There is a small, very slightly curved, somewhat corroded messer in the Kelvingrove museum in Glasgow that is relevant to this thread. There are some photos of it in this thread :http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t...w=previous (note: not the sabered arming sword also discussed in that thread). I think the blade was only around 70 cm long (I have better but still approximate dimensions for it written down somewhere - taken through glass with a tape measure, so the error of parallax is included free of charge). When I saw it about 5 years ago, it struck me how similar it was to those depicted in Talhoffer's manuscript, as shown earlier in the thread. It definitely had a nagel, and clearly had once had grip-scales rivetted onto the tang, though they are long gone now. The interesting thing about the blade was that instead of a clipped point it had something like a spear-point (i.e an almost symmetrical point sharpened on both sides), and even in the unsharpened portion of the back between the hilt and the false edge had bevels, so the blade had a sort of assymetric or mutilated diamond shape over its entire length.

People didn't use messer to clear woods because they had other tools much better suited to the purpose. Bill-hooks and axes, to name two. I am fairly confident in stating that messer were almost always intended as weapons and generally used for that purpose, although they could have occasional non-combat uses; slaughtering animals, perhaps.

Thanks for the information, very interesting!

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the English Wakefield-type hangers. They are “messer-like” but sport a tip better suited to thrusting and a sword-like grip construction.