Mike's HEMA Blog

HM JKL Fiore Dagger video

2012-03-05T15:56:00.001Z

I stumbled over

today. It's one and a half hours of Fiore's dagger, in English, by Historiallinen miekkailu JKL. Those of you who are interested in Fiore's dagger might be interested.

It's not how I'd present Fiore's dagger, or how I'd drill it (once people are drilling towards the end). It's not Fiore's dagger through the medium of Aliveness 101. But then again I didn't make a 90 min video on the system, so I can't complain.

On Sparring out of Distance

2012-03-02T11:38:00.003Z

Watching two people both waiting out of distance, hoping the other guy twitches first is only dramatic in Kurosawa movies. For sparring, it's a lot like pulling closed guard and clinging really tightly in BJJ, hoping the other guy will give up and go away.

I have nothing against feints done right. I'm totally for trying to steal the initiative with footwork. I'm only slightly annoyed by one handed shots out of distance when you don't have to care about edge-alignment.

But this.

Vier Leger - This is how they were recorded.

2012-03-01T15:53:00.001Z

The 'Vier Leger' are the 'four guards', the fundamental positions of Liechtenauer's fencing. There are only four of them. Of course there are others (Langort/Long Point, Kron/Crown etc.), but those aren't that important.

Hans Talhoffer, the anonymous blogger, knows more about Medieval High New German than I do. He once explained to me:

Guards are by no means a static position. The text is telling us, that the "vom Tag" is a way to lift your sword up over yourself. The misunderstanding in the old way of interpretations is the word "leger" where you stand still and be protected. But the guard is no protection but "to be on guard" is the exact translation from "auf der Hut sein" - to watch out for trouble coming. There is no much protection for someone on guard, he is the first one to be attacked in a battle. The translation "Leger" is probably wrong. There are two meanings in Middle High German: 1. lying in bed 2. lying in siege to a place, or bring yourself in a good position (to attack). You can choose the meaning that you like. But as these words has been made up by warriors, I would think the second meaning suites better.

So the saying "do not "leger" yourself but attack" by Liechtenauer makes much more sense. It means: do not try and wait for a better position, you may never get one.

So anyway, let's get on with it. This is how they are shown/explained. I haven't bothered with much Meyer/Paulus Hector Mair, because I haven't got that far making pretty pictures yet. Same for Jorg Wilhalm Hutter and a few other outliers. I also haven't bothered to infer what I think these positions should be like here. I haven't posted pictures of what aren't explicitly described as one of the 'vier leger', I haven't looked at plays or techniques that refer to them (ie. worked out what Ochs is from the description of the zwerchau). This is just the simples.

Also, these pictures lack context (most often a line given to indicate the floor/horizon/perspective), or how crammed onto a page they were, take them with a pinch of salt.

Also also, these positions varied with time or what have you. What Hutter shows, for example, is nothing like what the early illustrations show.

Liechtenauer's poem:

About the Four Wards:
Four wards alone –
Hold onto those, and curse the vulgar.
Ox, plough, fool,
From-roof–there are no others for you.

The Doebringer gloss adds to this:

Liechtenauer holds only these four guards that come from the upper and lower hangings, and from these one can fence safely. This is regarding the four guards.
Four guards only, and leave the common ones alone. The ox, plough, fool, from above/the roof, these should not be unknown to you.
Glossa. Here he mentions four guards that are valuable. But before all things, remember that you should not remain too long in one guard. Liechtenauer has a saying “He who is still, is dead, he who moves will live”. And from these guards comes the understanding that you should move in swordplay, and not wait in a guard and thus waste your chance.
[...]
Also know that you break all guards and positions with the strikes. You should strike bravely at the opponent so that he must move away and defend him. Therefore Liechtenauer does not hold the guards in such a high esteem; he is more interested in that you try to win the first strike.

Pflug:
MS 3227a/The Pseudo-Doebringer Gloss has Pflug and Alber a different way around. It describes this position as:

The fool [Pflug] breaks what (your opponent) strikes or thrusts. From the hanging strike and at once and follow by attacking after.
The third guard the fool [Pflug] is the lower hanging, and with it you break all strikes and thrusts when it is done correctly.

The Pseudo-Peter-von-Danzig gloss describes it as:

The second guard is called the Plough and set yourself in it thus, Stand with the left foot forward and hold your sword with crossed hands with the pommel under you near your right side on the hip so that the short edge is above and the point stands against him in his face.

On the left side set yourself in the guard of the plough thus, Stand with the right foot forward and hold your sword near the left side with the pommel under you to the hip so that the long edge is above and the point stands in his face. This is the plough on both sides.

The Ringeck gloss describes it as:

Hold it like this: stand with the left foot forward, and hold your sword with crossed hands beside and slightly above your right knee, in such a way that the point is towards his face.

Ochs:

The Pseudo-Doebringer gloss describes it as:

The second guard is the ox, or the upper hanging from the shoulder.

The Pseudo-Peter-von-Danzig gloss hasn't been translated.

The Ringeck gloss describes it as:

Hold it like this: stand with the left foot forwards, and hold your sword beside and slightly in front of the right side of your head, and let the point hang towards his face.

Alber:

MS 3227a/The Pseudo-Doebringer gloss has Pflug and Alber a different way around. It describes this position as:

The first guard, the plough [Alber], is when you hold the point (of the sword) in front of you aimed at the ground or to the side. After a displacement it is called the barrier guard or simply the gate.

The Pseudo-Peter-von-Danzig gloss hasn't been translated.

The Ringeck gloss has it as:

Hold it like this: stand with your right foot forwards, and hold your sword with outstretched arms in front of you with the point towards the ground.

Vom Tag:
The Pseudo-Doebringer gloss says that:

The fourth guard is from the roof, is also the long point. He, who does it well with outstretched arms, is not easy to hit with strikes or thrusts. It can also be called the hanging above the head.

The Pseudo-Peter-von-Danzig gloss hasn't been translated.

The Ringeck gloss has it as:

Hold it like this: stand with the left foot forwards, and hold your sword at your right shoulder. Or hold it with outstretched arms above your head. And how you shall fence from these guards, you will find described in this book.

27/02/12 - Back to the Italian.

2012-02-28T00:52:00.001Z

So, this week we took a break from the Liechtenauer to do a compare and contrast with Fiore's system. We ended up working with the Giocco Large (wide-play) section of the sword-in-two-hands in the Getty Manuscript. I'll send out an email with links to copies of the manuscript.

The session was pretty manual-focused, going through the plays in order. The drilling was pretty dead, but this was really an introductory class - different vocabulary and different cutting/body mechanics too.

Man, I prefer Liechtenauer as a system.

20/02/11 Session

2012-02-20T21:51:00.000Z

A brief re-cap of what happened:
Warm up, incorporating a little bit of getting used to 'being in each other's space'.
Some points on body mechanics. Beginning with everyone walking around the room looking snooty - head tilted back, shoulders rolled back and hips stuck forwards. Specifically, keeping the hips facing forward. Keeping the elbows 'in line' with the hips. Keeping the hilt in line with the forearms. Doing 'Ochs' right. It's basic stuff, but we'd been sloppy and I wanted to bring people up on it. It's partly also a tactical choice - you can fence more linearly, or with different weighting.
Then JP led us into a footwork drill. It began with mirrored stances, and the dance leader either performing a round, compass step or a 'shuffling' step, and their partner mirroring it. That naturally led to doing it with a bind, and then without a set leader, and finally while also going for thrusts.

Then sparring. Tom in particular impressed me with how much he has improved over the last few months.
As for depictions in period art, I'm working on an infographic in my spare time. Short answer - compare and contrast the following. They're a bunch of explicitly labelled depictions of Pflug:

06/02/11 Session Re-Cap

2012-02-07T13:00:00.001Z

Sorry for the lack of a written out lesson plan, I didn't make one.

This lesson focused on feints, and generally speaking all the stuff that happens in the beginning of a fight, out of distance. Trying to gain the initiative and the vorschlag. It's an area that the early sources don't tend to focus on, so I worked mostly from Olympic fencing principles to 'pad out' an area of the KdF.

To begin with, the key point that I wanted to make was that a good feint should be a credible threat, and in order for a feint to be a credible threat the attacker should be able to continue through into a strike. To emphasise this, the first drill was a set attacker and defender one. The attacker had to make a feint. If the defender reacted, then the attacker stopped. If the defender didn't, then the attacker could carry on through into a strike.

After that, it was the usual game of increasing options and intensity. For example, the next stage had the defender able to respond with an oberhau if they felt that the attacker was feinting - seizing the initiative, doing a nachreisen or whatever. At this point someone (I think Ant?) said:

'Doesn't it make sense for the defender just to do a zornhau most of the time?'

After that we started adding more options for the attacker - switching target quarters, stopping short (as an apel, or by changing your silhouette shape, or a twist of the hips - something to gain a reaction without presenting a target), and then we moved onto being able to transition between the hidden strikes after beginning a movement - for example beginning an attack, seeing an incoming oberhau, and transforming your cut into a zwerchau to regain the initiative.

Then we played around with daggers, because daggers are cool. I sparred JP at the end - he's come on a long way, although as always there are a few things that could be improved (ELBOWS!). He's planning on running a footwork drill he learnt in France next week. See the above meme for my feelings on the matter.

To fence with steel, with intensity.

2012-02-02T18:27:00.002Z

Monday's session was drills, drills, drills sparring. It seemed to go not too bad. Thoughts on a back of a postcard, please. Anyway:

Some people, as referenced elsewhere, are happy to play with steel using the bare minimum of protection. There's a spectrum of protection, from 'T-shirt' through to 'Full harness'. Obviously, different amounts of protection lead to different artefacts in free-play - if you're messing about in t-shirts, then you're not going to be using the same techniques against your sparring partner that you would against a tatami mat with a sharp. Equally, if you're dressed like 'Panzer Tom', then you're not going to move as you would if you were just wearing a T-shirt.

Thousands of tons of armour and Tom / making it's way through the... castle?

Let's get down to brass tacks and work out how much HEMA asks from your wallet.

Now then, all sports have their budgets. HEMA is relatively expensive to get into - most groups expect you to pick up a mask, a nylon and some gloves after a couple of months.
Let's say that is:
Sword - Knight's Shop Pro Line XTREME Rawlings Nylon Sparring Longsword Waster thingy - £47 + P&P
Fencing Mask - The Weapon Store (Pre-order Price of £50 + P&P), or Red Dragon (£65 + P&P). Given that the Weapon Store one isn't available yet, and that that is a cheap price, let's say £65.
Gloves - The cheapest Lacrosse gloves currently on UKLacrosse are 'Warrior Tempo Elite 11 Gloves' at £30.

So, you're looking at a 'beginners' cost of at least £150, not to mention classes etc.

Steel is even more. Of course, the sky is the limit. But, I was wondering earlier today, how much does it cost to play 'at the top of the game', ie. in a Swordfish tournament, using bought kit?

Longsword - I'd recommend either an Ensifer or a Regenyei Peter federschwert, if asked. Of course, you can go Chinese roulette, and get a Hanwei Federschwert cheaper, or if you have the budget go for a full on Albion, but that's your call. Last time I checked, a Peter's prices began at was 170€, or £140. Plus postage and packaging, bringing it up to £175. If you prefer a 'real sword' then I'd recommend something like a Pavel Moc, coming to £270-290. So, for a good HEMA training sword, you're looking at a 'ballpark' figure of £200-£300. Let's pick a nice round £200 here.

Gloves - Looking at the Swordfish injury report, there's only one glove that I'd recommend - the Ensifer Sparring Glove, at 200€, or £167.

Torso Protection - HistFenc.com's Axel Petterson Sparring Jacket, because it will make you fence like Axel. It's also £140.

Groin Protection - HistFenc.com's groin protector and Padded Skirt, £40.

Head Protection - Assuming that your mask is still going, and you trust it, then you'd only need mask padding and back of the head protection. HistFenc.com's 'Vectir' stuff comes to £40, or the 'Trinity' hood comes to £100 for the version that makes you look like a badass monk (a must for all I.33 practitioners). Let's say £40.

Mask - If you no-longer trust your old mask, then by this stage I'd recommend a top of the range three weapon coach's mask, such as an Allstar-Uhlman coach's mask, at £150.

Leg's - Leaving aside the bad-ass pair of three-quarter-length-gusseted-breeches, with matching socks, I'd recommend either some knee pads or some brush-cutter guards, at £15 or so.

Arms - Again, you could go for elbow pads, although HistFenc.com also does combined forearm and elbow protection for £33.

As usual, there will probably be some more things that you might like, such as a throat protector. But these are all pretty necessary. And they come to at least £635.

That's a lot of money. Sure, you could spend however much you want on golf clubs, but you don't need £600+ of kit to have a go at your local tournament. I mean, HEMA is a hobby where people are prepared to drop £600 for a book that's contents are freely available online.

Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day and spend too much time reading internet forums, I feel that HEMA is a martial art for middle-aged, unathletic, well-off men. Certainly, when you look at how much it costs to compete at a decent standard (No FightCamp, you don't have a decent longsword competition.) the price is certainly a barrier to taking part.

And at the end of the day, high barriers to taking part (and even more in the past, gated access to knowledge) means that HEMA is more likely to have bullshit merchants in it. At least when it comes to the documentary evidence:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. - http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html

Edit - Well, after ranting like that, it Jake N goes and posts something like this. Oh, and as someone pointed out:

[These] frustrations with HEMA aren't the result of lacking cash or watching others spar in WrongFun mode. I think they're because we don't get to train often and hard under good instructors.

Which, sadly, is true.

Class Structure, 23/01/12

2012-01-23T15:14:00.000Z

Okay. Here's the plan. It's Garry's last session for a while, and I think that we should give him an opportunity to spar/free-play everyone. It'll be entertaining. Still, the beginning of the session will have a bit more structure than that.

I like free-play. I think it's great. Branston pickle and red Leicester cheese sammich levels of good. But I also don't see it as the end of what I do - getting good at freeplay isn't what I'm training towards. It might happen as a side effect of getting better at Historical Fighting though.

Now, let's consider what we normally free-play at to to be the 'Standard model'. Not fencing at maximum intensity so we can try out new things. Kitted out with gloves, mask, for-arm protection and perhaps some extras, but not swinging at maximum force, because we're not gits. It's good, fun and helps. But it isn't all it could be in terms of improving you different levels of "freedom" and intensity.

On the one hand, you can change the force levels people use, from tippy-tap fencing to Conan-swinging. Another variable you can adjust is the intensity - from T'ai chi free-flow stuff to 'Swordfish finals' intensity. Adjusting those in training allows people to practice and test themselves to a greater degree.

Another thing that you can change are the options open to each fighter - forcing them to focus on one aspect of the fight. From the simple 'No closing to grapple' to 'Begin the fight with a Schielhau'. The epitome of this would be the 'robot fencing' drills on the HEMAA forum. The opposite end of the spectrum would be sharp-longsword-fight-to-the-death-with-sharps scenario.

Finally, the value of freeplay with a wide open choice table is greatly enhanced by having people watching/videoing and coaching actively what's going on. Let's incorporate that. I wish people did it for me more often! If you're in a 'coaching' role, then please video everything that you can.

10 mins: Meet, Greet.

10 mins: Warm up. Hopefully led by the great Gazza.

10 mins: Stretch. Discuss what the plan.

5 mins: Minimum intensity, minimum force fencing. (10%/10%) With no protection what-so-ever. No hits to the hands or the head. No thrusts above the shoulders. Be bloody sensible. I trust you guys.

2 mins. Regroup. Feedback. Discuss.

10 mins: Put on masks and gloves. Now, form into groups of three, with at least one 'experienced' or motivated guy in each group (JP and Dan should be good at this.) Begin 'standard' sparring at exactly the same intensity as before. Take the guys out and give them advice. Then increase the intensity, but not the force levels. End up at something like 40% intensity, 10% force.

5 mins. Re-group. Discuss what we've noticed.

10 mins. Now, let's change everyone around, and increase the levels somewhat. People can try more protective kit if they'd like. Something like 60% intensity, 40% force. More coaching. Go back in there!

10 mins. Now, the final burn. Let's ratchet the intensity up to the most that people can muster at this stage. 100% effort to win the fight. The coach's job is to keep an eye on how much the fighters' skill is degrading, but also on the force levels being used. If they creep too high (say, above 50%), then get them to tone it down again. If needs be, do a Mikael and jump in there with a rear-naked choke.

5 mins. Now, this is where we mind fuck with people. Remove all the kit. Now, reset back to the minimum intensity, minimum force levels we talked about before. You can only Vorschlag with an Oberhau. See how well people do.

That's what, an hour and a quarter of physical activity? We can do this guys.

Rest of Session - Beat on Garry with Sticks. The rest of the room coaches the guy fighting Garry. Not only looking at the fighter's weaknesses and how to overcome them, but also for any holes in how Garry is fencing, and how to punish him for them.

Approaches to HEMA.

2012-01-22T23:13:00.000Z

This is a re-post from the HEMA Alliance forum, of a post by Michael Chidester for the private email list of his old group, True Edge Academy. I'm re-posting it because it highlights some differences in people's approaches to historical European martial arts - I laid out my own thoughts when I began this blog. It's certainly food for thought:

My perspective on this issue puts Mike Cartier and Mike Edelson very much in the same category (something that will probably infuriate them both to read, since there's no love lost there). Michael E., as many of you know, sees a serious problem in the methodology of modern HEMA instruction--across the board, from raw recruits to champion fencers, our cutting technique is atrocious. His message is 'If you can't cut properly, if you treat your sword like a cruciform baton and consider any forceful touch with it to be a "kill", then I don't know what game you're playing but it's not fencing.' Very simply, if you can't attack cleanly and effectively, you're not a martial artist.
Not wanting to be a crank, he offers us a solution to this problem: cut early and cut often. While most people treat test cutting as an occasional tangent from real training when we feel like having a bit of fun, he advocates making it a core component of training--and not just cutting against easy nothing-targets like pumpkins and water jugs, but against durable, resilient targets that properly simulate people-stuff and will actually make you work for the cut. He's been accused of introducing alien concepts of Japanese Swordsmanship into HEMA, but as more examples of test cutting in Medieval and early Modern Europe pop up, it's clear that this is a practice that is quite appropriate for all of us.
Mike C.'s article, to me, represents the other side of that complaint. He also sees a serious problem in modern HEMA instruction--we really like to armor up to train unarmored combat and feel unsafe without our gear. His message is 'If you can't defend yourself, if you need to wear armor in order to feel protected in a fencing match and have little or no confidence in your ability to defend yourself with your weapon, then I don't know what game you're playing but it's not fencing.' Very simply, if you can't strike without being struck, you're not a martial artist.
Not wanting to be a crank any more than Mike E., he also offers us a solution to this problem: get used to training with minimal gear (eye-protection is the only thing he really advocates). Ditch the armor at times and learn to fence without it. A lot of people do this from time to time, but Mike C.'s advocating this as a core component of training and even the ultimate goal of training. He rightly points out that this requires two different kinds of "getting used to", mental and physical. Mentally, he says that we need to learn to trust our weapon and fence without fear--something that masters from Liechtenauer and Fiore all the way down to Joachim Meyer and George Silver clearly advocate (I'll pull quotes if anyone doesn't want to take my word for it). Physically, he says that we need to not only learn defensive techniques better and drill them hard and often, but also that many of us will probably need to adjust our general styles of fence to something that is less reckless, less exposed, and more stable and controlled (these attributes are also praised by many masters).
Mike C. then takes it a step further; just as Mike E. has been calling for cutting competitions to separate those who can use swords from those who only know sticks, Mike C. wants to see more time and energy spent in reconstructing the historical art of school fencing and more attention given to historical tournaments (which differ greatly from our modern sport of HEMA tournaments in a number of ways). In doing so, he expects that we'll start seeing a separation between those who train real arts of defense from stick-jockeys who train to win points in the ring. He might be accused of an ulterior motive here, since the teachings of Joachim Meyer are both his passion and uniquely suited for such competitions, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I support both of these men in their respective endeavors, and I hope that their experiments outside the HEMA mainstream will feed back into the group and raise the level of us all.

