RAPIER – DISH-HILT. Others were specified by persons indicative of the fashion of their hilt or blade. The dish-hilt rapier makes its appearance in the middle of the seventeenth century, its peculiar feature being a simple guard formed of a large, shallow circular cup and cross, without knuckle guard or pas d’âne. They are seemingly of French origin, and generally known to collectors as ‘Hamburgs.’

Sussex Inventory c1670

Randle Holme: Academie of Armory, 1688, III, iii, 9/2 mentions the back rapier, that is one with a back blade

‘A Back Rapier
A Rapier, with two edges’

The back rapier was almost certainly that light type of rapier that made its first appearance in the late sixteenth century and was extensively used by the cavalier troops against the basket-hilted broadswords of the parliamentary horse.