How heavy is a longsword?

Museums weigh their swords, so there is no need to guess. Eight hand-and-a-half swords dated about 1400 to 1540 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York weigh between 1.39 and 2.61 kg (3 lb 1 oz to 5 lb 12 oz), and six of them fall between 1.39 and 2.04 kg. Most are 118 to 128 cm (46 to 50 in) long overall, with a blade of 94 to 100 cm (37 to 39 in).

Our figure of 1.4 kg sits at the lighter end of that spread, but it matches what curators say. David Edge of the Wallace Collection in London has put an average late-medieval cross-hilt sword at about 3 lb (1.4 kg). A heavier, longer-bladed longsword can reach 2 kg or a little more.

The longsword was used in Europe from roughly 1350 to 1550. It has a straight double-edged blade and a grip long enough for two hands, though it could also be swung with one. That is why it was also called a bastard sword, an English term from the 15th or 16th century, and later a hand-and-a-half sword, a name from the late 19th century.

For a long time, books and films treated medieval swords as crude, clumsy clubs. Anthony Shore, writing for the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts, notes the stories of two-handed swords weighing more than 20 lb (9 kg). Dirk Breiding of the Met lists “swords are heavy and crude weapons” among the most common misconceptions about arms and armor.

Breiding gives two reasons. Very few people have ever held a genuine medieval sword, and almost all survivors were dug up, so their rusted, pitted look suggests a rough tool. In fact, a single-handed sword weighed 2 to 4 lb (0.9 to 1.8 kg) on average, and the weight of the pommel was set to counterbalance the long blade.

Ceremonial swords add to the confusion. Swords made to be carried in processions were bigger and heavier than fighting ones: a two-handed processional sword made in 1573 for the guard of Duke Julius of Brunswick, now in the Met, is 195.5 cm long and weighs 4.65 kg (10 lb 4 oz).

The giant two-handed swords carried by 16th-century German and Swiss foot soldiers were a separate, larger type. Robert Woosnam-Savage of the Royal Armouries in Leeds puts the fighting two-handed sword at 5 to 7 lb (2.3 to 3.2 kg) on average. The Met’s German two-handers from about 1540 to 1560 are heavier, at 4.3 to 5.2 kg (9 lb 9 oz to 11 lb 8 oz), with blades up to 138 cm long.

The biggest two-handers weigh two to three times as much as a typical longsword, but even these rarely went over 10 lb (4.5 kg), according to the Met.