The School of Battle

Halbschwert Ort Breaks Winden

2011-07-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

There is a technique in Codex Wallerstein, folio 11 recto, seen here:
http://media.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/file/82660/33346593581.png
in which you bind, then your opponent tries to take control of the bind with a Winden, and you counter the Winden by lifting your blade over his and going to a halfsword grip on the other side of his blade so you can set aside his thrust with a halfsword thrust. You can see my video interpretation of this technique here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoftDERAzE4

If you look closely, you will see that my version differs slightly from what we appear to be seeing in Codex Wallerstein: Specifically, I push Matthew’s sword off to my right side, whereas in Codex Wallerstein, Rudolph’s sword point appears to be on Ludwig’s *left* side. I believe the way it seems to be shown is very dangerous, because you can easily be sliced by your opponent’s sword if you let it stay on your left where it is virtually in contact with your body.

Because of this, I believe that the picture in Codex Wallerstein is actually poorly drawn, and that the sword is not fully depicted; in other words, I believe the sword is supposed to be on Ludwig’s right side, but the artist made a mistake of some sort. Possibly he might simply have made Rudolph’s sword too short, in which case we are not supposed to be seeing it on Ludwig’s left side at all. Until now, however, this has remained pure speculation.

If you have a copy of my longsword book, which is available here:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-knightly-art-of-the-longsword/6526382
you can read a more detailed discussion of this issue on pages 128-130.

In looking at the so-called “Rast Fechtbuch” (Reichsstadt Schätze Nr. 82) I now believe I see support for my position. Folio 53 recto, shown here:
http://www.marylandkdf.com/w/images/2/24/Sch%C3%A4tze_82_Reichsstadt_53r.jpg
shows a much better-defined image, and clearly shows Rudolph’s sword to be off to Ludwig’s right side, just as I demonstrate it in the video linked above.

Since this portion of the Rast Fechtbuch is probably just a copy of part of Codex Wallerstein we cannot take this plate as positive proof of my position because we cannot know whether the Wallerstein artist got it right and the Rast artist got it wrong by miscopying the earlier work. Alternatively, the anonymous master who wrote Codex Wallerstein may have intended it to be as shown in that book, but later masters may have disagreed with his interpretation for the reasons I give above, and the Rast depiction would then represent a newer version of the technique. Either way, I feel much more comfortable with my interpretation now, and feel that it is, at least, arguable.

Solo Practice

2011-05-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

People constantly ask what they can do for solo training, so I thought I would finally sit down and write an essay on the subject I can use to answer everyone who asks. The short answer is: Very, very little; not enough to be truly meaningful.

Here is the problem: The vast majority of our art, regardless of the form in question, has to do with the bind, either the way you come into a bind, or what you do from a bind. Unfortunately, a bind, by definition, involves two people, so in order to practice any of the meaningful parts of the art you must have two people. This is even true of simple cuts. For example, some of my students are struggling right now with the Zwerchhau; they can do it well enough on a pell, but cannot seem to learn to strike the point around first in partner practice. As a result, they simply knock the attacking sword away, and cannot manage to hit with enough force to do any damage at all with the cut—all of it goes into the bind. This is even more of a problem with the Schielhau, and, although you would not think it, the Zornhau Ort as well: with the former they learn to do the action of the cut, but constantly seek to actively displace rather than simply cutting, and with the latter they try to cut too soon and end up binding on their weak rather than strong. These things can only be learned with a training partner.

Acting from the bind is even more of a problem. Fühlen, Indes, and other such principles really have no meaning except in a bind. How can one learn to feel a bind alone? Things like Winden are simply impossible to even begin to understand without a partner, too.

So what can one do? There are a few things: Certainly pell work is essential for learning the very basic aspects of the art, and pell work should be a part of all training, with or without a partner, forever. Even with the pell, however, a partner is useful—almost necessary—for telling you what you are doing incorrectly. It is very difficult to see your mistakes yourself, especially in the area of edge alignment, one of the most important things the pell teaches us.

Some drills can be useful for practicing the guards, too; I teach one such drill for every form that has multiple guards, but after a few months the student should know the guards well enough that this exercise becomes a waste of time. One can also practice simple cutting or striking drills, but, frankly, they are vastly inferior to pell work. In my classes I include a few such drills, but they are really only intended to get people used to the idea of moving the weapon around (particularly the longsword—we emphasize the use of a push-pull motion of the hands to cut as opposed to swinging the arms). Such drills are only valuable for very new students who are actually in an existing class. They teach what someone needs to know to move on to partner practice, but in isolation they have no value whatsoever.

I am told that very late-period Italian books teach students to develop free-form solo drills called “flourishes;” in my opinion, this speaks very clearly to the nature of the school in question. I am quite certain that in the near future we will see competitions where such exercises are performed to loud rock-and-roll and judged on aesthetics; such, sadly, is the way of the world.

Then there are people who practice long fixed solo forms, akin to the kata of karate-do. Frankly, such exercises are of no value whatsoever. While an interesting discussion can be had regarding the value of solo kata for the practice of fistic arts, it is outside the scope of this essay. It is within our scope, however, to point out the dramatic differences between a punching and kicking art and a sword art based extensively on the bind: there is no comparison. For example, you cannot learn how to pull your sword back along your opponent’s blade in order to take control of the bind with a Winden am Schwert (“winding on the sword”) rather than pushing outward on it unless you have a blade held by a living partner against which to wind so that you can actually feel the dynamics of the bind.

Moreover, it should be noted that in the real combat martial arts of Japan, such as kenjutsu and jujutsu—the ones actually developed from battlefield experience—all kata are partner exercises (yes, iai is practiced solo, but the circumstances are very special and the kata very short). This is because the founders of these systems understood that for kata to have real combat meaning the techniques had to be learned in opposition to a living partner. So it is with the Kunst des Fechtens: solo exercises are of little value.

In conclusion, then, there are solo exercises that can be of some value for rank beginners in order to help them learn the guards of a system and to begin to learn how to move a weapon. Such exercises are relatively unimportant when it comes to understanding the techniques and the important underlying principles of the art, however, and can be of little long-term value; they should be set aside as soon as the student is ready for partner exercises. Pell work can be of tremendous value in learning our art for all ranks, from novice to the most experienced instructor, but even that is better done with a partner, and is still quite limited in that it cannot teach anything about the bind. Finally, long solo exercises akin to those of karate-do simply have no value whatsoever.

Correct training should consist of pell work, progressively free-form partner drills, formal two-man exercises, and, in the cases of armored forms only, eventual free play (after several years of hard work at disciplined partner exercises). The art cannot be learned without partners, however hard you try. You will succeed in only learning the crude outer shell of the art (if that) and never grasp the truly important parts.

What is Kron?

2011-05-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

In the comments section of one of my recent blog postings (see: here), a gentleman who gave his name only as “Alex” questioned my interpretation of the Kron. His question was well justified because of a strange plate in Jörg Wilhalm’s CGM 3711 which states that Kron is performed in the “armored hand” (i.e., a halfsword grip): “Item das ist die kron der sein schwertt gewappent heltt in der hand schon und nim war schon mit der kron die ist gutt in alle was zu allen weren und bis starckh darin oder schwach wie du wiltt gloss merckh.” CGM 3711 fol. 41r.

From this it is clear that, unless this is an error on the scribe and artist’s parts, Wilhalm saw Kron as being done at the halfsword. I argued that the source I had been discussing, the Falkner Fechtbuch, strongly suggested that Kron was not done at the halfsword, even though one of the figures in the picture was using a halfsword grip. I argued that the text made it clear that the person using the halfsword grip was, in actuality, performing the Abschneiden underneath the Kron to counter it, and I believe my analysis of the text supports this interpretation.

Still, Alex’s case was at least arguable. He pointed out that there were no good illustrations of Kron other than the Wilhalm reference and that in their absence, Wilhalm should drive our interpretation.

As sure as I was of my interpretation of the Falkner plate, I was still troubled. And yet I was sure I had seen a better pictorial source on this subject, I just could not place it. Finally, tonight I remembered the source: The Glasgow Fechtbuch. Look at this picture:
“This is the text and gloss of how the slice breaks the Kron.
Slice through the Kron, thus you will break it well already. So press the strike hard with a slice pull away.
Glosa: Understand that this is for he who would displace with the Kron and try to run in. So, take the slice under his hands on his arms and press well upwards, as painted hereafter. Thus is the Kron broken. Also, wind your sword out, slicing under to over, and then draw yourself away.” Glasgow Fechtbuch fol. 9r (tr. Dave Clarke).

This picture is, unlike Falkner, unequivocal: Ludwig is *clearly* performing an Abschneiden, which means that Rudolph is, just as certainly, in Kron—and Kron is, therefore, done as I said, with both hands on the hilt, not in a halfsword grip. Moreover, the Glasgow Fechtbuch is much closer in lineage to the Liechtenauer canon than is Wilhalm; indeed, it is just a later copy of Ringeck, and thus should be viewed as a more reliable source.

This, in my opinion, settles the question once and for all. It does not explain why Wilhalm has such a different version of the technique, but many of his plays are at variance with earlier Liechtenauer Society masters, so we really should not be surprised.

How Sharp Were Medieval Swords?

2011-05-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

One of the issues that always causes confusion when people attempt to understand medieval combat is how sharp were the swords that were used. Some argue that they were laser-edged razors, others that they were dull, still others have a vague sense that the truth must lie between those two extremes but are not sure where.

The short answer is that we do not know. There is no “universal sharpness scale” in the Middle Ages, and, in truth, swords probably varied in sharpness based both upon their intended use and the preferences and abilities of the user (or his armorer). That is not a very satisfying answer, however, so we should dig a little deeper to see if we can apply the evidence that has been left to us in order to come up with an estimate of the norm.

The first and most common-sense approach to this question that would occur to most people is to look at medieval swords to see how sharp they are. In fact, however, this is meaningless: I shudder to think how dull my favorite chef’s knife would become if it were handled for a few hundred years, and swords are no different; a sword that was once extremely sharp might be nothing but a slab of dull metal by now because of all the handling it received over the centuries. Likewise, just because a sword is extremely sharp today means nothing. I was given an antique saber when I was a teenager, and since it was quite dull I sharpened it myself; so may it have been with any extant swords that are sharp today.

The Fechtbücher, however, give us some excellent insights into this question if only we read between the lines. There are three attacks in the Kunst des Fechtens (not counting pommel strikes): The cut, the thrust and the slice. Cuts are chopping actions and thrusts are self explanatory. The slice is effected by placing your edge against a target (usually the wrists or neck) and pushing or pulling it along the flesh as if you were carving a Thanksgiving turkey; the longer the stroke, the deeper the slice.

Experiments have shown that a dull sword will not perform an effective slice, so we know that medieval swords must have been nearly as sharp as a modern kitchen knife, at a minimum.

The farther we go along the sharpness scale, the more delicate the edge becomes, and the more maintenance it requires in order to function properly. Even minor handling, such as sliding it in and out of a scabbard, etc., will dull a razor edge quickly, and in use a very fine edge will cause severe chips to be knocked out of the blade, chips that will be problematic to repair (and yes, swords were *commonly* used for edge-on-edge displacements—read my blog entry on the subject if you still do not understand this—but why create a bigger problem if you do not need to?).

Since a sword need only be a little less sharp than a kitchen knife, and since the sharper it becomes the more problems you are likely to have, why do more? Thus, it seems very likely that, allowing for personal preferences and sharpening skill, most medieval swords intended for Bloßfechten were probably about as sharp as a modern kitchen knife or a little less. My personal sword is sharpened to that level for this reason.

What then of swords intended for halfswording in Harnischfechten? Many people who have not really worked with sharp swords using halfsword techniques imagine that swords must be very dull in order to allow one to grip the blade in a gauntlet, let alone a bare hand. They have an almost supernatural dread of how dangerous swords must be, no doubt from watching bad samurai shows on television, and believe that you will be cut badly if you grab a sharp sword in your bare hand.

The facts, however, do not support this belief. We have techniques in the Fechtbücher in which you go from a slice to a halfsword grip with your bare hand in one technique:
“If you bind with him and he changes through and changes to Halbschwert, counter it with a slice from above. And as you slice you can switch to Halbschwert and thrust.” Ringeck ff. 53v-54r.
The gist of this technique is that you and your opponent bind, and he moves his sword around into a halfsword grip in order to hook your blade with his pommel. You respond with an Abschneiden, or slicing technique from above down onto his wrist, and then, after slicing him, you grab your blade in a halfsword grip in order to thrust it into him. So this technique clearly tells us to first use a slice—a technique requiring a fairly sharp sword—and then move into a halfsword technique wherein you grab your sharp blade in your bare hand.

This is possible because swords (and knives, for that matter) cut with a sliding motion. As long as you hold the blade firmly and do not allow it to slide in your grip, you will not be cut.

It should be obvious, then, that it is possible to perform halfsword thrusts while holding a sharp blade in your bare hand. In fact, all students of die Schlachtschule are required to actually perform a hard thrust with a sharp sword held in a halfsword grip into a solid target so that they can instantly refute some ARMA type when he says it cannot be done.

There is at least one source that suggests not all swords intended for Harnischfechten were sharp, however. In De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, a late-fifteenth-century Italian fighting manual, Phillippo di Vadi wrote that swords for armored combat should be dull up to a few inches from the point (the point needs to be sharp or it will not penetrate flesh well). Unfortunately, we cannot be sure how common this practice was, or even if it was actually done at all. Vadi shows a strange and very specialized sword with a flaring tip for armored combat, and we have no indication that such swords ever existed outside of his book. Moreover, it is strange that no other Fechtbuch author would mention such a detail if it were common. My personal belief, or perhaps “suspicion” is a better word given the paucity of evidence, is that this practice was not common, but we cannot be sure. We can be sure that halfswording with a fully sharp sword was possible (easy, in fact) and that it was performed with sharp swords at least some of the time. Farther than that we cannot go.

In conclusion, then, it is my belief that most medieval swords intended for actual combat, whether in or out of armor, were probably sharpened a little less than a modern kitchen knife.

(Incidentally, I recently read a comment by someone who had read my blog who wrote that I was “pedantic.” Whomever that was, I would like to thank him for the compliment, even though I know he did not intend it as such. When people hold firmly onto mistaken beliefs it is necessary to use great detail and careful documentation in arguments intended to refute their cherished misconceptions, because otherwise they will take everything you left out as a weakness in your argument. I take this anonymous individual’s comment as an indicator that I am being sufficiently detailed in both my arguments and my evidence.)

EDIT: I was contacted offline by a professional chef who informed me that in a professional kitchen the knives are much sharper than I suggest in this essay, and that different knives have different levels of sharpness. Let me clarify by saying that by "chef's knife" I meant a type of knife--eight-inch blade, wider at the base than the tip--not a knife owned by a professional chef, and that I was referring the the chef's knives in the home kitchens I have visited, not those in a professional kitchen.

Also, edge geometry varied considerably on swords, just as it does on many knives. I purposefully didn't get into this issue because it's one that's not terribly well understood. This essay paints the issue with a very broad brush because that's all the precision that is warranted by the subject; after all, as I point out in the essay, different swords surely had different levels of sharpness. We're only able to speak in broad norms here, and for that, edge geometry isn't really terribly important: If you place the edge on someone's wrists and perform an Abschneiden, how much force is requires to slice through? That's our real question.

Christian Tobler's "Captain of the Guild"

2011-05-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

I just received my copy of Christian Henry Tobler’s new book, Captain of the Guild: Master Peter Falkner’s Art of Knightly Defense, Freelance Academy Press, 2011.

The book is excellently prepared and looks well produced and serviceable. The binding is properly and cleanly executed, and the cover seems quite durable. The coloration and printing of the front and back covers is clear and vibrant, with no smudges or print misalignments. The book was produced in a 6”x9” Casewrap Hardcover format, and is 336 pages in length with full-color interior plates.

In this work, Tobler returns to his great strength: Studying and translating the Fechtbücher themselves. The book begins with a brief discussion of Fechtbücher in general, biographical information about Peter Falkner, and some brief notes about the manuscript in question. He then goes on to discuss each section of Falkner’s book in detail, from longsword to messer to dagger, staff, poll weapon (mostly halberds), dueling shields, and a very little Roßfechten and Harnischfechten (only one plate of the latter, although it shows a fascinating and unique technique). This discussion is comparable to the analysis in his book about the Paulus Kal Fechtbuch in In Service to the Duke (Chivalry Bookshelf, 2006), if not quite as extensive.

The main body of the book is a full-color facsimile presentation of Falkner’s Fechtbuch. Each page is shown in the proper position, and on the facing page there is a transcription and a translation of the text for that page. The facsimile even includes all blank pages and the cover of the book, details that are sometimes left out, and which are probably not, strictly speaking, necessary, but still nice to see.

The book concludes with a nice glossary and pronunciation guide for German martial terms, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

The great strength of Tobler’s work is his translation. The pictures are beautiful and vividly presented (and it stands well as a work of art), but, in the final analysis, this book is primarily a scholarly resource for those who study the German school of historical martial arts. To that end, I find Tobler’s translations to be the best renderings of anyone working in the field. While not always absolutely literal (e.g., Tobler often modifies word order to make it less confusing to the modern mind), he none the less manages to capture the precise meaning of the text better than most others working in this field. I had previously translated the poll weapon section of Falkner’s book for my own use, and while I got the wording right for the most part, Tobler’s word choices and order actually convey the meaning of the text better.

Overall, this is a superb book, and well worth the price charged. The book is somewhat less elaborately fancy than Tobler’s Kal facsimile, but that book seemed a bit more overdone than the actual quality of the book deserved; for example, it does not seem to be quite as durable as the current work, for all that it has gold edging on the pages.

One issue that Tobler discussed in his introduction could, I believe, use some expansion: Several of the plates in Falkner’s book do not seem to show the exact technique being described in the text. For example, folio 7r (Tobler pp. 58-9) is about the Schielhau, which is normally used to displace an Oberhau. The text supports that interpretation, but the picture shows something different: The figure on the left is, indeed, performing a Schielhau, but the figure on the right has his sword hanging point down on the inside of the Schielhau—not at all what we would normally see.

Tobler discusses this in his Introduction, saying: “The illustration of the Schielhau, or “Squinting Stroke” on folio 7r has drawn considerable interest… It seems to imply a very powerful deflection has occurred prior to the wielder hitting his opponent…” Tobler, p. 8. He does mention that we see similar positions in Jörg Wilhalm, but may not understand what he is seeing because he does not describe the complete play. This is not a “powerful deflection” prior to the blow (if I correctly understand what he means by that—he may mean the same thing), but rather a counter to the Schielhau using a Schnappen, as Wilhalm tells us himself.

Here are the two plates in this series from Wilhalm and their associated text:
http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/JWH1/jw19a.jpg
"This is also a piece of the Schielhau and a break against when the sword is at the neck. This is the break against the other piece, and mark that you see how it is painted.

http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/JWH1/jw19b.jpg
This is from the break of the Schielhau with Uberlauffen, that will break the Schielhau. With a strong cut or slice go over his flats and go immediately [to him]. This is therefore a strong break to make against the Gloss." Jörg Wilhalm CGM 3711 ff. 19r-v, tr. David Clarke.

Here is a video demonstrating an interpretation of this technique in slow motion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7nI7z80jRU

This suggests that a number (but certainly not all, nor even most) of the plates in Falkner actually show the counter to the play being described in the text for that plate. Another example can be seen in the dagger play on folio 49v (Tobler pp. 226-227). Here the text describes a fairly typical arm bar counter to a stab from above with a dagger, but what the picture actually shows is the original attacker, the person upon whom the arm bar is being applied, countering the arm bar by picking up the defender’s leg to throw him. This is a fascinating insight into this book, and certainly supports Tobler’s contention that Falkner intended his work for a very knowledgeable audience.

I have not had time to go through every single play in the book, but I did look carefully through the longsword material (and I have been working with the poll arm material for quite a while). Some of the longsword plays are quite confusing because they don’t seem to be illustrating anything, really—there seems little connection at all between the text and the picture. Perhaps with more study insights such as the one above will be gained by comparing this Fechtbuch with others.

