I enjoyed researching the weapons used by the reivers, for The Trail of Blood. These included pikes, halberds, swords, axes, spears, bows and arrows. But the humble dagger arguably plays the greatest role in the plot (I won’t say more, for fear of spoiling).
In the course of this research, I was delighted to find out that the reivers favoured a blade known as the “bollock dagger”. Not because that’s where the bandits rammed their blades (although we shouldn’t put it past them), but because they typically had a couple of oval guards at the base of the handle.
These bollock daggers lived on in Scotland, long after the reivers. Only for the prudish Victorians to ruin it all by rechristening them as “kidney daggers.” To which the only reply is surely “bollocks.”
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