A heavy canvas roll bound with leather straps, holding the working tools a blacksmith takes from the anvil: a cross-pein hammer for drawing metal and a straight-pein for setting, a hand sledge for heavy work, three or four pairs of tongs with jaws shaped for flat stock, round stock, and wolf-jaw grips, a hardy tool and a set of fullers and flatters that seat into the anvil’s hardy hole, swages for rounding and grooving, hot chisels for cutting glowing stock, and a brace of punches and drifts. The tools are crude to the eye — rough forged iron, handles of hickory or ash fitted with wedges — but each is dressed to the smith’s own stroke and the balance of their favored anvil. The kit does not include the anvil, the bellows, or the forge itself; those stay at the shop, and a smith travelling without them is a journeyman looking for work rather than a master at the craft.
A village smith’s kit may fit on a packhorse; a master armorer’s spans several chests and moves only on a wagon. The tools themselves are not precious — most smiths forge their own hammers and tongs from scrap stock — but the kit as a whole represents years of patient shaping, with each tool true to the hand that made it. A borrowed kit never quite feels right; a stolen one is a curse on the thief, since the stroke is never the same in another smith’s hands.