I keep wondering

I'm not sure what you are asking here.

I would imagine a few hundred years ago, kings, knights, and crusaders swords & daggers would boggle the mind in todays dollers.

But, in the last few centurys, more people have been killed with cheap butcher knifes and cheaper kitchen knives then any other kind of knife.

And it might even be true back in the age of kings & knights too.

Cheap and close at hand stands the best chance of being used more often.
And it don't get no cheaper or closer at hand then a kitchen knife in your own kitchen.

rc

The cost of a knife or sword has varied throughout history. Nowadays cheap knives can be had at Walmart for $2, which costs less than ten minutes of labor for the average minimum wage worker. In the old days, knives were a valuable and more expensive tool because of the time it took to make one well. In terms of old time prices, here is a sample list of what things might have cost in the middle ages:

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm

According to this site, a cheap peasant's sword (long knife) cost 4 deniers, or about 4-5 days' pay for an unskilled laborer. So, in today's money, a "cheap" sword would have cost about $300-$400. A knife would probably have been half that.

So, I suppose one could say that a lot of deaths in the past happened by blades costing $200 and up, whereas now that probably isn't so common.

In 27 years as a working street cop, I never took away a custom or ultra nice production knife from anyone. As for the better? knives I've confiscated, Buck and Gerber were most common, followed by various versions of the trusty old K-Bar military fixed blade.

My experience mirrors Old Bear's as far as what you encountered on the street.... There may have been guys out there equipped with high end blades but you'd never run into one (maybe a street cop might find his or her handiwork.... but that's about it).

Here's a true horror story of a cat that killed while doing burglaries of occupied houses... He'd enter late at night then go straight to the kitchen where he'd arm himself with whatever he found.... then he'd crawl on hands and knees through the house, knife in hand doing his thing. If no one awoke he'd leave them alone (the guy was a "pants burglar" looking for a wallet and keys to a car) take what he wanted and depart. If anyone awoke he'd try to kill them then flee. When we caught him he'd made seven kills between California and Florida and never carried a blade except when he was in someone's house.... Like I said, a modern horror story.... we didn't catch him until he'd killed once in our city....

I found a few Buck and Gerbers. More common were Fury and Jaguar brands, Cheap Rambo knockoffs were popular for a while, but the most common were an assortment of kitchen knives, icepicks, letter openers, nail files, and screwdrivers.

What about toothbrushes scraped on the floor? Homemade weapons certainly turn up quite a bit on prison TV shows (fictional and otherwise).

uh, you "think" that minimum wage clears $12 an hour? Sorry, but you are off by a factor of 100%. It's $6 an hour. and yes, it needs to double, to match what it had in buying power in 1970. I worked for min wage then, and an hour's work, after tax, ss, etc, would buy me 3 gallons of Shell premium gasoline.

I think if you went back and saw what really was used for most killing, you'd be shocked. Yes, the gentry, the knights were well armed with what would have been very expensive swords and daggers. But in a conflict, they made up the very small minority of the forces on the field. It was a very broad and steep sided pyramid of society, with the gentry sitting on the top and the vast bulk under them the peasants. Most peasants would be armed with pikes, maybe a mace or club of some type, or an ax in one form or another.

Swords and daggers were expensive items that only the top of the pyramid could afford. But, every man, had an ax of some sort for chopping of firewood. Axes were cheap to make, as was spear or pike tips. Cheap and fast to produce was important. And just as every peasant had a small ax, he also had a knife for the butchering of food. In the British museum there is a extensive hall of arms from the medieval period, and most of them are amazingly crude and cheap. The knives looked very little different than what the mountain man skinning knives looked like, and small hand axes were common. Conversation with museum curators was very enlightening.

One fact that will warp our view is, the gentry, the lordships, didn't use their expensive swords and showy daggers except as last resort. For a mounted knight, the lance, and then mace or ax was used. The swords may actually get relatively little use, as will the daggers. On the other hand, the peasant, when not engaged in some conflict on behalf off his lordship, will still be using his butcher knife to process food and small tasks, and his ax for the process of firewood to warm his hovel. He is engaged everyday in labor for his lordship, while his lordship sits on his rear end most of the time. Gentry did not do labor. So, the expensive swords and daggers of the gentry would survive long after the thin bladed butcher knife like knives of the peasant was worn away from use, as was the small hand axes. If mostly what we see is the tools of the upper level of the pyramid, then we can be lead to believe that is what most people carried.

Another very cool thing I saw in the British museum was, a stone mold for the casting of copper hatchet heads. This was way back, 5 to 6 thousand years old, and the one curator I spoke with said these small hatchet heads were not for chopping wood, but for weapon use, much like a tomahawk was. So even back then in the copper and bronze age, the lower peasant were still carrying a more mundane tool. There was a bronze sword on display, but he said it was for a chief of a clan judging from the engraving on it. The underlings would have been armed with more mundane told like the hatchets and spears.

JUst recently, we had a murder of a 7-11 clerk just spitting distance from our home. A nutso used a box cutter to attack the clerk, and the clerk died from blood loss. A box cutter. Then there was a murder down at Gallaudet University a while back. Two students were killed in their dorm rooms about a week apart. They found the killer, an exchange student from somewhere down in South America that was robbing and killing, using a 3.99 paring knife.

Metioning this with my son, who is a Montgomery County police officer, he told me that most of the knives they see coming in are either cheap kitchen knives, or total under ten dollar Chinese punk knives. Nothing has changed in a thousand years. Literally. MOst killing is done with very cheap stuff.

Cheap and nasty has been the preferred option ever since I can remember - cheap switchblade knives, broken off table legs ,loose cobblestones, discarded hunks of lead pipe, broken bottles, etc, etc, etc. Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury (1928) has a wealth of information about non firearms weapons and was recommended by Bartholomew Roberts, moderator.

An inventory of the Astoria fur trading post on the Columbia River for the 1812-13 season shows plenty of regular kitchen knives, and not one bowie or Arkansas toothpick. Another passage in the book is a quote from a trading post manager stating that "...the Texian knife (Bowie knife) is not yet wanted in our region." Green River knives were among the most favored, and can be had in the same models that that Jim Bridger would have handled. Most are basically kitchen knives. Some things never change.

My source is Firearms, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Men, By Carl P. Russell.