Of all the plays I did understand, however, the one that most surprised me was the Schnitt counter to Kron. Kron is a defensive move in which you lift your sword vertically to catch a descending strike, often the Scheitelhau in other sources, on the cross. Most sources say to counter Kron by dropping your blade under his and using an Abschneiden (a kind of Schnitt or slice) to cut his wrists. In Falkner, however, the Schnitt is performed at the halfsword; that is, you slice his wrists while holding your blade in your left hand and slicing the sharp edge across his wrists; see folio 11v; Tobler pp. 76-77 (NB: So much for those who think halfswording could not be performed with a sharp blade!). The text supports the picture in this, because the text says that if he hooks your blade with his cross to pull, you can turn your point or pommel to him for a strike or thrust, so this is not a mistake of the artist.

© Hugh T. Knight, Jr. 2011. All rights reserved.

Intellectual Honesty

2010-10-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Folks, without intellectual honesty we cannot have meaningful discussions. Without meaningful discussions, we cannot explore important areas of our art that are unclear. As one example, admit when you are wrong! Everyone makes mistakes, everyone spouts off comments “from the cuff” in informal discussions, and everyone of us is misinformed about certain areas of our art. None of these things marks you as an idiot or a failure, so admit to them when they are pointed out. Case in point, here is a conversation I just had on a discussion list:

He: “Unlike Fiore, [the Germans] NEVER [emphasis his—HTK] wait to counterstrike/exchange thrusts.”

Me: Yes, sometimes they do. I provided specific examples of the Sprechfenster, plays of the 3rd guard of the halfsword and others, along with a link to my blog entry giving a detailed analysis of this issue.

He: Your analysis is flawed. You do not know what you are talking about (no evidence, no citations, just the blanket statements).

Me: Direct quote from von Danzig telling us to assume Long Point *before* the combat starts and wait to see what the enemy will do. I cited the exact page where the quote could be checked for accuracy.

He: Claimed that was a threatening guard so it did not apply. What he *really* meant was that the Germans never do it the way *Fiore* does it, but he did not specify how that was different. (To make it worse, he confused Döbringer with Liechtenauer, thus demonstrating his lack of familiarity with the material, but I let that pass with only a polite correction after he had made the same mistake several times.)

Me: Deep sigh—here we go. First, showed him Fiore’s Long Guard which is exactly analogous to our Long Point, so it was clear Fiore *did* do it that way. Second, gave him a link to a video clip of a technique from the 3rd guard of the halfsword in which you do not threaten, you merely wait, and documented this with a clear citation for the technique. Next, showed a very similar technique in Fiore, thus clearly proving that, while I do not believe the German and Italian systems to be at all similar, the Germans *do* do some things that the Italians do, too.

He: Well, I am not going to take your undocumented video of a technique as evidence. Besides, I do not agree with your Sprechfenster argument. Besides, your video was poorly done (but no statement as to why).

Me: Well, I *did* provide a citation for the technique, but here is the text for you to examine so you do not have to look it up. And the Sprechfenster *does*deny your original argument, but I gave you a different example so as to deny your ability to twist the argument around. And the video is well done, but even if it were not well done it still proves the point because it matches the text exactly. None of this is open to interpretation: I have shown you an almost exact match of ideas proving that, at least in a limited number of cases, the Germans use the same approach of waiting that Fiore does.

He: Well, you are just an egotistical jerk.

Me: Let us leave personality out of this and avoid ad-hominem attacks. What is your response to the example from the 3rd guard I provided?

He: I will retreat into lofty silence to prove you are a jerk for being so insistent because I am a *real* scholar while you are not. What you should have done was to simply agree to disagree. That you did not proves you to be a jerk.

Me: When an issue is debatable or open to question then we can agree to disagree. When someone is patently wrong he should admit it; you have not supplied any evidence or documentation to contradict what I have written, nor even addressed most of it.

The funny thing is his signature line on his e-mails is from Mark Twain: “Far better to remain silent, and let others wonder at the extent of one's ignorance, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.” If only he had thought about that!

So folks, when you are wrong, admit it. Do not try to turn things into an ad-hominem slugfest; all that does is to prove that you have no more arguments to make and cannot respond to the ones on the table. And if you do, and your opponent responds in kind, that does not prove him to be a bigger jerk than you—he probably sees no reason to keep providing you with evidence when, clearly, you have no interest in it nor in reasoned debate. I have to admit that when I am attacked personally I often respond in kind merely because it is so much fun, but I acknowledge that it is unprofessional. Fortunately, in this case, I avoided the temptation.

This was a clear case of a guy who spouted off about a subject about which he was un- or misinformed. No harm, no foul—that applies to all of us in at least some areas, including me, and besides, this issue (Germans waiting to be attacked) is one about which very few people know the facts. In fact, as regular readers of this blog know, I actually *post* my mistakes here for all to see because I would rather admit to an error than to continue to be wrong because while ignorance is both inevitable and forgivable, blind obstinacy is not.

Columbus Day Sale At Lulu.com

2010-10-07T22:49:00.000-07:00

If you've been thinking about buying any books at Lulu.com, they're having a sale for Columbus Day: 14.92% off all purchases (up to a maximum of $50.00 in savings) until 10/11/10. Simply enter the word "EXPLORE305" in the coupon code field at checkout. So if you've been putting off buying some books, now's the time! You can find my storefront here: http://stores.lulu.com/hughknight

Active Fühlen

2010-08-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

Fühlen is the German word for “feeling;” in the context of HEMA, it refers to feeling whether your opponent is hard or soft in the bind which, in turn, tells you how to act next. And when you act, you are to do so Indes, another German word which means something like “just as” or “instantly.” Master Sigmund Ringeck told us:

“You shall learn and understand both the word Fühlen and the word Indes because these two belong together and together they account for the greatest art and skill in fighting. Therefore remember, if one binds against the others’ sword, you shall notice—right in the moment when the blades make contact—whether he has bound hard or soft. And as soon as you have noticed this, remember the word Indes: this means that you should attack the next opening immediately and nimbly, hard or soft so he will be defeated before he knows it himself.” (Ringeck ff. 38r-v)

In other words, Ringeck is saying that when a bind occurs you should feel (Fühlen) it to determine whether the enemy is hard or soft in the bind and then instantly (Indes) use the best play for whichever kind of bind it is. Here is an example: The attacker strikes a Zwerchhau, to which the defender responds by striking into the cut to displace it. The attacker must then feel the bind to determine whether his opponent is hard or soft in the bind. If the attacker is soft in the bind, the attacker should lift his sword up and over the defender’s head to apply a slicing cut to his neck. If, however, the defender is hard in the bind, then the attacker should use either a Duplieren or a cross-knock from the bind. In either case, whichever response the attacker uses from the bind must be performed Indes—in other words, it must happen the instant the swords clash together.

Unfortunately, these two goals—the process of Fühlen and the requirement to act Indes—seem to be mutually exclusive. It takes a moment, albeit a brief one, to determine whether your opponent is hard or soft in the bind, a moment in which you cannot be acting, thus the response is delayed. It would therefore appear you can use Fühlen or you can act Indes, but not both. And yet, it is likely Ringeck understood the principle about which he wrote; after all, he was not the only one to write about this, and it seems to be a central principle of the art.

In order to reconcile this apparent discrepancy it is necessary to look at Fühlen in a different way, a way which I have chosen to call “Active Fühlen.” The core idea of Active Fühlen is quite simple: When a bind occurs, the swordsman instantly responds with the correct technique to use if the enemy is soft in the bind—no stopping to feel the bind, you simply acts Indes. If the technique works, all is well: The enemy was, in fact, soft in the bind, and he should now be dead.

If, however, the enemy was hard in the bind then it is very likely the technique intended for someone soft in the bind will fail; in the case of the example given above the attacker will be unable to lift his sword up and over his opponent’s head for the slice without actively fighting his strength—which would violate another core principle of our art. In that case, the attacker instantly (Indes!) knows that his opponent is hard in the bind, and can go on to do the appropriate technique.

Thus, Active Fühlen refers to testing the bind without pause or hesitation. There is no moment of consideration in which the enemy can take the initiative of the fight because you are never still once the bind occurs (which we know to do from Hs 3227a). Most techniques intended for use in a soft bind will not work in a hard bind, so this is a very good test of the bind. Another advantage is that it makes the decision about which technique to use more automatic; there is no hesitation as you think about the correct technique to use in that situation which, again, helps to maintain the initiative of the fight.

The reason for automatically using the technique appropriate to a soft bind is that if it fails then nothing is likely to happen—you simply will not be able to do the technique, but will remain safely in the bind. If anything, it will probably cause your opponent to put even more force into the bind when he feels you moving against him. If, however, you tried to use a technique intended for a hard bind and your opponent was soft in the bind there is a good chance he would be able to hit you while you are acting; a soft bind is often indicative of someone pulling out of the bind to do something, for example. Thus, it is essential to test the bind with a technique intended for use in a soft bind.

We examined one example of Active Fühlen above with the Zwerchhau, now let us look at two more. If the attacker strikes with a Zornhau, then the defender can respond with the Zornhau Ort. The defender strikes down into the attacker’s sword with his own Zornhau, then thrusts Indes into the attacker from the bind. This is Active Fühlen because the Zornhau Ort will only work when the attacker is soft in the bind. Recognizing this fact is what first indicated this might be the solution to the Fühlen/Indes problem. If the attacker is hard in the bind the defender has a variety of choices about what to do depending upon whether the attacker pushes his sword out, down, or holds fast (the Zucken, Durchwechseln and Winden respectively), but in each case the attacker will make a specific motion which instantly tells the defender what he should do.

For the final example, let us turn to the pollaxe: In Le Jeu de La Hache we are told that when a bind of the queues (the tails of the axes) occurs we are to either push around and down, ripping the enemy’s queue away, then strike, or we are to leave the bind, dipping under the enemy’s queue and then knocking it away on the other side before striking as before (Le Jeu paragraphs 35-41). It is clear that to push your opponent’s queue around and down he must be soft in the bind, thus it is obvious which technique to use Indes in the bind. If that does not work, then the enemy is clearly hard in the bind and you should drop under his axe to backhand it away from below.

Not all techniques specify a hard or soft bind; in those cases Active Fühlen has no place. For example, in the queue displacement against an overhand blow in Le Jeu de La Hache (paragraphs 3-5) we are given only one type of response. This is because the displacement itself sets the nature of the bind, thus obviating any need to test it.

While no Fechtbuch discusses Active Fühlen in plain terms, this appears to be the only way to reconcile the instructions to both wait to feel the bind and also to act instantly without hesitation, and careful full-speed experimentation demonstrates that the principle works very well. Moreover, the play of the Zornhau Ort discussed above seems to suggest exactly this process; perhaps there is a very good reason this is the first technique in most longsword texts. Thus, Active Fühlen should not be seen as an addition or a change to Liechtenauer’s canon, but rather an attempt to explain what was meant all along.

Controlling Measure

2010-08-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

Most techniques can be characterized as either first attacks or counterattacks. Most counterattacks can be broken into two parts, the defensive and the offensive. The simplest version of this is a block followed by an attack. This applies even to single-time techniques, although with such techniques the defensive and offensive parts are combined so that they are performed simultaneously. Even if the defender avoids an attack (with no block) and strikes, the avoiding action still counts as the defensive part of the play, because something has to be done to negate the incoming attack.

In armored combat, choosing what action to use for the offensive part of the counterattack is a complex process. The primary decision factors include the nature of the combat, the nature and protection of the target area, and the actions of the attacker during the counterattack. One factor, however, that has very little bearing on the decision of which offensive action to use is the distance between the attacker and defender: Contrary to the misguided notions expressed in a recent pollaxe video, the defender does not make his choice of defensive action based on his distance from the attacker, because a skilled fighter sets that distance himself during the defensive phase of the counterattack. More on this below.

Medieval armored combat came in several flavors, but in the broadest sense it can be broken into just two: Sportive and lethal. Sport combat refers to friendly (a relative term, of course) deeds of arms in which the primary intent was to avoid killing or seriously wounding one’s opponent, even when sharp weapons of war were used. A variety of methods were used to make such fights safer, including limiting thrusting attacks and having the presiding noble stop the fight when especially dangerous situations arose. Lethal combats, contrariwise, were intended to end in death, and the techniques used favored those which would kill quickly, such as thrusts to unarmored targets.

In a friendly deed of arms fought with pollaxes, a strike to the head might be displaced with the shaft of the axe followed by a hook with the fluke on the back of the axe to pull the attacker to the ground (often grounds for the presiding noble to stop the fight). While that same technique might be used in a lethal fight (followed by falling on the attacker and going after gaps in his harness with a dagger), a better option might be to simply thrust into a gap in the attacker’s harness with the spike of the axe. This is an example of how the nature of the combat could effect the choice of which offensive action the defender might use during a counterattack.

The nature of the target was another factor to be considered. Although it might seem counterintuitive, in most friendly deeds of arms the combatants fought with their visors closed for maximum protection (Jacques de Lalaing being a notable exception that proved the rule), while in many lethal combats they fought with their visors open for better vision. Thus, in a lethal combat the defender might choose to thrust to the face against an attacker whose visor was open, or he might choose to strike his head or grapple if the visor was closed. (NB: These are simplified examples; in a real life encounter the choices were more complex.)

Finally, the choice of offensive action might be influenced by the actions of the attacker. For example, if the defender attempts to thrust at the attacker’s face with the queue of his axe and the attacker steps back to avoid the thrust, the defender can simply follow after him with a strike to the head. Or, if the attacker makes as if to displace the counterattack, the defender can shift the target somewhere else, such as the attacker’s hand. This, however, is something that defender cannot know about in advance (although it must be planned for), and so has little bearing on this discussion.

In order to keep all of these options open, the defender must take control of the measure of the fight. This means that during the defensive phase of the counterattack, the defender must move in such a way as to place himself where he needs to be to do the offensive choice that best suits the situation. He can step into the displacement with a longer or a shorter step, or he can stand fast, or he can step backwards, again with steps of varying lengths.

This idea is expressed brilliantly in the first three plays of Le Jeu de La Hache (an anonymous fifteenth-century pollaxe book): In each case, the attacker steps forward to strike the defender’s head with his mail (the hammer head of his axe), to which the defender responds by displacing the attack with the tail of his axe and then either thrusting into the attacker’s face with his queue (the spike on the bottom of the shaft) or striking the attacker’s head with his mail (which requires an extra step). So essentially the same technique is shown three times, but in different circumstances: In the first and third techniques, the defender is standing with the head of his axe forward, while in the second he is standing with the tail of his axe forward. In the first technique the defender steps forward to effect the displacement, in the second he steps not at all, and in the third he steps backward. Clearly, then, the defender is controlling the measure of the fight during the defensive phase of the counterattack. He is not stepping to some random spot and then using an offensive action that works best at whatever distance he happens to be from his attacker, he is stepping so as to be at the right distance to use the technique he wants to use.

Therefore, in conclusion, it should be clear that the defender should control the distance of the fight during the defensive phase of his counterattack, and the nature of the offensive phase of the counterattack should be determined not by the distance from the attacker, but according to the nature of the fight and the target to be attacked. The notion that the offensive phase of a counterattack is determined by the distance to the enemy reflects a lack of understanding of the basic principles of armored combat. Of course, one must be flexible: It is easy to make a mistake in the judgment of measure, making it necessary to switch to a different technique based on the distance to the attacker, but this should be considered an emergency choice based on error.

Roles in Formal Exercises

2010-08-01T02:24:00.000-07:00

Frequent readers of this blog will note that I often turn to traditional Japanese martial arts training processes for training students of HEMA. I do not use their techniques, interpretations or customs because I believe those to be contrary to the cultural aspects inherent in studying medieval German martial arts, but I recognize that these traditional methods of training and practice are vastly superior to the disgraceful nature of what is seen in most martial arts classes in these sorry days.

Like traditional Japanese martial artists, I recognize that free play is completely useless and meaningless when it comes to learning unarmored forms of combat, and that repetitive drills and formal exercises (called kata in Japan) are vastly superior and far more realistic when it comes to learning a true martial art.

When I first started teaching the Kunst des Fechtens, we simply called the attacker in these drills or formal exercises the “bad guy” and the defender the “good guy.” This nomenclature emerged as a joke, really, but as I thought about it I came to realize that this joke cost me a training opportunity, namely, being able to reinforce their real roles to the partners. Now, we refer to the attacker as the “teacher” and the defender as the “student,” regardless of their actual relative ranks, and emphasis is placed upon having the teacher lead the student through the exercise through correct use of measure, timing, etc. Again and again we emphasize that the student cannot learn properly unless the teacher teaches him the correct lesson—that is, does his attack correctly in all respects.

In his book on the ten kata of modern kendo, Paul Budden expresses this idea precisely, and also gives us some vital insights into the nature of formal exercises. Kata are often thought of derisively by poorly-trained modern martial artists because they never have the discipline necessary to advance far enough in training to fully understand them. Done properly, however, formal exercises, like kata, become living things that teach the reality of combat far better than two partially-trained students who just want to fight will ever learn in their clumsy attempts at free play.

“The idea that kata is practice for killing is a misconception. True representation is the high level training method as performed by two noble beings, correct in posture, dress and attitude, preparing to exact the practice of swordsmanship with true dignity and although both totally committed to the technique, they work within the dedicated guidelines to the utmost of their ability and control. It is a confrontation, with the resolve to carry it through to its conclusion. This conclusion is not stylized death with cuts that kill or pretend to. The feeling is of uchidachi [the attacker—HTK] as the teacher because he must lead shidachi [the defender—HTK] through the kata. His sole purpose is to teach to the student the responses and techniques offered through his attack. Timing is created by uchidachi’s lead, thereby establishing the correct distance, the necessary responses and zanshin (awareness, unbroken concentration). To this end, it is necessary for uchidachi in each kata to strike or thrust at specific areas for shidachi to learn and practice the correct responses. Each response... clearly demonstrates the complete control and the technique… The most important part of kata must be the ‘feeling,’ practicing with true sentiment but in very simple terms…

This almost electric feeling is sometimes apparent in the highest level demonstration by true exponents of the art. Keep your body strong by the correct use of breathing, kiai and awareness, and observe your opponent as a whole being rather than just watching his sword, feet or eyes…

This is the essence of the Kata, making it a living, vital and realistic form. It is not the clockwork motion that unfortunately is often the nature of kata today.”

(Budden, P., Looking At A Far Mountain, Tuttle, 2000, pp. 21-23)

Correcting An Interpretation From Christian Tobler's Pollaxe DVD

2010-07-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

In a review of Christian Tobler’s recent pollaxe DVD I noted that Tobler failed to document the techniques in his DVD, making it very difficult for scholars of the art to know the sources of the techniques being demonstrated, which, in turn, made it difficult to analyze Tobler’s interpretations.

Last week I posted a video demonstrating that one of the techniques shown in Tobler’s pollaxe DVD was executed poorly. Replying in the comments section to my video, Tobler demonstrated the validity of my allegation about his failure to cite his sources. He claimed that my video, even though it matched the one shown in his DVD precisely, was not the technique he was trying to show; he also claimed that because of this, my complaint was invalid (see 28:07 on the DVD in the chapter on the Durchwechseln). The video clip and Tobler’s comments can be seen here.

According to Tobler, the technique he meant to show is one taken from the Paulus Kal Fechtbuch in Vienna’s KHM, manuscript KK 5126, specifically the fourth technique. In his recent book In Saint George’s Name (Freelance Academy Press 2010), Tobler gives this translation for the technique:
“Item: If binds to you such that both hammers stand above and strikes with brute force (lit. “peasant’s strike”), then sense this and pretend as if you intend to parry and let his blow pass before you so that you have the hook at the neck or a free stroke to the head, shoulder or arm.” (Tobler 2010 p. 68)

The technique shown in his DVD, however, represents an inaccurate interpretation of the fourth technique, and lacking any citation, this made it very difficult to identify the technique he was trying to show.

The version of the fourth technique shown on the DVD went like this: The attacker winds up for a powerful “peasant stroke,” and the defender started to move to displace the attack. The attacker never tried to hit the defender, instead, he swung his attack in front of the defender to bind with the defender’s displacement. Thus, the attacker’s axe is well out to the defender’s right side in the bind. From there, the defender simply pulls his axe back out of the bind, then strikes the attacker on the other side of the attacker’s axe.

The problem with this interpretation is that it does not reflect a plausible combat action. Had the defender started to counterattack it would be plausible for the attacker to change the angle of his attack to bind with the defender’s attack (but unlikely since we are told it is a “peasant’s stroke” or huge, powerful swing—not something easy to redirect in mid swing), but that is not what the text says: It specifically says that the defender feigns a Versetzen or displacement (Tobler prefers the word “parry,” however, that word should be used for deflections, not hard stops as shown here), not an attack. There would be no reason whatsoever for the attacker to change the angle of his attack, even supposing he could, to bind with a displacement; it makes no sense. The entire reason for using a huge, over-powered swing is to blast through any possible defense, so it is unreasonable to assume someone doing so would give up his attack for an unnecessary bind (since the defender's displacement does the attacker no harm) with no possibility of causing damage.