Suggestions on the back of a post card, please.

16/01/12 Session - Krumphau

2012-01-17T11:57:00.000Z

Well, I took this session to get back into the swing of things after the festive season. I felt like someone who had eaten too many roast potatoes lately.

The basic plan for the class was to introduce the Krumphau to the newer people, and to get more experienced people used to the positions, pressures and opportunities that arise in the bind after the krumphau is struck.

At the beginning of the session, Garry led the warm-up and stretch side of things. Which was very nice of him, and a good alternating pattern of jog/footwork/sprint/footwork/jog etc.

After that it was on to the Krumphau. We don’t tend to use that secret-strike very often. Partly because it’s a situational technique, but partly because we’re not comfortable using it yet.

Introduction:This is the krumphau. It’s a downwards cut that falls along the plane perpendicular to the centre-line, and from the right ends in crossed wrists. That’s a definition. You can do it by waggling your sword from Schrankhut to Schrankhut. Want more information than that? Come here and let me show you...

When do you use it? Well, when the other guy is thrusting, or in Ochs. You spring out to the side and let the weight of the sword fall on his hands, or on his blade. Or you can do it if he cuts are you. Theoretically it’s what I should be doing when I get hit by rising cuts up the centre-line. It doesn't work so well against Pflug, because Pflug is structurally strong in that plane.

Isolation:
Practice it against a standing still target. First, practice throwing the point at their hands from a standard Vom Tag, hitting with the flat. Then try hitting them on the blade with the edge of your sword. Remember to spring out to the side and get used to not forcing the blade...

Intergration:
Okay, we've started on dead foundations. Let's start things off by building from that. Mask up. Start well out of distance, and then begin with the Agent entering from the guard of their choice with a thrust to the head or body. Do that ten times, getting used to the movements.

Stage 2, as the thrust comes in, the patient krumphaus, getting used to krumphauing (krumphewing?) to the blade. The agent gets used to the different pressures. Hard and soft. Equally, the patient gets used to the feel of it, whether or not they managed to break their opponent's structure.

Stage 3, mix it up. Game it up. Introduce the concept of tempo to it. When do you want to be beginning the movement of the krumphau? Where on their blade do you want to strike?

Stage 4, introducing decision trees. Just like in a 'standard' bind, there are a lot of different options depending on the circumstances, ie the distance, the pressures, the movement of the fighters. For the Agent, these are mainly either sticking in the bind or leaving it. The basic decisions aren't too different to any other bind - if the opponent is too strong, duplieren behind their blade or leave the bind. If the opponent is too weak, push on through immediately. If the opponent is structurally sound and threatening you, wind like a windy thing. If you're both rushing in, grapple and disarm and throw like a ninja. Simples, eh? He's an example of Pete's old decision tree for the krumphau:

Mine was a mess of lines on a page, all leading to 'Zwerchau like a boss'.

Stage 5 - Show the guys this video:

So yeah - there's the krumphau. Being demonstrated at fairly high intensity. Can we get working up to that speed, if only doing constructive freeplay, if only for five minutes?

Damn right we can. You guys made me proud!

And then some people sparred, and I had a chat with a new person. The End.

No idea what to run next week. Suggestions (and any videos from this session) on the back of a post card please.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T21:14:00.000Z

Well, this is just a quick update to let you know that things aren't dead at IDC. Although we've taken a break for the mid-winter festivities, some of us did get in some fun with sharps last week (although sadly I think that we didn't record any of it). Normal sessions will resume on the 9th.

That said, I'm starting a new job in the morning. Hopefully I'll be back in time. We'll see.

And as for New Years Resolutions, for HEMA I have:

IDC Lesson Plan 19/12/11

2011-12-19T14:37:00.000Z

Today plan is really a continuation of last week's drill, with a little exercise on getting used to the 'feel of the bind' at the end, if people want to try their new steel toys.

10 mins to meet, greet and sort out kit.

10 mins to warm up. Gazza is welcome to run this.

5 mins to stretch, and discuss today's plans

10 minutes of 'dead' cutting, to get everyone warmed up and used to their training tools/moving like a sword fighter again. The rought plan is:

Cuts from above, right and left.
Cuts from below, right and left.
Thrusts from Ochs with a step forwards, recovering into Ochs.
Thrusts from Pflug, recovering into Pflug.
Zwerchaus, right and left, and then in combination.

Now that's over, we kit up and drill:

10 mins of last week's blocking/stringing together cuts drill. Again, taking it nice and slow to begin with (especially if using steel), and gradually increasing pressure.

5 mins After a while, focus more on making a cover while keeping the point on the other person. If needs be, we can being in the Scott Brown longsword flow drill of mathematical perfection.

5 mins to explain that we're ignoring doing 'hidden strikes' against the vorschlag for the moment, because we'll run through a liiitle drill. Partner up like weapon with like weapon and do the following until it's time to stop. At all points, switch roles and reset.

Agent comes in with a downwards cut, an oberhau.
Patient, in response, does a Zornhau.
If neither cut lands, then the person with the centre-line stabs the other in the face.
If the stabber fails, then the stabbed responds with an absetzen, displacing the oncoming thrust by moving into Ochs or Pflug.
If the absetzen failed, it's because the stabber either flinched into Kron, or did their own displacement. The stabbed can get past this with either Duplieren or Mutieren.

Tie this into sparring - Freeplay where entering range is limited to downwards diagonal cuts.

Michael S’s Lichtenauer Tradition Unarmoured Longsword Primer

2011-12-19T09:34:00.000Z

So, I'm throwing this up, a Copy & Paste of a Google Document that's been languishing for six months or more, to illustrate a point over on the HEMA Alliance forums. Hopefully it'll be useful for you guys, although it's very much a work in progress, my own opinion, not reflective of the majority of Liechtenauer tradition sources, not bloody Meyer, just plain wrong etc. etc. It just reflects my understanding of the KdF. Give feedback please!

Introduction

This document is an primer for the unarmoured longsword fighting tradition associated with a figure called Johannes Lichtenauer. The tradition refers to itself as the 'Kunst des Fechtens', the 'Art of Fighting/Fencing', although annoyingly there's also a group or two called that.

This is meant to be a reference text, to help IDC members when looking at the texts. It’s designed to supplement group work rather than replace it, so I’ve done by best to keep interpretation to a minimum.

Lichtenauer’s name is associated with a poem in Middle-High-German knows as the Zedel, meaning teachings, or markverse. These "secret and hidden words" were intentionally cryptic, probably to prevent the uninitiated from learning the techniques he presented; they also seem to have offered a system of mnemonic devices to those who did understand. This is similar to Fiore’s Flower of Battle, which is captioned in verse.

Lichtenauer’s Zedel was preserved by students and teachers, and we have copies of it because subsequent individuals, such as Sigmund von Ein Ringeck, wrote glosses, passages expanding on the Lichtenauer zedel. The tradition lasted from the fourteenth century through to the age of print, with masters such as Meyer working within the Lichtenauer framework in the sixteenth century.

Ultimately the Lichtenauer tradition was superseded by Italian and Spanish rapier systems, as the longsword was replaced by the rapier in civilian contexts such as duelling, and the ‘pike and shot’ method of warfare came to dominate the battlefield with the military developments of the early modern period.

That said, there are differences between earlier and later examples of the Lichtenauer tradition. Some of them were used at a time when there were established fencing guilds in Europe, and play was limited to protect the opponents. For example Meyer downplays the role of thrusting, as it was limited in Guild activities.

Even in the same time period, Lichtenauer’s system was one amongst many - for example different longsword traditions survive in English poems, the treatise written by Fiore dei Liberi, the ‘Gladiatoria’ group of manuscripts and the ‘Nuremberg’ Group. Some, such as von Eyb’s fechtbuch, contain extracts from several traditions!

However, in order to avoid becoming too bogged down this document will stick to the earlier documents in the Lichtenauer tradition, as I believe that they provide a relatively clear, coherent and effective martial art between them. The main ones we’ll be working with are:

MS 3227a

Nicknamed the ‘Dobringer’ text, and implies that Lichtenauer was alive when it was composed. That said, the work survives in a much later ‘housebook’, a collection of interesting things copied out of personal interest. A translation of the text is available from http://www.ghfs.se/Texter/CodHS3227aD%C3%B6bringer/tabid/66/Default.aspx

Codex 44.A.8

Nicknamed the ‘von Danzig’ text, Codex 44.A.8 is a compilation of different fencing manuscripts in the Lichtenauer tradition, dating from 1452. It has two pictures at the beginning, one showing Lichtenauer in the traditional pose of a medieval craft-master, and the other depicting the four guards. It contains an anonymous gloss of Lichtenauer’s Zedel, that is repeated in near-contemporary and subsequent fechtbuchs, such as Cod.I.6.4°.3 (Codex Lew - 1450s) and MS M.I.29 (Codex Speyer - 1491). A translation of some of the text is available from http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Johannes_Liechtenauer

MS Dresden C 487

A fechtbuch containing a gloss of Lichtenauer’s markverse attributed to ‘Sigmund von Ein Ringeck’, dating to the early sixteenth century, but probably composed in the 1440s or ‘50s. A translation is available from http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Sigmund_von_Ein_Ringeck.

Glossary

This is a very list of technical vocabulary, with a brief explanation of what I think they mean. It isn’t exhaustive, and it isn’t final. I’ve also standardized the spellings in a pretty arbitrary way. You have been warned!

Underlined terms are fundamental, ish.

Guards: These are generally referred to by hut or leger, meaning guard, position, stance, etc. and implying safety.

Four Primary Guards*

The main positions in the Lichtenauer’s tradition, called the ‘Vier Leger’. All of these guards can be made with either foot forwards, and generally with the sword held on the same side of the body as the back foot:

Vom Tag - ‘From the Roof’. Several positions are described as being Vom Tag, ranging from the sword being on the shoulder to being held above the head. Comparable to Fiore’s Posta di Donna.
Ochs - ‘Ox’. A position in which the sword hangs with the point towards the opponent and the hilt held protecting the head. Comparable to Fiore’s Posta di Fenestre.
Alber - ‘Fool’. A position that seems to invite attack, with the sword held in from pointing to the floor.
Pflug - ‘Plough’. A position which the sword held at waist height, pointing towards the opponent.
Pictures of the Guards

The first four, taken from Codex 44.A.8, the ‘Peter von Danzig’ fechtbuch, dating from 1452. See http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/1452_-_Codex_Danzig_(Cod._44.A.8).

Secondary Guards

Other positions referred to in the early Lichtenauer tradition:

Kron - ‘Crown’. A position with the sword held high in front of the body, with the point not threatening the opponent. The cross is roughly turned parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the ‘center line’, the imaginary line between the two opponents. It is comparable to Fiore’s Posta Frontale/Corona Instabile.
Langenort - ‘Long Point’. A position with the sword extended and pointing towards the opponent, creating space between them and a threat. It is comparable to Fiore’s Posta Longa.**
Nebenhut - ‘Near Guard’. A position in which the sword is held close to the body, pointing away from the opponent.
Schranckhut - ‘Barrier Guard’. A position with the sword held in front of the body, pointing down to protect the side. Ringeck uses the transition between Schrankhut on the right and Schrankhut on the left to illustrate the mechanics of a Krumphau.
Pictures of the Guards

Some pictures of secondary guards, taken from Talhoffer’s Codex Icon 394a fechtbuch, dating from 1467. See http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Talhoffer.

Words for Injuring People:

General Cuts

These are the basic terms that are used to describe cuts:

Uberhau – used to describe a cut made downwards, and strongly favoured in the tradition. Comparable to Fiore’s colpi fendenti.
Unterhau – used to describe a cut made upwards.
Mittelhau – used to describe a horizontal cut made across the ‘middle’. Comparable to Fiore’s colpi mezani.

Master Cuts

These are a group of terms used to describe five ‘secret’, ‘hidden’ or ‘master’ cuts that are at the core of the Lichtenauer tradition. Four of the five are Verstzen, strikes which can be used to attack or disrupt one of the Vier Leger. All of them can be used to regain the initiative as single time counters to specific attacks (regain the Vor when done Indes).

Zornhau – ‘Wrathful Cut’. A strong downwards diagonal cut that can displace an opponent’s uberhau.
Krumphau - ‘Crooked Cut’. A cut somewhat perpendicular to the ‘center-line’, which from the right hand side is performed with crossed hands. It can be used to engage the opponent’s blade, or cut to their hands, and involves springing out to side. It can be used to attack or disrupt an opponent in one of the Vier Legen (versetzen), in this case ‘breaking’ an opponent in Ochs.
Zwerchau - ‘Athwart Cut’. A cut made roughly parallel to the ground with the hilt held high, using the short/false-edge when made from the right, and the long/true-edge when made from the left, and ending in a position similar to Ochs. It can be used as a versetzen, breaking Vom Tag by displacing cuts from above and cutting into the opening on the other side of their head. The Zwerchau uses the thumb under the blade in order to support it and give stability to the cut. When done from the right, it requires supination of the right forearm.
Schielhau - ‘Squinting Cut’. A vertical cut using the short/false-edge when made from the right, and the long/true-edge when made from the left, ending in a position similar to Pflug. It is one of the Vier Versetzen, breaking Pflug by displacing thrusts from below. Like the Zwerchau, the Schielhau uses the thumb underneath the blade.
Scheitelhau - ‘Parting Cut’. A vertical cut strike to the upper body of the opponent, made with the hands held high. It can be used to versetzen, breaking Alber through the principle of Uberlauffen.

Ways of Wounding

These are more general terms used for ways to injure people, and some specific technique names.

Drei Wunder – ‘Three Wounders’. Three basic ways of injuring an opponent, and a deliberate play on ‘Three Wonders’. They’re thrusting, slicing or striking, and each may be performed from each of the Acht Winden [Eight Windings].
Hewe or Hau – ‘Hew’, as in to strike or chop.
Stosse & Stich – ‘Thrust’ and ‘Stab’.
Snete & Schnitt – ‘Cut’ and ‘Slice’.
Drucken – ‘Press’, as in pressing the sword against the opponent.
Streiche – ‘Slash’ or ‘Strike’, which J. Norwood compares to Fiore’s colpi sottanni.

Techniques for Wounding

Well, this is sword fighting, so there are plenty of ways to injure someone...

Abschneiden – ‘Cutting off’. Slicing the opponent with the edge of the sword by placing the edge against the body of the opponent and then pushing or pulling the blade.
Absetzen - ‘Setting Aside’, deflecting a cut or thrust while at the same time keeping the point online to thrust into the opponent.
Ansetzen – ‘Setting Upon’, thrusting as a Nachreisen.
Versetzen - ‘’, strikes which can be used to attack or disrupt one of the Vier Leger.
Hende Trucken - ‘Hand Pressing’, slicing an opponent’s hands when they attack from above, and keeping pressure and winding against them.
Durchlaufen - ‘Running Through’, coming inside the normal reach of the opponent, normally to engage in grappling techniques.
Ringen Am Schwert - ‘Wrestling at the sword’.

Binding and Winding

Techniques and terminology for when the two combatants weapons and touching.

Binden - ‘Binding’. When the two longswords make contact in such a way that they stay together, for example when one Zornahau meets another.
Winden - ‘Winding’. Moving a weapon in the bind so as to affect the geometry and leverage in that moment, for exactly moving from Lang-ort to Ochs when a thrust is displaced.
Fulen - ‘Feeling’. The presence of the opponent’s sword in the bind, whether they are structurally supporting their blade or not, how much pressure they are transmitting through it and so on.
Sprechsfenster - ‘Speaking-window’. To me, the period in which it is possible to guage the Fulen of the opponents sword, all though it could refer to a specific technique in some contexts.
Duplieren - ‘Doubling’. Following up a displaced attack by moving your blade behind your opponent’s in the bind, if they displace hard. Done in the indes.
Mutieren - ‘Mutating’. Following up a displaced attack by winding your blade over the opponent’s to thrust to their hips, legs and abdomen, if they displace softly in the bind. Done in the indes.
Abnehmen - ‘Removing’ Taking your sword away from the opponent’s in the bind, presumably to put it back on the other side.
Durchwechseln - ‘Changing Through’. From the bind, taking your blade underneath the opponents to come up on the inside. Used against a hard displacement.
Zucken - ‘Twitching’. Pulling back your sword to thrust, usually to the other side of the opponent’s blade or to another opening. Compared to Durchwechseln, Zucken is used when the opponent’s blade is more vertical (like Kron) wheras Durchswechseln works better when his blade is more horizontal (like Langenort).

Concepts:

These are various ideas and technical terms used in the Lichtenauer tradition. I’ve tried to give a rough idea of what I understand them to mean, and I’ve divided them up by into arbitrary categories.

Distances and Timing

The Lichtenauer tradition didn’t have a modern understanding of mechanics, and instead worked in an Aristotelian framework for how objects interact.

Zufechten – ‘To the fighting’. The period when the two opponents are coming to close.
Krieg - ‘War’. The period when the two opponents have closed, when Winden and Ringen am Schwert happen.
Abzug – ‘Withdrawal’. The period when you get out of the fight.
Vor - ‘Before’. Both in the sense of acting before the opponent, and of having the initiative (which Lichtenauer strongly recommends.)
Indes - ‘In the moment’.
Nach - ‘After’. Both in the sense of acting after the opponent, and of having lost the initiative and so been forced to react to what they are doing.
Vorschlag - ‘First Strike’. The first attack, with which you enter from Zufechten to Krieg. It can be a very powerful blow, as in the zufechten it is safe to chamber the blow.
Nachschlag - ‘After Strike’. An attack made in the Nach. The attack that follows if the opponent counters the Vorschlag.
Nachreisen - ‘Traveling After’. Using timing to regain the initiative, attacking your opponent when he isn’t ready.
Uberlaufen – ‘Over running’. The principle that a higher attack out-reaches a lower attack, because of geometry.

