# Swords/axes *The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 23 Oct 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Peter Stephenson *23 Oct 1998, 07:50* > "Mark Millman" wrote: > In England (and in the Germanic countries generally, > to a lesser extent) the axe was favored; on the Con- > tinent (and especially in the Romance countries) the > sword was preferred. Just a PS: the long-standing tradition in England was that common people were beheaded by the axe, nobles had the right to the sword. Thus many of the more famous executions (such as Charles I) were by the sword. Traitors from William Wallace on, as is even more well-known, were hung, drawn and quartered. None of this seems to be relevant to Urth, were you can have any weapon as long as it's the sword the executioner happens to be carrying --- except maybe it implies the sword is more pleasant. Yeah, right. I think the executioner in question made more difference: an inexpert one took several blows to get the head off. ``` Peter Stephenson Tel: +39 050 844536 WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarotti 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy ``` --- ### Mark Millman *23 Oct 1998, 19:17 · follows Peter Stephenson* > On 23 October 1998 at 7:50 am GMT, > Peter Stephenson wrote: > "Mark Millman" wrote: >> In England (and in the Germanic countries generally, >> to a lesser extent) the axe was favored; on the Con- >> tinent (and especially in the Romance countries) the >> sword was preferred. > Just a PS: the long-standing tradition in England was > that common people were beheaded by the axe, > nobles had the right to the sword. Thus many of the > more famous executions (such as Charles I) were by > the sword. Traitors from William Wallace on, as is > even more well-known, were hung, drawn and quartered. > > None of this seems to be relevant to Urth, were you can > have any weapon as long as it's the sword the execu- > tioner happens to be carrying --- except maybe it implies > the sword is more pleasant. Yeah, right. I think the exe- > cutioner in question made more difference: an inexpert > one took several blows to get the head off. > > -- > Peter Stephenson > Tel: +39 050 844536 > WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ > Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarotti 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy Right you are, Peter. The sword, of course, is the more noble instrument, thus aristocrats and gentry "get" (oh, lucky folk) to have it used on them. Part of the reason that the sword was preferred on the Continent, I think, is that commoners typically didn't have the right to be beheaded--they could, at best (and think of what those phrases imply), be hanged. That was cer- tainly the case in France, and I believe it holds true for the rest of continental Europe. As Peter says, England didn't pre-emptively prohibit commoners from being beheaded. Lucky sods. Mark Millman ---