Also, note that the text says nothing about a bind actually occurring as is shown in Tobler’s DVD, it says to pretend as if you were going to do so.

Thus, Tobler’s interpretation clearly does not match the intent of the text. It is simply not reasonable to assume that a wild, overdone blow can be redirected in mid swing, and it is unreasonable to assume the user would want to even if he could.

A more reasonable interpretation of the fourth play focuses on getting the attacker’s axe to pass in front of the defender in a way that might actually happen in a realistic fight, and the author gives us the clue to understand that by specifying a “peasant’s strike.” Assuming the attacker has any sense of measure, he is striking at the correct range to hit the defender. Therefore, in order to cause the attacker’s axe to pass harmlessly to his front, the defender must slip back as the attack comes in. Then, since the attacker used a “peasant’s strike”—that is, one that is hard to stop or redirect—the attacker’s axe will swing harmlessly by, and the defender can step in at his leisure to hook or strike his opponent. This is the entire reason the anonymous author specified the “peasant’s strike,” to make it clear this is a case where a strike actually aimed at a real target (i.e., the defender’s head, not his axe) could be made to swing past harmlessly. This one clue makes the entire play make sense.

My students and I have prepared a new video demonstrating both Tobler’s flawed interpretation of the fourth play and a more reasonable interpretation as described above. That video can be seen here.

A Review of Christian Tobler's Pollaxe Video

2010-06-25T02:35:00.000-07:00

A REVIEW OF GERMAN MEDIEVAL MARTIAL ARTS VOLUME 1: THE POLEAXE (SIC) BY CHRISTIAN HENRY TOBLER

Reviewed by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

Christian Henry Tobler is a widely respected figure in the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) community. He has produced four books on various aspects of Johannes Liechtenauer’s art, and some of them have been excellent. Tobler shines as one of the preeminent translators working with German Fechtbücher today.

Tobler’s most recent effort is a DVD purporting to teach a complete system of knightly pollaxe combat based exclusively on German sources. The DVD itself is exceptionally well made in every regard. The box is handsome and well printed. The cinematography, done by Speaking Window Productions, is superb. The pictures are clear and well framed, the sound is excellent, and the editing is very clean and avoids the “cute” transitions seen in some videos.

The material in the DVD, however, does not come close to matching the quality of the production itself. The “complete course” fails dramatically in both scholarship and execution. Space does not permit a complete discussion of all of the errors in this DVD, nor even of all of the types of errors, but the most egregious can be broken down into a failure to document the material included in the curriculum, the inclusion of techniques from non-pollaxe forms of combat, errors of execution, and errors of omission.

Those working to interpret HEMA source documents should share the results of their efforts with other scholars of the art, both to disseminate information and to have their work peer reviewed. When presenting an interpretation, the scholar should include citations referencing the original material upon which those interpretations are based. Failing to do so, as Tobler did in this case, suggests an approach which is beyond question and not open to review. No one’s work, especially at this early stage in the study of HEMA, should be considered above review. Tobler’s failure in this regard makes it extremely difficult for those studying the DVD to check Tobler’s interpretations against the original sources.

The long-lost arts of medieval combat that are being resurrected today represent a fascinating glimpse into the Middle Ages. For the most part, however, they do not represent a viable system of self defense for our modern world. Some of the grappling material is well suited for real-world use today, but other forms, especially armored forms such as pollaxe combat, have no practical relevance whatsoever today except as matters of scholarship. If we still fought armored duels today then adapting techniques from other forms of combat to the one we need to learn to win a life-or-death fight might be justifiable, but such things simply do not happen. Therefore, the only valid approach to resurrecting these lost arts is to remain absolutely faithful to the original source material, and there is no justifiable reason for making up new techniques, even when those techniques are based upon techniques from other forms of historical combat.

Tobler has argued in the past that this kind of extrapolation is justified because when looking at the material we have we often see similar techniques represented in different forms of combat. For example, the Zornhau Ort, or “thrust of wrath” is found in both the longsword (e.g., Cod. 44 A 8 ff. 13r-v) and the sword and buckler traditions (e.g., Cod. 44 A 8 fol. 80r). Note, however, that it was necessary to modify the technique to some degree based upon the weapons being used. How the technique is modified makes a significant difference in its execution, and absent a teacher from the Middle Ages, we cannot know if our modifications would have met their understanding of the technique. Moreover, there is no reason to adapt techniques from one form to the other because we do not have to depend upon these techniques to preserve our lives as they did.

In spite of this, Tobler has chosen to extrapolate a large number of techniques from various other forms into his armored pollaxe curriculum. This fact alone significantly decreases the value of this DVD, especially since the error is compounded by his failure to include documentation for his source techniques as this prevents his viewers from recognizing and weeding out the inauthentic techniques.

Worse, in at least one case, Tobler extrapolated a technique from a different form (halfsword) to show a counter to a pollaxe technique in spite of the fact that the existing pollaxe sources show a counter to the technique already. After demonstrating his “collar throw,” Tobler demonstrates how to counter it by grabbing your opponent’s hand or arm and throwing him forward over your leg (see 25:00). This interpretation was flawed both canonically and in execution: First, the counter Tobler extrapolated comes from the armored halfsword material (several authors show it, e.g., von Danzig fol. 63r), not from the pollaxe material. Even if the reader does not agree that extrapolating from one form to the other is a serious mistake, certainly he should agree that doing so when we already have a technique in the pollaxe material for the purpose certainly is so.

In fact, we have a specific counter to the “collar throw” in Talhoffer 1467 (BSB Cod.icon. 394 a ff. 43v-44r): Here we see the takedown, and here we see the counter. Clearly, the second plate shows a different technique from the one Tobler included. Thus, not only did Tobler extrapolate a technique from a different form, he did so when we already had a perfectly viable pollaxe technique in the canon, making his extrapolation unnecessary.

Second, Tobler demonstrates the technique in a way that suggests he has never actually performed it at full speed against a resisting opponent. The subject in the DVD is barely even unbalanced because Tobler does nothing to break his balance nor to control his motion. Doing this throw correctly requires much better control over your opponent’s arm in order to actually throw him—merely trapping his hand up against your shoulder will not work against a resisting opponent. The best pictorial source for this is in the Goliath Fechtbuch (see MS 2020 fol. 63r) and can be seen here.

As can plainly be seen, the thrower in the picture above has much better control because he is using both hands (although it can be done one-handed) and because he has pulled his opponent’s arm down across his shoulder to break his balance and to create leverage. So Tobler should not have extrapolated this technique from one form to another because a counter to the takedown already exists, but having done so, he should have demonstrated it correctly.

The greatest advantage of a DVD over a book, when it comes to interpreting a martial art, is that the book can never show the flow of a technique nearly as well as a video can. Most books include only a few photographs for each technique, and the reader must connect them in his own brain to understand what the technique should look like. This DVD, however, contains so many errors of execution that they overcome this advantage. The most common problem, and it manifests in almost every technique demonstrated in the video, is one of measure, that is, the distance between the opponents as they perform the technique.

This excerpt from Tobler’s video illuminates the problem very well. Look at the first set of exchanges: The attacker (on the right) strikes well in front of his opponent directly into the defender’s axe. He makes no effort to strike his opponent at all. As a result, the defender does not really have to make any defense whatsoever; he could just as easily step straight forward after his opponent attacks and hit him with no difficulty. Now watch the rest of the clip: This error is not the exception, it is the rule in every single case, and not just in this excerpt, it is the case in almost every demonstration throughout the entire video. If the attacker had struck at the side of his opponent’s head, as he should have, then many of the techniques could not have been performed as shown in the video because the defender would have to first move the attacker’s axe over to the other side of his head. Thus, there are techniques in the video that literally cannot be done against an opponent who strikes correctly.

For example, at the end of the chapter on the Durchwechseln, Tobler says that if we bind we can leave the bind and strike around to the other side in a play reminiscent of Ringeck’s play of the Zucken (“twitching”) with the longsword (see 28:07). In effect, you bind, then pull your axe directly back from the bind and strike again immediately on the other side of the enemy’s shaft. As with other techniques in the DVD, this technique is both non-canonical and flawed in execution.

The problem of execution has to do with the afore-mentioned problem of measure: Since the attacker is striking well in front of the defender this seems as though it should work. Against a proper blow aimed correctly at the left side of the defender’s head, however, it will not work. This is because when your opponent tries to strike you in the head his axe head will not be able to move around your axe. When you displace it, his axe will still be to your left. In order to pull back and then strike around to the other side of your opponent’s axe, you must find a way to put his axe on your right side, which cannot be done unless he, too, pulls his axe back, in which case you do not need the technique in the first place—you can just hit him. A video demonstrating why this technique does not work can be seen here.

This failure of measure is indicative of the broader problem with the execution of many of the techniques in the video: It is apparent from the way many of the techniques are executed that Tobler and his students have not practiced these techniques in a full-speed, full-power environment against an opponent who is resisting their efforts. If they had, they would have realized that some of the techniques that Tobler extrapolated from other forms cannot be made to work with pollaxes, and that some of the pollaxe techniques have to be performed somewhat differently from the way they are presented here. Without that sort of experience, gained over years of effort, it is impossible to truly understand this material, and that lack of understanding is patently manifest here.

Finally, we must consider one other area. We have discussed some of the things shown in the DVD, but we must also discuss the things not included in the DVD. Tobler claims to present a complete system of German pollaxe combat, and yet some of the principles and techniques of the art are simply ignored.

One of the defining differences between unarmored and armored combat is that in the former, relatively little force is required to severely wound your opponent with a cutting technique. When striking at an opponent in armor, however, the circumstances are quite different. Armor is highly effective at dispersing the force of a blow, and only a very powerful blow can hope to stun an opponent or smash bones through armor. At the same time, one must bear in mind the unbalanced nature of the pollaxe, which, unlike a sword, has the majority of its mass concentrated in the head. This forward concentration of mass tends to cause powerful pollaxe blows which miss their targets to whip past the center line of the engagement, travelling well out to the side or down to the ground, and leaving the attacker helplessly exposed to a counter strike from his opponent.

The anonymous Burgundian pollaxe manual Le Jeu de La Hache specifically addresses this subject: “Whichever guard you are on, you can try to hit him on the head. Not so that if you should miss your axe passes beyond him, because that would be dangerous” (Le Jeu paragraph 22). Learning to strike with enough power to do your opponent injury while, at the same time, controlling your attack so that if you miss your pollaxe does not swing wildly past him, leaving you exposed, is something that takes a fair bit of time and knowledge to master. It is difficult to understand, then, why a DVD touted as a “complete, 500 year old system of knightly combat” (see the back cover of the DVD case), fails to even mention this subject.

In fact, Tobler discusses very few of the issues relating to attacking an armored man, other than a brief discussion of different ways to strike the face depending upon the position of the visor and a few vague notes about aiming for gaps in the harness. Different targets require different approaches; targets for the thrust must be handled differently according to whether the target is protected by mail or not, and only certain targets (e.g., the head and hands) are ideal for striking blows. Understanding not just how to strike or thrust but where, and how to do so differently according to the nature of the target, are critical elements of any complete system.

As for missing techniques, consider this technique from Talhoffer 1467 fol. 49r, an excellent and highly effective elbow push from the bind, or this technique from the same source (fol. 51r) which demonstrates a very effective Hinderbinden or “bind behind” counter to an Oberschlag.

By far the largest group of techniques left out of the DVD, however, are the grappling techniques. Grappling was a part of all German forms of combat, but was especially important in armored combat given the effectiveness of the armor against strikes and thrusts. It is confusing, therefore, that Tobler gives us only a few hooks and the collar takedown, leaving out all mention of the many other grappling techniques depicted in the Fechtbücher, such as these: Talhoffer 1467 fol. 45r, Talhoffer 1459 ff. 134r, 135v, and 137r. Surely, a “complete” system of instruction would have addressed these important principles and techniques.

Conclusion:
This DVD is well produced, but contains large numbers of errors in scholarship, execution and omission. As a result, this DVD cannot be recommended for any purpose.

Review by Hugh T. Knight, Jr. Copyright © 2010, all rights reserved. This review may not be copied or presented in any format whatsoever without the author’s express permission.

An Error In My Longsword Book

2010-06-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

I just discovered an error in my longsword book. On page 155, "The Right Abschneiden From Above," in the last paragraph the text says to pull down into a right Unterhengen using a thumb grip. In fact, this should not be a thumb grip and I have never taught it that way; this was probably a matter of getting confused as to which page I was on at the time, and, unfortunately, it slipped through the editing process. I apologize for any confusion this error may have caused.

Are the Gladiatoria MSS Part of the Liechtenauer Canon?

2010-04-30T12:11:00.001-07:00

Some readers of this blog may know of my fascination with the so-called "Gladiatoria" family of Fechtbücher, and one or two may even have read my translation of the Krakow edition. Recently, some excellent work by Dierk Hagedorn of Hammaborg has shed an interesting new light on the relationship between these MSS and the Liechtenauer school.

The issue is whether or not the Gladiatoria MSS are to be considered part of the Liechtenauer canon or their own, unique line.

Christian Tobler was the first to argue that many of the plays shown in Gladiatoria are "boilerplate" techniques that match very closely with ones shown in pure Liechtenauer sources such as Ringeck, von Danzig, etc. I agree with him completely on this issue, and have used this to justify the inclusion of Gladiatoria plays in die Schlachtschule’s purely Liechtenauer curriculum. It's possible, however, that the similarity of material was merely an example of parallel evolution; after all, while there are strong similarities, there are also plays that are very different from any shown in any Liechtenauer source (e.g., unscrewing your pommel and throwing it). I, personally, believe these different techniques simply reflect the fact that the Gladiatoria material is much, much more extensive when it comes to Harnischfechten than are other sources; in other words, we might consider the Gladiatoria Fechtbücher to be advanced texts on the subject, so it’s only natural that they should contain material not seen in the other sources.

Dierk Hagedorn has contributed a transcription of one of the more unusual Gladiatoria sources, Cod. Guelf. 78.2 Aug. 2. from the Herzog August Bibliothek—the so-called Wolfenbuettel Fechtbuch. This is an unusual manuscript in that it contains drawings of a wide variety of unarmored forms together with a selection of plates matching the regular Gladiatoria MSS and then a wide variety of war machine drawings (like those seen in Talhoffer 1459); it must be considered an outlier in the Gladiatoria family because of the “extras” it includes. The transcription can be seen here:
http://www.hammaborg.de/en/transkriptionen/gladiatoria_wolfenbuettel/start.php

Looking at Hagedorn’s transcription, we can see that the first two pages show a version of Liechtenauer’s standard Merkeverse. While it is possible that this material was included merely because the author wished to be associated with the famous Liechtenauer line (a claim that could be made for Talhoffer as well, who did the same thing in his 1459 Fechtbuch), it nevertheless does add to the likelihood that the Gladiatoria material belongs within the Liechtenauer canon proper, a contention with which I strongly agree.

A Review of "In Saint George's Name" by Christian Henry Tobler

2010-03-30T01:56:00.000-07:00

A BOOK REVIEW OF:
IN SAINT GEORGE’S NAME: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MEDIEVAL GERMAN MARTIAL ARTS
BY CHRISTIAN HENRY TOBLER, FREELANCE ACADEMY PRESS, 2010
Review by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

Overall, this is an excellent book. In Saint George’s Name is, as the subtitle proclaims, an anthology. Excluding the introduction, preface, etc., the book consists of nine sections or chapters, each dealing with an unrelated essay or translation or set of technique interpretations. It concludes with a glossary of German terms which includes a pronunciation guide. This review will address each chapter in turn.

The Book Itself
The book appears well produced and serviceable. It is perfect bound, is properly and cleanly executed, and the cover seems durable. The coloration and printing of the front and back covers is clear and vibrant, with no smudges or print misalignments. The cover is in full color and the interior is in black and white; the book is approximately 6.9 x 9.9 inches in size. The text, which consists of 207 pages, appears clean and properly printed; there are no crooked, folded, or otherwise misprinted pages. The photographs are clear and of a good size.

Chickens and Eggs: Which Master Came First?
The first chapter of the book is an essay which discusses the extent of our knowledge regarding the dating and authorship of several Fechtbücher. In it, Tobler points out that we can be sure of very few facts about either subject. Some few Fechtbücher contained precise information regarding dates and authorship, but most did not, and the common assumptions made by modern scholars about those that did not are based on very little hard data.

Tobler makes all of this clear and attempts to roughly date some of the sources (his argument about the MS attributed to Ringeck is especially interesting), however, his main point is that many Fechtbücher were compilations and that even when an author is associated with one section, it is a mistake to assume that author had anything to do with other parts of the MS or that the date of one section necessarily corresponds to any of the others.

Master Peter Falkner’s Dagger
In this section, Tobler gives us his interpretation of some (he states it is approximately half, p. 11) of the dagger plays from Peter Falkner’s Fechtbuch.

Tobler’s introduction begins with a very interesting insight into dagger combat: He breaks all dagger fighting into four different classifications, viz. left handed displacements, one-handed dagger displacements, two-handed upper and lower shields, and unarmed displacements.

Tobler then goes on to discuss dagger guards. Unfortunately, he chose to use the “guards” depicted in Hans Talhoffer’s 1449 Ambraser Codex as the exemplar for his guards. In that work, Talhoffer depicts four figures about to thrust with daggers. In one figure the text does mention a guard: “Here he stands in the lower guard with the third stab” (Knight 2008* p. 90), but the other captions make it clear they refer to attacks, not to guards. For example, the first says: “Here is the thrust from above which is also the first thrust” (Knight 2008 p. 88). It seems clear that these four figures, then, represent not guards, but four different attacks. This makes sense, since it would be foolish in the extreme to have a separate guard for each thrust; such a system would instantly alert one’s opponent to the attack about to be made. Guards need to be more neutral—places from which multiple attacks can be launched without telegraphing the nature of the attack in advance. We can infer from the third figure that there is at least one guard—a lower one—which suggests there might be an upper one as well, but if so we are not shown such a guard. Moreover, even the lower guard is not shown clearly; note that the text says he is performing the third stab from the lower guard, not the starting position of the guard itself.

Tobler next discusses the simple attacks of the dagger, basing these upon the four figures in the Ambraser Codex discussed above. These figures, he says, give us four thrusts: One from above with a reversed grip, a backhanded thrust with a reversed grip, a thrust from below with a natural grip, and a two-handed thrust from above intended for armored combat (which, while depicted in several sources, is never shown being actually used, as Tobler points out).

Tobler does not discuss the so-called “French Thrust” performed from above using a natural grip shown, for example, in Codex Wallerstein (see Codex Wallerstein fol. 28v), however, it may well be that that thrust is not mentioned in Falkner, and so was left out of this work. Tobler also fails to mention cuts with the dagger such as those seen in Paulus Kal’s Fechtbuch (see Kal ff. 75v-76r) and in Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbuch (see Talhoffer 1467 fol. 87v), but, again, it is to be presumed he left them out because none are mentioned in Falkner.

Next, Tobler gives his technique interpretations, giving examples of techniques from each of the four categories discussed above. Rather than including a series of photographs showing each step of the technique, he instead gives us a copy of the appropriate plate from Falkner’s Fechtbuch to illustrate the technique along with a detailed verbal description of his interpretation of how the technique should be performed. Unfortunately, Tobler does not give us Falkner’s actual text accompanying the techniques. As a result, we are unable to evaluate the accuracy of Tobler’s interpretations, which reduces the value of this section significantly. To be fair, however, Tobler indicates in his introduction that this section of his book represents what he calls “class notes,” and thus may not be as developed as he might have wished. He intends to publish a facsimile and translation of Falkner’s entire book at a later time, so we should be able to analyze this material more fully then.

“Lance, Spear, Sword, and Messer”
This section of the book was a significant disappointment. In it, Tobler attempts to argue that students of the Kunst des Fechtens should study more than just one form of combat (e.g., not just longsword or grappling) in order to see how they all fit together under the framework of a single set of basic principles which will, in turn, help to make those basic principles clear. This is perfectly valid, and needs to be understood by more people. He then gives a brief description of several weapon forms, with a very brief discussion of their similarities and differences.

