Nontron

The knife of Nontron is widely regarded as the oldest in France. It has been made in the same small town in the Périgord for centuries: a slender boxwood handle marked with a mysterious woodburned symbol, a blade shaped like a sage leaf, and a turning ferrule that locks the folding blade open. Today one workshop still makes it, by hand, exactly where it began.

Why this knife is different

At a glance

A knife older than the history books can date

The Nontron knife takes its name from the small town in the Périgord Vert where it has been made for centuries. Its history runs so deep, and is so wrapped in legend, that no one can fix a firm date on it. What experts agree on is simpler: the Nontron is regarded as the oldest knife in France. A Paris text from the early 13th century, Guillaume de la Villeneuve’s Nomenclature des crieries de Paris, already speaks of ‘Périgord knives’.

Cutlery took root here because of geography. Everything a knife-maker needed was close at hand: local iron ore, so tied to the town that the mineral nontronite carries its name, the boxwood forests of the Périgord hills, and the cold, clear water of the Bandiat river for tempering the blades. The Gaulish Petrocorii who lived here were celebrated ironworkers, praised in antiquity by the Greek geographer Strabo.

By the 17th century the trade was well established. Around 1653 Guillaume Legrand, a master cutler from Paris, settled in Nontron, and the first written records of the knife’s turning ferrule date from this period. A century later the wider Périgord counted dozens of cutleries, yet Nontron itself stayed a small workshop town where a few families, above all the Bernards and the Petits, carried the craft from one generation to the next.

The World Wars thinned their ranks. During the First World War the town’s cutlers were set to making locking knives for the French Ministry of War, and by the late 1920s only the Petit workshop remained. It became the Coutellerie Nontronnaise in 1928. Passed from the Chaperon family to new owners across the 20th century, the workshop has belonged to the Forge de Laguiole since 1992, with a stated aim of keeping the know-how in Nontron while carrying it forward. A new atelier opened in the town in 2000, and today around twenty cutlers still make the knife there by hand.

The mystery of the fly

Look closely at a boxwood Nontron and you will find it covered in fine woodburned marks: rows of small dots and a recurring motif of an upturned V crowned with three points. Nontron calls this motif the fly, and its origin and meaning have been lost. Some read it as a religious symbol, others as the compass of the Compagnons du Devoir, the journeymen craftsmen who once passed through the town. What is known is that the pyrography appeared alongside the clog-shaped handle, and that it is burned only onto boxwood.

Anatomy of a Nontron knife

The shape has barely changed in generations. A slender boxwood handle, often finished as a carp tail or a clog, a blade ground to the outline of a sage leaf, and a ferrule at the join. On the folding knives that ferrule turns to lock the blade open, an idea first recorded in Nontron in the 17th century.

The last house of the Nontron knife

Coutellerie Nontronnaise is the only workshop that still makes the Nontron knife, and it is recognized as a Living Heritage Company (Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant), a French state label reserved for rare craft skills. Around twenty artisans work in the Nontron atelier, which doubles as a small museum where visitors can watch the knives being made.

Tradition here is not frozen. Alongside the historic pocket knives and table knives, the house has invited designers such as Christian Ghion and Olivier Gagnère to reinterpret the oldest French knife for the modern table. Its cutlers are a fixture of the Fête du Couteau, the knife festival held in Nontron each summer, and once held a Guinness record for the world’s smallest folding knife, a piece just ten millimeters long.

Living with a handmade knife

Keep it out of the dishwasher. Boxwood handles and carbon blades should be washed by hand and dried at once. Treated this way, a Nontron lasts for generations.

A little oil. A drop of oil on the blade and the pivot now and then keeps a carbon edge bright and the folding action smooth.

Patina is normal. Carbon steel darkens with use. This patina protects the blade and is part of the character of a working knife, not a flaw.

Sharpen gently. Keep the edge with a fine stone or a steel. Well cared for, a Nontron is a companion for a lifetime and beyond.