TO DO:
Parts of the Sword
Hangen. Ringen am Schwert

Appendix:
Here’s an index of the terms used in the glossary, with references to where they’re used in the text.

Sources

‘An Index or Codex of word definitions’, HEMA Alliance Forum, http://hemaalliance.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=573
‘Secrets of the German Longsword’, Christian Tobler.

Footnotes (aka Pete's comments on the origional document):

*Fairly important point – they're “THE Four Guards” because they're best positions to approach in in the Zufechten – note the hands are all back out of snipining range, and theirs an obvious direct threat from out. The others are more for use in the Krieg (Kron, Einhorn, Langenort) or very much secondary choices (nebenhut, schrankhut) which seem to be favoured for melees.

**Note various points in manuals where you're told to shoot the point forwards from langenort – KdF's interpretation is not a full extension of hands and sword, but bent at the elbows for strength in the bind.

12/12/11 Lesson Plan

2011-12-12T10:55:00.002Z

No session last week, on account of a Carol Service in the space we use. We won a pub quiz instead. Go team!

Now, the plan for tonight's session is as follows.

20mins Meet, greet, warm-up, stretch. Ask Gazza if he wants to lead this?

15mins Everyone get as much kit as possible. Practice cuts 'dead', including:
10x Diagonal cuts down from the right shoulder
Diagonal cuts down from the left shoulder
Diagonal cuts up from both sides with the back edge.
Diagonal cuts up from both sides with the front edge.
(Possibly, depending on experience levels - Krumphaus from the dominant side, zwerchaus)

10mins Pair up. In super-slow motion, one person (the Agent) approaches the other (the Patient) from out of distance. The Agent goes for a strike or stab - trying to go slowly, if not telegraph. The Patient has lots of time to consider their options, footwork etc. and then make a cover or a counter.

5mins Now the Agent doesn't stop after one cut, but rather keeps on striking, using all the cuts we ran through earlier. Again, the Patient has time to sonsciously think about stance, feet, weight and blade engagement.

For both these steps, we're running at very low intensity. Winning isn't the point here. Don't rob your partner.

15 mins 'Flurry of blows'/Covering drill, part 1:
Start very well out of distance. Say, four metres apart or more.
both enter range, the Agent entering with a cut. The Agent continues to throw out cuts on different lines until they leave range again, so at least three cuts. Abzug and all that jazz.
The Patient parries/counters, and continues to try to not be cut. Countering with your point 'on-line' is optimal, but not if you try and achieve that at the expense of being struck with a gurt big sharp sword. This drill is designed to pressure test what was going on in the previous drill.
After the Agent has left the fight, reset to very-much-out-of-range and start again, swapping patient and agent.

10 mins 'Flurry of blows'/Covering drill, part 2:
As before. Except that now the Patient tries to get a counter-cut in as the Agent does the vorschlag, ie. a zwerchau, a zornhau, a schielhau. You get the idea.
BUT The Patiest also has to cover themselves from the incoming cuts. As before, they're trying not to get struck by a longsword here.

That's the main bit of drilling. After that, people are welcome to spar, and I'd like to do one-to-one work with lots of people. In no particular order:
Any first time attendees.
Jamie - Say, on introducing closing and grappling into longsword fights, if he's ready for that.
JP - Any questions, see how his fighting is getting along. Ask him to teach me something!
Dan - Any questions, see how his fighting is getting along.
Ben - ~~Catch up, any questions, see how his fighting is getting along.~~ Having spoken to him, give him positive mind-rays until he feels healthier.

Now, let's see how it goes.

Have a funky looking walrus by Albrecht 'I sketch fechtbuchs' Dürer...

Edit: Well, that went more or less to plan, more of less on time. An all-right turn out, given the weather, but a few faces missing. A couple of new ones too, who did great. Any feedback guys?

Oh, and there WILL be a session next Monday (the 19th).

How to do ‘not too bad’ in a sword fight: 2. How to cover yourself.

2011-12-03T00:27:00.000Z

How to do ‘not too bad’ in a sword fight: 2. How to cover yourself.

The last post in this series was looking at the earlier surviving evidence from the longsword fighting tradition associated with Liechtenauer, the Kunst des Fechtens. This post will do the same. However, where the last post was cherry-picking evidence about 'how to cut and thrust', this post will concern itself with 'how to cover yourself'. Simples? Then let's get on with it...

First up, let's start with good old MS 3227a. Now, the anonymous description of the fundamentals of combat, before the gloss itself, contains gems of wisdom such as:

'For in this righteous fencing do not make wide or ungainly parries or fence in large movements by which people restrict themselves.' - 14r

'Many Masters of play fighting say that they themselves have thought out a new art of fencing that they improve from day to day. But I would like to see one who could think up a fencing move or a strike which does not come from Liechtenauer’s art. Often they want to alter or give a new name to a technique, all out of their own heads and think up wide reaching fencing and parries and often make two or three strikes when one would be enough or stepping through and thrust, and for this they receive praise from the ignorant. With their bad parries and wide fencing they try to look dangerous with wide and long strikes that are slow and with these they perform strikes that miss and create openings in themselves.' - 14r-v

Now, I don't want to jump the gun here. But I think that it's reasonable to say that the anonymous author behind this seems to value covers with are tight; - from which it's possible to step through and stab someone in the face as easily as possible.

Another point which is emphasised in this 'fundamentals of combat' is that you should keep moving. This applies to covers too - it's not good to defend yourself and then stop and see what your opponent does next:

'When you fence with another, then in this you are well taught, and remain fast in movement, and do not tarry when he starts to fence with you.
Then make without limit and end that which is skillfull. Be quick and steady without faltering, at once so that he cannot strike. That is fortunate and he will be hurt, when he cannot strike away, as the other cannot part without being beaten. And after the teaching that is here described, I say truly, that the other cannot defend without danger. If you have understood this he will not come to strikes.' - 17v

Now, some people have interpreted this as saying that you should attack, attack and attack again. Personally, I don't think so. Instead, I believe that it is emphasising the importance of siezing the initiative in a fight, not hesitating and letting your opponent dictate how you act. In fact Hans Talhoffer (the anonymous blogger) has pointed out that it might mean that an opponent is dangerous when defending!

The other point it's worth making before we get onto the gloss is that the evidence so far supports 'Be Efficient' and 'Stab him in the face', even when making covers.

Moving onto the core Zedel, or Epitome of the art, and this Gloss, the subject of making covers first comes up in the section concerning the Zornhau:

'And also know that from two strikes alone come all other strikes that are possible to name: these are the upper strike and the lower strike from both sides. [Mike's note: That is to say rising and descending cuts, from the right and from the left hand sides. I tend to bastard-gerlish them as 'oberhau-s' and 'unterhau-s'.] These are the main strikes and form the foundation for all other strikes. They are in themselves basic and come from the point of the sword, which is the centre and core of all other pieces that is well described to you. And from these strikes come the four displacements from each side with which all strikes or thrusts are broken and also all guards, and from them you come into the four hangings and from these one can do fine art as you will hear later. No matter how you fence always aim the point at the opponent’s face or breast, then he will always have to worry that you will be faster since you will have a shorter way to go in to him than he has to you.' - 24v-r

Congradulations, we now have the hanging guards - Ochs and Pflug, on the left and the right hand sides. Now, where was that picture?

Picture? Singular? Why, I made a whole album of them!

Oh, and for the sake of completeness, that section carries on with:

'And if it happens that the opponent wins the first strike then you must be sure, precise and quick in the turning and as soon as you have turned in to him you shall move at once with speed and your point should always desire his breast and turn and seek its way there as you shall hear later on. And as soon as the opponent binds your sword then your point should not be more than half an ell [30-40cm] from the opponent’s breast or face. You shall be careful and note if you can get in behind and always go the nearest way and never too wide, so that the opponent does not come before you in case you hesitated and again find yourself to be left hanging or that you defended too weakly or defended too wide and with too much force.' - 24v

The next real mention of how to cover yourself (apart from using the hidden strikes), comes a fair bit later in the text:

'This is regarding the four displacements
There are four displacements that also hurt the guards seriously.[...]
Glossa. Note here that there are four displacements to both sides, to each side one above and one below. They break all guards, and no matter how you set aside a strike or thrust from above or from below, this can well be called a displacement. If he displaces you, then no matter how he does it, leave (his sword) and strike quickly at him. If it happens that you displace the opponent’s strike or thrust, then you should at once step in and follow at the sword so that he cannot move away from you. And if the other does the same when you are hanging again and gather yourself, then you will get hurt. You should also turn well and always aim your point at his breast so that he must consider this.' - 32v

In other words, you should displace the opponent's thrust or cut, keeping your own sword pointing at the other guy, and step into the incoming attack. Normally this involves adopting one of the hanging guards. From the 'Ringeck' gloss:

Or, from the 'Pseudo-Peter von Danzig' gloss:

Read those images. I won't bother to copy them out again.

Now, onto the other glosses to see what they have to say. We'll start with the 'Pseudo-Pete von Danzig' gloss since that tab is open. Folio references are to Codex 44.A.8:

'There are four hangings, the Ox above on both sides, these are the upper two hangings, and the plough below on both sides, these are the lower two hangings. From the four hangings you shall deploy eight windings, four from the Ox and four from the Plough, and you shall deploy these very eight windings, so consider and judge that you shall deploy the three wisdoms from every winding, that is one strike, one stab, and one slice.' - 37v

It then goes on to describe the various windings from each of the hanging guards.
The 'Ringeck' gloss, on the other hand, has this to add (folio references are to MS Dresden C 487):

'Mark, that which is called "After".
Mark, that if you cannot come in the "Before", wait for the "After". This will defeat all techniques that he does against you. When he comes at you so that you must defend yourself against him, so work deftly "in the Instant" with your defence against his nearest opening, so strike him before he can finish his technique. Thus you win the "Before" and he is left in the "After". You shall also know how you can use "the Instant" against his "weak" and "strong" parts of the sword.' 15v-16r

'These are the four displacements, which obstruct or break the four guards.
The displacements are four,
that also greatly trouble the four guards.
Beware, for to defend,
it becomes very difficult for you. [...]
And beware of all displacements, when they are used by poor fencers. When he cuts, strike also, and when he thrusts, you thrust too. And how you shall strike and thrust, that you will find described for the five cuts and in this section.' 34v-35r

Now, in conclusion it's probably worth spelling out that the sources I've quoted and used reflect how the author(s) imagine their art, their Kunst des Fechtens, rather than 'common fencing'. But then again it's better to have lost the initiative with a wild parry than to have been struck by a sword...

28/11/11 Lesson Plan

2011-11-29T10:44:00.000Z

Tonights plan is either to cover Absetzen and then possibly Shielhau, or to cover my interpretation of the Krumphau, depending on what people fancy when I get there. I'll type it up with drills etc. after.

And a quick note - there won't be a session next Monday because the space will be in use for more Church-y things. I'll send out an email and mention it in class.

Edit:
No-one had a camera, so no footage was taken.
The turn out was quite good - the limit of what the other end of the church can support, I think. And we were missing a couple of regulars for some reason. Ben was back though after life getting in the way, which was nice even if I didn't get a chance to sword-fight him.

The first thing we did was to introduce absetzen - in this case displacing an incoming thrust while keeping your point online. It also brought up the question of when to displace into Pflug and when to displace into Ochs. After drilling that for a bit, introduced that it could also be used to defend against an incoming cut. Kind of like
this video. But without the steel, skill or soundtrack. I tried to tie it all in together with a drill - both people start in the bind and vie for a stab to the head. Lots of doubles were had by all, and this was one of those drills where I really began to take a dislike to the synthetic training swords. I'm not a 'steel fetishist', but steel is just better at giving feeling in the bind and a combination of different generations of Rawlings synthetics didn't help. That said, the newer guys seemed to get this quite quickly - Jamie in particular impressed me. We both arrived at HEMA from a fencing background, and I couldn't help but find it funny that he was able to pick up on complicated aspects of the bind when he's still struggling with the idea of a passing step.

After that, I introduced the shielhau as a hidden strike, being a cut and an absetzen at the same time. We were mainly focussed on cutting so that the hands ended up in plfug, rather than extended right out or into an ochs like position. After all, this was some people's second lesson and I didn't want to confuse things too much. This exchange is an example of a more extended shielhau.

Finally, I introduced my interpretation of the krumphau, as much because people asked for it as anything else. It is, I think, a bog standard and uninteresting interpretation and we only did introductory drilling as we were running out of time.

During the 'free-play' period at the end I fenced Andy, which was as enjoyable as every and led to a discussion about drawing your sword, the 'Universal' parry, high-percentage techniques as opposed to elaborate systems and all that jazz. I then worked with Tom on trying to improve his footwork, working on having a more balanced stance with bent legs and taking fewer, smaller steps while keeping his weight centred and not slipping into a sideways-on 'Olympic Fencing' stance. Which made me feel a liiiitle bit like a hypocrite since that's where I tend to stumble.

It does occur to me that I really ought to do some more one-to-one stuff with guys like Ben, JP and Dan who have enough experience and a great attitude, so I've mostly been allowing them to wonder off, do their own thing and help others.

JP was also talking about, at some hypothetical point in the future, finding other people in Plymouth who might be interested in this kind of thing. Awesome.

As I said before, there's no class next week. I need to send out an email for that, since some of us were discussing taking part in the dreaded Monday Night Firehouse Pub Quiz.

And now, because you managed to survive this far, have a silly picture:

How to do 'not too bad' in a sword fight: 1. How to cut and thrust.

2011-11-25T11:55:00.000Z

[Well, no real feedback from Monday's session. I ran the Scott Brown drill I had had planned for last week, and I think people were able to do it. Hopefully they also got something out of it. I'm out of town this weekend, so here's something else.]

Now, this post follows on from the introduction. Essentially it's a brief analysis of what the early sources of Liechtenauer's Kunst des Fechten have to say about how to cut and how to thrust. Now, I personally think that these things are taught best face-to-face - better still interspersed with test-cutting. This fits with the advice given in the documentary evidence. However, that's a tangential topic. Let's get on with it.

Firsty up we have MS 3227a, an anonymous collection of anonymous works. It’s normally dated to 1389, but that’s a bit iffy given that the date given for MS 3227a is based on circumstantial evidence such as a calendar copied into the same book, and the lack of a prayer for the dead when referring to Liechtenauer. The author begins their introduction to the Kunst des Fechtens by going into quite some depth on the subject of how to strike (with a side-rant on the subject of flashy fencers). Now, this text is pretty easy to read and common-sense-ical in its explanations, apart from some technical points to do with Aristotelian philosophy and the KdF. I began copying out the relevant sections, but truth be told it’s all bloody relevant. Go, now, to wiktenauer and read the ‘Anonymous treatise on the fundamentals of combat’ section. It’s 1,500 words of pure gold, and that's nothing major. Read it now. NOW. It's why Peter comes up with things like ‘Rule 1: Be efficient, and Rule 2: Stab him in the face.’

Look at the re-capitulations too, while you’re at it. The advice is to be confident, go for the first cut at your opponent’s head and body to seize the initiative and be ready to keep moving - so don’t overcommit! Do not freeze up, keep on looking for an opening and use the feel of the bind, for example saying:
‘Hence Liechtenauer said: "Do not hit at the sword always the aim to openings hold. At the head or the body, so that harm stays away. If you hit or fail, seek to aim at the openings. In all lore turn your point keen in his face. And who makes big movements, will be humiliated. At the very nearest bring hits and thrusts properly. And hurry, that the other will not be the first to arrive. So you may stand against a good fighter.’ - 65r
However, here are some other specific points from the gloss of the unarmoured fencing epitome:

‘Do not strike at the sword but wait for the openings.’ - 18r

‘Also when you want to fence strongly, then fence from the left side with the whole body and with full force to the head and to the body wherever you can hit – and never to his sword, but as if he (the opponent) does not have a sword or as if you cannot see.’ - 19v
‘He (Liechtenauer) also means that you should not step straight in with the blows, but from the side at an angle so that you come in from the side where you can reach him easier than from the front.’ - 19v

CGM 1507, a book from 1470 by Paulus Kal, contains illustrations of Liechtenauer’s unarmoured epitome.
‘The Wrath strike [Zornhau] threatens with the point.’ - 59r

The guy in pink has cut into a bind. Notice how he has ended up right foot forwards, his point threatenning the other guy, his hilt in line with his fore-arms and his arms not fully extended.

Mscr. Dresd. C 487 contains a copy of ‘Ringeck’s gloss’ of Liechtenauer’s epitome, the full explanation of which is available on wiktenauer (http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Ringeck). The beginning of the gloss repeats similar themes - step with the cut. Because after all:

‘If you cut with an Oberhau from the right side, follow after the cut with your right foot. If you do not do this then the cut is poor and insincere, because your right side lingers behind. Then the cut becomes too short and cannot follow the correct arc down towards the other side, in front of the left foot. [...] In this manner you can perform all of your techniques correctly and with strength. And in the same way should all the other cuts be performed.’ - 13v-13r

‘It also repeats the theme to attack the other person with confidence, and to strike at their head and body and be ready to follow up the attack if it ends in the bind, for example saying:

'All fencers who are hesitant and wait for the incoming attack, and do nothing other than to ward it away, they gain very little joy from this sort of practice because they are often beaten. Always fight with the strength of the whole body! Cut close into him, to the head and to the body, so he cannot change-through in front of your point. And when the cut ends up in the bind you shall not hesitate but shall quickly and fluently make attacks against the nearest opening, using the five strikes and other techniques that will be described later.’ - 13r-14r

Equally, the author also advises you to begin the exchange with a cut from your dominant side, for example from the right if you’re right handed, saying:

‘When you come against him in Zufechten, if you are right-handed and want to strike him, you must not throw your first cut from your left side. That is because this is weak and cannot bring strength to bear if he binds the strong of his blade against you. Therefore, cut from your right side, so you can be strong and skillful in the bind and can do as you will.’ - 14r-14v

Finally, we also have the 'von Danzig' gloss. It first appears in Codex 44.A.8 from 1452, but a translation is most easily available from MS German Quarto 2020, the 'Goliath' manuscript from 1510-20. My folio references will refer to Codex 44.A.88, but the translation will be from Goliath. Don't blame me, this is how wiktenauer is laid out!

