HEMA Sabres

Why the sabre is the hardest family to shop for

Ask ten fencers what a sabre is and you will get ten answers, all of them correct. The word covers a curved cavalry blade, a straight backsword in a basket, a light gymnasium blade used indoors, an Italian duelling sabre and a Polish szabla, and it stretches far enough to take in the hanger and the dussack as well. No other type in the art carries that much ground.

The common thread is a single edge, a guard that wraps the hand, and a body of technique built around the cut rather than the thrust. Sabre is fought at a fast tempo with the sword hand forward and exposed, which is why the hilt matters more here than on almost anything else. A sabre without a proper guard is a sabre you will not want to fence with twice.

The five pieces in this group cover the ground a club actually uses. A hanger with a simple cross and a D knuckle bow, a three bar hilt, a stirrup hilt, and two dussacks, one cut from steel and one from a single slab of leather.

The military patterns, and what each one means

Most modern sabre study runs through the British military patterns, because the drill manuals survive, they are written in English, and they are specific about what the sword is meant to do.

The 1796

The 1796 light cavalry sabre is the broad, heavily curved, wide at the tip blade that everyone pictures when they hear cavalry sabre. It is a cutting sword and very little else. The guard is a stirrup, a single bar running from the quillon block to the pommel cap, which gives knuckle protection and almost nothing else.

The 1821

The 1821 patterns move towards a straighter, narrower blade with a pipe backed or fullered section and a three bar guard. The thinking had shifted. A cavalry sword that could also thrust was considered more useful than one that could only cut, and the three bar hilt gave far better hand cover than the bare stirrup did.

The 1845

The 1845 infantry officer pattern brings in the folding or fixed half basket, a Gothic shaped guard pierced with a royal cypher, and a straighter blade again. It is a sword carried on foot rather than from the saddle, and the guard reflects that, because a man on foot has his hand in reach for longer.

The gymnasium sabre

The gymnasium or practice sabre is the ancestor of modern sport fencing sabre. Lighter, blunt, often with a wide flat blade and a full or half basket, built to be used indoors against another person at speed rather than against a target. If you are training the military patterns from the drill manuals, a gymnasium form is the safe way to do it. The sabres on this page sit in that tradition: real steel, real hilts, blunted edges and blunted or rolled tips.

Radaelli, the szabla and the continental schools

Giuseppe Radaelli taught at the Milan military fencing school in the second half of the nineteenth century and his method is the backbone of the Italian sabre tradition. The Radaelli cut is driven from the elbow rather than the wrist, which produces a heavier, more committed blow. Italian sabres of this period are light, curved only slightly and guarded with a full bow.

The Polish szabla is a separate line entirely. It is a curved single edged sword with a closed or open hilt, sometimes with a thumb ring, and the Polish tradition around it is old, deep and in the middle of a serious modern revival. A szabla handles differently from a British pattern sabre because the grip and the curve throw the point in a different arc.

Hungarian and German academic sabre, the duelling sabre of the fencing salle and the various national gymnasium forms all sit in the same broad family. What they share is that the sword is an extension of one arm, worked fast, with the hand always the closest target.

Hilt forms, and what to buy

The stirrup hilt

The simplest useful sabre guard. One bar sweeps from the quillon block around the knuckles and joins the backstrap or the pommel cap, and there is usually a single short quillon on the opposite side. It is light, it is fast, and it leaves the back and the sides of the hand open. Good for drill, good for solo work, and it asks for a proper glove in sparring.

The three bar hilt

The knuckle bow plus two branching side bars, a form taken straight from the 1821 patterns. Three bars is the point at which sabre hand protection starts to be genuinely sufficient. It adds a little mass out at the hand, which most people find improves the balance rather than harming it, and it is the guard most clubs recommend for a first steel sabre.

The hanger and the cross with a D bow

The hanger is the short, broad, curved sidearm carried by infantry, sailors and huntsmen for centuries before the cavalry patterns were standardised. Its hilt is often a simple cross with a D shaped knuckle bow carried back to the cap, which is exactly the arrangement on the hanger in this group. It is the plainest of the sabre hilts and the closest in feel to a messer or a dussack.

The dussack, from the Czech tesak to Joachim Meyer

The dussack is where sellers get the history wrong most often, so this is worth setting out properly.

It begins as the tesak, a Czech single edged sidearm. It entered German usage during the Hussite Wars in the early fifteenth century, and by the late sixteenth century the dussack was an established military sidearm across the German lands and the Habsburg monarchy. That Czech origin is not a marketing flourish. It is simply true, and it happens to sit neatly alongside the fact that every blade on this page is made by hand in the Czech Republic.

