Collection: Folding knives | Gabardier 11cm

Thiers-Issard · Own design

Shaped like the flat-bottomed boats that once worked the Dordogne, the Gabardier is a Thiers-Issard design with a long, gently curved handle and an 11 cm 12C27 blade.

The boats of the Dordogne

Gabares were wide, flat-bottomed wooden boats that carried wood, wine, salt and much else along the Dordogne for centuries. Their crews were the gabariers. According to the story Thiers-Issard tells, from the 1600s some of them also carried wine and tobacco that had never seen a tax collector. The Gabardier's handle borrows the long hull and raised ends of those boats.

The largest gabares were around 30 meters long and carried up to 60 tonnes. In the eighteenth century they took thousands of barrels of wine a year from Bergerac down to Bordeaux, along with timber, stone and walnuts. The trip upstream was so hard that many boats were simply sold or broken up for their oak at the end of the journey. The railways ended the trade in the nineteenth century; today restored gabares carry visitors on the river again, at La Roque-Gageac and elsewhere.

Build and materials

A single 11 cm blade with Le Gabardier etched on it and the G.R. mark on the ricasso. The blade is Sandvik 12C27, a fine-grained Swedish stainless steel that is a favorite for pocket knives: it takes a keen edge, is easy to resharpen and resists rust well. Thiers-Issard offers it in woods including bocote, boxwood, kingwood, oak, ebony, yew, olive and palm wood.

The French pocket knife

In the early nineteenth century most people in France ate with their own folding knife. Women carried one in their pocket, often with a second silver blade for fruit; men's knives had a pruning blade and a corkscrew. Around 1850 the habit faded and the table knife took over at meals, but the pocket knife stayed with farmers, hunters, gardeners and anyone who worked outdoors.

Thiers was its capital. At the Paris exhibition of 1867 the town and its valley made 60 percent of all French cutlery, above all folding knives, and as late as 1960 pocket knives were still the largest single part of its output. Handles were made of horn, bone, buffalo horn and ebony shipped from Africa and the islands; before the Second World War Thiers imported around a thousand tonnes of buffalo horn a year, partly to cut into scales for pocket knives.

More pocket knives from Thiers-Issard

All our folding knives are made by hand by Thiers-Issard in Thiers. Explore the others: Le Thiers 9 cm · Le Thiers 11 cm · Le Thiers, forged · Le Thiers Sésame · Thiern · Yatagan basque · Pradel · Galeam.

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