Tobler then proceeds to argue that not only do the basic principles of Liechtenauer’s art apply to all forms, but that techniques can be extrapolated from one form to another. To illustrate his point, Tobler gives us examples of two extended (meaning several actions that develop from a starting technique) techniques with the longsword, and he then shows how to do the same (or almost the same) series of techniques with other weapons. Each example is accompanied by several photographs showing modern interpreters demonstrating the techniques. This is problematic, however, because it amounts to creating techniques that we have no evidence belonged to the Liechtenauer canon.

It might be argued that if a technique works with one form it can certainly be done with another, and, indeed, we see some of this in the extant material. Some of Lignitzer’s plays of the buckler, for example, closely resemble some of Liechtenauer’s longsword plays, suitably modified, of course, for use with an arming sword and buckler. Such an argument, however, must needs take into account the words “suitably modified” because most techniques do not transfer directly without some modification to allow for the differences in weapons. The problem with that lies in the fact that when we, as modern interpreters, convert techniques from one form to another we are necessarily doing so without knowing how the original masters would have done so. It is possible we might come up with a conversion with which Liechtenauer would have agreed, but we cannot know that for sure. If we had to make such conversions in order to survive fights today that might be reasonable, but we do not. We should be studying historical martial arts, without adding anything to them, not developing a new art by adding our own techniques, regardless of whether we believe those technique to be accurately extrapolated from primary sources.

An example of this problem can be seen when Tobler shows the play of the Zornhau Ort with the short spear (pp. 29-31). In that case, Tobler opens the engagement by having the attacker execute a strike (i.e., a blow, not a thrust) with the blade end of a spear, which the defender then displaces with an overhand blow from his own spear followed by a thrust, and the play continues as with the Zornhau Ort with the longsword. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any plays in any of the German sources that indicate a striking blow done with the head of a spear (or, if there are, Tobler did not document them here). One probable reason for this is that most medieval spears were tapered from the butt to the head in order to prevent them from being tip heavy once the steel spearhead was attached. This taper renders the front end of the spear relatively fragile and unsuitable for striking. Thus, it seems this extrapolation is invalid until and unless someone publishes documentation from a Fechtbuch showing a blow from the head of a short spear, and, even then, it would be necessary to document using the Zornhau Ort with that weapon.

One confusing (albeit minor) point of nomenclature: Tobler refers to the above mentioned thrust into Long Point after the initial bind as a Zornort, yet in Ringeck’s Fechtbuch it is called a Zornhau Ort: “Wer dir ober hawet, zorn haw ort im dröwet” (Ringeck fol. 19r). In the final commentaries on the sword, Ringeck uses the term Zornort specifically to refer to the winding up into the upper hanging (fol. 58r). Likewise, Talhoffer also uses Zornort to refer to the thrust from the Winden, not from Long Point: “Zorn ortt Im dröw” (Talhoffer 1467 fol. 3r), as does Jörg Wilhalm: “Das ist der Zornortt” (CGM 3711 fol. 4v). Thus, it seems the term Zornhau Ort was used in period to refer to the bind and thrust into Long Point, while the Zornort should refer to a thrust from a Winden (or, at least, from an upper hengen done am Schwert) after the bind. It is not clear why Tobler did not follow that nomenclature, however, this is a very minor point.

This chapter of Tobler’s book goes well beyond what we can reasonably accept as valid interpretation. We can examine similar techniques from different weapon forms that we discover in the various Fechtbücher with an appreciative eye, recognizing the brilliance of the concepts underlying our art, but in this reviewer’s opinion, we should not make up such techniques ourselves because doing so defeats the purpose of studying an historical martial art.

The Messerfechten of Master Paulus Kal
This chapter explores five plays of the Messer taken from Paulus Kal’s Fechtbuch. It is laid out in the same way as the chapter on Falkner’s dagger techniques above, with extensive interpretive text by Tobler accompanied by reproductions of the matching plates from the actual Fechtbuch but no modern photographs. While the actual text from Kal is left out, just as in the dagger techniques by Falkner, in this case the Kal Fechtbuch is readily available in translation (by Tobler), making this less problematic. These techniques are relatively clean and straightforward and appear to be very accurate interpretations of Kal’s teachings.

Hot, Wet, Cold, and Dry: The Four Guards
In this chapter, Tobler discusses the guards of the Liechtenauer longsword in terms of their possible relationship to astrological and alchemical superstitions held by medieval men. The scholarship is excellent.

A Late 15th Century German Poleaxe Treatise
In this chapter, Tobler translates and interprets several plays of the pollaxe taken from a version of Paulus Kal’s Fechtbuch held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. These techniques are very important because they have not been published prior to this. There are seven techniques listed, and they consist only of text, with no associated drawings.

Tobler presents each technique in turn, giving first a transcription of the original German text, then a translation into English, then a detailed explanation of his interpretation of the technique. In addition, he includes several photographs showing the technique being demonstrated by interpreters in full harness—a nice touch.

This chapter is very well done. The material is laid out both clearly and completely, and the photographs do a good job of demonstrating Tobler’s interpretations. This is, without doubt, one of the most important sections of the book, and it is pleasing to see that here Tobler has given us enough information to realistically analyze the accuracy of his interpretations.

Master Paulus Kal’s Four Hip Wrestlings
This chapter gives us Tobler’s interpretation of the four wrestlings at the hip from Paulus Kal’s Fechtbuch. It follows exactly the same format as the chapters on Falkner’s dagger and Kal’s Messer discussed above, with Tobler’s interpretations written out and supplemented by plates from Kal’s Fechtbuch. As with the other examples mentioned, the original text is not included, nor are there any photographs of modern interpreters.

The Von Danzig Fechtbuch
The last chapter of the book is also the largest, representing more than half the length of the book. It consists of a complete translation of the so-called von Danzig Fechtbuch (Cod. 44 A 8) preceded by a brief chapter of introduction. One gets the impression that the purpose of the book was really to present this translation, but that the author felt it was too short to justify being published on its own, and that the other material was included to round out the size of the book and to present other materials that were also too short to publish on their own (not that there is anything wrong with that). Regardless, this section of the book is worth the entire price of the book, and would have been had the book cost the same amount with nothing else included.

Whatever one may think of Tobler’s interpretations, it must be agreed that his skills at translation are superb, and this chapter proves that beyond any doubt. He manages to present a translation which is accurate and yet which, at the same time, flows well in English without the clumsiness some translators demonstrate. Moreover, in this present work he demonstrates that his skills in this area have, if anything, improved since his previous works were published.

For a student of Liechtenauer’s art, the von Danzig Fechtbuch is one of the most important sources available, both in terms of breadth and completeness. In spite of this, much of the book has never before been published in English, and it was well worth the wait. Tobler’s work here should serve to inspire a tremendous amount of discussion and, probably, re-evaluation among scholars of the art.

Conclusion
Christian Tobler has given us yet another excellent resource for the study of the Kunst des Fechtens. In Saint George’s Name is well produced, reasonably priced, and contains a treasure trove of important information. While some of the arguments expressed in certain chapters may be questioned, the majority of the work is superb. This book is a “must have” for any serious student of Liechtenauer’s art.

*Knight, H., The Ambraser Codex by Master Hans Talhoffer: A Fifteenth-Century Fight Book, Lulu.com, 2008 http://stores.lulu.com/hughknight

Review by Hugh T. Knight, Jr. Copyright © 2010, all rights reserved. It may not be copied or presented in any format whatsoever without the author’s express permission.

A New Book About the German Longsword

2010-01-15T02:21:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased to announce the publication of the fourth book in the die Schlachtschule unarmored combat series entitled The Knightly Art of the Longsword by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

Johannes Liechtenauer, the father of German martial arts, created a system of combat that was second to none in all of history. Later authors wrote books detailing his art, some for earnest combat and others for a sportive version, that have survived to the present day. This book attempts to draw together the writings of various masters of Liechtenauer’s school into a single, comprehensive source detailing the art of fighting in earnest. Not limited to a single author, nor to just the basics of the art, this book attempts to show the full range of Liechtenauer’s art without mixing in any of the more sportive sources from later authors. In addition to the techniques themselves, The Knightly Art of the Longsword includes information on strategic concepts, fundamentals, equipment, finding a school, training, and even how to teach the art. It also includes several carefully documented essays on medieval swordsmanship and how to practice it, along with a complete glossary of German technical terms relating to the longsword and a full bibliography. It is available in both a perfect-bound edition and a spiral-bound edition designed to lay flat and open for use at practices.

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in knighthood, medieval combat, history or martial arts in general. Whether you are new to the study of medieval combat or have extensive experience in the art, this fully documented and lavishly illustrated book with more than 340 pages and 600 photographs will be a useful and fascinating addition to your library.

The Knightly Art of the Longsword has been published through Lulu.com and is only available for internet purchase at this time:

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=906667

The author is the founder and head instructor of die Schlachtschule: The School of Battle, a school located in southern California and dedicated to rediscovering and practicing the knightly arts of combat from medieval Germany. He has more than 30 years of martial experience ranging from traditional Japanese sword and grappling arts to over ten years of German martial arts practice. He founded die Schlachtschule in 2003 and teaches a curriculum that includes sword, spear, pollaxe, grappling and dagger combat both in and out of armor. More information can be found on the school’s web site:

http://www.schlachtschule.org/

Some Observations On the Zornhau

2009-11-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

Hello,

There has been quite a lot of argument and discussion on various internet fora regarding the correct use of the Zornhau in the Nach, that is, when being used to counter an Oberhau. Is it used to strike the opponent's sword (with a follow-up technique immediately afterwards), or is it to be used to strike his sword and his head in one motion--a "single-time cut with opposition"?

I have written a brief paper on this subject, to include pictorial demonstrations, which I believe definitively settles this question. It can be found on the die Schlachtschule web page by clicking this link: Some Observations on the Zornhau

As always, I welcome any responsible comments or questions.

Misguided Terminology

2009-10-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

To quote a great scholar and patriot who is a hero of mine, “I’ve had alls I can stand, and I can’t stands no more!” Well, me too: There are just so many mistakes in common usage among students of medieval combat that I, too, have had all I can stand, and I can stand no more; it is time for some corrections.

First, there is no such thing as “chainmail.” None. That term was coined by misguided Victorian antiquarians because of a complete misunderstanding of medieval artistic conventions. When they looked at depictions of mail in medieval artwork they found several different ways of representing it, and because of ignorance and a too-credulous belief in the accuracy of artistic representation (a lesson that should be taken to heart by all students of WMA!), they believed each style of representation was literally accurate and represented a different type of defense: chainmail, banded mail, etc. In reality, different artists simply had different ways of depicting mail, and there is only one form (in Europe; the Japanese had a different style) of mail. There was such a thing as “double mail,” but that term refers to mail of a normal construction but with thicker rings intended to reinforce specific parts of a hauberk. The word “mail” comes from the Latin word for “mesh.”

I should not even have to say it, but the term “plate mail” is also completely meaningless. That term was invented by the makers of a particularly unfortunate role-playing game that has inculcated a large number of children with an incredible amount of ridiculously inaccurate information about medieval combat. The use of this term smacks of an adult living in his mother’s basement.

Further on that line, the word “maille” should never be used in modern sources. Granted, the word was spelled that way in medieval books, but it was a *misspelling* then. This smacks of the abomination “Ye Olde Shoppe” which is *never* correct, and, in fact, has never *been* correct—the “Y” is a poor attempt to capture the “thorn” diphthong symbol often used in Middle English, and we have long since abandoned the extra Es used in suffixes. I have even occasionally seen—heaven forefend—“chainmaille,” a mixed-message abomination I hope to never see again.

Simple shoulder armor is called a “spaudler,” not “spaulder.” Spaudlers are not pauldrons, and the terms are not interchangeable.

When speaking of the typical articulated arm defense of the 14th and 15th centuries, the term “vambrace” should be used to refer to the entire arm harness proper, not to the portion covering the forearm only. These vambraces consisted of the lower cannon (which protected the forearm), the couter (which protected the elbow), and the upper cannon (which protected the upper arm).

The garment worn under armor is referred to by different terms depending on the type of harness worn over it. The knee-length, (often) long-sleeved, padded garment worn under the great hauberks of the 13th century was called an “aketon” (from the Arabic word for cotton), *not* a gambeson. Gambesons were quilted garments, often of rich fabric, worn *over* or in lieu of mail in that period (many of these can be seen in the Mac bible). The best term for the fitted, usually unpadded, garments worn under the tight-fitting plate armor of the later Middle Ages is “arming doublet.” While not universal, the term doublet was most often used in the sources I have seen, and is used in the document “How A Man Shall Be Armed to Fight on Foot” (Hastings MS. [f.122b]). So please, let us not see the term “gambeson” misused any longer.

“Sparring” is a term reserved for pugilism; it has no meaning when applied to free-play bouting with swords. And free-play bouting with swords has no place in what we do, so I do not understand why it keeps coming up.

The term “broadsword” is somewhat problematic. It should *never* be used to refer to the one-handed swords of the middle ages, still less to bastard swords or longswords or swords of war. The term was frequently used to refer to the late-period basket-hilted English sword (often considered Scottish today, but I assure you, the Scots got it from the English) characterized by a double-edged, pointed blade of the sort George Silver referred to as a “short sword.” I, myself, use the term broadsword for this weapon in order to clearly distinguish between it and the backsword, an almost identical weapon with only one sharp edge which Silver includes in the term “short sword.” I do not use the term short sword because it was also used in the High Middle Ages to refer to arming swords, and I wish to avoid confusion between this earlier meaning and Silver’s usage.

Next, the term Fechtmeister: A Fechtmeister is a teacher of medieval combat, not an all-powerful being with 50 years of experience in the art and the ability to leap tall list fences in a single bound who has killed fifty men in *real* fights. Anyone who teaches WMA should call himself a Fechtmeister, just as anyone in the middle ages who taught dancing would call himself a “dance master.” The word master, itself, has come to have far too exalted a meaning in this day and age, causing people to shy away from it. Consider the Krumphau text in Ringeck: He tells us that to “weaken a master” we should strike his flat with the Krumphau (fol. 25v). Can he really mean this technique should only be used against the top experts in the art? Or is he simply using the term to refer to a skilled, well-trained student? The latter is far more likely. Please, avoid the chest-thumping false modesty of decrying the use of accurate medieval terminology; most who do it only do so as a way to put down those whom they dislike, and they demonstrate gross ignorance when they do so.

Finally, lest it seem I only criticize others, let me share my current shame: When I translated the Gladiatoria Fechtbuch, I translated the word “thartschin” or “tartschin” (spelled various ways in the MS) as “ecranche.” This term refers to a small shield used in jousting with a small corner cut out (called the “bouche” in French) to make room for the lance. A literal translation of the word would have been “target,” but that term is often used to refer to a small round shield today, and since most modern authorities I had read used the term ecranche for this kind of shield, I followed their lead. A friend of mine, Will McClean, who is one of the premier experts in the field of medieval deeds of arms, pointed out that the term ecranche is a very modern one, and that the word target was used in period. I should have used the word target, and will do so when I make an updated edition of my book.

2009-09-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

A New Book About Pollaxe Combat

I am very pleased to announce the publication of the third book in the die Schlachtschule armored combat series entitled The Play of the Axe: Medieval Pollaxe Combat by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

This book is intended to introduce the reader to authentic medieval pollaxe techniques as taught by medieval fighting masters. It begins with a general introduction about medieval fight books and the nature of armored pollaxe combat, and follows with a chapter dedicated to the strategic principles of medieval combat as they apply to the pollaxe. The author then gives a detailed chapter on how to train, including information about finding a teacher, training without one, and the equipment necessary for training. Next, the book goes on to explore detailed pollaxe techniques, starting with fundamentals such as stance, footwork and guards, and moving logically through techniques to be used in a wide variety of situations in pollaxe combat. Finally, it ends with an appendix containing instructions for creating drills to use with any of the techniques in the book, rules for free play in armor designed to recreate real combat, and a detailed glossary. Consisting of more than 200 pages containing over 380 pictures, this is the most detailed and carefully-researched book on armored combat written since the Middle Ages. It is available in both a perfect-bound edition and a spiral-bound edition designed to lay open flat for use at practices.

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in knighthood, medieval combat, history or martial arts in general.

The Play of the Axe: Medieval Pollaxe Combat has been published through Lulu.com and is only available for internet purchase at this time:

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=906667

The author is the founder and head instructor of die Schlachtschule: The School of Battle in North Hollywood, CA, a school dedicated to rediscovering and practicing the knightly arts of combat from medieval Germany. He has more than 30 years of martial experience ranging from traditional Japanese sword and grappling arts to over ten years of German martial arts. He founded die Schlachtschule in 2003 and teaches a curriculum that includes sword, spear, pollaxe, grappling and dagger combat both in and out of armor. More information can be found on the school’s web site:

http://www.schlachtschule.org/

On Mixing Styles

2009-07-09T03:08:00.000-07:00

When we choose to study Western Martial Arts how do we decide what material to study? Basically, we have four choices: We can study the teaching of a single master or source if that source is complete enough to be rewarding (e.g., Silver or Meyer, but not Codex 11093); or we can study a closely-related group of masters or sources (e.g., the Liechtenauer Society Masters); or we can mix and match various unrelated and often antithetical sources (e.g., mixing Ringeck and Fiore); or, finally, we can ignore historical sources altogether and simply go play tag with fake swords, making up whatever we want to do and ignoring the masters completely.

Obviously the fourth choice is not a valid option; anyone who has read this blog knows why that is so, so I won’t belabor the point except to continue to remind the folks who do this that there’s no reason in the world to make up a new system of combat—it’s already been done by those far more qualified to do so—and unarmored free play always has and always will change the system being studied: The Kendo Syndrome can not be denied.

Just as obviously the first two choices are perfectly valid. I have often thought of giving up Liechtenauer to study Silver because I find his material to be brilliant, but, alas, my heart is fixed on Harnischfechten and the pollaxe, neither of which Silver addresses. Meyer is, likewise, fascinating, and his books show a rich, and potentially very rewarding system—but, again, no Harnischfechten (as an aside, lately I’ve been accused of being opposed to Meyer or of putting him down because he taught Schulfechten; nonsense! I think he is a great choice for study for those not interested in Harnischfechten).

The second option, studying closely-related sources, is an excellent and perfectly valid choice but is not as perfect as the first option because when you start mixing then you run the risk of making changes. For example, let’s say that you study Liechtenauer through Döbringer, Ringeck, Kal, and von Danzig. Now let’s say that Paulus Kal’s book showed technique A being done one way, and all the other sources described it another. Which way do you choose?

What if, in his day, Kal was considered perfectly conventional in every single thing (he wasn’t, by the way) except technique A, and in that he was considered a radical for breaking with the Liechtenauer tradition. Not knowing that, you practice technique A as Kal showed it because he has a picture to help you understand it while the others do not. Now, if Liechtenauer came back from the dead, he’d look at what you’re doing and say that it was contrary to his way of doing things. No great harm, you say, after all, it’s pretty certain every master changed Liechtenauer’s art in some way. True, very true, but let’s say every one of the masters listed above had a technique like technique A; now you’d be doing techniques B, C, and D, too, and no real school of German combat every used that combination of techniques. In effect, then, you would have created a new style of combat; one related to and derived from real schools of medieval combat, but still different.

Now I’ll grant that this example is likely a very small thing, and that the overall system you’d be practicing would be close enough to a real style of combat to be perfectly valid today, particularly given how much confusion we have about how a *lot* of techniques are to be done. I’m not trying to imply that four unusual interpretations make for an invalid system of study, not at all. But caution and diligence are required lest we go too far.

Having said that, I like the idea of using multiple sources to approach a single school; as Sydney Anglo wrote in his Renaissance Martial Arts, you can use what he calls a “dossier approach” to compare and contrast multiple sources, each with a slightly different way of expressing any given technique, in order to see the technique several different ways and thus build a much more creditable understanding of the technique being studied. Those studying a single master rarely have that luxury. Besides, no single source represents a complete system; I love Ringeck’s Fechtbuch, but he covers neither dagger nor pollaxe, and I would miss both forms.

But now we come to the troublesome option: Those who want to mix and match different systems with very different approaches to combat to build a system of their own. The most common mixes are Liechtenauer and Fiore, but I also know of one misguided young man who is proud to be mixing English, German (both Ernstfechten and Schulfechten!) and Italian longsword with Silver and goodness only knows what else.

