How To.. wear the Pugio and Gladius (belts, fasteners)

[Crispvs]

A couple of years ago now I had a concerted look at all of the representational evidence I could find for waistbelts passing over or through baldrics. Although I looked at many images, not a single one showed a belt passing over a baldric. Several in fact showed baldrics being worn by soldiers who were not wearing belts. Accordingly I stopped passing my belt over my baldric. A fortnight later, after several bad experiences during a show, I had another look at the evidence and realised that a number of sculptures (although certainly not all) showed baldrics that were obviously extremely short, and shortened my baldric accordingly. This solved the problems.
Under normal circumstances it hardly moves now and even after running, it rarely moves so far that I cannot easily and effortlessly bring it back into position in order to resheath my sword at the same time as everyone else (not that the Roman army is likely to my mind to have felt that resheathing a sword quickly was nearly as important as being able to draw it quickly). Like Rusty, I could easily find and draw my sword in the dark, but the difference is that I found that it is not necessary to have the baldric strapped down to do this.

In Byron's second photo you can see that Surus has followed my lead to an extent and that the sword pommel does indeed hang where it tends to be shown in the sculptural evidence. You can also see that like me he no longer feels any need to pass his belt over his baldric.

Regarding the suspension of your pugio Rusty, I would respectfully suggest that if your pugio requires the use of all four rings to ensure it stays on your belt, then you either have your frogs too far apart or the straps allow the sheath to move about too much (or both).
A quick survey of the surviving evidence shows that there is absolutely no evidence for the lower suspension rings actually being used (although there is some rather compelling evidence for them *not* being used). The sculptural evidence also consistently shows frogs butting up against and even overlapping the upper suspension rings, with there being no evidential basis for the straps first (to the best of my knowledge) proposed by Morel in 1985 and slavishly followed by re-enactors ever since. The sculptural evidence actually rather strongly suggests that the upper suspension rings of dagger sheaths were tightly tied with thonging to the frogs. Not only is this much more secure (in my experience the pierced ends of the straps most people use tend to detatch themselves from the frogs rather too easily) but it also eliminates much of the movement which allows some daggers to jump or even fall out their sheaths when re-enactors make sudden movements.

Try it and see if it causes less of a hastle during the day. If it works out to be worse, please do tell me.

Crispvs