Factoids - has anyone else noticed these?

[Crispvs]

Ben,

I marched Hadrian's Wall in kit before I started looking closely at how belts and baldrics were depicted in sculpture, so no - I didn't march the wall with my baldric over the belt. However, have worn it like that for seven and a half years now, I doubt that I would find it a problem if I were to walk the wall again in kit.

I think one of the major reasons some people have trouble when wearing them over the belt is that their baldrics are simply too long. The comment above about the sword swinging about between the legs would seem to bear that out. If you look at the contemporary depictions, often the part of the scabbard between the suspension rings is more or less level with the belt, indicating baldrics which are somewhat shorter than those of most re-enactors. If your baldric s long enough that you can pass your belt over it, you can be fairly confident that there is a good chance that it is longer than the one being depicted in the sculpture. If you start with the representational evidence and work outwards from there, as I did, you find that the problems tend to sort themselves out without too much recourse to modern assumptions. After all, if we accept that the Adamklissi metopes, despite their somewhat primitive execution, show a fairly faithful representation of real soldiers, then anyone who insists that baldrics need to belted down has to explain the fact that there are soldiers depicted on the metopes who are wearing baldrics but are not wearing belts. There are, admittedly two sculptures which do show longer baldrics (that of M. Favonius Facilis and one of the figures from the Mainz column bases, although this latter example also lacks a belt, so we return to the same point I made about certain figures on the Adamklissi metopes), but these are not necessarily representative of the majority of examples, which indicate shorter baldrics.

Of course, I would be lying if I said I came to the conclusion about the length of the baldric at the same time as I noticed the lack of baldrics passing under belts. It was only a week or two later, when I decided to try wearing my sword 'unbelted' for the first time. It did swing about terribly and if I had been most people I would have simply concluded that it did need to be belted down after all. However, I decided instead to assume that I might have got it wrong rather than assuming that the ancients did not know what they were depicting. I didn't initially see what I was doing wrong but realised that if the sword was that unstable I could not have been wearing it in exactly the way the originals were worn - it was simply too inconvenient. So I went back and looked at the sculptures again and that is when I noticed two things. Firstly, most stelae seemed to show the sword pommel quite high up the body, near the armpit, which would necessitate a shorter baldric, and secondly, I noticed the detail I mentioned above of the position of the locket plates vis a vis the belts. Accordingly, I shortened my baldric so that I came close to achieving a result which matched the sculptural evidence as I could now see it, and immediately found that the problems I had initially encountered with the unbelted baldric had mostly disappeared. It does not shift around much, and when is does move around the body a bit (normally when running), it is the work of a moment to simply pull it back into place. Most of the time I hardly even notice myself doing it. As for interfering with the legs, it simply does not hang low enough to have the freedom to get between the legs, although I have certainly seen this happen to people whose baldrics were far too long, despite being belted down.

So, I can't claim to be doing it in exactly the way the Romans did it (assuming they all did it the same way, which is another debate in itself), but I can say with confidence that I am doing it in a way which is far more in line with the evidence than the way many other people do it is. I hope that is helpful as an answer to your query.

Crispvs