Many who mix unrelated styles argue that all systems are really just the same thing; after all, they claim, there are only so many ways a human being can use a weapon. The young man I mentioned above has even gone so far as to claim, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that there is only one pan-European school of swordsmanship. If there are only so many ways a man can fight, then why is it I can easily tell the difference between most of the techniques of Ringeck and those of Fiore? How can I instantly recognize the differences between Katori Shinto-ryu and Maniwa Nen-ryu and Eishin ryu? Since there’s only one way to fight shouldn’t all of these systems be the same? And how can I tell the differences between judo, jujutsu and aikido? Again, aren’t there only so many different ways to fight? Sure, there can be overlaps: Both Shotokan Karate-do and Taekwondo use front snap kicks and straight punches, but to any but the most casual viewer the overall effect of watching people from each style will make it clear they’re doing something very different. So saying that both Ringeck and Fiore have a technique in which you bind then thrust from the bind “proves” they’re really the same system is specious nonsense.

I’ve read people who claim that the deeper they study both Liechtenauer and Fiore the more they come to see them as the same thing. Untrue—that’s like saying the more you study apples and oranges the more you see them as the same thing. They may both be fruits, but they’re otherwise quite different, as a truly deep analysis will show. The more I read about Fiore and talk with those who study and teach his art the more I realize how fundamentally—I’m tempted to say “radically”—different his system was from that of Liechtenauer.

So any attempt to mix and match unrelated sources is really bound to create a new system; one never practiced in history. “So what?”, some people ask; didn’t Liechtenauer admit traveling all over Europe studying with different and presumably unrelated masters to develop his system? Yes, he did, and it was perfectly justified in his day, when people really used these skills in real life. But we, today, are supposed to be studying *historical* combat; combat the way it was really done. How can we do that when doing so means we eschew real systems of medieval combat in favor of making up a new one today when we’re not living in an environment where the skills of our art are being used for real? We’re not *qualified* to make a new system. You can’t say that you’re doing the same thing Liechtenauer did because you’re not doing it in the same environment (and, by the way, you’re likely no Liechtenauer!).

The only possible justification for developing a new style of combat is to develop one that’s more effective than the existing styles—one that will let you win more fights, in other words. But we don’t need to win fights today with swords and armor, such things just have no meaning in our modern lives. Only those living in a dungeons and dragons fantasy world argue about being “real swordsmen.” Our only valid reason for studying WMAs is to resurrect real systems that existed in the middle ages; making up new systems should be left to LARPers and their ilk.

Otake-shihan on Freeplay

2009-06-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

I just found a great quote I wanted to share with anyone reading this blog. You've all read things I've written about Otake Risuke, the current Shihan of Tenshinsho-dan Katori Shinto-ryu. This ryu is the oldest extant Japanese martial arts school and is listed as an ‘intangible cultural asset’; it comes from the days when bushi fought for real. Otake-shihan is considered a living national treasure of Japan and is the only one who holds a full license (gokui kaiden) in the art. In my opinion he is the greatest swordsman of any system living today. This quote can be found in its entirety here: http://www.cateransociety.com/Joseki.htm:

"Kata is still the teaching method in the classical Japanese sword arts precisely because it preserves the essence of the art's history—the art as it was understood by those who created it. Some schools, such as the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu … pride themselves on the fact that they have never used any type of free sparring in their practice.

{Otake-shihan said:} “(I)t is said that a shiai, or competitive contest, is synonymous with shiniai, which means ‘to meet for the sake of death.’ That is another way of saying that any kind of combat is a serious matter of life and death. As a result, from then until now, competitive matches have been forbidden in Katori Shinto Ryu...”

Otake-shihan then went on to say that, in sparring, "the vital responsibility and danger of handling a real weapon is replaced by the mental approach of the game-player with a toy weapon."

Game players with toy weapons. Perfect. Real swordsmen don’t do freeplay.

The Bind

2009-06-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

What do we mean by hard or soft in the bind? This misunderstanding needs to be resolved because it's one of the biggest problems people have when it comes to learning to do a variety of techniques, especially the Winden (more on this below).

OK, so what is a bind? You and your opponent stand in the Zufechten and he attacks, so you displace his cut with your sword: now you’re in a bind. If you cut first and he displaces it doesn’t matter, you’re still in a bind.

There’s no inherent advantage in a bind—no one is in a better position. In general, the one who moves first wins, but not always (e.g., the Sprechfenster). But whomever moves first is in the Vor and whomever waits for his opponent to move is in the Nach.

The masters tell us to Fühlen—feel—the bind to determine if our opponent is hard or soft in the bind (which I advocate that you do with what I call “active Fühlen,” but that’s a discussion for another time) and then to act Indes (“instantly”) and appropriately; they give us a list of techniques to use in any kind of bind that can happen, with those techniques being built upon the concept of replying to strength with weakness and weakness with strength. To learn to do that, however, you have to understand what is meant by each kind of bind.

In general, there are only two kinds of bind: Hard and soft. But each of those can be broken into various subcategories. If someone is soft in the bind you can push your point straight forward in a thrust and his sword will be moved out of the way by yours. If he is hard in the bind and you try that thrust you will find that unless you are very strong and are willing to engage in a test of strength (which we know never to do) you will not be able to push his blade out of the way with your thrust.

There are three subcategories of a hard bind: In the first, your opponent pushes your sword out to the side and somewhat upward with strength. In the second your opponent pushes your blade out to the side and somewhat downward with strength. And in the third your opponent holds the center line with his point aimed at you using enough strength that you can’t easily push his sword away but without actually pushing at all—he just holds fast, controlling the center and threatening you with his point. This last version is what a skilled fighter will always do (although if you push on his sword with strength he should obey the injunction quoted above and react to your strength with weakness).

Finally, there’s one last thing someone can do in the bind: He can leave it.

So, to go back to our original scenario, your opponent cuts at you—let’s say he does so with a Zornhau—and you respond by cutting against his sword with your own Zornhau to displace his cut; you are now bound. And let’s further suggest that you immediately (Indes) try to thrust straight at him with your point from the bind while, of course, remaining am Schwert (on the sword; i.e., in the bind). If your opponent is a common swordsman one of five things is likely to happen: (1) he can be soft in the bind, in which case your point goes home and he dies; (2) he can push your thrust out and up; (3) he can push your point out and down; (4) he can stay hard in the bind, controlling the center, in which case your thrust slips off harmlessly to his left; or (5) he can leave the bind and try to void your attack while attacking on the other side of your sword (Abnehmen). Of course, a skilled swordsman can attempt to counter your thrust using one of the sophisticated single-time techniques from the Fechtbücher, but that’s a different discussion.

Now, if your opponent does any of those things the masters give us a whole list of things to do in response. Against a soft bind you just thrust and he dies—no problem. If he pushes your thrust out and up you Zucken over his blade. If he pushes out and down you Durchwechseln under his blade. If he holds the center line you Winden or Duplieren. And if he leaves the bind you snap your hands over to your right to hit his head and bind his blade in one motion. (These are all just examples, of course, you could do other things as well).

When you read a Fechtbuch and are told to do some given technique against someone who’s hard in the bind, however, this always refers to someone who holds the center firmly, not someone who pushes off to the side. If the technique being described is supposed to be used against someone who’s actually pushing his sword out to the side the technique will always tell you that.

This is important because quite a few techniques meant to be used against someone who’s hard in the bind will not work if he’s pushing his sword outward to move your point away from him. An example of this is the First Winden (“first winding”): Many of my new students have come to me, frustrated because when they try to do the First Winden it doesn’t seem to work. What they don’t realize is that their training partner is (inadvertently) cheating them by creating a situation the First Winden isn’t designed to deal with—he’s pushing outward. In fact, if you try to do the First Winden and your opponent moves his sword outward you should immediately (Indes) change to the Second Winden, but that’s a discussion for another time, too.

In conclusion, then, when you feel the bind you have to know what you’re feeling for and what to do whatever your opponent might do. As you’re practicing, however, be aware of what the text really means: Someone who’s “hard in the bind” is holding the center line firmly with his point aimed at you and he is not pushing his sword outward.

Testing Yourself and Your Art

2009-05-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

I often read about people who say that if you don't test your skill in freeplay then you're not a swordsman, or words to that effect, and I'd like to explore that a bit.

What do they mean when they say that? Well, mostly what they mean is they want to see if this stuff really works, then they want to see if they're any good at it. And it only seems logical that there's no other way to test that other than freeplay, right?

Well, here's the problem with that kind of thinking: Newtonian physics seems a lot more "logical" than relativistic physics; in fact, the latter is so counter-intuitive sometimes it's hard to wrap your mind around it. None the less, when we measure the effects it turns out Newton was wrong; close (for the wrong reasons and only in mild conditions), but wrong.

So it is here; the “logical” answer of an ignorant mind is wrong because it doesn’t posses all of the facts. First, how will you test that the techniques work? Freeplay isn't a fight, it's not even much like a fight. In a fight with swords you know you can easily die—for real. Not lose a bout, not get teased by your friends, *die*. That means you never, ever ignore an attack because if you do, you'll get killed. In freeplay, however, people often take risks they never would if a sharp sword was swinging towards them—they make a calculated gamble on the basis that they might pull their trick off, but in real life they wouldn't be that stupid.

And they think that this factor isn't a big deal—another failure of “logic.” Many techniques in the KdF only work because of the “threat factor” inherent in some techniques. One of the big reasons we never see any actions from the bind in freeplay videos is that people leave the bind because they think they're fast enough or lucky enough to get away with doing so, even though they should know it's bad technique. And usually their opponent isn't very good, and maybe they *are* fast and lucky, and so they get away with it sometimes. In real life, however, once you're in that bind your opponent's point is aimed at you, and if he does his job right and you leave the bind you're going to die on his point. So KdF techniques are geared around your opponent doing things the way he would if a *real* sword was aimed at him. Modern foil fencing actually tries to take this kind of thing into account with its rules about right of way, but that doesn't work all that well—rules intended to make a sport like combat never do.

So, clearly, you can't test these techniques to see if they work because you're not using them for what they're designed for. But that's moot: The techniques work, they really do. German people weren't stupid. Liechtenauer's art wouldn't have been the most famous and widely-written-about and copied art in all of Germany for more than 150 years if it didn't work. So people who doubt this need to get over themselves and stop pretending they're qualified to have a contrary opinion on this subject.

All right then, so what about testing yourself to see if you can really *do* the techniques? Sorry, but you can't do that, either, at least not in freeplay (but see below). The safety rules, safety gear and artificial structure of a sports bout make for a kind of fighting that's too different from a real fight for their test to have any meaning.

Let me make an analogy here: I usually compare kendo and kenjutsu, but something I wrote yesterday reminded me that most people have no idea how huge the gap between those two is, so let's compare judo and jujutsu (real jujutsu, not that silly, unrealistic, sportified version the punk rockers in Brazil play with). In essence, Kano-sensei developed judo as a means of discipline and spiritual development, not as a true combat system. Oh, he saw value in self defense applications, and a good judo dojo will work on those quite a bit, but that wasn’t his primary goal. He developed a system of freeplay called randori which could be practiced safely as a means of helping the student practice the *principles* of judo, but, in fact, when you look at the self defense aspects of judo you find that the majority of the techniques they teach there are not permitted in randori. Kind of telling, eh? Why aren’t they permitted? Because they’re *dangerous*!

Judo was developed from jujutsu, but in jujutsu there’s no randori. Do you know why? Because the techniques can’t be done safely in a competitive environment. After all, they’re like the self-defense techniques that Kano-sensei forbade in judo randori! In randori you try to break someone’s balance so you can throw him, and there are rules to ensure that you throw him in a way that won’t cause serious damage. If you can’t break his balance you switch to another technique and just keep going until the time in the bout expires. That art isn’t all there is to this is proven by the fact that there are weight categories in sport judo; this is because it often takes a lot of strength to make some of the techniquess work.

In jujutsu, however, you don’t just try to break someone’s balance, and you don’t use much strength to do it, you normally use a strike—called atemi-waza—to render him unable to resist. I’ve met lots of people I can’t unbalance well enough to do a hip throw just using movement on the mat and a push-pull motion of my hands, but I’ve never yet met anyone I couldn’t throw easily after first stuffing my fingers into his eyes!

So, in actuality, randori “tests” neither the techniques of the system to see if they work nor the practitioner’s ability to use those techniques because the safety rules and artificiality of the bouting rules change the nature of combat so radically. As I said before, it was only intended to be a way of practicing the root principles of the system; the need for strength and power comes in only when you pervert it into a sport.

Early in the 20th century the Tokyo Police Department held a contest between well-known judo and jujutsu experts to determine which would become their official martial art. In a closely-fought contest with numerous safety rules the judoka won, but it was a near thing. The reason they won isn’t that judo is a better system of combat—it’s manifestly not, nor was it intended to be—but because they got competitors who were just *better* at the sport. Real giants (not literally; one was remarkably small) of the art who were very good at what they did. Actually, all of the winning team were jujutsuka first, anyway. When you get competitors who are very good at their sport and pit them against each other it doesn’t prove that one approach is better than the other, it merely proves which side had the better competitors. In this case the difference is even more profound because there was no jujutsu in the competition. That’s right, none. Do you know why? Because the safety rules meant that most of the techniques that make jujutsu different from judo weren’t allowed. And what was left? Judo. So jujutsu wasn’t tested at all in the competition, and no one in it tested his ability to perform in combat. All they did was see which side was better at a sport.

This analogy is perfectly suited to the KdF. Consider Ringen: In Codex Wallerstein Master Ott (or whomever wrote it) tells us that: “Although a weak fighter in a serious fight can be equal to a strong opponent, if he has previously learned agility, reach, combat techniques [by which he means joint breaks, etc.—HTK], and death blows, in a friendly fight strength always has the advantage...” (Wallerstein ff. 15r-15v; Zabinsky pp. 66-69) In other words, a weak fighter can win in a lethal fight if he uses reach and agility *and* joint breaks *and* strikes to vital targets, but in a sporting environment the stronger wrestler will usually win… just exactly like the difference between judo and jujutsu. So we can’t practice combat Ringen in a competitive environment any more than we can practice longsword in a competitive environment. That’s why we practice Ringen just like they practice jujutsu in traditional Japanese dojo: in a carefully-controlled drill environment, not in freeplay.

And this analogy holds true for the longsword too: The addition of safety rules, the ability to ignore risk, the safety gear you need to wear that prevents you from executing many of the techniques, the gamesmanship or playing of the rules, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam… All conspire to prove that when you do freeplay you are *not* testing your ability to fight, merely your ability to play a sport.

So the “real” swordsman isn’t the one doing freeplay, he’s just playing a game. It might be fun, and if he’s willing to lie to himself it might let him pretend he’s a mighty warrior doing his art “for real.” But in reality what he’s doing has no more combat relevance than handball, and what’s more, he’s ruining the efforts of those who are trying to resurrect a lost art because by changing how it’s done, they take away from the historical art in favor of a new version designed for 21st-century notions of sport.

“But,” I can hear you shouting in anger, “if all that’s true, how can we learn to do our techniques under pressure against a resisting opponent? Don’t you see how important that is?” Of course I do, but that’s a different question, and one that has nothing to do with freeplay. I’ve written before about how you use a series of progressive drills, starting with controlled and carefully-scripted ones and progressing to more and more free-form drills against a resisting opponent. By the end you’re engaging in very short bouts of what could almost be considered freeplay, but there are important differences: By absolutely controlling what both partners can do you can eliminate safety concerns without softening the rules and you can prevent people from gaming the rules because if someone tries you merely stop, explain the error, and continue on. I’ve written about these drills elsewhere (look at older blog entries) so I won’t go into great detail about them here, but done correctly, these kinds of drills come closer to real combat than any freeplay system ever has. That’s swordsmanship. That’s art. That’s real.

Is this approach perfect? No, of course not, to be perfect we’d have to fight real bouts with sharps with death on the line, and none of us will ever do that. So no, none of us will ever perfectly master our art, it’s true; but then, you know what? we don’t need to, because none of us will ever be in a life-or-death swordfight. But we’ll come a lot closer than someone doing freeplay, and we’ll do it without ruining the art all of us are working so hard to resurrect as those who practice freeplay do.

What is vom Tag?

2009-05-20T00:40:00.000-07:00

The term vom Tag means “from the roof”, and is so called because it is most often used to launch attacks from above. The Fechtbücher, however, give us two different variations of the guard. Here the guard is described by the two most important Fechtbuch authors of the fifteenth century, masters Sigmund Ringeck and Peter von Danzig:
“Stand with your left foot forward and hold your sword at the side of your right shoulder or above your head with your arms extended.” (Ringeck fol. 34v).
“Hold your sword either at your right shoulder or with your arms stretched high over your head with your left foot forward.” (von Danzig fol. 26r). (Translations mine.)

We are also fortunate in that there are actually drawings from the Fechtbücher depicting how the guard is to look. The one accompanying this entry above is from von Danzig, and you can clearly see he is showing the version held on the shoulder. The overhead version can be seen in the Paulus Kal Fechtbuch here:
http://mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00001840/images/index.html?seite=122

So it should be clear from these sources that there are two versions of the guard, both apparently of equal value or usefulness. But did the masters consider both variations to be equally useful? How would we know? One way to consider the question is to examine various Fechtbücher to see what they say about the actual usage of the guard in real techniques. First, let me say that when you take this approach the results are ambiguous to say the least; much of the time the texts tell us nothing helpful about this issue. Having said that, however, there are a surprising number of passages that give us a hint. I am not going to list all of them here since they all fall into one general form, that of telling us to cut from our right shoulder, as in this example: “Note: When your adversary strikes at you from his right side with a strike from above, then hit with a Zornhau from your right shoulder against it.” (Ringeck fol. 19r). I believe the “from your right shoulder” is very clear.

Although this can not be considered “evidence” in any rigid sense, when I look for examples that would suggest a cut from vom Tag should be performed from the over-the-head variation of the guard I can find none at all. To me, that makes what we have far more meaningful. Add to that the fact that von Danzig chose to show only the shoulder version of vom Tag and I believe a strong case can be made that the shoulder variation was the more common version of the guard (at least with the early masters—see below), although not the only one.

Having said all of that, I do not believe the overhead version of vom Tag should be dismissed as useless. Clearly Paulus Kal was a Liechtenauer Society member, and his book shows only the overhead version (although not all his guards are strictly canonical; for example, his Alber is held back toward the hip so that the guard is more to the side rather than directly in front as other authors describe it). Moreover, later authors such as Meyer and Mair show only the overhead version of the guard, and their texts support its use. We must note, however, that Mair seems merely to have illustrated others’ works, and Meyer taught Schulfechten (“school” or sport fighting) as opposed to the Ernstfechten (fighting in earnest) of Ringeck and von Danzig; it could well be that the lack of thrusting in Schulfechten made the overhead vom Tag more useful (or less vulnerable). We can not know, but we do know that both authors were later than our primary sources and that their art varied significantly from earlier sources. Thus I do not believe these later sources should be used to address this question for those of us who study Ernstfechten today.

Recently, some ARMAteers have been quite vocal about their interpretation of the guard vom Tag. They claim the only “true” version of the guard is the overhead version, doubtless because of their severely flawed approach to cuts in general in which they try to make the cuts as wide and overwhelming as possible (very much like a Buffel as described by Ringeck) in direct conflict with the instructions in Ms 3227a to cut with short, direct movements. This misunderstanding has led them to call the shoulder version of the guard “lazy vom Tag” under the general principal that to scorn something is the same as showing valid evidence relating to it. When asked about the picture in the von Danzig Fechtbuch they say the other guards are painted strangely and so this one must be as well, thus they dismiss them all. Personally, I find the other depictions just fine (although the Pflug is shown with the hands back a bit farther than I do it) and precisely in keeping with the instructions in the major sources, so this argument is clearly specious. There is a “lazy” vom Tag, and that is when the hands are held so low that the cross is well below the shoulder: this version of the guard renders a correct straight-line cut of the sort described so clearly in Ms 3227a difficult if not impossible, but this is a fault of tired students, not a problem of interpretation.

In closing, it would be a mistake to say there is only one version of vom Tag, but the evidence seems slightly to favor the shoulder variation for those who practice Ernstfechten. As for “lazy vom Tag”, we may safely leave that among the arguments that edge-on-edge displacements were to be avoided at all costs and that cuts from above are supposed to go to the ground.

What is a Pollaxe?

2009-05-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Pollaxes (please note the spelling) include three primary variants: Those with axes and spikes, those with hammers and spikes, and those with axes and hammers. All are "pollaxes" regardless. This is the common academic use (although many academics mistakenly spell the word "poleaxe") and it was in use in period as well.

