Size/Weight of early medieval forging hammers?

[Simon Thibault]

Anyone have information about early medieval or earlier blacksmith or forge hammers? how large were the faces, how heavy? single-handed hammers, not striker hammers.

 

 Happy Spring/summer!

[Alan Longmire]

There were several small-ish hammers in the Mastermyr find, like 500g or so, with square faces about 25mm wide.  Click on any photo in the link below for bigger pics.

 

https://vikingar.historiska.se/objects.php?showcase=2f10fceb-a523-4cdc-b832-2a927b1312c1&e=&l=en

 

The hammer depicted on the door of the Norwegian stave church whose name escapes me is the same shape, but if it is to scale with the figures would be around 2Kg.  Otherwise I don't know of many surviving examples. 

 

 

There's a couple of late Roman hammers in the British Museum, but they're carpenters' hammers for the most part.   Here's a late Roman forging hammer, anvil, and tongs in the British Museum:

 

 

This is part of a hoard buried at Waltham Abbey in Essex between ca. 50 - 100 AD.  Note the hammer is forward-weighted!  The weight is not listed on the caption, but it's probably around 800g or so.  

 

 

 

 

[billyO]

I would imagine that in general, because iron and steel were valuable and rare resources that they were generally on the smaller side, but they would also have been made to fit the task. 

I also doubt that the 20th century western european male machismo that has modern smiths brag about how heavy their general forging hammer is hadn't entered the blacksmith consciousness yet.

 

[Alan Longmire]

4 hours ago, billyO said:

I also doubt that the 20th century western european male machismo that has modern smiths brag about how heavy their general forging hammer is hadn't entered the blacksmith consciousness yet.

 

Very true!

 

Modern smiths tend to forget that for the first 1500years of ironworking smiths made large objects by welding up smaller bits of iron and steel rather than start with a big bar and work it down to usable size.  You don't need a big hammer to weld small things.  

 

If you look at hammers in western art from Roman frescos to Renaissance painting, you'll see that sure, they had big sledge hammers for certain tasks, but single-handed hammers tend to be in the 500 - 1000g range for most tasks.  File-makers hammers and cutlers hammers are heavier, but only because you don't use them the same way as you use a forging hammer.  Used properly, they don't cause strain. 

 

They did use big hammers where iron was made, yes.  Merchant bar iron, however, was short bars.  Early iron age trade bars from northern Europe are about 40cm long x 20mm square with a loop welded on the end to show it was good.  By the 1400s merchant bar was pretty much the same, except without the welded loops.  Around that same time, the steel industry took off in Sweden.  They shipped high carbon steel coupons in barrels all over the north of Europe.  These steel coupons have been recovered from several shipwrecks, and are usually in the form of small rectangular bars about 50mm x 100mm x 4mm on average.  You don't need, nor can you effectively use, a huge hammer on that.

 

A final thought on preindustrial versus modern western hammer size and smiths:  Back in the day they worked carefully with tools that fit their bodies, because that's how the world worked.  There was no such thing as taking six weeks of PT if you gave yourself tendonitis from using too heavy a hammer.  Nowadays that machismo thing is everywhere, and it's a badge of honor to use a bigger hammer.  PT is everywhere, and you can even have corrective surgery if you really screw yourself up.  

[Brian Dougherty]

1 hour ago, Alan Longmire said:

 

Back in the day they worked carefully with tools that fit their bodies, because that's how the world worked

 

I suspect they figured out rather quickly that a hammer with half the mass, swung twice as fast still has twice and much kinetic energy as one twice as heavy swung half as fast.  Even if they didn't know the math, I'd guess the saw the productivity gain.

[John Page]

Fascinating! Alan, do you happen to have any handy sources where I can see pictures of the surviving merchant bars? I haven't read up on those before but it's quite interesting! Those early methods of quality 'proof' of wares are filled with ingenious solutions to those various questions. Sort of like the touchstones to divine precious metal alloys. Anyway thanks for putting this on my radar!

[Alan Longmire]

Here's one in the Museum of London collections, but the loop/socket has rusted off:

 

https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/v/object-4569/currency-bar/

 

And here's a short PDF about the various standard types with line drawings:

 

https://historicalmetallurgy.org/media/vsyj1s02/hmsdatasheet08.pdf

 

and here's some from the British Museum:

 

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613016329

 

If you look at the PDF, these sword-looking ones are typically British Celtic, there were other types on the continent.

 

I need to find the article about the steel coupons traded by the Hanseatic League, hopefully I still have it...

[John Page]

Very cool thanks! I was imagining something a little different but that makes more sense!

[Simon Thibault]

Whoa! i never expected that currency bars would be like that. That's pretty much like forging blades from modern flat stock?

 

 And thank you for the info about the hammers, makes sense. I really like the roman forward weighted example. I started out with my small stump anvil and relatively thin bar stock with heavy hammers... didn't move metal well but did knock my poor little anvil around!

[Alan Longmire]

14 hours ago, Simon Thibault said:

That's pretty much like forging blades from modern flat stock?

 

Kind of, the flat British ones, anyway.