Infantry Hanger

Origins

A hanger was a short sword, usually with a single-edged and slightly curved blade, worn hanging from a belt. In the seventeenth century it was a common sidearm for hunters, sailors and foot soldiers. As the flintlock musket and the bayonet became the infantryman's real weapons, the sword shrank into a secondary arm, but European armies kept it as part of a soldier's proper dress. In the British army of the early and middle eighteenth century, privates, corporals, sergeants and drummers of the foot were all expected to carry a sword of some kind.

Muskets came from the Board of Ordnance, but swords were bought by each regiment's colonel from private suppliers. There was therefore no single official design. The names used by collectors today, the Pattern 1742 and Pattern 1751 hangers, are modern labels. The first comes from the illustrated clothing book of 1742, which shows a soldier of each regiment, and the second from the paintings of grenadiers made by David Morier in about 1751. Surviving swords differ in detail from regiment to regiment.

Design & Construction

The typical hanger had a blade about 63 to 71 centimeters long, slightly curved, sharpened on one edge and often with a narrow fuller near the back. Many blades are thought to have been imported from Germany and fitted with hilts in England.

The hilt was cast in brass. The simpler form, the so-called 1742 type, had a single knuckle bow, a guard shaped rather like a heart and a rounded pommel, with a grip cast in brass with spiral grooves. The 1751 type is similar but often has an extra bar or bars on the outside of the hand. Some regiments gave their grenadiers a hanger with a fuller half-basket guard. Highland regiments were different again and carried basket-hilted broadswords.

The scabbard was black leather with brass fittings. It sat in a frog on the waist belt on the left hip, usually sharing a double frog with the scabbard of the Socket Bayonet.

Combat Use

In battle the hanger was hardly used. The British infantryman fought with the Brown Bess Musket and its bayonet, and a man with a fixed bayonet had more reach than one with a short sword. At the Battle of Culloden in 1746 the government infantry who met the Highland charge did so with volleys and bayonets, whatever swords hung at their sides. In camp the hanger was more useful as a tool for cutting brushwood and tent poles than as a weapon.

Service in North America showed how little the sword was valued. Before his march on Fort Duquesne in 1755, General Edward Braddock ordered his regulars to leave their hangers in store, along with their shoulder and waist belts, to lighten their load in the woods. The redcoats who were beaten at the Battle of the Monongahela therefore fought with musket and bayonet alone. The regulars who defended the fort at the Siege of Fort William Henry in 1757 belonged to an army in which the hanger was still regulation issue, but how many men actually wore it on campaign in America is uncertain. Many regiments seem to have laid their swords aside in the field, and some replaced them with hatchets.

Legacy

The army finally accepted what the soldiers already knew. The royal clothing warrant of 1768 laid down that privates of the battalion companies were no longer to carry swords. Grenadiers were still supposed to have them, although in practice many grenadier companies gave them up during the war in America that began in 1775. Sergeants kept their swords, and so did drummers and fifers. Hangers of British type were also carried by some American soldiers during the American Revolution, using captured, imported and locally made swords.

Other armies kept the infantry short sword much longer. German infantry in British pay still carried hangers in America, and French infantry carried the short saber known as the briquet through the Napoleonic period. In Britain the infantry private's sword was not revived. Original hangers are now sought by collectors of eighteenth-century arms, and they appear with other British Arms & Weapons and Short Swords.