Much of the same advice is repeated again, but so instead of regurgitating it let's have a look at other ways in which the advice is presented. The glossa for the zornhau states that:

'Glosa The Wrath Strike counters all high strikes with the point. And it is indeed nothing other than a bad [or simple and straightforward] peasant strike. Deploy it thus: when you come to him in the pre-fencing: if he strikes to you from his right side high to the head, then to this also strike from high on your right (note in margin: in the weak on the sword) wrathfully displacing with him on his sword, if he is then weak on the sword, then aim to shoot ahead with the point and stab to his face, or attack the chest between the arms.' - ff. 13r-v

In other words, a simple cut is from the right side to the head, at an oppening (the opponent's right shoulder), yet on this occasion simultaneously displacing his incoming cut. From the bind there's also enough room to extend into a thrust. Generally speaking though the advice when it comes to thrusting is to 'drive out' into it, or 'shoot' with a stab. Without adding too much personal interpretation, there's not that much more to say that won't be covered under 'how to cover yourself'.

It's worth noting that here I've picked the sections which illuminate the mechanics of simple cuts here. There are plenty of other sections that I could have chosen, and indeed I tried to ignore the 'hidden' strikes which have different cutting mechanics.

How to do ‘not too bad’ in a sword fight: Introduction

2011-11-19T14:00:00.000Z

An alternative approach to Liechtenauer’s Kunst des Fechtens

Well, our usual training schedule is up in the air a bit, so beyond arranging informal meet-ups, sprinting up hills and getting into some kind of exercise routine, I guess I'll just have to geek out about sword fighting. M'kay?
This post has its roots in the KdF Roadmap that Pete wrote, and also in something that Chris Walters said over on the HEMA Alliance forums. The idea behind it is that the sources we look at are not manuals. Rather they’re mnemonics, easy to remember poems from a dead oral culture. Or they’re glosses and illustrations, explanations of jargon from a highly technical area of carefully preserved yet hidden knowledge. Or they're artist's sketches. Or they might be attempts to preserve a dying art. It’s difficult, we have to look at the intent behind the documents - they’re not Longsword 101 for complete newbies who have modern training equipment and intentions. We can’t just look at the pretty pictures and take guesses. Or for that matter study techniques in isolation and expect to be able to sword fight.
N.B. There's a counter-argument to all this along the lines of 'But Meyer's printed work is a Longsword 101! Why not just study Meyer?' My answer to which is that I find Meyer really cool, and want to learn more about the fencing system he presents. But I don't think that it's the same art as, for example, Paulus Kal practised in the 1450s.

Yet at the same time, there’s something that I’m going to call The HEMA Hypothesis - basically that the dead dudes knew their stuff. It might be expressed as ‘a fight that simulates historical context will have historical fighting work’ and conversely ‘If, in your simulation of a historical fight, the evidenced methods of fighting don’t work, then it’s because of a fault in your simulation. Not because of a problem in the methods.’ Or it might be expressed as something like ‘In order to learn what are the effective mechanics of interpersonal violence in a particular context, it might be worth paying attention to the opinions of those who would be in a position to know.’ I don't think I'm stepping over the line by saying that that’s a pretty core assumption or belief for most people who train HEMA.

Because of those two points there is space for works that attempt to lay out the contents of the primary sources in a more easily digestible, 'how-to' manner. There are plenty of examples - just look at the texts from the Freelance Academy Press, Chivalry Bookshelf or Paladin Press. Very few of them actually present uninterpreted(ish) primary sources and translations. Rather lots of them are presentations of some dude’s interpretations. Nothing wrong with that - that’s what an awful lot of this blog is. Fair enough - it’s only within the last few years that the sources have become widely available, or available at all without huge personal expense, thanks to resources like wiktenauer. They've been invaluable.

But any way. At the moment I believe that there is a very small gap in the market here - for a freely available copy of what the dead dudes say about fighting in their times. True we already have one, one called wiktenauer. But if we take the resources up on wiktenauer as the sources presented raw (or al-dente) at one end of the spectrum, and a work like John Clement's Medieval Swordfighting as the evidence pre-digested, then this would just be a little bit chewed. The evidence laid out as ‘this is how you sword fight better.’

Which is what this series of posts is going to be. Of course, it’s not going to be a substitute for training. Or for training with people who know their stuff. It also won’t last for ever - in time there will be better resources, better organised ones, and more freely available images and translations. But hey. That’s progress. And progress is inherently good, right?

But, back to that balancing act between interpretation and presenting the evidence. This isn’t going to just be a system that I’ve made up (though you could make an argument that we each have our own individual understandings of how sword fights work, but that's straying into naval gazing. Which we don't have time for...) As Pete laid out in his Kunst des Fechten Road Map, he outlines what he thinks are the three most important things
to know before engaging in sparring, so that you're not just getting beaten up for no reason:

How to cut and thrust.
How to cover yourself.
How to control the bind.

I think that's pretty reasonable. It's not an exhaustive list, but they're all pretty key areas in a sword fight. In fact, I'm going to steal it and use it as the structure for three upcoming posts. In a perfect world I'd have the time to train and communicate these things on a one to one basis with each guy in the group, but we simply don't have the resources right now.

Instead, this 'Alternative Approach' will be looking at the documentary evidence and using it to justify what I do teach. The sources tend to focus on techniques, rather than on basics such as ‘This is how you should hold a sword’ or ‘This is the body structure you should have behind Pflug’. It makes sense - when you’re laying out a system, they've spelt out the structure of it, and then specifics for specific situations. I guess instruction on things like approaches in a bout or how to cut well would have been done informally.

There’s also relatively little out there about ‘common fencing’; presumably fighters would either already have some fighting experience, or some basic actions would have been built up in training and the authors thought that it wasn’t worth wasting words on.

Finally, I’ll be focusing on sources from Liechtenauer’s KdF rather than different systems like the 'Fiore school' or the English sources. The reason for this is that I'm not terribly confident at interpreting them, indeed if I look at Fiore, I understand its plays as displaying KdF principles now - one might show a ‘Hangen and Schnappen’, or another something like a zorn-ort. If I was using those sources as examples, I’d be conveying my interpretation of them without being that confident that I was doing them justice. Moreover, I would then be converting that into a package that I think the Liechtenauer guys in my group can learn from. Publicly. No thanks. Some day I'm going to drink a lot of coffee, map out all the conceptual stuff and all the technique-decision-trees I can think of, and copy and paste all the relevant bits of all the documentary evidence to support it. That'd be 'my' KdF. But you know what? Life's too short.

These posts will hopefully be coming up over the next few weeks, depending on how much of a pain real life decides to be.

Finally, because this post is a very long wall of text:

No training today.

2011-11-14T23:07:00.001Z

Well, due to circumstances beyond my control there was no IDC session this week - it seems that the space we normally used is literally falling apart. Looks like we may have to look at alternative venues (which was something that we were thinking about anyway...)

Hopefully some people might be up for meeting up in the park this weekend regardless.

A Not-So-Universal-Parry?

2011-11-12T01:38:00.001Z

Gregory Mele has a rather interesting article over at the Freelance Academy Press blog, called The Truly Universal Parry. Give it a read. What's a shame is that the article doesn't go into much detail about why the technique works - how it functions on a mechanical level. It doesn't explain why changing from holding a single-handed sword as-if-it-was-in-its-scabbard to high-on-the-right-with-the-point-extended is structurally strong and a powerful movement, or how stepping allows you to generate more force and stepping off-line changes the nature of the parry. There's also a mechanical difference between it used as a hanging-guard with the point out to the left, as shown in this Talhoffer .gif, and it ending with the point directed at the opponent, as shown in the Fiore .gif.
N.B. The .gifs are pretty massive (about 5-7MB). It may be worth right-clicking on them and opening them alone in a new tab.

An animated .gif of the play from Talhoffer. The parry is made as a hanging cover under the incoming cut - elsewhere it is shown as a displacement up followed by a stab down the centre-line.

A Fiore play, cobbled together haphazardly from Flos duellatorum: Il Fior di battaglia di maestro Fiore dei Liberi da Premariacco by Francesco Novati - a critical edition of Fiore's Flos Duellatorum, Pisani-Dossi MS, Private Collection, Italy, 10 February 1409

Bonus points for why the same parry isn't as prevalent in weapons that require two hands. The equivalent cut in Lichtenauer longsword would be an unterhau from Nebenhut-on-the-left-hand-side to crossed wrists in Ochs-on-the-right-hand-side, using the true edge.

The chap in the bottom-right is in something like I imagine nebenhut-on-the-left-hand-side to be. Mittelalterliche Hausbuch von Schloss Wolfegg, after 1480, f. 3r; 'Introduction miniature "jugglers and acrobats" (figures in some cases worked by the "people-Four" from the "Great card game of the Master ES of 1463)'. Wikipedia it.

On the other hand a cut up with the false edge from Wechsel into something like Kron or Langort is very strong.

Said cut, cobbled together from Hans Talhoffer's BSB Cod.icon.394a, f. 2v and 6r.

I have my own explanations or theories as to how it functions, but I'd be interested in hearing other, more experienced peoples'. Who knows, if I have enough time I might write out my own.

Flowing/Cutting/Footwork Drill Theft.

2011-11-11T23:46:00.001Z

Scott Brown is a guy who does HEMA. He seems to like flow drills, geeky references and coffee in the morning. You can find his youtube channel here, or you can stalk him yourself.
At FightCamp he did a class this year in which he presented a drill. Initially, I felt that it was very confusing and 'dead' drill. Now though, I feel that it may be useful in order to help get people used to changing footwork. The drill also has a lovely mathematical elegance, and that kind of stuff is important in sword fighting. Just ask the Spanish rapier guys.

Pete summed up the drill as follows:

1 is cutting from your right, down to the left. 2 is cutting from your left, down and to the right. When you cut line 1, you step with the right foot, whether passing or shuffling. When you cut 2, you step with the left foot. You parry into the guard with the sword-side foot to the rear.
To explain - start with parrying with Pflug on the inside. You start with your left feet forwards. You're gonna start. So cut 1, with a passing step forwards. He parries with a left Pflug, so needs to pass backwards. Then he cuts a 2, so needs to pass forwards again, while you pass backwards. Then you cut a 2, but you've now got a left foot forwards, so it's a shuffle for you and him. etc You need to do 12211221 to reset to starting positions.
Repeat with inside Ochs blocks, and then outside Ochs (hanging stylee) and outside Pflug.

Also:

This may or may not have something to do with Monday's class.

Yes, this is somewhat at odds with the 'drill with intent/aliveness' line I've been going on about. Meh.

07/11/11 Lesson Plan - Now with video and added feedback.

2011-11-07T17:07:00.002Z

Well, last week's lesson wasn't great - I was tired and unclear, the drills didn't play out well enough and there were the usual kit issues. Today's plan is nice and laid back - partly in response, partly because I may be running late.
Plan is to run a pair of drills, and then go straight into coached and cornered sparring. If anyone wants to do any one-on-one work, I'll be more than happy to.

The drills are:

Start out of distance. The aggressor enters in Vom Tag and makes an attack with intent from that guard. The defender can respond however they want. Swap roles. Swap partners.
The second drill is very similar - the pair start out of distance, with the aggressor in Vom Tag. However, as he closes to enter he transfers to a different guard - could be one of the main four, such as Alber or Pflug, or it could be one of the more marginal guards. In either case, the defender still has the same job - recognise the threat, respond to it, repeat.

Also, don't do this please:

Well, when I say 'however they want', this wasn't what I had in mind...

See you all in a few hours...

Edit:
How'd it go down? Middle I guess. Low turnout (partly because of the holiday weekend, partly because of illnesses). We were off to a slow start, and again there was the usual swapping around of kit to be able to drill. A rather nasty smack someone received in the first few minutes also blew the wind out of the sails of the drill.
On the other hand, the free-play went quite well. I spent a lot of time working with Tom to try and encourage him to develop his fencing and not just rely on a few techniques, his build and our unwillingness to hit him really hard. By the end of it his footwork had improved a lot, he was experimenting with bind-work and it was all pretty encouraging. Hopefully we can build on that.
Ant also surprised me with how his bind-work has come along. Hopefully his feet will get with the program and he can start kicking my arse soon!
JP bought along a camera, so hopefully there'll be plenty of footage soon.

I'll also try and organise a play in the park this weekend if the weather is any good.

Edit 2:
JP's put up some of the footage from Monday night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5eRRO2CyvA - Ant and I are sparring in this one. As I said above, your bind-work has come along nicely. None the less though, I get the impression that you're not always using the guards other than Vom Tag very effectively out of the bind - there's a section from about 1m44s where it really shows (although I'm impressed by how quickly your feet recover when you realise you're in a grappling situation, although you haven't done very much of it). At this point I think we should probably work on your fencing before we get to the bind - transitioning between guards, hunting for openings and having the footwork in place to support your cuts and closes into distance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dWeNKxTbz4 - JP and I are sparring in this one. Looking at your Vom Tag, your hands are wandering forward to the point where they become easy targets (although I don't go for them in the video), and your head is crouched forward as well, meaning that your cuts are very strong, but don't have the range (or don't have the structure to support them when the cuts are more extended.) I also feel that you're passively waiting for opportunities and openings to arrive in this exchange/spar/assault/whatever, rather than moving around, transitioning between guards and trying to create them. A lot of the time you're not stepping to support your cuts/work the angles, instead fencing linearly. Although looking at the end of the video your footwork is a lot better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H4kf4TLCSU - Tom and Jakob are sparring in this one. I think/hope this video was taken before we had the one-on-one training session. A lot of the things that we talked about are evident in it, from the 'pawing the ground' tell at 12s in, to making big swings with all your weight on a straight front leg, like at 16s. You're also swinging at Jakob's sword a lot of the time, rather than trying to hit him, and ending up getting really heavy blows to the side after your opponent gets bored of the clackety-clack game. As I spelt out on Monday - you can get away with it in a friendly sparring situation at the risk of upsetting the other guy who is hoping to learn something, but in a tournament or competitive environment you'll get muller-riced if you try and fence like that. Relying on physical intimidation in free-play has also meant that your fencing hasn't progressed much - you've shown me that you can use the bind, displace and all that kind of stuff, but it's not showing up in sparring. Hell, if we skip back to March then back then your free-play was better, if anything - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ehgzhgvDXg . I think you need to ask yourself if you're happy to sit comfortably on the plateau you've reached, or if you want to become better at fighting with a longsword. If you do, then I'll do everything possible to help and support you in that ;)

Any other feedback, comments, criticisms etc. from the rest of the internet?

31/10/11 Lesson Plan. Zwerching 201: The Binds That Tie

2011-10-31T15:04:00.002Z

Well, today's a bit busy, so cheers to Pete for giving me a hand preparing this lesson plan.

Well, let’s admit this a sequel to 10/10/11 Lesson then.

Basically, we’re going to let the decision tree branch into three - is he weak in the bind, too strong (and therefore pushing offline), or strong and online? Then we’re going to have two or three related options for each. Against weakness, we push our Ochs through and attack his face. If he’s too strong, we attack cutting to the right side of his head in the other direction before he can recover to a threat. If he’s strong and online, we have to push him offline by abandoning our point’s threat and going to a very hanging cover. It’s the top half of http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ySjPcJVl9qc/TpLlbr8xcvI/AAAAAAAAAEI/fmYTK9k2-OA/s1600/ZwerchauonepartonAbnehmenstrikestheotheronotheractionsfromdisplacement.png

First 30 Minutes: Warm Up and Faffing: Let’s call this half an hour to be ready to introduce new technique. I’d suggest throwing some winding and both Zornhaus and Zwerches (or at least compact oberhaus) into the warm up. In fact, make sure they’re in there.

10 Minutes: Best Case Scenario: He’s not strong enough, because I’m awesome.

We’re going to run all this as one guy in Ochs, his partner in Kron/Langenort. I don’t even care which order they do it in. Agent Zorns, Patient counters Indes with a Zwerch is canonical, but it could be Agent thrusts to Ochs, Patient displaces from Pflug on one side to a forward-angled Kron on the other to cover himself.

In this case, the guy in Ochs is going to take control of the bind, by raising his point to collect the opponent’s weak on his strong, or otherwise as works at the time. The point is to get his point in the other guys face. Cover three options - stabbing him in the face or a high opening, stabbing past his face and then cutting his throat, or the slightly complicated play of turning the sword along the long axis once the tip is past his face so the edge bound switches, then using the short edge against his neck and your right foot behind his left to shove him over. Look at Tobler for the general idea - Secrets pp.54-55.

10 Minutes: Still Not Bad: He’s trying too hard in the bind, and therefore sucks at sword fighting.

Assume the guy not in Ochs tries to push the sword away, not threatening you. For a moment, you can abandon your impregnable Ochs fortress and do whatever you want. Firstly, you can wind to right Ochs behind his sword, almost coincidentally cutting him with a dupliered Zwerchaw. How humiliating. Secondly, and less extremely, you can just cut into Langenort at his face, which is less dramatic but offers better cover if he wasn’t pushing too too much offline. Option three is taking off to Zwerch to the other side.

10 Minutes: He Can Fight?!?: Your opponent has attended SwordFighting 101 at his local community college, and has both a strong structure in the bind and an online pressure that’s threatening to come over/through your Ochs and do bad things with the stabby end of his sword.

So we’re going to be cunning. Rather than fight back with all the high pressure we can, and turn into a Hollywood (or “When Peter Fights Batfink”) bind we can chat past, we’re going to deflect his pressure and do something unexpected. These techniques sacrifice our threat from the point, so you’ve gotta hope they work fast.

Firstly, we can use our crossguard to collect his blade and shove it harmlessly to the right as we drop to a hanging guard, the point aimed down and to the right. Make it an active shove, so he can’t cut us with online force, as often happens if people misjudge a more passive handing guard deflection. From here, we can come off and strike to his right hand side (from our left...) with a Zwerch or Zornhau. We can bring our hilt over his hand to secure them while controlling his right elbow with out left hand, and then throw him with a step of our left foot in front of his right, or we can just come under our hanging cover and grapple. Verkehrer und Durchlauffen! What a wonderful phrase! Verkehrer und Durchlauffen! It’s just a transitory phase...

Finally, I’d suggest starting to integrate all this with a restricted sparring set, similar to the one in the last Zwerchau lesson. I’d suggest Agent Zorns, Patient Zwerches, swapping roles after each exchange.

Note to self AND FREE-PLAY VIDEO!

2011-10-25T17:37:00.001+01:00

Michael Chidester makes some good points over in this HEMA Alliance thread that tie into the SG forum's questions about Liechtenauer's systems as opposed to others.

Last night went well - I had some really enjoyable sparring with everyone. Hopefully there'll be some video of it soon to analyse.

Edit:
The videos have started coming in. I'm on a reeeaaally slow connection here, but here's Mark and I sparring:

More to come in time.

Edit Edit:

I haven't had time to knit-pick it all, but I might get around to it tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be getting some more footage on Monday.

24/10/11 Plan

2011-10-23T19:39:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow night is IDC night, and as I mentioned before it'll also be Johann's last night. My plan is therefore to run a warm up and stretch like normal, and then let people spar him. I'd quite like to take a back seat for a class, although I'll be up for it if people want to ask questions or do some one on one training. I've also got a lesson plan for the Schilhau if people are up for it, but that can always be left a week.

