of tripe perpetuated and regurgitated from one book to the next (see my opinions on pirate flags for example).

The tie breaker is that the site I was thinking of was Snopes who admit that the whole thing was an exercise in creative writing and proving that no source is infallible. See this page of their website.

I believe the first time the Blackbeard/Sing-a-song-of-sixpence tale appeared on the net the site which produced it had a page 2 which read something like "Don't believe a word of this, we made it up to prove how easy it is to fool people..." Gimme time and I'll remember the original site, but it ain't true.

Cheers Cut-throat, I'm working on the definitive collection of authenticated pirate and privateer flags - I'm up to about 120 now from the 17th-19th centuries. If there's any more you want to know about let me know and I'll see what I can find. There is one that's bugging me actually - Anyone ever come across any reference to Hornigold's flag?

Cap'n Badger, I retook it after you left... MY skiff again now! You've also met Tall Paul, he came over and had a chat with us a IFOS. He don't post often but I have seen him here.

I'm afraid that the attribution of that flag to Blackbeard is almost certainly a piece of 20th century fabrication - along with the popular flags of Rackham, Avery, Bonnet, Condent and Moody. Although illustrations of their flags and "Blackbeard's" fill countless pages and websites there is no evidence for them earlier than the very late 19th century at earliest. A couple of them - Condent's and Moody's - seem to have actually existed, but there is no evidence to connect them with those pirates (Moody's supposed flag was actually a Barbary Corsair flag for example). Others - Avery's, Bonnet's, Rackham's, and Blackbeard's (with the horns) - are modern inventions. Blackbeard's supposed flag (without the horns) was flown by a handful of pirates including Charles Harris, Ned Low and Francis Spriggs. Until yesterday I also believed it to have been flown by John Quelch, but now I'm not so sure. It is quite a different sort of a flag and Low, Harris and Spriggs all sailed together so it seems a little bit odd for Quelch to have also flown it. That's why I'm so keen to track down the origin of the description. According to contemporary sources Blackbeard is known to have flown a flag bearing a "death's head" (probably just a skull, but maybe with crossed bones too), and at least one contemporary illustration shows him flying a black flag with a skull superimposed over bones and an English white pennant. This same flag was also probably flown by Stede Bonnet, an associate of Blackbeard's. His flag is also described as a "death's head" and shown in a contemporary illustration thus. Nowhere in any period source have I yet found written or pictoral evidence of Bonnet's supposed flag with a heart and dagger which so often appears in modern publications. Best get your skinning knife out, but save it for the guy who perpetuated the vexillological myths rather than your flag merchant who was duped along with the rest of us.

What ho chaps, On various websites and books John Quelch's flag is described from a seemingly contemporary quote as "ornamented by and anatomy with an hourglass in one hand, and a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it in the other" Cordingly, in Under the Black Flag says that this quote originated at Quelch's trial "in 1702". BUT a: Quelch hadn't even turned pirate in 1702 and b: I've recently acquired a copy of the trial report and it makes no mention of such a flag. The earliest reference I have found for this quote comes from The Book of Buried Treasure by Richard Paine (1911). Paine doesn't offer a source for his quote, but elsewhere he refers to "old manuscripts" and "old records". SO, does anyone know what the actual origin of the quote about Quelch's flag was? Did it in fact come from his trial but can only be found in the full original notes and not the published version? Is there another "old document" which contains those words, and if so what is it? Or did Paine either make it up or mistake Quelch for some later pirate like Harris or Low? Anyone?

LOL! No disrespect intended, but considered the massive Gibraltar force and the really huge Jolly Roger, they shoulda called us at least via radio and asked us if everything was shipshape! Well since there's no law about flying Jolly Rogers at sea there's really no reason why they should have been bothered. You clearly weren't pirates (what real pirate would fly a jolly roger past Gib?) so they probably had better things to do.

At least 4 it would seem - perhaps I was borrowing someone else's...

The butterfly shaped piece of leather on the front of riding boots (called, I believe, the "butterfly") is to prevent the boot being worn away by the stirrup. The butterfly takes all the wear and is a lot cheaper to replace than the whole boot. With regards to portraits and illustrations - we have portraits of people in all sorts of dress, from elegant court wear to hunting outfits. On the other hand many of the illustrations in question are not people posing for a picture, they are people in their working gear, the clothes they really wore. On the one hand, no I wouldn't pose for a photo in my work clothes, but on the other hand if I wanted illustrate a mechanic I would do him in his overalls, not his Sunday best. It all depends on the type of picture in question. Pirates Own Book: As I said before, it was illustrated 100 years after the events it describes and the pictures certainly shouldn't be taken as evidence of anything.

