E. M. R. Ditmas, in two essays on Arthurian relics which still remain the best summary of the subject, touches briefly on ‘Gawain's sword’. All she says is that it was exhibited at Wallingford, but she gives no references. Sir Frederic Madden, in his pioneering edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, privately printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1839, discusses Gawain's sword in his notes, saying that ‘I was the first to discover the following curious memorandum … relative to the sword of Gawayne’. This was in a series of medieval notes on a blank leaf in a manuscript from the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, which was in the hands of a local Suffolk antiquary, and which Madden dated to the reign of Edward I. It reads:

Hec est forma gladii Walwyn militis: a puncto usque ad hilte, 53

pollices; hilte continet 11 pollices et dimidii; manicle prope 11

pollices; pomel continet 3 pollices. Latitudo 5 pollice, longitudo

in toto continet 66 pollices et dimidii, unde scribere in canello gladii:

The four lines in italic are a verse proverb: a suggested translation is ‘Put aside foolish handsomeness (or elegance) and cherish wise patience (or weakness)’.

It is almost certainly not part of the inscription, and has been tacked on by accident. Madden's note was followed by a discussion of the same text from a different source by Robert Huntington Fletcher, a pioneer in the study of the Arthurian legend in chronicle sources.