"Purse" with dagger

[Baron Alcyoneus]

I was looking at a lower-class wedding from Alessandro Caravia's Naspo Bizaro (1565), and wasn't sure what it was at first. There were several in the picture, and until I looked real close, I couldn't tell that it was a dagger with the hilt sticking out of one side, and the scabbard from the other.

It makes me wonder if there was some law requiring it to be secured in this manner at the time in Venice. The book itself is a free E-book on Google books, but I'll give a couple links to pages that show this.
http://play.google.com/books/reader?id= ... pg=GBS.PP1

pg xvii http://play.google.com/books/reader?id= ... pg=GBS.PR4

Oddly, the picture I'm looking in At Home in Renaissance Italy isn't in that, although it is obviously by the same artist(it is in the British Library).

[Thomas Powers]

"Always carry a knife!"