A backsword is a type of European sword characterized by having a straight single-edged blade and a hilt with a single-handed grip. It is so called because the triangular cross section gives a flat back edge opposite the cutting edge. Later examples often have a "false edge" on the back near the tip, which was in many cases sharpened to make an actual edge and facilitate thrusting attacks. From around the early 14th century the backsword became the first type of European sword to be fitted with a knuckle guard.
Being easier and cheaper to make than double-edged swords, backswords became the favored sidearm of common infantry, including irregulars such as the Highland Scots, which in Scottish Gaelic were called the claidheamh cuil (back sword), after one of several terms for the distinct types of weapons they used. Backswords were often the secondary weapons of European cavalrymen beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
- Classifications of swords
- Basket-hilted swords
- Dwelly's Illustrated Gaelic to English Dictionary. Glasgow: Gairm Publications, 1988, p. 202
- Culloden: the swords and the sorrows. Glasgow: The National Trust for Scotland, 1996
- Włodzimierz Kwaśniewicz, Leksykon broni białej i miotającej, Warsaw: Varsavia, 2003.
- Pierre Goubert & Maarten Ultee, The Course of French History, London: Routledge, 1991.
- Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984 ISBN 0-631-13142-6
- R. G. Allanson-Winn & C. Phillipps-Wolley, Broad-sword and Single-stick: with chapters on quarter-staff, bayonet, cudgel, shillalah, walking-stick, umbrella, and other weapons of self-defence (All-England Series.) London: George Bell, 1890.