Or used alone in your left hand

That's in fact the name by which I learned about them. It was much later that I came across Main Gauche or left hand dagger

now I want one so I could call it a left-land dagger while holding it in my right, 'cuz I'm a bastard lefty that way

You're right, partying dagger is definitely the better term.

@@MM-gk1tm I think parrying dagger is a better term especially if you are left handed

Can confirm flo ftw

...and not for fools-wielding.

Learn FMA dual wielding is taught out the gate

But what if your dagger is hot?

@@umartdagnir even better

This is an important point. It's worth noting that bucklers stuck around for the entire 16th century & beyond, even though become less commonly worn & paired with swords than daggers. Miguel Pérez de Mendoza y Quijada wrote about fencing with & wearing the buckler in 1675. It's debatable whether the buckler or the dagger is the better companion to the sword, but the dagger definitely wins in terms of versatility & generally in terms of convenience.

The dagger is also substantially more *lethal* than the buckler is. If someone is able to get past your sword and close to grappling distance, the bucker isn't the best tool to attack them. The dagger, on the other hand, was MADE for fighting at grappling distances. This gives your opponent a good reason to keep his distance and fight at maximum range.

This is true, but it's also worth noting that media wasn't quite as widespread back in the day, and certainly no films to draw a direct parallel. Stories back then were usually more like poetry or plays and rarely were weaponry specified or setting the standard there. Tournaments were the closest thing they had to action films. Trends would thus be based on a mixture of local preferences and conditions. As Matt put it, maybe the dagger is "worse" with a sword than a buckler, but when these side weapons are alone the dagger is far superior. Thus if you find the conditions dictate you need a back up weapon in different situations, you'd always prefer the dagger to the buckler. In addition to that yeah it looks pretty cool. But that would probably be set up by seeing a fellow fighter use it in an interesting and effective way. Though it might not be the most efficient choice, it would be a standard set by a trusted superior or a live fight, not a performance where the details can be smudged. In that instance the worst case scenario is if you have a mentor who pretends to know what they're talking about but does not actually. Instead of Dirty Harry, you were looking out for the "bullshido master".

Funny thing is that the Chinese essentially have a buckler which essentially is about as lethal as a dagger. Skall did a video about it. Must have a pain to carry cus as far as a I know, it didn’t catch of anywhere else

@@PJDAltamirus0425 I wouldn't say the gou-rang is as lethal as dagger, though it's certainly more dangerous than a simple round buckler. European bucklers did sometimes have spikes, but that also makes them harder to wear conveniently, like the gou-rang. In theory, a buckler with a retractable blade like that one famous lantern shield would be a way around the convenience problem. I'm not aware of any historical buckers that had such retractable blades, but that lantern shield shows it was possible with 16th-century technology. Holding a buckler & dagger together, as Hans Talhoffer showed, would be another option, though this presumably requires a few seconds or so of prep time.

Pretty sure walking around the inner city with a buckler then was the same as walking around the inner city with a baseball bat these days. My guess is the treaty of Lyon in 1601 meant lots of unemployed Piemontese soldiers loitering around northern Italy.

Amazing reference ! Any idea on why the comeback at night specifically?

@@cwmyr this is only speculation, but with bad vision in low light conditions parrying a thrust is quite hard so the buckler covering a larger area just by holding it in front of the body is safer than the dagger, which requires "active" parrying.

@@Lohgoss Also consider that if carrying a buckler brought unwanted attention, it would just be easier to get away with at night.

@@Lohgoss What's amazing is that the italians invented the lantern buckler exactly at that time, so guards had a double use item!

@Honeybadger_525, Marozzo has a section on cloak and dagger.

Yes he does! Marozzo was specifically who I was thinking of. I don't know of any other fencing manuals from that period that specifically discuss cloak and dagger. I do know that some later knife fighting traditions sometimes employ cloaks, coats or ponchos in the off hand.

@@Honeybadger_525 Fabris is 50 years later than Marozzo, but his treatise brings up a point which may explain why dagger and cloak wasn't as popular in that period as it could be. In it, he says the biggest advantage of the cloak was that it could be used in jurisdictions where the dagger was banned. To me, this implies that Dagger and cloak's unpopularity was due to circumstance. If you were using a cloak, it was because the dagger was banned, and if the dagger's not banned, you'd prefer to use sword and dagger. Now, that was an assumption on my part and could be off base; Fabris tried to keep his book from having too many different subjects in favour of going deep into rapier specifically, so it could just be that cloak and dagger was excluded for brevity's sake like sword and buckler were. It could be Cloak and Dagger were popular and treatises on them just don't surface as frequently; It wasn't until the 2010's we discovered Giganti book 2 was real, after all.

Try it, dagger and cape is insanely chaotic and fun!

@@laufert7100 I read that long ago Roman legionaries used large, strong daggers to parry blows if they did not have a shield with them. But for me, with no experience in fencing, fighting with two objects at the same time in two hands seems to be an abstraction that probably requires superhuman coordination. But well, I used to think the same way about turning the steering wheel of a car and changing gears manually at the same time.

Another point towards that analogy is the few cases where big hand cannons are actually preferable. Picturing the old west, or even modern ranchers, sometimes a large and powerful pistol is the choice. But why? Because a rifle might be a bit much to be carrying around, but a compact and light pistol doesn't have enough power to get the job done.

Yeah, and what people are referring to with the printing press on a societal level. A Renaissance man probably owned and carried more stuff than a medieval man. More trade, even from exotic places the old world and the new world to Europe, printing presses starting to makes the first kinda relatively afforadly books, more money based economy and civilians are less tolerance of encumbrance than soldiers, soldiers have put with bulky and heavy throughout history. The place where that isn’t the case , where people walk around heavily armed, like the Scottish highlands and I think India with the sikhs have been noted by outsiders as strange and lawless.

Not only that, it takes more effort to move the sword around the buckler, the more complex the hilt. Probably part of why later buckler sources advices the buckler to be held out from the body, separate from the sword?

As a fellow lefty, I have to ask: Where do you find asymmetrical weapons suited for left handers?

Excuse the pedantry but it’s ‘droite’, not ‘droit’ as ‘main’ is feminine.

@@drzander3378 Thank you! My French is very very rudimentary. As many Parisians who have assisted me in the past know very well.

@@mlo9005 A number of antique saber guards (especially for gymnasium swords) are symmetrical. I find cheap broken ones, and remount the guards. Rapiers, I’ve had students build several guards for me, and cup hilts are typically symmetrical. Court swords are generally not difficult. Turn the blade over.

I made that joke too when I learned rapier and dagger! 😊 Main droits unite!

Forgive me, my le Francais isn't as strong as it should be for an English speaker; does "rebated" mean "blunted" in my ugly, mutt tongue?

Üdvözletem! Csak ki akartam fejezni az örömömet hogy vannak más magyarok is akik Matt videóit figyelik. Legyen a napja kellemes és örömteli! :)

Stealth pun

In the early 17th century, Joseph Swetnam recommended wearing a two-foot dagger & a rapier that was at least four feet. Some Renaissance wore absurdly large & inconvenient sidearms.

@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 something that is 2 foot sounds more like a short sword. then a dagger. It would be fun to see someone trying to walk indoors with a 4 foot rapier and a 2 foot dagger.

That's a generic term, which misses the intended use of the weapon. I like the "parrying dagger".

He can do that all day.

He liked it more couse it stole vitality with every strike and gave it to him, a vampiric dagger. So he could easily exhaust the opponent with even tiny lacerations. At least thats what i member x)

@@vedymin1 Yeah, but I was trying to steer clear of the magical aspects and focus on the purely martial ones.