Sydney Anglo, one of the most respected scholars working in the field, writes:
"With few exceptions, narratives of axe fighting date from the middle decades of the fifteenth century and are Burgundian in origin; and, of these, the only chronicler who made a serious attempt at accurate and detailed reporting is Olivier de la Marche. Yet even he uses a wide range of terms for the various parts of the pollaxe which he usually designates by the word hache, through he sometimes prefers baton. On one occasion only, when describing the encounter between Jacques de Lalain and an English knight in 1448, does Oliver specify a taillant, that is an axe head with a cutting edge: and it is, I think, significant that another account of the same combat similarly makes special reference to this feature. Olivier frequently mentions the use of the hammer-head (maillet or mail)..." (Anglo, S., Le Jeu de la Hache: A Fifteenth-Century Treatise On The Technique Of Chivalric Axe Combat, Archeologia, CIX, 1991, p. 3)

“Poll” is an archaic English word meaning head; the modern term “polling” (as in political polls) derives from it because polls are like head counts on a particular issue. Thus, a pollaxe is a headed weapon, meaning a staff weapon with a head on it. A halberd is another kind of poll arm, or headed staff. Because people forget what poll means they assume it is an archaic spelling for “pole” since all of these weapons are mounted on a sort of pole. (It is sad how changes in language use are so often touted as being positive things when they are so commonly based on complete ignorance and an unwillingness to do research.)

While the French and Germans did not typically use the "poll" (it is an English word, after all) they still referred to all these variants as axes. This picture:
http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/0002/bsb00020451/images/index.html?seite=83
shows pollaxes, and we know they were considered axes because Talhoffer's text says: "Der erste anbinden mit der axt" or "the first bind with the axe."

Here's another example from the Paulus Kal Fechtbuch:
http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/bsb00001840/images/index.html?seite=81
with exactly the same text as the Talhoffer plate above, except he spells the word as "axe" (those medieval Germans weren't really careful about spelling).

As you can see, in both of those examples the axes in question are pollaxes with a hammer on one side and a spike on the other. Even more interestingly, almost all medieval fighting books that show pollaxes show the hammer and spike version (an exception is the very strange Codex 11093) and all refer to them as axes in spite of having nothing we modern people would recognize as an axe blade. Some German authors occasionally refer to pollaxes as "Streitaxt" (battle axe) or "Mordaxt" (death axe), but those terms are rare; most of the time they simply call them axes.

In Le Jeu de Le Hache (Fr: "The Play of the Axe") the term used is simply "hache," which is French for "axe," and yet the descriptions in the text make it absolutely and unquestionably true that the axe being described is just the same as the ones shown in the German sources: a hammer and a spike.

Unfortunately, no extant German source gives us a good set of terms for the various parts of the axe, so we turn primarily to Le Jeu for that. The hammer is called a "mail"; when there's a blade on the axe it is called a "taillent" (although this is never the case in Le Jeu); the spike on the back of the mail is called the "bec de faucon" or falcon's beak; the spike on top is called a "dague"; the "croix" refers to the cross formed by the head of the axe and the shaft; the smaller cross formed by the two small bolts often used to hold the head on the weapon are sometimes referred to as the "croisee." When there is a spike on the bottom end of the shaft it is called a “queue” and the metal strips that sometimes reinforce the sides of the shaft are called “languets” (although these are never mentioned in Le Jeu).

Some of these terms play a double role as well. The author of Le Jeu intended the weapon to be used more or less in thirds (one third above the right hand, one third between the hands and one third below the left hand) and he uses the term croix for the entire third of the weapon above your right hand and the word queue for the entire portion of the shaft below your left hand. The portion of the shaft between your hands is called the “demy hache.” This is important to note because it can lead to confusion if you do not understand this naming convention: I saw a video on the internet showing someone who was blocking attacks with the actual head of the axe in places where Le Jeu says to displace with the croix because he misunderstood this; what the text actually means is to displace with the shaft of the axe below the cross proper. If that was not true then displacing attacks with the tiny queue would be difficult at best!

So the terms "Bec de Corbin," "Lucerne Hammer," "polehammer," and "poleaxe" should never be used when referring to pollaxes, and all types of pollaxes, whatever the head configuration, should be called simply "pollaxes" unless you want to use the German or French terminology, of course (or you can just call them "axes," but then people will think you mean a hatchet).

Edge on Edge Contact

2009-05-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Some authors have argued that you must always displace your opponent’s attacks with the flat of your blade so as to prevent your edge from being damaged. While most people realize this to be a fallacy today, some groups (whom I can not mention without angering a bunch of guys in red shirts) stick dogmatically to a misunderstanding of this issue.

This particular myth springs from a desire on the part of one author (we all know who, right?) to show how historical combat was completely different from what Hollywood showed on the big screen without actually doing the research necessary to understand the problem. Additionally, some folks have noticed that relatively few extant swords have much edge damage, thus leading them to believe edges were not used for displacement in the middle ages. There is also a certain sense of value operating here: someone buys an expensive sword and he can not imagine letting it get all hacked up, so he transfers that reticence to his medieval ancestor.

As logical as all of that might seem, careful research shows it is simply not true. Hollywood doing something does not automatically make it wrong (suspect yes, but not necessarily wrong), and most extant swords probably were not used for fighting; only the nicer pieces tend to survive. Moreover, we know swords often got hacked up; read this quote from a fifteenth-century chronicle:
"...and after the battle his sword was all but ruined. The beautifully gilded hilt had been bent and nearly wrenched free and the blade all notched and toothed like a saw" (Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Nino, tr. John Evans, In Parenthesis Publications, 2000, p.16).

Then we look in the Fechtbücher themselves. The German sources do not say much on the subject, but George Silver does; in his “Brief Instructions” he says: “...ward his blow with the edge of your sword” (fol. 24r). You can not get much more clear than that, and he is not alone—other authors say the same thing.

Why displace with the edge? The fact is that while you might get a nick in your blade, you have to remember that you will normally displace with your strong and cut with your weak, so nicks on the strong have little effect on the sword’s efficacy. Worse, if you displace with the flat of your blade you are much more likely to break it. Consider a wooden board: If you strike the edge you are much less likely to break the board than you are if you strike the flat—it is simple physics.

Moreover, edge displacements are stronger than ones with the flat. Try this experiment: Get a practice sword (not a sharp one) and hold it normally. Now have a friend push against the edge while your resist, then try again with him pushing against the flat: Surprise! It is much easier to resist his push with your edge because that is the direction in which your grip is strongest. Thus, if you try to displace with the flat of your sword there is a chance your opponent will be able to simply blast through your defense.

So while you might not normally go out of your way to displace edge to edge, in many techniques it is perfectly normal; the Zornhau is a perfect example of this. And, as you can see, there is no reason to twist the principles of fighting completely out of their natural order in order to avoid doing something that is not only natural, but perfectly safe.

The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch

2009-01-22T00:31:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a new fight book translation by Hugh Knight entitled: The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch, published through Lulu.com.

This is the first-ever complete translation of the anonymous fifteenth-century fight book commonly known as The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch. It contains detailed information on armored spear, halfsword, dagger, and ground fighting techniques along with unarmored techniques for Long Shields, sword and buckler and staff combat. Most medieval fight books consist of text with no pictures or pictures with scant, cryptic text, but The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch is rare in giving us both pictures and detailed text explanations of the techniques it shows us.

This fascinating insight into fifteenth-century knightly combat belongs on the shelves of anyone with an interest in medieval history or martial arts. The book can be purchased in either perfect-bound soft cover or in case-wrap hardcover directly from the publisher here:

http://stores.lulu.com/hughknight

Replacing Free Play

2008-12-17T12:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve received a lot of criticism from readers of this blog recently regarding my essay that argues that Bloßfechten (i.e., unarmored) free play not only has no place in what we do, it’s actually detrimental. While most of these criticisms have been of the uninformed sort and thus not worthy of rebuttal, some raise issues that are at least confusing to some readers and should therefore be fairly addressed.

Before I do so, however, I’d like to clear up one point: Most of my detractors simply say that I don’t believe in free play, which isn’t true. I don’t believe we should practice Bloßfechten free play because of the Kendo Syndrome I wrote about in my essay, but I am a great fan of Harnischfechten (i.e., armored combat—and that doesn’t mean unarmored techniques done in armor; I’m talking about spear, pollaxe and halfsword techniques designed for armored combat) free play in the right circumstances. Unfortunately, my detractors don’t seem to consider Harnischfechten a viable martial study so they just say I don’t believe in free play at all, which I consider unfortunate.

The majority of those who want to do free play argue that there’s no other way to really learn their art; that to merely practice “moves” is sterile and empty, and there is a degree of truth in this. If you’re not doing it for real you don’t know if you can do it, right? Let’s start to answer this first by considering what it is we are trying to do.

Why do we study historical martial arts? I can think of only three possible reasons: First, because it’s fun and interesting; second, because we want to be able to use medieval martial arts today; and third, because we want to resurrect a lost art as part of understanding a historical culture. For the purposes of this discussion we can actually eliminate the first reason because either of the other two approaches can be fun and interesting, so the only reasons for practicing historical martial arts is either to use it as a modern martial discipline or to resurrect a lost art (and of course, there is bound to be a great deal of overlap in most people!).

Now, looking at those two options, what do we see? Practicing for martial purposes alone is worthy, but the simple fact is that we won’t ever have a sword or pollaxe (etc.) fight on the streets today. Thus, any attempts to “improve” the historical arts in order to make them better for today are simply invalid; there’s no reason to do so. I’ll grant that the grappling arts have a lot of value for modern combatives applications, but the longsword et. al. don’t. Thus, there’s no justification for changing our art from its historical context and form. So practicing historical combat as a form of pure martial art is fine, but there’s no justification for changing it in any way.

Here we come to the crux of the problem: All attempts at practicing Bloßfechten free play (in any art) automatically change that art. Look at Kendo, as I did in my original essay: Kendo no longer bears any close relation to the combat swordsmanship of the art from which it came, Kenjutsu. They took an unarmored form (yes, Kenjutsu includes armored techniques, but we’re just talking about unarmored combat here) and found it too dangerous to practice safely, so they replaced the steel sword with a safe simulator; they still needed protection from the simulator so they added armor; and they needed to make the art easier to see and judge so they added rules about what you can do (e.g., you aren’t allowed to strike someone’s left wrist unless it’s raised up—seriously). But all of these changes changed the art completely. The armor limits your freedom of motion, the practice sword doesn’t behave like a real sword (e.g., the blade isn’t curved, yet several Kenjutsu techniques rely on that curve), and the rule changes drastically impact the art (e.g., there are no slicing techniques in Kendo, so why guard against someone doing them?).

Or go to any Karate tournament today. Watch them do kata; if you have a modicum of knowledge about fistic arts you should easily be able to distinguish between the Shotokan Karate-ka, the Taekwondo people and the Kung-fu people (just to pick random, disparate examples). Now watch those same people compete in the sparring competition and you'll see something horrifying: All of the uniqueness they displayed in kata is lost. They all fight from a modified side horse stance and their primary techniques are mid- and high-level side and roundhouse kicks with very few hand techniques. Why? Because in their game, those techniques work best. Don't tell me it's better that way, the game was made up with no concern for historical accuracy or combat effectiveness and the real arts have been lost.

This is true with European combat as well. It happened in period; the art was divided into Schulfechten (“school fighting”) and Ernstfechten (“fighting in earnest”). In Schulfechten thrusting was forbidden, as were many of the more dangerous techniques (joint locks, etc.). And it happens today: We need hand protection because we can’t afford to miss work with a broken hand, so we wear gauntlets that prevent us from doing unarmored techniques correctly. Just as one example, consider the Winden; I have never seen anyone who can perform this technique in a free play situation while wearing gauntlets because the gauntlets, no matter how good, make the hands too slow and clumsy.

Some might argue that all of this means we should be practicing Schulfechten instead of Ernstfechten, and there’s some truth in this (but that’s for another essay), but the simple fact is that even medieval Schulfechten is far too dangerous for today’s practitioners without serious protective gear; medieval surgeons made a lot of money sewing up scalps and setting broken bones after a Schulfechten event, so we’d need protective gear, rule changes, etc., and we’re back to the same problem.

So the bottom line is that any attempt to do Bloßfechten free play *inevitably* changes the art being practiced, and there’s no justification for changing the art. At the same time, however, my detractors are correct when they say that you can’t really learn the art perfectly without doing free play. How do we reconcile this?

One way is to accept it. The truth is we’re never going to have to defend our lives with a sword, so it makes sense to give up a little understanding in exchange for not ruining the art we’re trying so very hard to resurrect. After all, why go to all the trouble to understand the art if you’re only going to throw away that understanding so you can play at swordsmanship in free play? When you do free play you’re not learning our art, you’re making up a new one, so claims that you need to do free play to learn our art are wrong to begin with anyway.

There is, however, another way: You can learn to use a form of drills that lead you from just understanding the motions of a given technique to truly mastering it in a semi-free play environment. This process is actually better than free play (given our constraints; it’s not better than real life-or-death combats, but then, they were often so… final) because even at its highest level there is a rigid control of what you can do, so students are prevented from “gaming” the exercise or from making up new techniques not part of the curriculum.

The way this works is to do your material in set drills that start in a slow, controlled manner and progress to a more natural way of practicing. In our Schule we do this in five stages:
1.) The teacher announces what he’s going to do and tells the student exactly how to respond. This is continued until the student can do the technique perfectly, and speed and power gradually increase.
2.) The student attacks with a specific attack and the teacher counters with a specified counter, then the student counters the counter.
3.) The teacher attacks with an announced attack, the student counters with a specified counter, then the teacher responds with an *unannounced* counter, and the student must counter that.
4.) The teacher attacks with an unannounced attack and the student must counter that.
5.) The same as (4.) except the teacher will counter the counter and the student must counter that.

As the student works through each level the speed and intensity increase; by level 5 the drill is as close to free play as it’s possible to be, including full speed, full power hits. The advantage, however, is that it’s all rigidly controlled as to what the student may do; if the student tries to use a trick that’s not part of the system to “score a point” the teacher simply stops and corrects him and they start over.

But if all this is true, you say, how is it any different from free play? Don’t you still need gauntlets, etc.—all the things you said would change the art? No! not if you do it correctly. You can limit targets as necessary so they don’t get hit or wear such protection as won’t interfere with a certain kind of technique (e.g., a heavy fencing mask). For example, if the teacher knows he’s not going to respond with a Winden he can wear a gauntlet to encourage the student to attack his hand with a Krumphau, or you can make it a ground rule that if you use the Krumphau in a given practice you’ll aim at the blade ahead of the cross instead of the hands. This is a little bit complicated, but it really just comes down to how creative and inventive the teacher is. You can’t make these choices in free play because then it isn’t free play, right?

The biggest advantage of this approach is that you reward only what is accurate. If someone is doing free play and he takes advantage of a loophole in the rules to score a point he gets rewarded for denigrating his art. If someone using this drill approach uses gamesmanship the drill just makes no sense; you stop, correct him, and start over. Thus we get most of the benefit of all-out free play with none of the harm.

The Zornort Reinterpreted

2008-10-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

When you interpret the techniques and principles of der Kunst des Fechtens your interpretations become very personal; learning you're wrong is painful and more than slightly embarrassing. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than discovering you’ve made a mistake is clinging to that mistake when you know it’s wrong—that’s what makes ARMA ARMA, and I can’t allow myself to go that road.

To that end, I have to admit that one of my cherished interpretations is wrong. I’ve actually been gnawing at this for some time now because I suspected a problem (I’ve even discussed this with some of you), but after a recent discussion I had with Christian Tobler I’ve come to realize my worries were well founded, largely because of an improved translation of von Danzig and some other things I’ve recently come across.

I have long argued:
http://talhoffer.blogspot.com/2008/02/zornhau.html
that when your opponent cuts at your head and you counter with a Zornhau that your cut should be aimed at his head, not at his sword, and that you only thrust at his face if he stays on course such that your swords bind together (NB: I was not saying you hit his head from the bind, just that you aimed at it). My reason for this derived from Döbringer’s instruction to always cut to the man, not to the sword, and it had the powerful advantage that if your opponent’s attack was a feint your cut would land before his real attack could. There’s more to it, but that’s the most important part of my reasoning. Of course we know there are several situations where you *do* cut to the sword, not to the man (e.g., the Krump to the flat), but I didn’t think this was one of those situations.

The first suspicion I had that my interpretation was flawed arose from the fact that no one but me could do this technique this way comfortably, and one of my rules is that “if it’s right it’s simple to do.” When you cut at your opponent’s head your point is, naturally, going to be *past* his head, so to thrust from the bind with the Zornort you have to pull your hands up and back to bring your point on line, just as we see in this picture from Goliath:
http://www.schielhau.org/images/29.jpg
and most of my students have really struggled with this action.

Then, to compound my suspicion, a better translation of one of my sources seemed to suggest that we were being told to cut to the sword, not to the head. I wrote to Christian and we discussed this issue. He supplied me with his translation of von Danzig (VD is, in most respects, our primary source for longsword material), and the text in VD is *clear* that you must cut to your opponent’s sword, not to his head.

So, while I don’t like it, I have to admit my mistake and change my interpretation. From now on we’ll be doing the Zornhau to the blade and then thrusting directly from there. Actually, VD says to cut down without displacing, so this is more of a single-time action anyway (I’ll be showing you all this subtlety in class soon!). That’s ironic because I used to do the Zornort that way years ago, but changed my interpretation when I read Döbringer.

Of course, this doesn’t answer all questions: In Lignitzer’s first play of the buckler *you* cut first, not your opponent, and when he binds you Zornort to his face. Since you cut first your sword should be over his head just as I used to do the Zornhau (this was another part of the reason for my doing it that way) with the longsword which means you have to pull your hand back for the Zornort; this is still a good argument for my incorrect interpretation, but I can’t cling to it in defiance of the clear text from VD. So I think we’ll be spending some “quality time” taking a good, long look at Lignitzer to make sure my take on this is correct.

The drei Wunder

2008-09-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Recently I was driven to wonder if there are rules for when to use each of the “drei Wunder” or “three wounders” of the German longsword, the cut, the thrust and the slice. Speaking of the Winden, master Peter von Danzig tells us: Take heed in the winding that you not strike when you should stab, and not slice when you should strike, and not stab when you should slice (Goliath fol. 14r).” Unfortunately, he tells us we have to know when to use which, but he doesn’t tell us how to decide which to use. Trying to answer this question drove me to ask whether it was possible to ascertain a general rule about when to use them in all situations, too, not just during Winden.

First, consider that most of the time we are instructed to cut, not thrust, when in the Zufechten. The interesting point about the Zufechten is that we are *never* told to strike a Vorstich, that is, an opening thrust. All of the first attacks we're told to use as opening attacks are cuts, or Vorschlag, not thrusts. Compare this with what Silver has to say about thrusts being so easy to set aside or displace and I think it’s easy to see why this is so. It’s interesting to consider that there’s only one kind of thrust that *is* used in the Zufechten: the Absetzen, and that it’s used against both thrusts and cuts, doing so with a powerful “wedge” effect that completely closes the line of attack.

Second, moving on to the Krieg, consider when we’re told to use which Wunder. If you think about it, most situations can be broken down into a few discrete groups: A.) Your opponent is soft in the bind; B.) he is hard in the bind with his point on line; C.) he is hard in the bind and pushes your point high; D.) he is hard in the bind and pushes your point low; E.) he leaves the bind. Now what do we know to do in each of those situations?

In (A.) we know to simply thrust home—our point is on line and he’s not resisting. In (B.) we know to Wind—our point is directly online and he’s resisting but his point still threatens us. In (C.) & (D.) *both* points are offline, so the thrust isn’t an instant advantage, which drives us to cut in (C.), but in (D.) our point is down which makes cutting difficult, so we always Durchwechseln. And in (E.) his point is offline and we’re free to act as we will.

Looking at these responses to the various situations my take is this: When your point is directly on line and there’s no limit to its use then you thrust because nothing is faster than a thrust from that situation (when you’re already close) and it’s a good fight ender (better than a slice, anyway). Any time your point is *not* on line then you cut (or slice—I’ll deal with them below), unless your point is down which makes cutting difficult (hence the Durchwechseln). Any time he leaves the bind you have to know what he’s doing: Sometimes (e.g., the counter to the Abnehmen from the plays of the Zornhau) you cut because you can bind his sword at the same time for safety, and sometimes you thrust (e.g., the Nachreisen when he pulls back from the bind when your point is forward) because it’s fast and he’s not moving from cut to cut. Note that all other Nachreisen should be cuts because you’re not bound and you are, effectively, using a Vorschlag (see above).