Also, Jakob was interested in getting some Hanwei practical rapiers. I would certainly be up for having a play with them, and have a fencing jacket, and I'm sure Ben feels the same. Anyone else?

Apart from that, I'm all right. Been thinking a bit about the best way of interpreting the earlier KDF's intentions (ie. who was the intended audience, how does this relate to how we train and what we train for?), but I haven't reached any kind of conclusion yet - damn SG threads, bringing up complicated issues...

Tom's mask rocks.

18/10/11 Training

2011-10-18T00:07:00.001+01:00

So, I spent today doing someone-else's-home-improvement rather than planning a lesson. Blame the economy.

You know that drill? Where one person does a vertical cut, and the other displaces/parries/deals with it by adopting a hanging guard on the opposite side, and then mirrors the movement? Like Fiore's 'Villian's Blow' or whatever? The dead as hell one?

I ran that. As an excuse to get people thinking about tempo, to introduce some entering into ~~crappling~~ grappling, to introduce hangen and schnappen, to play around with Zwerchaus. That kind of stuff.

I also introduced the Schilhau as another type of displacing cut. So, lots of introducing and a fair bit of dead drilling, we can work on this.

Next week is Johann's leaving beating though, so perhaps not then.

G'night

10/10/11 Zwerchau again Lesson Plan

2011-10-10T14:07:00.000+01:00

So, I think that last week's lesson went quite well, but this week people might still be a little bruised and battered from Saturday. So, we'll crack on with the task at hand - practising and integrating what we've already learnt, drip-feeding in more concepts and techniques, and generally getting better at this whole sword fighting thing. Generally speaking, we're going to be working with the same kind of drill as last week, but this time focusing on the Zwerchau, the dastardly displacing crooked cut into Ochs.

This is a Zwerchau. From MS Germ.Quart.2020 , folio 22r

Want more notes on it from the surviving documentary evidence? Go read this post.

10mins of faffing about. - As with last week's plan, I’m resigned to the idea that there’ll be a period at the beginning of every session sorting out kit, getting water, meeting and greeting and all that stuff.

15mins warm up and stretch. A good ten minute warm up of jogging, sprinting, lunges, walking like Doctor Zoidberg, wrestling steps and so on, depending on my mood. If people are feeling lazy or low on energy, then we're going to warm up harder. What would them Svedes do? Five minutes of stretching after, introducing what we’re going to do this class.

5 mins of everyone going for water and kit. Exactly what it says on the tin. They'll need a sword like object and at least a mask between two, but preferably a mask each.

5-10 mins. Begin the drill. 'Who here knows what a Zwerchau is, and feels that they can comfortably do one?'. Use this to divide the class into experienced and inexperienced people, so we can partner them up against each-other, at least to begin with. Then divide the class so each pair is across the hall. At this stage (side A) just walks up to them and without breaking pace cuts a zornhau and then recovers into Ochs on the left hand side from Langort. Then they reset. After a few tries, swap sides. This is to get people into a sword-y mood, and get them thinking about cutting and recovering. I can wonder around and observe.

5-10mins. Next step. Keeping the same partners, they now thrust up from Pflug, stab their partner in the face or chest, and then recover into Ochs. Simples. Swap sides and so on.

At this stage, if anyone has any questions about structure or footwork or hand positions or wrist positions, I should be addressing them. Ask about it.
5-10 mins. Still sticking with the same partners. Side B, that is to say our previous crash dummies, now walk up and try and deliver a Zornhau to Side A. Side A responds with a thrust from Pflug into Ochs (and their face). Oh look, some kind of displacing going on. Swap sides and so on.

10-15mins. The final bit in this stage of the drill. Side B flounces up with a Zornhau, being as confident as they were in the beginning. Side A is in Vom Tag, and they respond by doing exactly what they did before - thrusting into Ochs, displacing and simultaneously killing. Congradulations, you can has a hidden strike. Swap ends. Then swap partners by rotating around clockwise 1d10 steps. Make sure that everyone can do it comfortably, by having them zwerchau me.

If by this stage everyone can do a Zwechau in isolation then HURRAH! LESSON GOAL ACHIEVED!

By this stage we might be as far as half-way through the available time. Now, there's a whole bloody bucketful of potential plays and directions that we can take from here, just as we did last week. Don't believe me? Somewhere I have a bunch of sketched out decision trees. Here's one of some plays from Ringeck (IIRC):

One day we'll all understand this. One day I'll be able to do it under pressure.

Instead of worrying about all that we can take baby steps depending on the mood and how we feel If people are really up for learning more conceptual/technique stuff, read this next section here. Otherwise, skip ahead to the next bit of italicised text.
Here are some options from the point of view of the zwerchauer. That's a word I just made up. Liechtenauer was a zwerchauer. Anyway:

If the zwerchau lands with a cut, protecting yourself, congratulations, you win.
If the zornhau lands with its cut, congradu-well-done, you lose.

Now, they're the two basic conditions, however there's a whole bunch of stuff which could happen in between, like

The zwerchau succeeded in covering you, but it came up short and you ended up with the point on-line with his throat, but not there yet.

Well, there's an obvious solution. Step forwards, stay covered, stab him in the throat. Kind of like a zorn-ort under the same conditions. Hell, there might be a system here somewhere.
But what, about this situation?

The zwerchau succeeded in covering you, but the other guy is putting in lots of pressure and trying to push my point off-line. I won't be able to just stab him in the throat.

Well, you've got two options here, depending on how much pressure he's putting in. This is where that whole being able to read the bind thing comes in. For example you can release the pressure and be soft where he is being strong, by leaving the bind and re-engaging, for example with any of the plays we did last week to cover this situation. Abnehmen, Durchwechseln and Zucken - to use the jargon. Hell, there might be a system here somewhere.
Otherwise though, otherwise you could do a duplieren. What's a duplieren? It's a technique which releases the pressure in the bind to attack behind their blade. It's kind of awesome when it works. We covered it back in... February.

At this point, this isn't really a class plan, just a bunch of reminders saying 'You've got the beginning of a drill, you know what to do from here Mike, go run with it on the spot.'

Want more plays from it? Go watch:

Because all this stuff is really not the point. It's giving you options from the position depending on the pressures of the fight. It's not integrating the Zwerchau into people's plays. It's not a gradient between drills and sparring. It's me indulging sword-fighting-geekiness. Instead:

10-15mins. Swap partners by rotating a position clockwise. Now, mix it up, make it less dead. Either person can enter with an attack, so for example Side A can enter with a Zornhau, while Side B could enter with a Zwerchau.

10-15mins. Swap partners by rotating a position clockwise. Now, mix it up, make it less dead. Either person can either zornhau or zwerchau, no set defenders.

5 mins. End of session thanks, question and answer etc. Let people who want to spar spar.

How'd it go?
All right, ish. To be honest, I was running out of steam at the beginning of the session and absences meant that to begin with the drills were dead and un-useful. We did manage to have everyone doing Zwerchaus in isolation by the end of the class though; and I was impressed by how Dan was doing after a quick one-to-one session working on getting comfortable with Ochs.
For me though the highlight was playing with single-handers against Andy and Jakob. Now, I know nothing about rapier, sidesword or sabre combat. They're just bloody fun to play with. Unfortunately Matt took some footage, so I can see how lazy my footwork was.
Fortunately though, someone also caught Matt and Graham in free-play. You can see it at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=294351257244186 if that'll work. Looking at it briefly, I thing that Graham needs a bit more confidence reacting to the bind - at the moment it looks as though he's freezing up after contact rather than trying to seize the initiative. On the bright side he's doing the right things - clearing the centre-line, winding his point on and, well, actually trying to incorporate the session into freeplay. Another point is footwork - when Graham's stepping, I think that he's being too linear - I think that I didn't emphasise the need to step forwards and out to the side with the Zwerchau.
Matt's looking good, with neat footwork and lots of attempts to make use of the space by circling. Especially impressive for a man who walks with a cane! I like how he's providing a threat almost all the time, and willing to disengage from the bind at the right times. On the other hand, I think that there are a few times when he didn't commit to entering the fight with a Zornhau, but instead just waved a sword in Graham's direction. Really though, that's a minor quibble - especially if he doesn't feel that comfortable in the bind yet. It might be worth running through pflug, ochs and the cone of protection shabaz with him again.

A Kunst des Fechtens Roadmap

2011-10-07T18:23:00.002+01:00

What is this HUGE post?

When I last taught at IDC, a first lesson new guy named Adam came up afterwards and asked what he needed to improve. At the time, worn out by teaching and anticipating getting thrashed on camera and in front of everyone imminently, I quoted what a BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-jitsu) black belt told me the first time I rolled with him and asked the same question - that everything was bad, what else could it be so soon? Keep training and it will all improve. Which sounds kind of profound, or at least it did to me at the time, and covers the main point: keep at it. Nothing substitutes for training.

Of course, I haven’t been training in either BJJ or HEMA anything as much as I’d like to. Partly I’ve been injured, partly life got in the way, partly “no excuses” laziness. Like most people not “shut the freak up and train”-ing, I’ve been on the internet talking about it. On the Bullshido forum, I noticed praise (which is rarely given there) for the “BJJ Roadmap” eBook by a guy named Stephan Kesting. It’s a free guide (available at here at his website if you’re interested) which doesn’t aim to teach BJJ but to “give you a basic framework to help you make sense of all the different techniques you are learning. In essence I am trying to give you a big picture which functions as a kind of ﬁling system to help you learn more efﬁciently, and to access the correct technique quickly in the heat of battle.” I read it, it made sense, and it seemed to do a good job of not trying to interfere with the role of actual classes but help the student make the most of them. If you show up to your first four classes spread across 9 weeks, do eight techniques without much apparently in common, and then spar messily a few times, you may well wind up confused and lost about the overall shape of the art.

Like BJJ, Kunst des Fechtens (“Lichtenauer” longsword fighting) can get pretty complicated. I think there’s a place for a similar guide - not an instructional work on the whole of KdF, but a guide to what someone new should look to learn. KdF can be used as a pretty wide term - fighting in or out of armour, unarmed or with a wide range of weapons were all covered. This guide will be written for unarmoured longsword fighting in the tradition associated with Lichtenauer, using that system’s terms and jargon. Many of the concepts and ideas have analogues in other historical longsword fencing systems, and the many skills that you need to develop can be approached from an ahistorical, ‘pan-European’, or just plain making-it-up-yourself way of understanding a fight. It’s just that this guide is intended for people interested in “blossfechten” (unarmoured) KdF.

Starting the Map
Before I start talking about KdF, the system for fighting with the longsword, it’s probably best to get to know your longsword. There are a lot of great practice drills involving just taking a longsword (or simulator of one) and moving it about, feeling where it wants to balance and move. Remember that the less the centre of gravity (CoG) of a longsword has to move, the less work you have to put into moving it. Don’t move the sword’s CoG in a big arc when you can move it in a straight line. You’ll take longer, be more predictable, get tired, and generally die first. Get used to gripping it properly, and transitioning your hands around the grip as needed. Ask your instructor on that - I’m not going to talk about it here.
If you want to work out the overall structure of KdF, you may as well start with the moments of stillness, like places linked by roads of transitions in our roadmap. Theses are the positions you take before attacking and in binding on the opponent’s blade.

KdF ostensibly has four guards in it’s “Vier Leger” - Vom Tag, Ochs, Pflug and Alber - as well as the position of Langort. Familiarising yourself with these five positions is probably the first thing to do - I’d suggest you can leave Alber on the back burner for a while. There are other positions such Schrankhut, Kron or Nebenhut that you’ll see often enough, but they’re not as common or crucial as these five.

The Vier Leger are the positions we’re told to adopt out of distance, because we can attack powerfully from them. They threaten an attack. Remember to have the “sword side” leg to the rear. This lets you power your attack with the passing step forwards. Additionally, Ochs and Pflug are used as the “hanging guards”, they can be used to cover yourself from an opponent’s attack and bind with his sword. Langort is close to being the attack - there’s less scope for a powerful attack, but the point is right in your opponent’s face.

Next, I’d work on making sure you’ve got two types of transitions between these positions down: Winding and the Meisterhau (“Masterly Strikes”, although I prefer Hidden Strikes, a term also used in the sources). Winding is simplest to think of as changing your guard to Ochs or Pflug, even if you’re already in one. So I can wind from a bind in Langort to Ochs, or from Ochs on the right to Ochs on the left, or from Pflug on the right up to Ochs on the right (or left). Lots of permutations - look at the binding discussion later. Winding is great for moving his swordpoint out of your face while putting yours in his.

The Hidden Strikes are topics in themselves. In terms of what to focus on when training them as a beginner, may I suggest the mechanics of throwing the cuts, and timing? Not timing vis-a-vis your opponent, just in your own movement. Ask your regular scheduled instructor for more details, or ask me to expand on it here, but timing of movements within a blow are important. Once you can throw it as a coordinated movement, work on distance. Learn how far away you can hit comfortably is important. As the “Dobringer” glossa of Lichtenauer’s Blossfechten says, “It is terribly embarrassing to see someone thus stretched out as if he wanted to run after a hare”. Learn your reach and fight to it. Finally, learn how to use them as active counter-attacks against an opponent’s attack. This will involve an introduction to the timing of sword-fighting, and the Vor/Indes/Nach (Before/During/After) and concepts used in KdF.

So let’s draw up a list of what you need to learn before you can start doing relatively free-form sparring:

[Editor's Note: In this section Pete talks about 'the line' a bit. You may not know what that is at this stage, so excuse me while I get some conceptual, theoretical baggage out of the way for him. Imagine two blokes holding longswords staring at each-other, like in the freeze-frames above. Now imagine an invisible line between them, stretching from one's sternum to the other. That is the 'centre-line'. Suppose that Bloke A reaches out to stab Bloke B in chest without stepping. Bloke B doesn't like this, so he might step to move the 'line', or displace the other guy's sword to gain control of the 'centre-line'. I hope that this makes sense. Go ask your instructor if it doesn't.]

The basic principles that will help you do KdF well probably begin with Rule 1: Be efficient, and Rule 2: Stab him in the face. Then consider Rule 3: Strength is in structure and Rule 4: Fast isn’t fast - smooth is fast, and slow is smooth and Rule 5: Be weak where he’s strong, strong where he’s weak. These aren’t from Lichtenauer, by the way. They’re me. Except the stolen ones, which are most likely my own teacher, Adam Roylance. [Editor’s Note: And the fifth one, which is actually something Liechtenauer-y! See Codex Döbringer (MS 3227a), folios 21r-22v.]

Focus. Don’t whip a longsword around your head like a Braveheart extra, hoping to win by intimidating your sparring partner into quitting rather than get walloped by you after he’s stabbed your face. Intensity is easy to crank up. Skill is hard. Try and rely on skill in sparring.

Those five positions, including both the withdrawn and extended versions of Ochs and Pflug. Recognising them will let you have some idea what’s going on in Zufechten - “I’m in Vom Tag, my opponent is shifting down to Alber - could I hit him in his head?”

A basic grasp of distance. KdF more or less divides distance into Zufechten (“Coming to the fight” - I can’t hit him right now) and Krieg (“War” - I can). The point where the two meet - where you can hit him with a step as you strike - is going to be focus of a lot of your early work. You want to know when your opponent can hit you and when you can hit him.

Footwork. How else can you control distance and angles? It also rather helps with most everything else, from cutting to disengaging. Experiment and find out. Focus less on leaping about like a ballerina or worse, sport fencer, and more on just staying moving. Frequens Motus is a term that gets used a lot in KdF sources. Dead things stay still.

The four openings to target. “His Ochs is covering his upper right opening. So I... hit him somewhere else?”

The five “Hidden Strikes”. I’m not going to particularly detail them here. Suffice it to say that learning them teaches a number of key principles at the same time. As examples: Zornhau teaches controlling “the line” and basic cutting mechanics in the Vorschlag (Before Strike - the first attack as you enter distance, to cover that transition), Zwerchau teaches using Ochs to cover yourself, Schielhau teaches using Pflug as an extended hanging guard, Krump teaches lateral footwork and beats, and Scheitelhau teaches why you shouldn’t just reach for the opponent’s legs if he’s ready for you...

Absetzen - using any position where the point is aimed at your opponent’s face to cover you while stabbing him in the face.

Winding to cover the line once bound.

Abnehmen - taking your sword out of the line. Why and how is a matter for a lesson, but at the least get a handle on the back up and cut down the other side style and Durchweseln (disengaging your blade under his). Think of them as going over and under.

Purposes, Not Techniques:
That sounds like a lot. There’s a few more things that will really help - Duplieren and Mutieren especially - and we haven’t even started on the wonderful world of wrestling at the sword. It’s honestly not that complex, once we’ve got past the German Jargon and don’t discuss individual techniques but their purpose. Honestly. If we look at that previous list, it can all be broken down into three things that for you to learn:

How to cut and thrust.
How to cover yourself.
How to control the bind.

1. I talked earlier about timing in the movement of throwing a cut. I’m not going to go into detail, hopefully, about technique here. I’ll instead suggest you observe Rule 1 as well as timing/telegraphing issues. Developing your technique is a matter for live training, but a rough guideline - go from hitting a held target (I think it’s much more helpful than repetitive air cutting, just like boxing padwork is more helpful than a karate air-punching kata) to hitting one while you and your partner move about, to using it in “competitive” drilling. “Chain” attacks together and get used to not stopping or standing still. C-c-c-combo maker. Get feedback. Test cutting will also help, if your group is in a position to practice it.

2. Covering yourself means thinking about the line a lot. The two key skills are reacting in time to an opponents attack (distance as well as timing!) and having an efficient counter-technique (whether a counter attack or not) ready to hand. I insist that Lichtenauer bloody well does encourage single time defense with offense, out of the bind as well as in, but any cover beats dying in extremis. When in doubt, Meisterhau.

[Editor’s note: I think Pete’s throwing out a lot of jargon here. It’s not his fault, it’s the coffee. To put it more simply, think about whether you or your opponent is controlling the ‘centre line’, the space between you and them. If in doubt, use the hidden strikes to clear that space while gaining the initiative of the fight.]

3.The bind a very complex area of longsword fighting, surprise surprise, and this will be a long section. There are eight possible binds, depending on whether you’re high or low, left or right, and bound on the inside or outside, as well as the Sprechfenster or “Speaking Window”. The Sprechfenster is a relatively neutral position, since both fencers are in Langort, but it’s still possible to “have the line” in it. Having the line is much preferred, because you can use it to obey the basic rules and stab him in the face! Efficiently!

Controlling the bind requires a strong structure in the position you’re in, an understanding of how to transition between the positions, and most importantly Fuhlen - “Feeling”. This means being able to appreciate what’s happening in the bind by feeling it through your sword, allowing you to react quicker than if you wait to see it.

