Over time the story became somewhat cloudy and muddled (sometimes it wasn’t a squirrel, but a rat), but the smith ever after maintained that it was the most stunning revelation he’d ever had. “If that vermin hadn’t decided to relax on the sun-warmed hull of my latest creation,” he told his chair (he was pushing 80), “I’d never have realized what I’d been missing all these years.”

And medieval war-fashion was never the same.