As for slices, they are not sure fight enders, not as sure as cuts and thrusts, anyway, but they are powerful *threats* that prevent your opponent from doing things he might want to. Any time your point is past your opponent but your blade is too close to him for a fast, easy cut you slice. That one’s pretty simple and obvious. Consider the neck slice in the plays of the Zwerchau: You use it when your opponent is soft in the bind. You don’t cross knock so you can make a cut as you would if he’s hard in the bind because a.) you don’t need to since he’s soft in the bind and b.) because it’s faster and it lets you stay am Schwert, which gives you control. Your point is past your opponent’s head (since that’s how you do the Zwerchau) but too close to allow for an easy cut without moving your sword a large distance (which would give your opponent time to do something).

So, in conclusion, I think it goes like this: In the Zufechten, when you strike first (Vorschlag) it should always be a cut, and thrusts are only used when they can set aside (which closes a line) an incoming attack. This is because thrusts are weak and so easily displaced that they’re not much of a threat, and the Vorschlag is mostly about creating a threat to force your opponent into the defensive in the Nach.

In the Krieg you can thrust when your point is online and free (or he’s soft in the bind, which much the same thing) or when both points are offline and yours is down so cutting is difficult; otherwise you cut whenever neither point is on line. And you slice when your point is not on line and your point is past your opponent but too close to allow for an easy cut.

One note about situation (A.) above: When your opponent is hard in the bind with his point on line I say you should Winden, implying it’s a thrust, but we have to remember, of course, that you can use any of the drei Wunder when you wind. The Duplieren is an example of a cut (or possibly slice) done from situation (A.). I don’t think there’s a rule to that, I think they’re just tools in your toolbox to be picked almost at random. No source I’ve read hints at under what circumstances you’d prefer a Winden with a thrust over a Winden with a cut (Duplieren), all of them simply say you do it when he’s hard in the bind. I continue to look into this for more insights. I do believe, however, that you only use the slice from the Winden when your point is past your opponent and you don’t really have room or time for a cut.

One last thing: None of this should be considered carven in stone: This is fighting, not algebra. There are probably exceptions in the Fechtbücher to most of what I’ve written here, so this should be taken only as a guideline, not as established scientific fact.

A New Book About Sword and Buckler Combat

2008-09-16T02:29:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to announce the publication of the third book in the die Schlachtschule unarmored combat series entitled Medieval Sword & Buckler Combat by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

This book is intended to introduce the reader to German medieval sword and buckler combat as taught by Andreas Lignitzer, Hans Talhoffer and Paulus Kal, fifteenth-century masters of the sword.

The book begins with general notes about sword and buckler combat in the middle ages then moves on to a detailed discussion of the tactical principles of German medieval martial arts applied specifically to the sword and buckler. It continues by gradually teaching a progression of skills from stance and footwork to guards to simple attacks and defenses to compound techniques and finally a step-by-step exposition of Lignitzer’s six plays of the sword and buckler. In addition there is an extensive discussion of how to train, where to get training equipment and much more.

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in medieval combat, history or martial arts in general.

Medieval Sword & Buckler Combat has been published through Lulu.com and is only available for internet purchase at this time:

http://www.lulu.com/content/3944278

The author is the founder and head instructor of die Schlachtschule: The School of Battle in North Hollywood, CA, a school dedicated to rediscovering and practicing the knightly arts of combat from medieval Germany. He has more than 30 years of martial experience ranging from traditional Japanese sword and grappling arts to over ten years of German martial arts. He founded die Schlachtschule in 2003 and teaches a curriculum that includes sword, spear, pollaxe, grappling and dagger combat both in and out of armor. More information can be found on the school’s web site:

http://www.schlachtschule.org/

The Ambraser Codex by Master Hans Talhoffer

2008-09-08T23:56:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a new fight book translation by Hugh Knight entitled: The Ambraser Codex by Master Hans Talhoffer, published through Lulu.com.

Master Hans Talhoffer was one of the most prolific fight book authors of the middle ages and one of the best known today with at least six editions of his books known to still exist. Hugh Knight has translated his so-called Ambraser Codex from c. 1449, a book detailing the step-by-step process of the formal judicial duel with spear, sword and dagger as fought by armored knights in the fifteenth century along with a wealth of additional dagger, grappling, spear and mounted techniques. More than just a word-for-word translation, Knight has used various other fight books of the period to help interpret the techniques Talhoffer has given us, even including pictures of modern demonstrators in some cases.

This fascinating insight into fifteenth-century knightly combat belongs on the shelves of anyone with an interest in medieval history or martial arts. The book can be purchased in either perfect-bound soft cover or in case-wrap hardcover directly from the publisher here.

Pollaxe Video Clip

2008-08-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

The readers of this blog may want to know that I've recently uploaded a video clip showing a selection of plays of the pollaxe to YouTube:

Click Here for Video

This is something of an experiment, and it's not perfect yet, but I thought people might enjoy seeing some of the plays as there's very little accurate pollaxe material up on the web.

Note that in all the actions Matthew is swinging at me at full power, although I tried to do most of the counters slowly enough that people could make them out.

My thanks to Nicholas Mueller for putting this video clip together for me. I hope you all enjoy it and I look forward to your questions or comments.

2008-06-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was approached by the editor of an electronic magazine about publishing a review of my unarmored wrestling book. At the same time, he asked me to write an article for his magazine so I wrote an article about what armored combat was really like, including some representative techniques. The review and the first half of the article (the second half will be in the September issue) can be downloaded for free here. There are several kinds of magazines there, but this one has Dave Rylak and me in armor on the cover; it should be easy to spot. I hope you enjoy it.

Left vom Tag?

2008-05-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

There are four primary guards in the Liechtenauer school of swordsmanship: Ochs (Ox), Pflug (Plow), Alber (Fool) and vom Tag (From the Roof). Each of the first three guards, Ochs, Pflug and Alber, are explicitly described in the Fechtbücher as having a right and a left variant, although in the case of Alber the difference is limited to which foot is forward—all other parts of the guard are the same on both sides since the sword is held on the center line.

But what of vom Tag? No primary source even suggests a left-side version of this guard (for right handed swordsmen, at least; see below). Why is that? The answer lies in a careful reading of the Fechtbücher. Master Sigmund Ringeck tells us this:

“If you want to strike from your right side make sure your left foot is forward; if you want to strike from your left side, the right foot must be forward.”

In this section Master Sigmund is referring to the Zufechten: the first phase of the combat when the combatants are still at a range which will require a step in order to hit; once a cut has been made and displaced the combatants are said to be in the Krieg (The War). You can be in any guard in the Zufechten, of course, but in this case let’s focus on vom Tag. When you strike from the Zufechten you are supposed to strike from your right for a stroke from the right and vice-versa. But then Master Sigmund goes on to say:

“Note: This tenet is addressed to left-handers and right-handers. If you are a right-handed fencer and you are closing to an opponent and you think you can hit him, do not strike the first blow from your left side because you are weak there and you cannot resist if he binds strongly against your blade. Because of this, strike from the right side, you can work strongly am Schwert (on the sword) and you can use all techniques you like.”

In other words, combining these two quotes, Master Sigmund is telling us that a right-handed swordsman who wants to cut from vom Tag should start with his left foot forward and cut from the right side (with a passing step). And yet we know there are cuts from both sides in a fight because Master Sigmund tells us this: “Note: This is the first tenet of the long sword: learn to strike blows equally well from both sides if you want to learn to fence well.”

These two quotes seem contradictory unless you read them very carefully: Master Sigmund said: “If you are a right-handed fencer and you are closing to an opponent and you think you can hit him, do not strike the first blow from your left side…” By “closing”, Master Sigmund is clearly referring to an action from the Zufechten, i.e., before a bind; obviously, then, if you are not closing, i.e., you are in the Krieg, you can and should throw blows from your left if the tactical situation warrants it. Here’s an example of a blow thrown from the left in the Krieg:

“Note: When you bind at the sword with strength and your adversary pulls his sword upwards and strikes at your head from the other side, then bind strongly with the true edge and strike him on the head.”

In other words, your opponent cuts at you and you displace the blow so that you are in the bind (or vice-versa; how you get there is immaterial). Your opponent then pulls his blade back and over yours to cut to your other side, so you respond by turning your hands and cutting him on the other side while binding your long edge against his second cut. So you obviously strike from your left, but it would be the height of foolishness to go from the bind to left vom Tag and then cut: You simply lever your blade back with your hands—assuming no guard at all, really—and cut again. No left vom Tag required.

So, does this prove there is no left-side version of vom Tag? If you think about it, you’ll realize that there is never any reason to assume vom Tag in the Krieg because of the way you pull the point back: if you pull your hands back into vom Tag when you’re in range—in the Krieg—your opponent will kill you with a Nachreisen while you’re moving into guard. Thus, it’s clear that you will only assume vom Tag in the Zufechten, and since all blows thrown from the Zufechten are to be thrown from your right side (if you’re right handed), it should be obvious that there’s no need for a left-side version of vom Tag.

One caveat: In the same section where he talks about only cutting from your right if you’re right handed Master Sigmund tells us that if you’re left handed you should only cut from your left. This tells us that there is, in fact, a left-side vom Tag… if you’re left handed. Thus, this essay should only be construed as referring to right-handed swordsmen.

People love symmetry. If you tell someone there’s a cut or guard on the right side then he will expect there to be a matching version on the left side and will feel somewhat disappointed if no such symmetry exists; most modern books on longsword fighting include a left-side version of vom Tag for just this reason. In fact, in my longsword study guide (Introduction to Liechtenauer’s Longsword) I include a left-side version of vom Tag, and I even teach it to my beginning students. In my case, however, I find it a convenient way to introduce beginning students to cutting from the left side; later, I teach my students how to cut from the left in the Krieg without using left vom Tag.

In conclusion, then, there are no circumstances in which a left-side version of vom Tag could be used by a right-handed swordsman without violating the tactical principles of der Kunst des Fechtens. The left-side version can be useful for teaching beginning students cuts from the left, but later they should be taught how to do so in accordance with Liechtenauer’s principles.

What Is Intent?

2008-04-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

The word “intent” gets bandied about a lot in WMA circles these days, and with good reason: Intent determines the realism of practice. I think, however, that sometimes people mistake the meaning of the word in our context so perhaps a little insight into this much-misunderstood word might be in order.

In my Jujutsu days we used to speak of someone as being a “good uke”, and it’s worth looking at that idea as a way of understanding intent. In Jujutsu the person who “loses” the engagement when executing a technique (not that anyone loses—but that’s for another discussion; in this case we’ll use the term for simplicity’s sake) is called the “uke” while the person who executes the final technique is called “tori.”

When some people talk about a good uke they mean he attacks in a way that makes it easy for tori to do the technique—a slow and obvious attack—and then goes along with the counter easily, making a big, flashy fall regardless of how well tori actually executed the technique. Some older instructors who are past their prime need students like that to “prove” they still have “it.” But this kind of uke teaches no one anything; his actions aren’t realistic and so a student doing the technique never learns anything.

Others say a good uke is someone who smashes a student with a powerful attack he can’t possibly counter at his current level of development so he sees what it’s “really like.” These folks are usually insecure “instructors” who are referring to themselves and want to make those around them see how powerful they are: “Look at me, I’m so good you can’t even do this technique to me because of the power of my mighty attack.” Another flavor of this problem is those who want to act absurdly macho; they usually speak too much of “real fighting” and “street practicality” (not that these concepts aren’t important—they are, but you can’t drop most students in at the deep end and expect them to swim straight away) and not enough of form and technique and discipline. These are usually very young people with little real understanding of serious combat who have watched too much television about “gangstas” and far too much absurd MMA; they are usually identifiable by their counter-culture look, their rejection of traditional martial arts methods and values and their lack of serious progression. These two flavors of mistake fail just as miserably as the uke above who goes along too easily: Both create students with no understanding of the real fundamentals.

A good uke is someone who acts and reacts “with intent” but who balances intent with an understanding of the person acting as tori. That means uke must have the insight to see tori’s level of development and must attack with just the right amount of intensity: enough to challenge tori, but not so much that it will overwhelm him if he really *tries*. Likewise, uke must respond to tori's technique realistically: If tori does the technique that’s being practiced correctly—given his current level of development—it should succeed; if not, it should fail.

So, in short, a good uke is one who does his job in such a way that if tori does everything to the best of his ability then the technique they’re practicing together (there really are no winners and losers) will work the way it’s supposed to.

Those who know me know that I work very hard to keep my Japanese martial arts experience from tainting my German martial arts practice; they are not at all the same, and I would consider it a shame to have the one taint the other. On the other hand, some training principles are perfectly suited to both, and this is one of them.

I think by now my definition of the word “intent” should be perfectly clear. Attacking with intent means that you attack as you would in a real fight, but that you temper that based on two things: First, the skill level of the person you’re attacking, and second the purpose of the drill, which should be to practice a specific technique or sequence of techniques. If you fail to consider the first thing you’ll never teach your students anything; all you’ll really do is make them either think themselves incapable of learning or make them believe the art itself is flawed.

If you fail to consider the purpose of the drill your student will never learn how the specific technique you’re practicing actually works and will therefore never be able to apply it in a realistic situation. Case in point, let’s consider the Block Croix technique with the pollaxe from Le Jeu de La Hache (para. 7-8): If the teacher attacks too gently (for the student’s level of skill, remember!) the student will never feel what it takes to stop the initial swing; if he swings too hard he will blow through the student’s defense and prevent the student from learning how the technique works. If the teacher doesn’t swing at the student’s head (many people, scared of hitting others, swing “short”, so that the blow would not have been able to hit the student) the student will never learn the “measure” (Liechtenauer: “all arts have length and measure!”) of the technique, which is fairly tricky with this particular technique. If the teacher does something “tricky” as he swings his blow the technique will fail and the student will be confused as to what the technique is actually supposed to do. (You can see the Block Croix in the video clip below.)

Acting with intent is important for the student, too. It’s easy enough to do on a single technique, but in a technique with multiple parts students often fail because they focus too much on the last part of the play. For example, let’s consider the cross-knock used when someone binds against your Zwerchau with the longsword: The teacher attacks with an Oberhau and the student responds with a Zwerchau to the teacher’s head that is intended to displace the blow and kill in one motion. The teacher then changes the arc of his cut to bind hard against the student’s Zwerchau in order to prevent himself from being hit, so the student knocks the teacher’s blade to the right with his cross to prevent him from responding for a moment while the student whips his sword around to strike another Zwerchau at the other side of the teacher’s head.

In order for the student to properly understand this sequence both the teacher and student must do things in a very specific way: The teacher must cut directly at the student’s head with an appropriate level of speed and force. The student must respond with a real attempt at a Zwerchau; here’s where most students err—they know they’re practicing the cross knock so they do a half-hearted Zwerchau that wouldn’t have worked at all. The teacher must then bind hard against the middle of the student’s blade or else the student won’t get the play; the cross knock doesn’t work, for example, if you bind at the point of the sword (in which case the student should Durchwechseln), so the teacher would be cheating his student. Then the teacher should hold fast in the bind so that the cross knock actually does what it’s supposed to.

(NB: Once a student has mastered the basics, of course, the teacher can build drills that create choices; for example, the teacher might do everything up to the bind described above, then vary his bind either to middle of the sword or to the point, forcing the student to actually read the bind and respond correctly. But this can’t be done until the student is doing the individual techniques correctly and without conscious effort.)

Another example is the Winden: When swords bind the teacher must hold a hard bind with his point on line (i.e., aiming at the student), and the student responds with the Winden. If the teacher pushes too much then the Winden won’t work; that’s not a failing of the Winden, it’s a different situation to which the student should respond by moving smoothly into the second Winden. But there’s no reason to push that way at first while the student is still learning the first Winden! The teacher must act correctly for the specific technique being practiced. Likewise, when the student is learning the second Winden he should still perform the first Winden with intent and only move to the second Winden when forced to do so by pressure on his blade from the teacher. After both Winden are learned well enough the teacher can make the exercise into a drill wherein the student must do the correct thing, either thrusting through with the first Winden or changing to the second, but in that case the teacher must limit his actions; pushing his sword up into Kron, for example, doesn’t belong in that specific drill.

Intent, then, isn’t about battering your training partners or students into humility, it’s about making your practice as realistic as possible based on the skill levels of the two people involved. Attack hard and fast, yes, but not more than your partner or student can handle. Make it as challenging as you can, and don’t let a poor technique succeed, but don’t create a no-win situation, either. Do *each* part of a technique or sequence of techniques as perfectly and as realistically as possible, as if you didn’t know what the next part was going to be. To the extent your gear and training permits, always aim for the correct targets. And, of course, always remember that you’re not out to really hurt anyone; use control. A little pain is good, of course, especially when it comes as a result of doing something wrong—our Schule motto is “Was Sehrt, das lehrt” (what hurts teaches)—but no one should be really damaged, and pain is pretty useless with a complete novice since they’re doing everything wrong at first.

So do techniques as fast, as hard and as accurately as possible while considering the skill levels of the people doing the techniques and the needs of safety (within reason). That is acting “with intent.”

A Correction To My Book: "Fencing With Spear And Sword"

2008-04-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've been refining my Gladiatoria Fechtbuch translation in preparation for trying to find a publisher, and in so doing I've discovered an error that I made both in my translation and in the interpretation of the play I put into my book Fencing With Spear And Sword.

This is the plate: fol. 8r

The text says:
Merckh den anfang des stuckhs das auch get aus den vir huetten wenn du wilt das enthafft treyben So setz für den rechten füesz vnd cher den knopff fur sich gegen seinem gesicht So pewtstu Im dy plosz mit deinem rechten vgsen ob er dy ploz wolt trayben oder suchen mit sterckh seins stichs vnd So slach vnttersich mit chrefft deins ortt swertz So weysstu Im aus den stich vnd greyff mit dem ortt ausserhalb in sein tenckhe knyepueg als du es auff der andern seytten gemalt sichst

Which I now translate as:
Note the beginning of the technique that also derives from the four guards. When you want to do this seriously move your right foot forward and turn your pommel forward towards his face, thus you offer him an opening at your right armpit. If he means to seek or exploit your opening with a strong thrust then stab down with strength with your sword’s point. So you displace his thrust, and grab with the point from the outside in his left hollow of knee like you see it in the next picture. [Continued on fol. 8v]

Originally, I translated the text to mean Ralph (i.e., the figure on the right) steps forward with his right foot and moved his pommel forward to void Larry's (i.e., the figure on the left) thrust; the idea was that Larry makes a thrust from below at Ralph's left armpit (which is exposed when he's in the upper guard) so Ralph steps in while changing the side that’s forward in order to make Larry's attack miss.

In re-examining my translation, I now see that the text really says Ralph switches to the right-leg lead shown in the plate to invite an attack to his right armpit so he is better set up for a leg hook. The leg hook itself is then shown in the subsequent plate, fol. 8v.

You can see this play in my Fencing With Spear And Sword book on p. 76: "Left Knee Lift Counter to an Unterstich".

My motions are still exactly correct, it's just that I should change feet before the thrust rather than in response to it.

My sincere thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng for the patiently-given insights that helped with this correction.

I'm sorry for any judicial combats you have lost as a result of reading my book and doing this technique incorrectly.

What is a Master?

2008-04-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Let’s shatter some modern cultural assumptions, shall we? In this country we have a certain idea about the word “master” that doesn’t translate well to the medieval mindset. Raised on bad kung-fu movies (and my, but isn’t that redundant!), many Americans associate the word master with a wizened little Asian man capable of leaping tall buildings while kicking down trees, all the while uttering clumsily cryptic nonsense with a sage expression on his face. A master seems to be someone who has spent a lifetime learning his art and who’s ability is so far beyond other practitioners that it seems magical.

Since this blog is about western martial arts I won’t get into why that use of the word doesn’t really apply to Asian martial artists the same way (Shihan means Shihan; the word we associate with it isn’t a good definition if the connotation is unjustified). Instead, let’s look at what the word “master” meant in medieval Europe.

In Europe a child destined for a skilled trade would leave his parents at a very young age (often his early teens) to be apprenticed to a craftsman. He would spend several years as an apprentice, learning the trade while doing labor to pay for his keep. When the apprentice had learned enough to really be of use to his master in the craft he was studying he would be called a “journeyman”, and would spend several more years working at that level. Finally, when he was ready to go out on his own, he would prepare a “masterwork”—an example of his work that would demonstrate to the guild in which he worked that he was ready to take the next step.

