Product Code Database
A scabbard is a sheath for holding a sword, dagger, knife, or similar edged weapons. Rifles and other may also be stored in scabbards by horse riders for transportation. Military cavalry and had scabbards for their saddle ring and for transportation and protection. Scabbards have been made of many materials over the millennia, including leather, wood, and metal such as brass or steel.
Most commonly, sword scabbards were worn suspended from a sword belt or shoulder belt called a baldric.
A number of ancient scabbards have been recovered from weapons sacrifices, a few of which had a lining of fur on the inside.p266 & p282 Lars Jorgensen et al. 2003 The spoils of Victory - The north in the shadow of the Roman Empire Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark) The fur was probably kept oily, keeping the blade free from rust. The fur would also allow a smoother, quicker draw, and protect the blade. In classical antiquity, Greek scabbards often had ornamental metal fittings, characteristic of the Iron Age. The Roman army used scabbards to a great extent with short , carrying their swords quite high up.
Japanese blades typically have their sharp cutting edge protected by a wooden scabbard called a saya.
Some military police forces, naval shore patrols, law enforcement and other groups used leather scabbards as a kind of truncheon.
On the other hand, in Japan, except for some cases of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, water-resistant lacquered wooden scabbards have been used throughout history.
Scabbards were historically, albeit rarely, worn across the back, but only by a handful of Celtic tribes, and only with very short lengths of sword. This is because drawing a long, sharp blade over one's shoulder and past one's head from a scabbard on the back is relatively awkward, especially in a hurry, and the length of the arm sets a hard upper limit on how long a blade can be drawn at all in this way. Sheathing the sword again is even harder since it has to be done effectively blind unless the scabbard is taken off first. Common depictions of long swords being drawn from the back are a modern invention, born from safety and convenience considerations on a film set and typically enabled by creative editing, and have enjoyed such great popularity in fiction and fantasy that they are widely and incorrectly believed to have been common in Middle Ages. Some more well-known examples of this include the back scabbard depicted in the film Braveheart and the back scabbard seen in the video game series The Legend of Zelda. This has facilitated the modern anachronism colloquially known as a shabbard, developed by YouTuber and novel writer Shad Brooks. It uses a flat plate attached to the sheath which more easily guides even large swords into the scabbard. There is some limited data from woodcuts and textual fragments that Mongol light horse archers, Chinese soldiers, Japanese samurai and European knights wore a slung baldric over the shoulder, allowing longer blades such as greatswords/zweihanders and nodachi/ōdachi to be strapped across the back, though these would have to be removed from the back before the sword could be unsheathed.
In The Ancient Celts by Barry Cunliffe, Cunliffe writes, "All these pieces of equipment shields, mentioned in the texts, are reflected in the archaeological record and in the surviving iconography, though it is sometimes possible to detect regional variations" (page 94). Among the Parisii of Yorkshire, for example, the "...sword was sometimes worn across the back and therefore had to be drawn over the shoulder from behind the head."
Modern knife sheaths are frequently made of polymer materials such as Kydex.
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