I'd figured that much! I just don't know offhand exactly what the letters are noting. With regards to dressing up to go ashore, yes fine. Except for riding in, how many of the gentry preferred boots over shoes in day-to-day fashion?

No idea I'm afraid Cut-throat

Judging by the gear the other people are wearing I'd say it's very late 18th century at the earliest. The style of the drawing suggests to me that it's more likely 19th century but I would be glad to be proven wrong. OK, lets apply a little common sense here. You're a whalerman (or a fisherman), you've got a good pair of long boots which you wear for protectionwhen slicing up whales, but they're not very practical for general sailing in. What do you do? Personally I'd take 'em off and replace them with more practical shoes for general day to day wear, wouldn't you? Next, you join a pirate crew and don't have to cut up whales any more. What do you wear? Yes, whalermen and fishermen wore long boots for practical protective purposes. Yes, if we dig deep enough I'm sure we can find plenty of examples of whalermen and fishermen turing pirate. BUT, it doesn't really follow that they would all have worn their stinking boots when they no longer had to. Some might have done certainly, but why would they? I'm not, and never have been trying to prove that nobody ever wore boots at sea, but we've really got to accept that they would have been impractical and the evidence does show them to have been rare and exceptional. Too unlikely to be worth contemplating. If we only have a tiny number of pictures then it would be unwise to draw too many conclusions, but we don't, we have a large number. On my website alone there are depicted at least 99 seamen from the GAoP, and that is only half the pictures in my collection. For only 2 people to be wearing boots (and both of them French officers - possibly the same French officer) out of that number is pretty conclusive in my book

It's true that we can only guess at exactly what pirates wore, the trick is to examine the evidence and make educated guesses. Take those pictures for example: The first one comes from the notoriously unreliable "Pirates Own Book" by Charles Ellms - published in the 1830s it has no reliability whatsoever in terms of the GAoP seafarers it claims to represent. In that picture alone we have what looks like a pair of late 16th/early 17th century boots worn with breeches of the same period and a doublet which seems to stem from someone's imagination opposite an early 19th century naval uniform. The middle picture is interesting but again looks like a mid-19th century (or later) illustration, and so is of little significance regarding the GAoP - even if its reliability were not in question. Out of interest, what is the origin of that picture? The final picture again looks 19th century, but is different in that I'm pretty sure those are fishermen (judging by their garments) rather than deep-sea sailors. Fishermen we know wore boots, but they were principally to protect their clothes from the stink of fish being gutted. I think it's really stretching it to use pictures of fishermen as evidence of the clothing of seamen since the two trades were considered quite seperate at the time. Just to prove I'm not a drum-banger, here is a genuine picture of a GAoP period seaman in boots. It is a French seaman and dates from around 1700 - FWIW this is the only pictoral source I have showing seamen in long boots out of the hundreds in my collection

Your wish is my command... Captain Sir Sidney Smith accepts a lift from a middie The Cutty Sark gig crew (foreground) and us The gang on Victory Nelson on the Victory The Bonaventure girls have demanded their own bumboat for next year

Well, just about every picture I can think of showing common seamen from say 1500-1800 (OK, actually every picture that I can think of) shows seamen either in shoes or very occasionally (maybe 1-2% at a guess) with bare feet. I've never seen a single picture that I can recall, nor seen any documentary evidence, in favour of common seamen wearing long boots from the Tudor period to Nelson's time. I suspect that the issue is about 20% practicality (boots restrict movement, fill with water, flap about etc) and about 80% cost. Think about the difference in the amount of materials and work between a pair of shoes and a pair of thigh-length boots... OK, as pirates you might say "I didn't buy these boots, I stole them" but then you really must ask yourself how many pairs of long boots would have been available to steal on the high seas at any given time in the period? Also, we have to bear in mind the simple idea that long boots just weren't that fashionable during the GAoP. If you look at high class portraits most of them (not all by any means, but most) are wearing shoes. This idea of "I'll wear long boots to make myself look flash" is a very modern one, it is not necessarily an 18th century attitude. Plus, sailors had their own fashions, distinct from what was fashionable ashore, and shoes seem to have been almost exclusively the vogue for seamen rather than boots. None of this is to say that no pirate ever wore boots instead of shoes, but he would have been in a decided minority if he did, and I can't think of one good reason why he should have done.