One model for thinking about all this, borrowed from BJJ, is that within each position of possible bind is the postures of the fencers. If you’re in a strong Ochs, you’re able to resist your partner’s attempts to take the line easily. If you’re in a weak Ochs, then it’s likely to collapse under pressure. From this posture comes the pressures which occur. To continue the previous example, if your Ochs keeps you in line to thrust, your partner will almost certainly try to push across to take your point out of his face. From pressure comes the potential to use techniques. If he pushes sideways, he isn’t threatening you, so you can come off the bind and hit him with a Zwerch to the other side. That’s probably overthinking it a little when you’re beginning, but it’s critical to remember that each technique has a context. If you’re bound in Sprechfenster, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to Zucken - his point will be too on the line. If you’re in a very off-line Ochs, Mutieren won’t work. Various kinds of Abnehmen might, as might closing to grapple. Learn multiple options for each situation as your vocabulary of techniques grow, but it starts with “Is he weak? Stab him. Is he strong? Wind. Is he offline? Come off the bind.”

Free-play:

Freeplay is good. Freeplay let's you pressure test interpretations, integrate things, and feel like a badass. The problem is, it can also serve to encourage you to aim to "win" sparring, rather than using it as a time to keep training. People (and this includes me too much of the time) stick to what they know they can do rather than experimenting, rely on attributes rather than technique, and "game" aspects of sparring (by which I mean exploit the sparring rules - like whippy nylons which won't cover like steel would, shinai which bounce, not counting hand shots etc). This can lead to sparring actually damaging one's skill (if hypothetical) at fighting with a real longsword in some anachronistic fifteenth century skirmish.

What should you do as you begin free-play, then? Well, get used to being hit and hitting people. Don’t panic and forget your training, don’t worry about losing, just try to keep calm and apply what you’ve learnt. Focus on the key points mentioned earlier - cutting well to cover the entry into range, with a real threat that they have to deal with, keeping yourself covered and safe, and controlling the bind to hit the opponent.

Now I’m a fan of grappling in sword fighting. I can’t deny it. It’s not what you need to focus on right now, though. Durchlaufen (coming in under the cover of your sword to grapple, aka “Rush ‘n’ Crush”) or Ringen Am Schwert (wrestling at the sword, techniques where the sword is a part of the grappling technique) are very important areas of Lichtenauer’s KdF. However, they can easily (for me, for example) serve as a crutch for inadequate bindwork. You need to first get a handle on fighting from Zufechten, when you enter with big cuts and thrusts, and the Krieg, when you can hit him without a step (and are probably in a bind to stop him doing the same), before you close further.

Feedback is very welcome. And have a nice day.

Peter

(Rule 6: Be Excellent To One Another AND PARTY ON, DUDES!)

03/10/11 Lesson Plan and ramblings.

2011-10-03T12:00:00.002+01:00

I'm going to be breaking with tradition today and posting up the lesson plan before the actual class.

The last month has been spent getting people at various stages of experience into HEMA and KdF. As a forthcoming article/essay from Pete will outline, it’s reasonable to say that you need to have a basic understanding of some aspects of sword fighting in order to get stuff out of sparring on its own (as opposed to drilling with intent, structured free-play or whatever). Well, stuff beyond the immediate ‘I really suck at this.’ feeling...

Although he focuses on the system associated with Liechtenauer (or as I'm now going to call him Johnny Lickty, just to annoy you), he broadly outlines:

How to cut and thrust.
How to cover yourself.
How to control the bind.

I'm growing my beard until I can pose like this symbolic representation of Johnny Lickty here. That's how serious I am about this.

I think that what we’ve been covering lately directly addresses those three areas, in about that priority. We’ve covered things like guards, stepping and 'the centre line', but all without them being the end goal of what I’m covering (I hope). To disappear up my own butt for a moment here, I think that a lot of this conceptual and technical baggage is epiphenomenal - it appears as an indirect consequence of mechanics of trying to kill someone, so while they’re useful for explaining a system to someone who already understands it, learning positions by wrote isn’t a very effective way of teaching absolute new comers.

But anyway to pull back from that tangent for one moment - we’ve covered a fair bit of ground pretty quickly - how to cut, how to thrust, how to cover yourself with hanging guards and with a counter-cut. Leaving the bind to cut to the other side. All this kind of stuff. So this lesson will be trying to cement that stuff and make sure that everyone’s on the same page. It’ll be a skill-set focused partnered drill rather than learning new techniques and concepts.

10mins of faffing about. - I’m resigned to the idea that there’ll be a period at the beginning of every session sorting out kit, getting water, meeting and greeting and all that stuff. I might as well take it into account.

15mins warm up and stretch. A good ten minute warm up of jogging, sprinting, lunges, walking like Doctor Zoidberg, wrestling steps and so on. Five minutes of stretching after, introducing what we’re going to do this class.

5 mins of everyone going for water and kit. Exactly what it says on the tin. They'll need a sword like object and at least a mask between two

5-10 mins. Begin the drill. Divide the class in two, down the length of the hall. Pair people up across it and according to weapons. Get everyone on one side a mask (or everyone, if we can). The other side (side A) at this point just walks up to them and without breaking pace cuts a zornhau at side B’s mask, while they stand there in vom Tag. Then they reset. After a few tries, swap sides. This is to get people into a sword-y mood, and get them thinking about cutting. I can wonder around and observe.

10-15 mins. Next step. Everyone shuffles around a position clockwise, meaning that they swap partners. The person wearing the mask, on side B, can now block with a crappy unthreatenning defence into kron, without even stepping. Side A’s hit now either lands, or it gets blocked. If it doesn’t land and they’re being pushed offline, they should step off and cut to the other side. If it doesn’t land but they hold the centre-line, they should stab side B in the face. Repeat, then swap sides. This is building up the drill, and getting attackers used to feeling the bind and reading whether to press on or disengage. The emphasis here is on Side B providing the right set of inputs for Side A, and not stealing the drill from them.

5-10 mins. Change around clockwise for new partners. Build it up again. Now, Side B, if they feel that Side A is leaving the bind to attack on another line, can try and stab Side A with just a step. This is meant to make it less of a dead drill, and to re-inforce the importance of reading that bind. Swap partners.

10-15 mins. Guess what, change partners, build it up again. Now, if Side B feels Side A going in for a thrust, they can displace into one of the hanging guards, as well as thrust with that step. Stuff should be getting a lot more gamey now as the options increase for each side. Swap sides.

10-15 mins. Lastly, if it is not yet 8.30, we can have another stage in the drill in which Side B can use a zwerchau into the oncoming cut. Side A should be really being made to work to get their cut landing now, not just walking up as they were in the beginning. We’re almost doing structured freeplay, with the myriad of options available.

5 mins. End of session thanks, question and answer etc. Let people who want to spar spar.

End of the plan.

In other HEMA news, HEMAGoth has quite an interesting spin on 'Fighting with Intent' over on his blog. It's a fair point, and ties in with stuff that Matt and I talked about - how what we do is a monkey dance, training for sociable violence. However, I'd also argue that there's a difference between intent to harm in fighting, and an intent to behave in a way which would cause harm if we were doing it for real. I can wrestle with an intent to hurt someone, yet I can also wrestle with an intent to actually follow through with my actions and put the other guy on the floor. I think the point that I'm trying to make here is that 'We're not trying to kill each other' isn't an excuse for dead training, bullshit drills that train the wrong responses to the wrong stimuli, or make acceptable wasting people's time with things that they won't get better from.

Which has become one of my set-piece rants. It's okay, I think that I have another one brewing at the moment, 'shameless self-promotion without making getting into HEMA any easier'. It's self-serving, doesn't do this fringe hobby of ours any favours and just rubs me up the wrong way.

But that one would lead to drama, and so is to be avoided...

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart; his passport shall be made,

And crowns for convoy put into his purse;

We would not die in that man's company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

- That's the good kind of drama.

Edit:
Okay, it's been a couple of days since the session, and I have to say that it went quite well. Everyone was able to perform the techniques (at least in isolation), and people were getting better at feeling the bind despite using nylons. Even better yet, people were making useful suggestions (such as hand-stretches) and making good feedback outside of class.

The plan for next week is to build up a drill based around the zwerchau, from 'being used to counter a downwards cut' to 'I heard that you likes zwerches, so I'm zwerching under your zwerch, so I'm protected from your zwerch by my zwerch which is also zwerching your head.'
It'll be less complicated than that, honest.
The other thing that I've been asked to clarify are body positions, such as the structure when you're in ochs, and the type of footwork you should be using when changing the line. Now, I think Pete subscribes to the 'whatever works' school of doing things, but I'm sure that there must be a better answer than that...

Michael Edelson on training and cutting.

2011-10-02T21:07:00.002+01:00

Although I wouldn't have expressed it in quite the same terms, Michael Edelson has quite an interesting post on the relationship between test cutting and training for HEMA over on his blog at the NYHFA. It's certainly thought provoking for me, as someone whose main training simulator is a synthetic nylon.

I do wonder what he thinks of the latest 'federschwerts' which seem to becoming more and more the norm in Europe, both for training longsword systems and competitions.

One of these is older than the other.

Test cutting

2011-09-29T00:25:00.000+01:00

Spent the last couple of days test cutting while Pete's still down, using a loaned Albion Regent. Look it up. It's pretty. Over-all, I'm amazed at how much the experience has made me immediately aware of how much I have yet to learn in HEMA as a martial art - this is something that the documentary evidence says very little at and which I would really like to improve at.

In any case, here's some contrasting compilations:

from last night; and from tonight:

It's a step forwards. A tiny, tiny baby step, but progress none the less. I think that the biggest difference is that before I was trying to strike the target and impart momentum to it in the strike (and boy did they go flying), while tonight I was at least partly attempting to cut through the target with it interfering as little as possible.

But looking at the front on footage, my footwork's terrible! Something to work on, and hopefully something that'll pay off in sparring...

Pete's heading back to London tomorrow morning, so there will be a bit of a lull in the HEMA-centricism of my life for a few days until things settle down again. It'll be a shame to see him off, since he's been a brilliant training partner and a good class leader. Also, I'll miss his shiny new video camera...

26/09/11 Training - Zwerch, zwerch baby.

2011-09-27T00:35:00.004+01:00

Tonight I had the rather enjoyable experience of being able to partake in a class, rather than leading it. Instead I bullied Pete into running the show with a class on the Zwerchau, one of the top-secret German master move things.

Personally, I enjoyed it. The warm up and stretching in particular was above and beyond the call of duty, but seemed to have done the job. From a reviewer's point of view, the content of the class was something that I was already pretty familiar with, both theoretically and in terms of his interpretation. Partly because we'd already run through it.

In terms of leading the class though, I figure that I set him a difficult job - too small a space, a mixed bag of training tools and kit, and experience levels all over the place, from Andy's first HEMA lesson (about which I'm feeling a bit guilty), to guys for whom this is all old hat. I thought that Pete made a good go at it - perhaps he could have broken things down a bit more, and perhaps he could have worked on positive re-enforcement, but by the end of the class everyone in it seemed to have learned something and I had relative new-comers wanting to get into really interesting and positive conversations about the techniques in it.

At the end we were able to spar a bit, which was nice.
And by nice, I mean that I ended up lying on the floor, underneath him, eating pommel to the face. Like normal.

Pete and I really need to work on staying on our feet...

But yeah, any other reviews from less biased people? Like Ben and Johann?

Unless the lesson plan is super top secret then I'll post it up when I have Pete's permission (the lazy git has gone to bed), and for those that are interested then all my notes on the Zwerchau can be found at http://indesidc.blogspot.com/2011/03/notes-on-zwerchau.html from March.

Notes for now though - I need to work on the Zwerch again next week. I need to look into alternative training venues.

For those of you who missed it before, or who can't be bothered to find their email, or whose personal computers recently exploded, here's me copying out the bulk of the last big email I sent out:

Hey guys,
I had a few questions last night, about sources, equipment and so on. This is my attempts to answer them:

Sources:
For the German Longsword stuff, I tend stick to the earlier manuscript sources (in the Lichtenauer tradition), as I believe that they provide a relatively clear, coherent and effective martial art between them. The main ones we’ll be working with are (prepare for copied and pasted technical stuff):

MS 3227a - Nicknamed the ‘Dobringer’ text, and implies that Lichtenauer was alive when it was composed. That said, the work survives in a much later ‘housebook’, a collection of interesting things copied out of personal interest. A translation of the text is available from http://www.ghfs.se/Texter/CodHS3227aD%C3%B6bringer/tabid/66/Default.aspx

Codex 44.A.8 - Nicknamed the ‘von Danzig’ text, Codex 44.A.8 is a compilation of different fencing manuscripts in the Lichtenauer tradition, dating from 1452. It has two pictures at the beginning, one showing Lichtenauer in the traditional pose of a medieval craft-master, and the other depicting the four guards. It contains an anonymous gloss of Lichtenauer’s Zedel, that is repeated in near-contemporary and subsequent fechtbuchs, such as Cod.I.6.4°.3 (Codex Lew - 1450s) and MS M.I.29 (Codex Speyer - 1491). A translation of some of the text is available from http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Johannes_Liechtenauer

MS Dresden C 487 - A fechtbuch containing a gloss of Lichtenauer’s markverse attributed to ‘Sigmund von Ein Ringeck’, dating to the early sixteenth century, but probably composed in the 1440s or ‘50s. A translation is available from http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Sigmund_von_Ein_Ringeck

Yes, it's mostly technical gobbledee-gook and no pretty pictures. To help remedy this, I began working on a glossary/primer back when we shifted from Fiore to Lichtenauer many moons ago. You can find it at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YlTRF-pt4eV0Gfw4E5evX07zb39FpqovQZW4dAhL1fo/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CLWlqNoE

If you're desperate for pretty pictures, there are also some associated with Paulus Kal from the same period, available online at http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Paulus_Kal#Liechtenauer.27s_Blo.C3.9Ffechten that illustrate some of the system. And yes Matt, they're shown standing in quite high stances! In later sources fencers are often shown deeper (http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Breu_Sketchbook_(Cod.I.6.2%C2%B0.4))

If you like reading material, then that should cover it for this week... ;)

Equipment:
At the moment, your best bet is to ask someone who has been a member of the club for a while, although there's a great big list of HEMA-related equipment online at http://hroarr.com/equipment.php - I'd recommend getting protective gear before getting a sword like object, but I understand the temptation to buy something to swing first!

Generally speaking though, the training tools we use are Knight's Shop Dave Rawlings Line Synthetic Waster Sparring Swords. AKA plastic toy swords. You can find them online athttp://www.theknightshop.co.uk/catalog/hema-synthetic-waster-sparring-swords-c-857_563_573.html?osCsid=a704690f0069cc6b05a3738eb02c1664
In terms of gloves, the bare minimum that I would recommend are a pair of cheap Men's Lacrosse gloves (most of us use Warrior Tempo Elite ones, although they seem to be out of stock or production). Your best bet is uklacrosse on this side of the pond:
http://www.uklacrosse.com/gloves-c21.html
When it comes to masks, you have a basic choice between 'white' bib and 'black' bib. Netwon ratings refer to the puncture-resistance of the material of the bib, not the mask itself. The most cheap and cheerful one that I can recommend at the moment is the the Leon Paul club sabre mask - http://www.leonpaul.com/acatalog/Standard_Sabre_Masks.html

Congrats on making it through the wall of text. Have an unrelated webcomic:

Now, I need to go and grab some sleep. I've got a busy day tomorrow, and hopefully some short notice test-cutting in the evening...

19/09/11 Training - stabbing him in the face.

2011-09-20T10:00:00.002+01:00

As normal, a quick place holder until I get around to writing something up properly.
The content of the class was very similar to last week - bind mechanics and entering the fight. The big difference was that rather than hitting the other guy with your sword, it was centred on stabbing them in the face...

Another good turn out - this week there were the same recent faces, and as well as a few more chaps. Some of who apparently know my brother from years back. Small world. The only down side to this that we're running out of space and loaner kit - I'll have a scout around Exeter again to look for alternative venues.

Everyone seemed to get something out of it and enjoy themselves, but I'm beginning to feel that I can start bringing in different drills, now we've got the absolute basics down.

And now, because no blog post is complete without a distracting picture to break up the wall of text, have something completely unrelated:

12/11/11 Training - Longsword 101

2011-09-13T11:49:00.000+01:00

This post is mainly a place holder until I have some time...
Edit: Now being edited by a very tired Mike, being fuelled by Red Fang, courtesy of Johann.

The IDC session was split into two groups - one, mostly of regulars, had a play with the sabre material that they've been looking at lately. The other, a mix of new and old faces, were subjected to a class on my current, temporary and probably incorrect interpretation of the Zornhau. A zornhau is essentially the fancy name for what is essentially a gurt big cut. I mean, erm, 'When you are angry and raging, then no strike is as ready as this upper strike [Oberhaw] struck from the shoulder at the opponent'. Yeees.
For more information on the Zornhau I'd recommend taking a gander at the old post, Just Hurry Up and Hit Them With Your Sword.

Ran a session introducing fighting with a longsword, the main point of which was to get across that yes, there is a system underlying all of this, we're not just wailing on each other with glorified sticks. Interesting mix of previous backgrounds and time spent in HEMA - hopefully everyone was able to get something out of it. Lesson plan (Don't judge me! This was for personal reference and saves me having to type it all out) was something like:

The doodle is terrifically important. It adds gravitas.

The warmups were covered by Johann in the end, which I'm perfectly okay with.

although, of course, no plans survive contact with the enemy. It ended up taking up almost all of the two hours we had available. I'm okay with this, for this kind of lesson and the intended audience that it had. People did seem to improve over the session, from JP's footwork to Bruce's willingness to actually hit the other guy with his sword. 'Crazy arse Zwerchau' is a technical term, from the manuscripts.

~~I need to send various emails when I have time - Links to sources, links to equipment, the IDC logo to JP, etc.~~ This has been done. Now, for something a bit more wordy...

To break it down, I guess it ended up being something like:

A downwards, diagonal cut as the most natural aggressive motion.

Letting people get a feel for what we're up to, and also used to moving in a fight-like manner, yet being watched over. This means hitting eachother on their masks. Tangent: I'm completely in favour of absolute new people being allowed to swing at eachother in a monitored and controlled (but as natural and like-a-real-fencing-as-possible) enviroment. How else are you meant to learn if they're safe, what they need to work on, how to go about changing their behaviour in a fight etc? Ooooh, controversial. Artifacts etc.

Refine that from a mechanical point of view a bit. Already, we're playing with some of the principles behind a fight as well - vorschlag, nachreisen, tempo, initiative, other zufecthen type stuff. To be honest, I don't think that I can teach that material in a coherent way right now, it's something that I'll keep focusing drills on.

Introduced the same cut as a response against the first cut. Explained the possible outcomes, depending on who does it better from a structural point of view. Again, letting people have a play with it in the same manner.

