Hunting Sword with Scabbard, Knife, and Fork

The flat grip is formed by two plaques of ivory, held to the tang of the blade by four domed rivets encrusted with silver rosettes. There is no separate pommel, but the grip expands slightly toward the end, which is rounded and has a semicircular lobe on one side. The lower third of the grip is covered by iron plaques made in one piece with the guard. The knuckle guard of flattened oval section expands to a diamond-shaped lobe in the middle, its end turned outward in a tight curl just before reaching the grip. The rear quillon turns toward the blade and has a semicircular tip to which a tiny button is attached. An oval shell guard, convex toward the hand, is attached to the outside of the quillon block and turns down toward the blade. The blackened iron surfaces are heavily encrusted with sivler, with dots outlining the various elements of the guard and the edges of the tang, and with dense foliate scrolls with leaves, flowers, and berries covering the guard. The decoration also includes hunting related motifs: a reclining stag in the center of the knuckle guard, a crouching dog on the tip of the quillon, and a charging boar on the shell guard. Most of the silver is applied in high relief and has engraved details.

The straight, single-edged blade is hollow-ground at the sides and has a short back edge at its tip. The outer side of the blade is etched with two running deer and a rabbit, framed above and below with double lines which converge toward the point and are closed by a feather-like ornament surmounted by a large bird. The inner side of the blade has large stylized vase-shaped ornaments and includes an oval medallion enclosing the portrait of a bearded man and a rectangular cartouche with the date 1656. There is no cutler's mark. The simple scabbard of black leather is mounted with a bright steel chape. Near the top of the scabbard is a pocket, the front of which holds a shield-shaped suspension hook. The pocket now contains a small knife and fork of steel, their handles of spirally twisted silver engraved with flowers, the flat ends engraved with the letters D.A.G.N. (probably the owner's initials) and the date 1685.

Short curved hunting swords, known in Endland as "hangers" or "woodknives," were a sort of machete of peasant origin, but by the middle of the sixteenth century they had been adopted as practical tools of woodcraft by knights and nobles as part of their specialized hunting equipment. As the German name for these hunting swords––Hirschfänger––suggests, they were intended for the coup de grace of the downed stag, but at least in their studier examples they were also useful as all-purpose tools, such as for cutting a path through the underbrush, curring wood and kindling for the campfire, as well as chopping the joints of a deer's carcass.

The design for such weapons was traditional and changed very little over the centuries. The asymmetrical pommel is found on late fifteenth-century German hunting swords (for example, acc. no. 29.158.704), as is the down-turned shell on the outside of the guard; the knuckle guard, also a common feature on hunting swords, is already found on the so-called "woodknife" of Henry VIII, datable to about 1544, at Windsor Castle.

These swords were usually accompanied by utensils (knife, fork, and bodkin) as a camping set, carried in the pocket of the scabbard. The knife and fork associated with this hanger are not the original set belonging to it.