The fighting form is short and broad. A single edged blade of roughly 25 to 38 inches, thick in section, with a straight or slightly curved spine. The distinctive feature is the grip. On the practice dussack there is no separate handle at all: a hole is cut clean through the wide end of the blade and the hand passes through it. No pommel, no upper guard, no cross. The thickness of the material around that hole is the only hand cover you get.

Meyer and the 1570 treatise

Joachim Meyer's fencing book of 1570 is the single most important source for the dussack, and it is one of the reasons the type is alive again. Meyer treats it as a teaching tool as much as a fighting tool. The dussack section of his book is where a student learns the cuts, the guards and the tempo of single sword play before moving to anything longer, and modern clubs use it in exactly that way. If you fence longsword, the dussack will teach your hand things the longsword will not.

Wood, leather, synthetic and steel

The historical practice dussack was wooden. Modern clubs use four materials and they are not interchangeable.

Wooden dussacks are cheap, period correct and unforgiving, because wood does not flex and a hard blow lands hard. Leather dussacks are cut from thick vegetable tanned hide, they bend under a blow and come back, and they are the safest thing you can put in a beginner's hand. Synthetic dussacks in moulded nylon sit between the two and survive outdoor training better than either. Steel dussacks are the serious end. They handle like the real object, they teach the bind properly, and they demand a mask, gloves and a partner who knows what they are doing.

Both ends of that range are in this group. The leather dussack is a single slab of vegetable tanned leather with the hand hole cut clean through, a raised rolled rim around it, two lines of stitching along the rim and no steel anywhere in the piece. The steel dussack is 51CrV4 spring steel with a nagel peened straight through the blade and finished flush on both faces, no cross of any kind, wooden scales on three steel rivets, and a rounded blunt tip with no point at all.

The tip rule on sabre

The Berlin HEMA Cup gear requirements are the clearest published statement of the standard most European events work to. Permitted tip shapes are spatulated or rolled with a minimum diameter of 1.5 cm, and rounded tips are explicitly not allowed on rapier and sabre.

That line catches buyers out, because a smoothly rounded blade end looks harmless. The problem is that it concentrates force on a small area and it can find a gap in a mask that a broad flared button cannot. Two of the sabres here carry a rolled and flared tip about 15 mm across. The hanger is rounded off and blunted rather than flared, and the product page says so plainly, because it is a drill and club sparring piece rather than an event entry. The steel dussack has no point whatsoever. Read the tip row against the ruleset of your own event, and never accept a claim of tournament legality from any seller without the name of the ruleset attached. The gear rules guide goes through the rest of the kit.

Steel, hardness and flex

The four steel pieces here use 51CrV4 spring steel hardened to 49 to 52 HRC. That is softer than the 1095 at 54 to 58 HRC used for the sharps and the display swords elsewhere on this site, and the reason is simple. Hard steel does not bend, it breaks. Spring steel at this hardness bends under a hard bind and returns straight.

Flex on the three bar and the stirrup sabres sits in the light tier, on the hanger in the medium tier, and on the steel dussack in the medium range that dussack drill wants. Light flex on a single handed curved blade is not a weakness. A sabre is swung fast with one arm, and a blade that gives a little on contact is easier on the person receiving the cut and easier on your own elbow over a long session. The flex guide explains how the tiers are measured and why makers publish different numbers.

The five pieces on this page compared

Every figure in the table below is taken from the specification panel of a product on this page. Nothing is estimated. Sizes vary piece to piece because each blade is forged and ground by hand, so read a stated length as nominal rather than exact.

Browse related sword categories

• HEMA messers, the longer single edged blades with a nagel
• Smallswords and spadroons, including the straight single edged spadroon
• HEMA rapiers in swept, dish and cup hilts
• HEMA sideswords for cut and thrust play with a complex hilt
• HEMA feders built for longsword sparring and tournament entry
• The full HEMA sword range, all forty nine pieces in one place
• The wider sabre collection, including display and collector pieces
• Engraved and personalised blades, runes, symbols and crests

Guides worth reading first

• The HEMA sabre guide, patterns, hilts and schools
• The dussack guide, from the Czech tesak to Meyer
• What is HEMA, and what a club night actually looks like
• How to choose your first HEMA sword without wasting money
• Synthetic against steel trainers, and when to move up
• HEMA sword flex explained, tier by tier
• HEMA tournament gear rules, tips, edges and masks
• The messer guide, nagel, clipped points and grosses messer