There’s an old German folk song about a man named Bolle. In it, our protagonist makes a series of very poor life choices, including losing his child in a crowd, drinking all of the beer at the fair and getting into a knife fight. When he returns home disheveled his wife beats him. At the end of the day he dies hungry.
The song isn’t medieval, but the client of this scabbard has a special fondness for it and asked if I could come up with an interpretation that would fit his Albion Soldat. I used a number of late 15th century illustrations as inspiration. A common medieval device for visual storytelling was to repeat the same character in an image to depict different parts of the story in a flow from one part to another, which I mimicked here.
Poplar core wrapped in linen and covered with leather.
Historical Handcrafts 