Quote Originally Posted by Incanur View Post
Read Blades of the British Empire.
I own a copy. My buddy Matt Easton wrote the introduction ;) It's a great book of anecdotes.

Lancers with lances and swords were pretty obsolete by 1898.
They weren't obsolete, read up a bit on the Russian front in WW I. They just has a much more limited (increasingly limited) role.

As far sword quality goes, accounts differs. If properly sharpened, some regulation British swords did good service.
Emphasis on the 'if' and the 'some'. Read up on it a bit further, including in the book you are citing. Quite often the swords were so bad the pommel was preferred for use as a knuckleduster than the actual blade itself.

(snip)One blade from the Mary Rose, while possessing a hard edge, was soft iron with a very thin outer layer of steel that would not survive many sharpenings.
This was an intentional design feature of many swords, see Petter Johnsson...

One Viking-era sword was miserably soft and would not have held a decent edge. See The Sword and the Crucible by Alan Williams for details.
Yes but the plural of anecdote is not statistic, and that doesn't change the reality - swords from the mid 16th century on back to the early Medieval period were usually hand-made by experts, master cutlers and sword smiths. European military swords in the 17th, - 20th century were usually mass produced using very shoddy methods, often not even properly sharpened, and / or kept in metal sheathes which dulled the blades and so forth, and English swords in particular were notoriously bad, worse than continental designs, according to the English themselves.

G