Ok Jeff, file duly noted.
First and correct me if I am wrong, there is a single cushion pommel seven beaded sword that happens to have Masonic iconography. We'll come back to that and perhaps merge or move it to a thread I initiated today regarding military swords used in fraternal society.
Secondly and while freely admiting to not being involved in Free Masonry, the article is thirty years old. While not dismissing such work, I have at times spent a good bit of browsing in the past decade reading about it. Here is a good site. Especially so for iconography. that is a nice chart in the Hamilton article though, a nice job with that.
http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/masoni...ns_america.htm
Let me see if I can find some more I plumbed the depths and angles of such history.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
I can just about paraphrase the Hamilton article historical notes from the bookshelf I have there, simply in regarding notes about the Templars, Free Masons and development of fraternties both in England and somewhat worldwide (including American growth). South Carolina history is another interesting portal for such research.
Another older and goody from my bookmarks regarding guilds, craft and economic growth.
http://www.takver.com/history/benefit/ctormys.htm
Getting back to beaded swords, I think not as associative as that single article example.
I do find the Hamilton artice quite useful to me in some aspects but not so much regarding what amounts to fraternal presentation swords. While interesting to in a different association of/to fraternities, what I find specifically of interest are some fairly plain swords that incorporate private purchase requests. Presentation swords are yet another category and as we all may agree that many military officers have been or are Free Masons, in the end, it's just a sword. I do not see that the number of beads are specifically engineered for Free Masons or even officer grades.
My feeling is that a continued discussion regarding fraternal swords, while quite parallel in this thread's interest, is a sidebar that might be better suited in a seperate thread than spadrone examples. Either that or I'm quite agreeable to attaching a mess o pictures of Shriners sabres, a dandy 1796 lc lodge sword and an exceptional British yeoman cavalry sabre with some really neat Scottish rite stuff engraved and gilded. Of those three I listed, it is just the Shriners sabres I would specifically assign to only fraternity. Some examples have been out there listed at dealers for some years (as of a few days ago, including a dandy skull and bones hilt for really short money.
Cheers
Hotspur;
I like this spadroon a lot. Actually a couple to share. Oh yes, how about the diamonds in the counterguards? 