The bloody big sword made for mangling one’s enemies
I HAVE held a claymore. Or certainly something like it. It was handed to me as one of his heirlooms by a lovely old lord who wielded it deftly in his baronial hall. But I made a right pants of it as usual, and struggled to control the thing, like a chimp with a hosepipe, nearly beheading myself in the process.
The claymore: it’s the right big, two-handed sword associated in the popular mind with muckle beardie Highlanders using it to cut swathes through wicked redcoats and other Lowland agents of Satan. I have overegged the pudding here, as usual, but historically speaking, the dessert may still be deemed edible.
As usual with Scottish history, there’s much debunking, and much debunking to be debunked too. And don’t get me started on the etymology. What’s that you say? Please get started on the etymology? It’s always good for a laugh?
Oh God, all right. Actually, the problem isn’t so much with the etymology, which in itself is pretty straightforward, as with the application of the word. Claymore is from the Gaelic claidheamh mòr, “great or big sword”.
Unfortunately, it was also applied to later, basket-hilted or jessie swords, which usage the Oxford English Dictionary has judged to be “inexact, but very common”, and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica said was “wrongly” applied. One authoritative commenter elsewhere said it had “usurped the venerable name of the ancient Scottish weapon”.
Sharp thrift from purists
ACTUALLY, I don’t know why I even mentioned it, because we were all just thinking of the two-handed one, except to say there was an attempt to call the baskethilted sword the “claybeg”, from claidheamh beag, or “small sword”, which all sounds in order until purists point out that, in Armstrong’s Gaelic Dictionary of 1825, claidheamh beag is defined as a “Bilbo”.
A Bilbo. Yes, it says here that’s a type of 16th-century small rapier once popular in yonder America. But that can’t be right as Bilbo is a Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings. Such a lot of nonsense. I told you I wish I hadn’t started this. What about the myths and associated debunkery? Oh lordy. Right, the main point at issue is that the claymore was supposedly only in use from the 15th to 17th centuries, so it couldn’t have been used by William Wallace, as depicted on statues and in Braveheart. However, the sword housed in a glass case at the National Wallace Monument in Stirling doesn’t look a kick in the fundament off a claymore, and its blade has sometimes been identified as 13th century.
You say: “Exactly what are you talking about?” That is a good point, impertinently made. I should provide some descriptive detail for the record. The average claymore was 55 inches long (blade 42 in plus grip of 13). In 1772, Thomas Pennant described one encountered on his visit to Raasay, Skye, as “an unwieldy weapon, two inches broad, doubly edged; the length of the blade three feet seven inches; of the handle, fourteen inches … the weight six pounds and a half”.
Cut to back
SO, a big beastie, right enough, fit for a fine, strapping fellow stravaiging purposefully across the heather with a bullock on his back. In fact, clansmen would often use a shoulder sheath to carry their claymores on their backs.
As you would expect, the sword has a cross hilt of forward-sloping quillons with quatrefoil terminations. There is also some stuff here about “spatulate swellings” and “lobed pommels”, but I don’t think we need indulge in that sort of talk in a family newspaper.
In battle, the claymore sacrificed speed for power and reach and, being two-handed, didn’t leave any paws free for a shield or a cigar. But what sort of coward used a shield? And you could always have a smoke after you’d smote. Assuming you were still fighting in 1925 or whenever.
Actually, the aftermath of a good smiting makes grim reading. One of the last recorded instances of the claymore’s use was at the Battle of Kill-A-Krankie, if I have the spelling right, in 1689. Interestingly – work with me on this – it also showed the occasional efficacy of a Highland charge, even against a more disciplined force of redcoats armed with guns.
After Viscount Dundee’s rebel forces had smote, his second-in-command, Cameron of Lochiel, recorded in his memoirs: “The enemy lay in heaps,
The claymore sacrificed speed for power and reach and, being twohanded, didn’t leave any paws free for a shield or a cigar. But what sort of coward used a shield?
almost in the order they were posted, but so disfigured with wounds, and so hashed and mangled that even the victors could not look on the amazing proofs of their own agility and strength without surprise and horror.” Ouchy.
Gunning for swords
EVENTUALLY, though, the claymore was deposed by the cowardly musket. Put “the claymore” in a Google search today, and you get a page of hotels and guest houses. In addition, I have been passed a note by my researchers saying CLAYMORE, all caps, is a “Japanese dark fantasy manga series”. I have no idea what that means.
As regards historical artefacts, you can see a sword that looks something like a claymore, but wielded with one hand, on the Great Seal of John Balliol, King of
Scots, the poltroon known as “toom tabard”. And he was cutting about, so to say, in the 13th century.
And there’s a real cracker on the effigy on a mid-16th-century tomb at Finlaggan, ancient seat on Islay of the Lords of the Isles.
If you are so minded, and want to frighten the neighbours, or some ned wielding a Samurai sword out on a Saturday night, you can buy replica claymores online, usually for several hundred quid, but sometimes cheaper.
In reality, the best place for such a thing would be up on your wall, where you could pass it off as a family heirloom (remove the “made in China” label first). Before bunging it thither, though, you might like to have a wee go at wielding it.
But take it easy at first. Don’t go poking yourself in the eye and smashing a valuable antique vase like I did.