After that though, I think that I made the mistake of trying to explain yielding to strong pressure before I did zorn-ort/just stabbing him in the face. Je ne sais pas. But options wise, that was 'Your opponent wins with his first cut', 'You win with your counter-cut' possibilities covered. 'Opponent overbearing in the bind' partially covered in terms of abnehmen, zucken and other disengages (but leaving out duplieren), and 'You end up in a structurally good position in the bind'.

Finally, I introduced the concept of displacement/absetzen, on the ground that it's pretty important. It also meant that we got to play with Ochs and Pflug. Which meant that 'Opponent ends up in a structurally good position in the bind' was covered a bit too. Hell, you could make flow-charts out of this, bro.

Which is a lot of material introduced. From there the session was mostly just trying to train and incorporate that. I've promised a session next week on similar stuff, and I intend to deliver. I think we'll need to cover the same ground again, especially since we've had a fair bit of interest from people in giving HEMA and IDC a try. Which is nice! This time I might focus on displacement a bit more, and perhaps bring in the zwerchau if it happens naturally and people are doing well with the material so far.

The feedback that I've had so far has been, well, very good. This makes me happy, and also sets a target for next week. Especially if we have even more people, which of course might begin to make space and kit an issue, although it wasn't really this week with a group of seven using half the hall.

I need to lay my hands on a camera to record some of this stuff...

As always, feedback and C&C are more than welcome.

World's Quickest Update

2011-09-10T13:36:00.000+01:00

I didn't manage to make last Monday's practice, and there weren't any other meetings in the park this week on account of the lovely English autumn. Looking forwards to Monday's session though, in the dry and the warm.

Feedback to the last post has been general agreement, but with no real commitment to training.

Finally, awesome engravings are awesome:

On 'Doing' Historical European Martial Arts...

2011-08-30T10:04:00.001+01:00

Okay, I've had a few different trains of thought sloshing around my head since FightCamp and this is my first attempt to put them down on (electronic) paper. It was either this or get depressed about the job market...

Let's start off with some (provisional) definitions. Definitions are good. They make sure that we're singing from the same hymn sheet. They're also definitions about HEMA. HEMA related definitions. HEMANITIONS! Like demolitions. Like competitions! BUT WITH MORE HEMA! (No wait, that's really, really stupid.)

System - A coherent framework, which is to say that it's a way of thinking and understanding stuff. In the context of HEMA they normally have to do with how to 'win' a fight, although you could say that Dom Duarte has a system to do with horsey stuff, which in turn draws from Aristotelian thinking. You can talk about the longsword system associated with Lichtenauer, or for that matter Brazilian Jui Jitsu. They're martial arts, but they're also systems that we can make comparisons between.
Technique - An action, normally one which puts you in a mechanically better position to win the fight. A 'Krumphau' might be a technique, but so would a lunge, or an arm bar. The documentary evidence is full of techniques, and a lot of the focus of HEMA has been on working out how to perform techniques based on the sources.
Scholarship - All that stuff historians do. Pretty relevant to reviving dead arts.
Attribute - Lots of the sources have a section in them on what you need to be a good swordsmen. You know, the 'Eyes of a falcon!', 'Dance-moves of a deer!', 'Cat-like reflexes of Fiore!' stuff. In modern terms we might think of strength and stamina.
Skill - This is a bit more airy-fairy, but thinking about 'skill sets' might make more sense. I think it's pretty coherent to say that someone can be skilled at performing techniques well. But you could also say that they're skilled in reading their opponent's intentions, or skilled in knowing when to perform a certain technique at the right moment. A 'good' hip-throw is useless if you lack the skill to perform it at the right time. I guess it’s a kind of practical knowledge.
Concept - An important part of the system, concepts are ways of understanding the world, or in HEMA terms of describing what's doing on. Some concepts are relatively easy to demonstrate - such as 'absence of blade' in Olympic fencing, but they might be as complicated as 'fulhen' in Lichtenauer. I guess understanding a concept is theoretical while ‘skill’ is practical - you can conceptually understand the blade engagements that take place in a technique like ‘mutieren’, as well as be skilled in carrying out the technique.

These definitions aren't perfect, I admit. (And language only has meaning through use. There are not set meanings to... Wait, what? Wrong place wrong time? No, please don't hit me!) I have no idea whether 'Provoker-Taker-Hitter' is a concept or a technique, or whether 'footwork' is a skill or a set of techniques. But to be honest I don't care, all I'm doing is laying out my understanding of those terms when I use them.

Now, back to the title. When we say that we 'do' HEMA, what do we mean by that? After all, if I say that I 'do' fly-fishing, everyone has a fairly good understanding that I mean that I stand in rivers with a rod and attempt to catch fish. I guess the same could be said of HEMA - in doing HEMA people hit one another while understanding that hitting of each other through historical frameworks. So I wouldn’t say that Mark Gilbert, a LARPer who comes to Fightcamp, ‘does’ HEMA. He hits people with sword like objects, but doesn’t seem that interested in the historical and conceptual stuff (although I might be doing him a disservice with this.) Equally I’m not sure that Sydney Anglo, the historian, ‘does’ HEMA. He’s brilliant at research and conceptual stuff, but he doesn’t seem interested in reviving it as a martial art. No sword waving for him. Instead, there is a middle ground. A goldilocks approach. A golden mean. All that crap.

and back to Oats and Squats.

But on the other hand people are into HEMA in different ways and because of different motives. If there is a spectrum of people’s motivations for getting into HEMA, at one extreme there are guys who consider themselves 'scholars' of fencing, and at the other there are the guys who are only interested in hitting people with swords. It just so happens that HEMA is the most convenient or appealing movement for them to do that in (as opposed to classical fencing, or the SCA, or whatevs). But it also isn’t just one spectrum - I've also heard people say that they just want to stop themselves getting ‘bingo-wings’; that they want to become ‘the best anachronistic fighter they can’. Some people want to be a knight, or sword fight like they do in the movies. Cool, whatever. I’m not going to try and claim that one reason is any ‘better’ than another, although I might point out that other activities might be better for those people achieve those goals.

You're not a knight. This grizzly wheeler-dealer is a knight.

Now, for most of the life of this blog, I've been focusing on becoming better at running HEMA classes, on trying to have sound interpretations of the sources, or on understanding the systems that they present. This is a cool story, bro. But at FightCamp 2011 someone pretty much said:

'How many teachers does it take to make a good fencer?' 'None, but they have to want it really, really hard.'

In other words, no matter how good you are at untangling the sources, or at interpreting the techniques in them, you’re not going to be a good fencer/fighter if you can't put that into practice. And coming away from the sparring barriers at FightCamp I'm pretty sure that I can’t. I'd been 'studying' HEMA, rather than training at it, in much the way that you study to become a physicist, but train to be an electrician. Go read some Aristotle, he’s full of this crap.

Unfortunately though, I like to pretend that I subscribe to the 'Best Anachronistic Fighter I Can Be' school of thought. Not anachronistic in the SCA sense, but rather that I would be unlikely to fight in such a manner in this day and age. We might as well just call it 'The best martial fencer I can be' since I can't afford a horse! It's a hobby, something to work towards, and it takes into account reasons as to why I might not get to Lichtenauer levels of beastiness. Sure, there are other motives like chillin’ with some cool guys, but ultimately it’s because I want to get as much better as I can. Needless to say, realising quite how poorly I’m fencing is not a good thing in my own terms.

(See also: ‘The "No excuses" line is marketing bullshit. There are perfectly good excuses for not doing things that you intend to do. Life gets in the way. It's just that we'll call you out if you give shitty excuses.'; ‘You can start doing this if you have a very low level of fitness. We'll take care of it. You can't keep doing it and be unfit though’ and ‘This hobby isn't for everyone, nor should it be.’)

Returning back from that tangent, I feel that I've been focusing too much on scholarship rather than training to become better at HEMA. So, how can I train to be better?

Go and join GHFS.

Well, limited class time means that sessions are a poor way of getting better martial attributes - fitness classes and circuit training probably aren't the best use of meagre two hours a week. If we had three or four sessions (and someone knew what they were talking about), that would be a different matter all together. Time to set up a pell in my back yard. And go running. And drink less... On the other hand though, classes seem to be to be the place for training to get better skills and be able to perform techniques better - with alive drills, training with intent, purposeful sparring etc.

'But Mike!', I imagine you crying, 'Isn't this what you've been advocating all along!'. Yes, yes it is I suppose. But it's also not something that I've been experiencing much. I’ve either running sessions or taking part in (to my mind), fairly directionless sparring. Hitting people for the sake of it. As much as I hate to say it, there's also probably the matter of partners. Various people have discussed before about how it's possible to 'rob' your partner out of a drill, to (even subconsciously or due to lack of understanding) stop them from getting anything from it. Equally you can have people who are unenthusiastic about the idea of training to get ‘better’, and instead just want to go whack each other with sword like objects.

Shit happens, people have off days, and not that there's anything wrong with that. It just means that I’m not getting better at HEMA. I’m not getting what I want from the hobby. Pretty narcissistic, but what the hell.

Which sucks. But then again I've heard the same kind of thing from people in three different HEMA organisations, that they feel that a lack of motivation, and a lack of collective will to improve as fighters, is making them wonder if HEMA is worth it. People have limited resources of time and money, and it’s entirely reasonable to say ‘I want to love this activity, but at the moment I can’t justify it over eating protein this week.’

Which isn't in any way to say poor training partners or poor teachers are bad people. In my experience there isn’t much of a relation between enjoying the company of a person socially, how much you can get from training with them (or for that matter the validity of their HEMA interpretations.) Yet on the other hand there are undoubtedly groups where it all works - that give an impression of having an awesome atmosphere, where people 'do' HEMA with the same intentions, engage in research and come up with martially effective results.

And damn but am I jealous of them.

(Coming up at some unknown point in the future: What to do from here. Suggestions please on the back of a post card. I have a rough mental road-map. It’s just that ‘Drink Powerthirst’ is one of the stages.)

Post-FightCamp update.

2011-08-23T23:26:00.000+01:00

I'm back from FightCamp 2011, sore and bruised. This is also the first update to this blog since May. These two observations might be related.

Other people have put up their reviews of FightCamp up on the intertubes, but that doesn't really appeal. An event like FightCamp is as much an opportunity to socialise and network as it is to study HEMA, and this blog isn't for recounting the delights of Dragon's Tayle fajitas, or who carried who out of the beer tent at what o'clock.

Class-wise, I only took four. Two on ringen (one by Magnus Hagelberg and the GHFS crew, which was a brilliant re-fresher and reminded me how much I want to train wrestling; and one by Predrag Nikolic, which brought to bear quite how deep wrestling is, and how much I need to train at it), one long Longsword drill by Scott Brown (which should have been titled 'Permutations of permutations of permutations in the Rain'; brilliant, frustrating and waiting to be stolen in equal measure), and finally a lesson on Wrestling at the Sword by Martin Fabian &co.

That Martin Fabian &co. I thought the class was brilliant. Everything in it I had either been taught or read about, yet the lesson was the first time I can seen it done and explained with intent, clarity and coherence. The guys drove to FightCamp too, which shows quite how much they love HEMA.

Peter Regenyei's federschwerts (the ones that made it to Britain) were snapped up quickly. Because they were incredibly good training and sparring tools from what I could tell, and very well priced. I still couldn't afford one, but I wanted one!

Sparring wise, I didn't do that much sparring up at the barriers, although I did get to fight a few of the LSDC people, and a guy from Lille who was a joy to cross longsword-like-objects with.

To be honest though, I wasn't too happy with how I sparred with the longsword (more on that later), although the Knights Shop basket hilted one-hander things are stupid-wrong-fun. I didn't enter the tournaments. Although this was supposed to have been The Summer of the Sword, I haven't been able to spend that much time on HEMA lately for various boring reasons. The only thing to do is to go back next year harder, better, faster and stronger.

But not dressed like this...

In conclusion though, I hugely enjoyed FightCamp 2011. It's driven me to try harder at HEMA, and I'm grateful to everyone who made it happen, from Matt Easton and his team, the Grange Staff (I'll get Pete to send you more fliers), the instructors, the people from around the world who attended and above all the IDC guys, honorary and otherwise.

Same again next year?

Recommendation

2011-05-16T00:21:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to work out what to run on Monday's session, and I'm beginning to feel that what we're exhausting what I know about the Lichtenauer system. Who knows, I may just end up running a drill-centric class tomorrow.

Oh, and the anonymous person behind Hans Talhoffer on facebook made a post on his blog: http://talhoffer.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/off-measures-2/ You should read it, it's really good.

More of those Sword and Buckler ramblings

2011-05-02T01:00:00.000+01:00

So, still no answer as to why that manuscript had seemingly anachronistic sword and buckler fighters in it - Magnus proposed that they might be meant to represent a more rural type of fighter.
In any case, I just noticed that the Jörg Breu Sketchbook is now available online, and guess what it has in it?

Okay, no need to guess

Looks like it's a direct copy of the other sketches, but in any case it's from the 1543 Cod.I.6.2°.4

See http://media.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/node?id=85014 and http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Breu_Sketchbook_(Cod.I.6.2%C2%B0.4)

Apart from that I'm up to my neck in University work - no idea if I'll be able to make Monday's session in the park...

Something a bit wierd from Jorg Wilhalm

2011-04-05T19:03:00.002+01:00

Jörg Wilhalm was a hatter in C16th Ausberg, and a bit of a mad one at that - everyone loves the pretzel seller hanging around in CGM 3711:

But personally I find CGM 3712 more interesting - the sketches of the fighters are simply beautiful in places, although apparently it was a copy made in 1556 - I don't know, I'm relying on wiktenhauer here because my Renaissance era German sucks. What it does have is an unlabelled section on sword and buckler fencing. What's so interesting in it, to me at least, is that the clothes of the fencers keeps changing. To begin with they're wearing skirts:
[Edit, apparently there were armoured skirts called 'tonlets', fashionable for blokes in the early C16th - http://www.royalarmouries.org/visit-us/leeds/leeds-galleries/tournament-gallery/henry-viii/tonlet-armour Some resemblance?]

and then they're wearing puff and slash:

and for the last section they are wearing hooded cloaks, with one fencer always wearing the hood up:

Now, I'm no expert on changes in fashion, but to me they certainly don't look to be wearing C16th guard - in fact it looks medieval. Now, somewhere before I saw pictures of two people fencing with swords and bucklers, wearing cloaks, one of whom is always wearing one with a hood up. Where was it again? Oh, I.33, a German manual from around 1300ish:

The top pair look really similar, don't they? Which would be awesome - it could simply be a trace. Didn't PHM or someone once see a copy of I.33? Except for the fact that Jorg Wilhelm contains all kinds of wierd stuff not seen in I.33, including changes of perspective:

So can anyone shed some light onto what's going on here?

Class plan for 4/4/11 - The Krumphau

2011-04-03T21:40:00.000+01:00

Warming Up:
I’m pretty sure I wrote something about footwork drills, jogging and stretching:

While jogging, swing your arms in circles with straight arms (i.e. shoulder warm up) in time with running - so arms point down as you land with the left foot etc. Coordinating arms and legs is a useful skill, whether in wrestling or swordplay.
Similarly, skipping while jumping as high as possible and reaching up with the rising hand. You should feel like you’re really exerting yourself with this. You should also feel ridiculous.
Include some side-to-sides, possibly in wrestling stance (i.e. low), and stepping outside/inside with hips turning.
Hip opening/closing. The “Stoeppler Tai Chi” drill. It’s all about the knee-hip opening and closing, and the chest one, and keeping legs bent enough to notice.

10 mins

Stretches

10 mins

Cutting practice:

First of all, cutting in a circle. 20x Zornhaus from the right, 20x Zornhaus from the left. 20x Zwerchaus from the right. 20x Zwerchaus from the left.
Jog the length of the hall, cut a zornhau/zwerchau at me, sprint to the back of the queue.

10 mins.

Go get water, etc.

Introduce a new guard, the Schrankhut:

Show it on the right and the left.
Explain its tactical uses.
Get everyone to do it on the right and the left.
Note thumbing the blade.
Get people to cut from Schrankhut on the right to Schrankhut on the left, and vice versa.

10 mins

Schrankhuuuuuut

YOU CAN HAS KRUMPHAU

Introduce a new technique, the Krumphau:

Conceptually - One of the five secret strikes, breaks the guard Ochs, making it one of the vier versetzen. When done from the right, at an opponent doing an uberhau or unterhau, the krumphau is cast with crossed hands, at the opponent's hands. Make sure that you jump out to the right as you do so. Use it in the same way against someone in Ochs.
Explain cutting it from vom Tag, with the sword rotating around its centre of balance, into Schrankhut.
Get people to do it.

7 mins

Isolate the Krumphau:

Partner people up. Attacker thrusts from Pflug. Defender does the Krumphau from vom Tag to displace it or void it and cut to the hands. Get the defender to mask up, so that the attacker can do their part with intent, and the attacker to glove up so that the defender can cut to their hands with intent.
Look for problems. They should be down to not doing one of the above.
Get people to change into threes, and examine eachother doing it. Be critical! Also, don't piss about and do whatever you feel like.

8 mins

Intergrate the Krumphau:

Now, get two people in front of the class. Ask them to do it so that everyone can see. Then, if they do it correctly, ask the the to do a zornhau from the right, and the defender to krumphau against it. If they do it wrong, get everyone to change partners and keep doing until people do it right. The rest of the lesson is contingent on getting everyone, by the end of the session, to be able to do the krumphau against a thrust from Pflug.
In this demonstration, show how if the defender's blade is below the attacker's then they can hangen and schnappen.
In this demonstration, show how if the defender's blade is above the attacker's then they can wind their point on-line, or just bounce off it into their head with the short edge
Show how this can be done against an unterhau too.

10 mins

Change partners, attacker can thrust, uberhau or unterhau from vom Tag. The defender can krumphau against it from vom Tag. Get people to mix up the footwork. Get both to wear masks and gloves.

10 mins

Congradulations, now Sparring!

However, I haven't been paying too much attention to sparring lately. To be honest, I haven't done enough of it myself. However, I will point you to a post by Axel, the Swedish Man'O'War, which is just spot on. To this end, sparring on Monday will be done in groups of three, with the third person coaching the other two. They then swap around and keep going. When they go around for the third time, the coach is allowed to stop the other two and give advice mid-bout.

For the last ten minutes, have a king of the hill fencing match - randomly select two people to begin, whoever wins three points gets to stay in, whoever loses swaps out and coaches the next contender.

