Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Matthew Amt]

I have heard that Classical writers such as Tacitus were schooled to not use a word repeatedly, so they'd use other words. I remember looking up the original Latin for a certain passage to see what word was actually used for the translation of "javelin", and it was actually "tela", meaning just "weapons"! So they may not have swapped hasta and lancea, but they certainly got more vague at times.

But even if words were strictly used in the Classical era, we're talking about the 5th to 6th centuries, here, and I KNOW that Latin was getting sloppy at that point! Plus the growing number of people for whom Latin was a second language. And even if they were still pretty consistent with what they called things, *we* don't know what they may have called something like this, simply due to the lack of nicely labelled artwork, or labelled artifacts. So trying to decide what this particular weapon was called is pure speculation.

But a picture would be nice!

Matthew