Class plan for 28/3/11

2011-03-27T19:05:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm liable to be a bit rushed tomorrow. Fortunately, here's a hypothetical class plan that someone else once made:

Warming Up:

I’m pretty sure I wrote something about footwork drills. Here are a few suggestions relevant to the topic of the rest of this class, but use whatever warm ups and stretches work for you:

While jogging, swing your arms in circles with straight arms (i.e. shoulder warm up) in time with running - so arms point down as you land with the left foot etc. Coordinating arms and legs is a useful skill, whether in wrestling or swordplay.
Similarly, skipping while jumping as high as possible and reaching up with the rising hand. You should feel like you’re really exerting yourself with this. You should also feel ridiculous.
Include some side-to-sides, possibly in wrestling stance (i.e. low), and stepping outside/inside with hips turning. I hope you understand what I mean. I’m going to cover some material where changing the line is important.
Hip opening/closing. The “Stoeppler Tai Chi” drill. It’s all about the knee-hip opening and closing, and the chest one, and keeping legs bent enough to notice.

10 mins

Warming up with cuts. I like it, you like it, we heard a rumour Axel likes it. Also that he warms up by chopping down a telegraph pole with his leather dussack, and doing handstand pressups on the tips of two sharp arming swords, but we’re going to start light and work our way up. Next week - cutting down garden canes with Del Tins and doing elevated leg jumping pushups on basketballs. Wait, those sound like good drills and this was meant to be a joke...

Idea for useful variations:

air cutting while walking along (e.g. zornhau from right to langort/sprechfenster, recover up to vom Tag on the left, zornhau from left...) with *drumroll* a panel of critics. Get a pal or two to watch, then give feedback. Then have one of them do it. With a few groups, you will have room and time to do it with a decent number of reps before you walk into something, and time to get feedback. Try to work out a way to switch partners/groups regularly. Focus on getting movements smooth, cutting effectively, and keeping posture and balance.
Alternately zorning and covering with an upper hanger. Almost like doing singlestick :P

10 mins
From here, move into...

Techniques

Well, the plan is to build up a sequence/play based around the bind resulting from meeting a Zornhau with a Zwerchau, to Introduce the techniques, Isolate them to allow some proficiency within a set play, and Integrate them a little in the context of a “sensible” flow of techniques. Ideally, it’s one we can recognize in Lichtenauer, although even as a study of what this bind could result in, it’s very incomplete as a set of techniques. For reasons of comprehension, we’ll assume the Patient is a man and the Agent a woman. Make sure both partners swap and let the other person practice each technique/role. Switch partners from time to time too, even if it means starting at the beginning.

There’s quite a bit of material, so I hope I’m not being too ambitious for one session.

So, we start with precept one of the Lichtenauer system - killing people. Patient waits in vom Tag. The Agent will approach from zufechten distance, close and kill him with a Zornhau as soon she’s in distance to connect, without breaking up her footwork too unduly. I don’t really care if you shuffle in with small gathered steps then leap into the Vorschlag, or do the KdF Approved Technique of lots of natural, small passing steps that just stroll past someone as you give them a new centre parting.
Precept two - acting Indes. As the Agent strikes her Zornhau, the Patient now strikes a Zwerchau to counter it. The idea is for the Patient to be able to pull the technique off against a real threat. The Agent shouldn’t help him too much - if her Zornhau is weak or out of distance or off target, the Patient ain’t gonna learn much. Make every technique alive, and try to complete it. It’s your opponent’s job to stop you, WITHOUT preempting you and “cheating” the drill.
Now add another element - winding. If the Patient’s Zwerchau doesn’t hit his opponent, he can wind against her blade and secure a thrust. For this, the Agent may have to deliberately go weak on the bind to help.
Next step - Abnehmen. The Agent will strongly resist the wind, and the Patient will use the energy he is given to Zwerch around her blade and hit her on the other side of her head to the one he was previously targetting.
Next variation - Mutieren v play 3. As the Patient tries to wind up, the Agent will fall over his blade to thrust at his lower opening. The Fuhlen in 4-6 is pretty important here, and so we’re going to show a reasonable spread of options by allowing
A last technique - Nachreisen v the Abnehmen in 4. As the Patient comes off the bind to strike to the other side, the Agent will either thrust to the face or Zwerch to the (default: Agent’s Right/Patient’s Left) upper opening, which covers the Agent as well as hurting the Patient.

This means we now have a situation where depending on the pressures of the bind, trying to run through the drill will result in:

The Patient being hit with a Zornhau
The Agent being hit with a Zwerch
The Agent being hit with a winding thrust
The Patient being hit with a mutiered thrust
The Agent being hit by a Zwerch to the other side
The Patient being hit by a Zwerch under the one he was trying to connect with.

Hopefully, the timing involved will become obvious if each move is done with intent. Try to dissuade use of a hangen-and-schnappen or durchlaufen as a “solution” to the bind. It sort of works, but it’s too easy a distraction.

I’d be happy if a group could get the complete play set working in 40 minutes. That’s probably optimistic. Make sure you switch partners regularly to help offset boredom. That gives you an hourish of material before allowing freeplay.

Final Point: Not really a lesson plan, but I’ve noticed that other MA classes I do use a quick few minutes of stretching out afterwards, with it’s attendant not doing much and sitting in a circle, as a chance to get messages out. Also, shaking hands with EVERYONE in class afterwards.

Class Plan for 21/3/11

2011-03-21T15:16:00.000Z

So, some of you may have notices a lack of posts analysing out training after sessions. To make it worse, I'm not sure if I'm going to have time to come up with a proper lesson plan on the blog this week. It's not lack of love for HEMA, just University getting in the way. It's approaching the end of term, so I've been battling a lot of deadlines and group work, all of which drag me away from hitting people with swords.

Last week's session was a bit of a step back from the week before, partly because I was teaching a new technique rather than just drilling, and partly because energy just wasn't there. I don't know if it was my lesson's pacing or just a lack of drive by that point on a Monday.

Rough outline for today:
Warm ups, stretches.

Using swords as focus mitts, getting people warmed up and in the mindset for longsword work.
Speaking Window drill.
[Start switching between the two every thirty seconds or so, and swapping partners every minute, as they don't rely on kit]

Practice cuts - 20 Zornhaus from the right, 20 Zornhaus from the left. 20 Zorn-Orts from the side that the person is most comfortable from. 20 Zwerches to the right. 20 Zwerches to the left.

Teach people how to infinity cut/figure of eight cut/ribbon cut.

Something like the drill Jon did at the open day. Person 1 attacks, person 2 defends. Unfortunately this needs everyone to have kit. Also, realistically, only three people can do it in the space at a time. So I'm tempted to say that those with kit get priority.

Person 1 cuts oberhaus to either side without stepping. Person 2 tries to statically block without moving.
Person 1 cuts oberhaus to either side and can step. Person 2 tries to displace them without moving.
Person 1 cuts oberhaus to either side and can step. Person 2 tries to displace them or catch Person 1 with a thrust. Things are now a hell of a lot more cagey.

Circle of Death with Longswords - Using spare swords or whatever is to hand, make a 4 ft wide circle. One person is in the circle, the other outside. For three attacks, the person inside can only defend. After that, they are able to counter. First person to die loses. Need to be fully kitted up.

No idea whether this will work or not, but to be honest these 'no teaching, only learning' drill sessions depend a hell of a lot on who shows up and what mood they are in.

Class Plan 14/3/11

2011-03-14T12:06:00.000Z

Today's plan is to introduce a second meisterhau to everyone. Yeah, I know that I said that I would focus on drilling for a bit rather than theory, and that is still the plan, but hopefully the 'learning' in this is drill-centred enough that people can move at their own pace.

Warm up:
Circle of Doom. Try using the whole space, and mixing in stretches like last time. Introduce Spring Right and Spring left. 10 mins.

Footwork:

Ladder drill. Swords out on the floor to produce rungs. Steps, then two steps forwards, one step back. Add in circling around gloves on the way back. 7 mins.
Then Ringen dance drills. 2 mins.
Then Pillar of Doom. First normally, then weaving between gloves. Then weaving between gloves and against an outstretched sword. 10 mins.

Paired Drills:

Quarters drill from last week. One person adopts a guard. The other person cuts to the open area. 2 mins.
One person changes between the four hangers. The other person cuts to the openning as it forms. 2 mins.
One person changes between the four hangers. The other person cuts to the openning as it forms. As they cut, the first person displaces the incoming blow. 5 mins.

Now, information time.

Introduce the Zwerchau - the Crossed/Athwart Strike:
One of the five master-strikes. Already covered the Zornhau (Wrathful Strike).
Takes away that which comes from the roof.
Single time counter.
Essentially a change from Vom Tag to Ochs, displacing a oberhau as it cuts.

Show it being done. Discuss how you do it.

Bring the sword in front of the body, roatating it around its centre of balance.
Then lift up with your hands into Ochs, supporting the blade with your thumb.
If cutting into left ochs, you should land the cut with the false edge.
Step out to the side too.

Points:

Hands up and infront, covering the head, even when you are changing between blows.
With a leap it will hit the head.
Can be used from zufechten as a vorschlag.

Get everyone to attempt it against me.
5 mins.

Paired drills (isolating the technique):

Get everyone practicing it. If they look bored/able to do it. Begin to introduce responces to counters:
You can run through and wrestle.
Immediately follow up with a zwerchau to the other side as a durchwelschen.
You can strike it to Ochs and to Pflug (so at the opponent's upper and lower openning).
If they respond hard, you can duplieren behind their blade.
If they respond hard, you can hook their wrists with your pommel as part of a schnappen.
If they respond weak, you can schnick them to the neck.

10 mins.

Second to Last Paired Drill:
Two people begin in distance in Vom Tag. Only cuts allowed are Zwerchau, Zornhau and a thrust. No stepping back. Closely supervise it. (Get Johann to supervise a second pair?) 10 mins.

Last Paired Drill (Incorporate the Technique):
Both people start out of distance in Vom Tag. Only cuts allowed: Zornhau, Zwerchau. No steps backwards. Closely supervise it (Get Johann to supervise a second pair?) 15 mins.

Free sparring.

There's the lesson plan. I might be able to get a video camera if I go up to campus soon. Failing that, it should hopefully be a decent mix of a new technique and drills. Thoughts?

Notes on the Zwerchau

2011-03-14T00:11:00.000Z

From the Primer:

Zwerchau
- ‘Athwart Cut’. A cut made roughly parallel to the ground with the hilt held high, using the short/false-edge when made from the right, and the long/true-edge when made from the left, and ending in a position similar to Ochs. It can be used as a versetzen, breaking Vom Tag by displacing cuts from above and cutting into the opening on the other side of their head. The Zwerchau uses the thumb under the blade in order to support it and give stability to the cut. When done from the right, it requires supination of the right forearm.

From Goliath, 22r, the Zwerchau against an oberhau:

To the face!

Dobringer 27r-28r:

This is on the cross strike [Twerehaw]
The cross strike [Twere] takes away what
comes from the roof, do the cross strike
[Twere] with the strong and note your work.
Cross strike [Twere] to the plough [P?uge]
and follow hard to the ox [Ochsen] he who
do the cross strike [Tweret] well with a
leap will hit the head. He who lead the
feint/error [Veller] , hits from below as
he wish, [Vorkerer] forces, runs through
[Durchlawfer] and wrestles [Ringet] take
the elbow with skill, jump him in the scale.
Glossa. Note and know that from the whole
sword no strike is as good, ready and strong
as the cross strike [Twerhaw]. And it goes
across to both sides using both edges the
foremost and the rearmost at all openings
below and above. And all that comes from
the roof [Dem tage], that is the upper strike
[Oberhaw] or what comes from above and
goes down, that the cross strike [Twerhaw]
will break and defends against for you if
you do the cross strike [Twerhaw] well, or
if you cast the sword aslant in front of the
head on whichever side you wish, just as
you do when you want to get into the hang-
ings [Hengen] or the turning [Winden]. In
the cross strike [Twerhaw] you turn the ?at
sides of the sword, one up and one down
with the point horizontal, one [edge] to the
right and one to the left side. And it is good
to bind the opponent’s sword with this cross
strike [Twerhaw]. When this has happened
then the other can come away with dif?-
culty and he will then be struck on both
sides with the cross strike [Twerhaw]. So
when you make a cross strike [Twerhaw],
regardless of the side or if it is high or low,
you will go up with the sword with your
hand turned and the cross guard in front
of your head so that you are well guarded
and covered. You shall do the cross strike
[Twerhaw] with a certain amount of power.
And when you must ?ght for your neck [i.e.
for your life] , then you shall use the earlier
described teachings and seek and win the first strike
[Vorschlag] with a good cross strike [Twere-
haw]. When you go against another, then as
soon as you think that you can reach him,
with a step or leap, explode with a cross
strike [Twerehaw] from high on the right
side using the back edge straight at the
head. And you shall let the point shoot out
and move across well so that you drive the
point well and turn [Winde] or tightens it
around the opponent’s head like a belt. So
that when you do a cross strike [Twerehaw]
with a good step or leap out to the side,
it is impossible for the opponent to pro-
tect himself or turn away. And when you
thus win the first strike [Vorschlag] with
the cross strike [Twerhaw] at one side, then
regardless if you hit or miss, you shall at
once and without delay win the after strike
[Nachschlag] with the cross strike [Twer-
haw] to the other side using the forward
edge before the other can collect himself
and come to blows or other techniques ac-
cording to the afore described teachings.
And you shall cross strike [Twern] to both
sides, to the ox [Ochs] and to the plough
[P?ug] that is to the upper and the lower
opening, from one side to the other, above
and below continuously and without any
interruptions so that you are in constant
motion and the opponent can not come to
blows. And each time that you do a cross
strike [Twerhaw] above or below, then you
do it well and throw the sword across above,
well in front of your head so that you are well covered.

From the Glasgow Fechtbuch:

Double-Zwerch

Ringeck 27r-29r

Do the Zwerchau with these techniques.
The Zwerchau takes away
that which comes from above.
The Zwerchau counters all strikes that cut down from above.
When he cuts in from above against your head, spring with the right
foot against him away from the cut, out to his left side. And as you
spring turn your sword with the hilt high in front of your head, so that
your thumb comes under and cut him with the short edge against his left side.
So you catch his strike with your hilt and strike him in the head.
A technique from the Zwerchau.
Zwerch with the "strong";mark well your work with this.
This is how you shall work with the "strong" from the Zwerchau.
When you cut against him with the Zwerchau, think that you shall
strike powerfully with the sword's "strong" against his. Hold him thus
strongly in the bind then cut with crossed arms behind his sword blade,
from above against the head, or cut him with the sword to the face.
Another technique from the Zwerchau.
When you bind against his sword with the Zwerchau, if he is weak in
the bind, so lay the short edge against the right side of his neck and
spring with the right foot behind his left; and pull him over it with the
sword.
He who Zwerches well
with a spring, places the head in danger.
That is to say, that in all of your Zwerchau strikes you shall take a
proper spring out to the side where you want to strike him. So you can
strike him well in the head. And see to it in the spring that you are
properly protected from above with your hilt above and in front of your
head.

Can anyone guess on the lesson plan for tomorrow?

It's all a bit Academic

2011-03-09T21:52:00.003Z

Jeffrey Hull recently posted over at HEMA Alliance's forums that:

It seems to me that the lack of any substantial dedicated fight-book materials for the large High Medieval triangular shields has simply to do with timing.
The vast majority of fighting manuscripts started appearing after 1400 - thus well-after the era of common usage of those things. By then, the high nobility had taken to full plate armouring, with only those little cavalry targes to be seen (cf. Gladiatoria versions circa 1425-50). Otherwise it tended either to be bucklers or pavises.

That's a perfectly good explanation as to why not much 'heater-shield HEMA' goes on. But let's turn the question on its head...

Why is it that most fighting manuscripts appear after when heater shields were used?

Codex Manesse, a book of romance and chivalry from c. 1304-40

Was it because there were changes in society? Did the type of people writing things down change or after the black death were different groups taking part in structured martial activities? Was it because the nature of warfare and combat changed; with the new technologies encouraging martial systems to be recorded? Was it because the type of people involved in combat wanted to show their intellect as well as their prowess?

This is a bit too much of a derailment to be brought up on HEMA Alliance in this embryonic form, but to me these are questions that the HEMA community needs to explore, especially if we want to engage with academics and institutions. Sure, they may not affect sword-swinging too much, but I feel that if you're not asking 'Why am I learning to swing this sword in this way?' then you're not trying hard enough.

Codex Gladiatoria, an illustrated guide to breaking another person from the 1430s.

For example we know from the archaeological record shows a different distribution of trauma at Visby then at Towton. To my mind, this strongly implies a difference in the mechanics of the two different battles. Furthermore, in the century between these two combats, documents about the mechanics of individual combat popped up from Portugal to Poland, from Italy to England. What was the relationship between these two connected developments?

Sod it, that's my dissertation fodder. Back to this essay.

Mike's HEMA Blog

HM JKL Fiore Dagger video

On Sparring out of Distance

Vier Leger - This is how they were recorded.

27/02/12 - Back to the Italian.

20/02/11 Session

06/02/11 Session Re-Cap

To fence with steel, with intensity.

Class Structure, 23/01/12

Approaches to HEMA.

16/01/12 Session - Krumphau

Happy New Year!

IDC Lesson Plan 19/12/11

Michael S’s Lichtenauer Tradition Unarmoured Longsword Primer

MS 3227a

Codex 44.A.8

MS Dresden C 487

Guards: These are generally referred to by hut or leger, meaning guard, position, stance, etc. and implying safety.

Four Primary Guards*

Pictures of the Guards

Secondary Guards

Pictures of the Guards

Words for Injuring People:

General Cuts

Master Cuts

Ways of Wounding

Techniques for Wounding

Binding and Winding

Concepts:

Distances and Timing

12/12/11 Lesson Plan

How to do ‘not too bad’ in a sword fight: 2. How to cover yourself.

28/11/11 Lesson Plan

How to do 'not too bad' in a sword fight: 1. How to cut and thrust.

How to do ‘not too bad’ in a sword fight: Introduction

No training today.

A Not-So-Universal-Parry?

Flowing/Cutting/Footwork Drill Theft.

07/11/11 Lesson Plan - Now with video and added feedback.

31/10/11 Lesson Plan. Zwerching 201: The Binds That Tie

Note to self AND FREE-PLAY VIDEO!

24/10/11 Plan

18/10/11 Training

10/10/11 Zwerchau again Lesson Plan

A Kunst des Fechtens Roadmap

03/10/11 Lesson Plan and ramblings.

Michael Edelson on training and cutting.

Test cutting

26/09/11 Training - Zwerch, zwerch baby.

19/09/11 Training - stabbing him in the face.

12/11/11 Training - Longsword 101

World's Quickest Update

On 'Doing' Historical European Martial Arts...

Post-FightCamp update.

Recommendation

More of those Sword and Buckler ramblings

Something a bit wierd from Jorg Wilhalm

Class plan for 4/4/11 - The Krumphau

Class plan for 28/3/11

Warming Up:

Techniques

Class Plan for 21/3/11

Class Plan 14/3/11

Notes on the Zwerchau

It's all a bit Academic