Incidentally, this is another way we’ve ruined our own language: Today, we use the word “masterwork” to refer to an object that represents the apex of a long life of dedicated work and study; we see a “masterwork” as an example of the very highest skill that can exist in a craft. Michaelangelo’s David is often called a “masterwork.” Nonsense. If that was the standard called for to achieve the rank of master in a craft guild then almost no masters would ever have existed. The very basis of how we think about words has been corrupted.

Going back to our young journeyman, he would prepare a masterwork to be judged by a council of guild masters. Think of it like a final exam, if you will. If they judged his work to be acceptable (not exceptional—acceptable) they would confer upon the young man the rank of master and he’d happily go off to set up his own shop. Thus, we can see that in medieval Europe a “master” was someone just getting started on his own in a craft or trade—nothing at all like we think of the word today.

While we don’t have information on rank structure among fencers from medieval Germany—our primary focus here, of course—we do have some from Renaissance England. A student of the sword in late-period England was called a schollar. After some period of training (probably a couple of years, but my sources aren’t specific meaning it probably varied considerably) a schollar would be tested in practice bouts and if he passed he’d become a provost—the lowest rank that was allowed to teach. After some time as a provost he would fight more practice bouts against other provosts in front of “ancient masters” (presumably high-ranking guild officers) and, if he did well enough (he didn’t need to win all his bouts, just demonstrate an acceptable level of proficiency), he would be granted the rank of master. One source, at least, says that you had to be a provost for seven years before attempting to test for master, but there are records of men doing it in far fewer. (Wagner, P., Master of Defense: The Works of George Silver, Paladin Press, 2003, pp. 11-12) Note that: The bouts fought were against other provosts, not high-ranking masters, and the prospective master didn’t need to win all of his bouts. This clearly shows how skewed the modern notion of a master being a godlike killing machine really is.

This system still exists today in some crafts: The art of falconry is still practiced in the United States today; it is one of the most carefully-regulated arts extant, with very precise rules about who may do what and when. When someone starts to learn falconry he must spend two years as an apprentice under the direct supervision of a more experienced (but not necessarily master-level) falconer called the “sponsor.” After that, if the sponsor agrees he’s done well enough the falconer becomes a “general falconer”, a rank which he holds for five years. At the end of five years the general falconer automatically becomes a master falconer. I’ve heard many master falconers say they may be masters but that they haven’t yet “mastered” their craft; here we see a different use of the root word, and this use is perfectly valid: master is a rank, and not a very high one, but mastery is something few masters obtain but for which all should strive. Ignorance of this lexicological distinction is one of the main reasons why people today don’t understand the correct use of the word.

While we’re on this subject, let’s consider the word “Fechtmeister”: The word means “fight master” or “fencing master”, and is a job title, not a claim to rank. It is analogous to a “choir master” or “dance master.” Someone fresh out of school with a still-damp degree in music might be hired at a church, for example, as a choir master without a lifetime of practice and experience. A Fechtmeister is the same thing: He is someone who runs a school that teaches German martial arts, nothing more. Too many of the people who teach der Kunst des Fechtens are afraid to use the title Fechtmeister today for fear of ridicule, but that merely shows they are deserving of ridicule for not understanding the structure of what they do. If you aren’t skilled enough to teach don’t open a school; if you are and you do then you’re a Fechtmeister. People need to get over their misunderstanding.

In conclusion, those who decline the title of master out of some misplaced sense of false modesty need to set aside their ignorance and learn to use the word in its medieval sense. Those who laugh at them for doing so merely bray out their own ignorance.

Attacks as Transitions From Guard to Guard

2008-04-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

Some modern books on German swordsmanship have argued that all attacks are transitions from one guard to another in spite of the fact that no Fechtbuch makes that claim. This is an issue because adherents of test cutting who struggle to justify their pernicious practice argue the existence of the guard Alber proves the Oberhau is done from vom Tag to the ground, as if there were no reason for any guard except to be an endpoint to an attack.

In fact, guards are never the endpoint of attacks except incidentally. Instead, attacks are done from guards (usually) to either Langenort (‘long point’) or to one of the four Hengen (‘hangings’). Hanko Döbringer (or whomever wrote Hs. 3227a) tells us this about cutting: “And this art is quite earnest and righteous, and it goes from the nearest in search of the closest and goes straight and right when you wish to strike or thrust. So that when you want to attack someone it is as if you had a cord tied to the point or edge of your sword and this leads the point or edge to an opening.” (fol. 13v). This means we’re supposed to cut in a straight line from guard to the target, not a big swing. He adds to this later when he says: “For you should strike or thrust in the shortest and nearest way possible. For in this righteous fencing do not make wide or ungainly parries or fence in large movements by which people restrict themselves…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.” (ff. 14r-v)

In other words, real swordsmanship is about making cuts as small and controlled as possible; not to the ground, but to Langenort. In fact, the earliest Fechtbuch, I.33, specifically says: “Note that the entire heart of the art lies in this final guard, which is called Longpoint; and all actions of the guards or of the sword finish or have their conclusion in this one and not in the others.” (Forgeng, J., The Medieval Art of Swordsmanship, Chivalry Bookshelf, 2003, p. 23).

You see, when you cut to Langenort you are stopping in a position in which your point threatens your opponent if you have missed, and thus you maintain control over the fight. If you cut to the ground you are not really threatening him at all. We know this approach is correct because Döbringer tells us so: “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.” (fol. 24r); and later: “Whether you hit or miss, always seek the openings with both your hands and learn to bring the point to the eyes.” (fol. 29v) So the idea is to cut into a position in which your point is in line for an immediate threat if you miss with your cut—something a cut to the ground can not do.

We read more evidence to this effect in Codex Wallerstein, which says: “So you fight against someone, and you come at him at the length of the sword, so both of you are going head to head. Then you should stretch out your arms and your sword far from you and put yourself in a low body position so that you have a good reach and extension with your sword and so that you may attack and defend yourself against all that is necessary. The reach is in your standing behind your sword and bending yourself; the distance is in your staying low, as shown here, and making yourself small in the body so you are great in your sword.” (fol. 3r) This is yet more evidence that when you cut you create a barrier between yourself and your opponent with your sword; something that cutting to the ground can not accomplish.

It must be admitted that you can cut to the ground on purpose as a way to lure your opponent into acting as you want him to; this technique is called the Wechselhau and is seen, among other places, in Lignitzer’s third play of the buckler, but note that it is a special case in which you are deliberately acting to provoke a response. Note, too, that the Wechselhau is not Alber, so the argument that the existence of Alber proves you are supposed to cut to the ground is specious.

Not only does cutting to the ground cost you the defensive capabilities of your point and yield the important center of the fight, but it is also dangerous because it gives your opponent an extra “fencing time” in which to act. The masters tell us to react to someone who does this with a technique called the Nachreisen (‘following after’): “When he strikes an Oberhau and brings the blade down with the strike, travel after him with a strike on the head before he can get his sword up again.” (Tobler, C., Secrets of German Medieval Swordsmanship, Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001, p. 93) What this means is that if someone is foolish enough to over cut in such a way as to lower his point to the ground he has to cut, stop at the bottom of his cut, then pick his weapon back up before he can do anything. In the case of the Wechselhau this can be done because you intended it all along, but in the case of someone who merely missed his target you create a moment in time for your opponent to act.

By using short cuts to Langenort do we make our cuts ineffectual? Not at all: Not only does cutting to the ground expose you to a Nachreisen, but it is not necessary for a fight-ending blow. Medieval swords were sharp; not as razor-like as people like them today (such edges are usually delicate because they are thin), but sharp none the less. It takes very little strength or effort to cut into a skull or hack into an arm with a good sword. The cut may not be perfectly clean, and the head or arm may not be cut completely off, but then you do not need to do that to win the fight, and not giving your opponent the initiative of the fight more than outweighs the loss of a perfectly smooth cut.

Having thus proven that cutting to the ground with an Oberhau is based on a misunderstanding of der Kunst des Fechtens (except for the special case of the Wechselhau) let us now go on to explore the other kinds of attacks of the system. All of the other attacks in the German system except for the Oberhau and the Zornort (‘thrust of wrath’: a thrust done into Langenort) end up not in guards, but in one of the Hengen. There are four Hengen, and they correspond to the guards Ochs and Pflug, but are done, usually, with the arms more extended. The problem with seeing this lies in the fact that the precise nature of the Hengen is determined by the range to your opponent rather than a precisely-determined position relative to you. Worse, some authors (e.g., the Goliath Fechtbuch) are sloppy about terminology, using the names of the guards indiscriminately in place of the Hengen.

As an example we will consider a Zwerchau: Some have likened the Zwerchau to a transition from vom Tag to Ochs along a horizontal line. In reality, however, Ochs is a specific position with your hilt near the right side of your head: If your opponent is farther from you than your sword can reach in that position you must extend your arms to hit the target. Thus, we can more accurately say that the Zwerchau is a cut executed in a horizontal line from vom Tag to the Oberhengen on your left side. Of course, if your opponent is closer the Oberhengen might be in roughly the same position as Ochs, but that is coincidental. Thus we see that the guards are determined by the position of your sword relative to you but the Hengen are determined by the position of your sword relative to your opponent; a subtle but very important distinction.

As another example consider the Winden; here we are explicitly told to move our sword from Langenort, winding it am Schwert (’on the sword’ or in contact with the opponent’s blade) back towards the weak of his blade (near the tip) into the Oberhengen. If you displaced your opponent’s original cut so that his sword never reached your head then winding back to Ochs will actually move your sword off of your opponent’s blade. In actuality all you need to do is to wind back far enough that you are on the weak of his blade before thrusting, and this is always going to be forward of the guard Ochs: It is an Oberhengen, as can be seen here, not Ochs.

The same is true of all of the techniques in der Kunst des Fechtens: The upper Absetzen is not a transition from Pflug to Ochs, it is a transition from Pflug (or Alber; this is a lovely and sneaky variation—see below) to the Oberhengen. Likewise, the lower Absetzen is a transition from Pflug to an Unterhengen. Döbringer explicitly tells us this: “One technique is called the Baking Master [Weckemeister]. And it comes from the Unterhengen on the left side, seeking with the point after the Absetzen.” (fol. 47v)

The Schielhau is a transition from vom Tag to an Oberhengen, just as the Zwerchau, but in this case the transition is vertical rather than Horizontal; it is as plain as day when you think about it and study the Fechtbücher. Here is a picture of Ochs from the Meyer Fechtbuch (the figure on the right) and here is a picture of the Schielhau showing clearly that the wielder is in an Oberhengen. Clearly the wielder’s hands are well forward of Ochs.

What, then, is the purpose of Alber if not a mere ending to an Oberhau? If merely an end to a cut it would not rate as a guard, and yet it is one of only four guards. In reality, Alber is a subtle, dangerous position used as a guard of provocation. You assume it not as the result of a cut that missed its intended target, but in the Zufechten (‘pre-fencing’; the time before an engagement begins). As we said before, cutting to Alber if you missed your target will get you killed by an opponent using the Nachreisen or Uberlaufen. But if you start in Alber you are encouraging your opponent to attack in the way you want or else you are attempting to appear helpless.

Admittedly the Fechtbücher give us relatively few techniques to use from Alber, but there are some and they suggest more. Consider Döbringer, who tells us to use this guard (although he uses a different name for it; like Talhoffer he calls it the Iron Gate) against multiple opponents: “If you are set upon by four or six peasants, then place either foot forward and with the gate you will create a shield by placing the point towards the ground. Hear how you should do this, place yourself so that they are right in front of you and that no one can get in behind you. Now hear what you should do, when they strike or thrust at you, Absetzen with strength going up from the ground and then you will shame them well.” (fol. 44v) Note that this uses Alber from the Zufechten, where it is safe to assume, not in the Krieg ('the war'; the term refers to the phase of the fight that occurs after you have engaged) where it is dangerous to do so because you move away from a threatening position without doing anything to render your opponent helpless.

In conclusion, most of the people who argue attacks are transitions from guard to guard are either seeking a philosophical symmetry in fighting that does not exist and is certainly not mentioned in any of the Fechtbücher or else seek to justify the pernicious practice of test cutting. As I have shown, neither position is valid: Attacks are transitions from guards, which are assumed in the Zufechten, to either Langenort or to one of the four Hengen. Attacks can, of course, also originate in one of the Hengen or in Langenort: if you attack and are displaced you can assume Langenort and use Fühlen to determine your opponent’s intention and then act from there (this is part of the concept called the Sprechfenster), etc., but that part is never in dispute. And while the Hengen can resemble the guards Ochs and Pflug, they are distinctly different because guards are determined by the position of your sword relative to you while the Hengen are determined by the position of your sword relative to your opponent.

Practice Longswords

2008-03-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

Frankly, I think Albion makes the best swords I have ever seen; I am currently trying to save for an Earl, I'd sell my soul for their Munich, and I wish I could justify buying their Poitier—it's the best-handling arming sword I've ever touched. Unfortunately, there's no reason at all, from a WMA standpoint, to ever own a sharp—they're purely for decoration. You can't practice with a partner with a sharp because you'll kill each other, yet all practice should be done with a partner or on a pell, and the pell will ruin your edge (in period they used double-weighted swords or swords of wood on pells), and you should never engage in test cutting because it will ruin your ability to cut correctly (see why here).

On the other hand, I'm extremely disappointed in Albion's line of practice longswords. They offer two longswords, the Liechtenauer and the Meyer, and neither is worth owning. We already know how medieval sword makers made practice swords because there are two extant models at the Met (these were copied by Arms & Armor for the Fechterspiel; you can see them in the picture at the beginning of this essay) and another in Switzerland (which was copied by Hanwei for their Federfechter), but Albion ignored these excellent examples and, like SCAdians with no discernable interest in history, decided to figure things out on their own.

A practice sword should have thick edges to minimize injuries during practice, but doing so makes the blade far too heavy. As a result, medieval sword makers made swords with very narrow blades and thick edges; in essence, the same amount of steel as a sharp, just redistributed. They also added a very wide reinforcement called a Schilt ("shield") near the cross to reinforce an area that would be very prone to breakage if it had a narrow blade. When you do all of that you have a weapon identical to the Arms & Armor Fechterspiel, and that's why our Schule uses them exclusively.

Albion, on the other hand, chose to ignore the medieval way of doing things and simply make a wide, deep fuller down the length of their blade in order to reduce overall blade weight. This works, but it's not a medieval practice and therefore has no value: After all, why practice a medieval art while eschewing medieval practices? Worse, Albion's Meyer is a Fechterspiel-style sword of the sort depicted in Meyer's Fechtbuch, but still used the wide, deep fuller to lighten the blade, even though they added a Schilt as Meyer's Fechtbuch shows; in other words, they're the same style of trainer as the ones at the Met that Arms & Armor copied for their Fechterspiel, but either Albion doesn't know that (which would be a terrible shame), or they just don't care—which would be an even worse disgrace.

The Arms & Armor Fechterspiel is a superb weapon. It handles as well as any sword I’ve ever used, is designed and built according to medieval designs and principles, is durable and very safe to use (bearing in mind that it’s still a weapon, and while not sharp is still capable of lethal blows) and is quite handsome as well. The balance is spectacular. The Fechterspiel comes in two versions, one with polished furniture and the other with rough castings, but frankly, there’s little to choose between them. I own two, one finished and one not, and they have held up marvelously in heavy practice.

The point of the Fechterspiel is simply rounded off, and while nice for some kinds of practice, tends to slide off too easily during actual thrusting practice. To compensate I purchased rubber bird blunts from an archery supply house and taped them in place. When you thrust against a mask they “stick” enough to simulate an effective thrust. In addition, the flex in the Fechterspiel blade is such that it absorbs most reasonable thrusts so they don’t hurt as much.

The only slight criticism I can make of the Fechterspiel is that the leather on the hilt has a thick seam which can rub your hands badly over the course of a long practice. I wish Arms & Armor could find a better way to sew the leather, but I’d rather have it as it is than have a glued edge that comes apart in the course of heavy practice as often happens with lesser weapons.

Of course, just as with any tool the Fechterspiel requires maintenance. They’re made of steel and so prone to rust, and while the steel is hardened well it still tends to get nicked in practice. I assembled a small kit for sword maintenance: It contains silicone-impregnated cloths from a firearms supply company, blocks of polishing compound suspended in a rubber matrix much like large pencil erasers, a file, a rag, a bottle of machine oil, and spare rubber blunts and tape. When I get home from practice I use the file to eliminate nicks and burrs in the blade and cross, then smooth the filed areas with the polishing blocks. I then wipe the blades and furniture with the silicone cloth unless I don’t intend to use them for quite some time, in which case I oil them carefully. It is very important to dress nicks and burrs right away because otherwise they can lead to weak spots in the blade and because they can draw blood from your partner when practicing things like slicing techniques.

The Fechterspiel is the only steel longsword allowed for practice in my Schule.

I have not yet had the pleasure of handling the CAS/Hanwei Federfechter, but like the Fechterspiel, it is a copy of an extant medieval practice sword currently in a museum in Switzerland. I have, however, had occasion to discuss this sword with people I trust. In general, most people found the sword to be an acceptable practice weapon with a few caveats: First, the blade has too much flex, which makes Winden practice problematic. Second, some of the parts are too “squared off”, which tends to make them a bit sharp (a few minutes with a file could probably solve this). Finally, some of the blades have broken in the course of normal practice. Whether these breaks are the result of an inherent flaw in the weapon or exceptions that represent swords slipping through quality control can’t be known at this time. I have to admit, however, that I find these swords extraordinarily ugly. They’re not inaccurate in design, but in the middle ages, just as today, some work was more elegant and more beautiful than others; these simply represent an aesthetic I can’t find appealing. Of course, that should have no bearing on their value as practice swords, it’s merely my taste. Even with all the flaws these swords have, they are very inexpensive for what they are and may deserve some careful consideration.

The Myth of Test Cutting

2008-02-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

People love to take up their shiny, sharp swords and hack through various objects ranging from pool noodles to water bottles to rolled tatami. Doing so makes them feel cool and fierce and warlike when, in fact, all it really does is to lead them astray. This essay will show that test cutting has no value, no historical provenance, leads to bad swordsmanship, and confuses people about how swords work.

The idea of test cutting comes to us from Kendo and Iaido practitioners. Vast hordes of them practice test cutting of various sorts because they believe it will help them to cut better; they wax rhapsodically about it, actually, telling us that you can tell how perfect a swordsman’s cut is by how cleanly it cuts through the target while at the same time telling us that their swords are perfect razors whose merest touch will slice off a hand, apparently not seeing the inherent contradiction: If the sword is actually that sharp even a clumsy cut will kill—why do more?

In actuality, test cutting is not part of Japanese sword practice (well, not exactly). I know, I know, that sounds heretical, but it’s true. Bushi (what are know as Samurai today) didn’t do test cutting. “What?!” you cry, leaping to the scent of blood, “Have you never heard of Tameshigiri? Do you think we made that up?!” No, you didn’t make it up, you’ve been lead astray as to what it is.

“Tameshigiri was used to test the sharpness and quality of a sword: often it was carried out on dead bodies, tied-up living criminals, or bamboo straw test objects that had been secured to something. Educated or high-ranking bushi did not practice Tameshigiri, as it was purely a test of the sword’s sharpness, and in no way a measure of the samurai’s skills.” (Fumon, T., Samurai Fighting Arts: The Spirit and Practice, Kodansha Int’l., 2003, P. 49)

Bushi *did* practice one kind of cutting practice called “suemonogiri”, but that had a specialized purpose. When a bushi was going to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide, he would be assisted by another bushi called the kaishaku; his job was to cut off the head of the bushi performing seppuku (or almost cut it off—there were different kinds of cutting, but that’s outside the scope of this essay). Seppuku was considered an important ritual, and the kaishaku’s role was critical. Bushi spent hours practicing a huge, cleaving, ritualized cut (some ryu-ha have a kata devoted to it) to be used for the decapitation, and suemonogiri was an important tool in this process. But it *wasn’t* combat swordsmanship, and wasn’t practiced as such!

So: Test cutting had no relationship to combat.

Flash over to medieval Europe: We have no records of medieval knights practicing test cutting of any sort. There is one apocryphal story of Richard I but it didn’t actually happen, and it didn’t have any real combat relevance anyway. When we read about training in Europe we actually read only of training on a Pell; this is an excerpt from the anonymous Poem of the Pell:
“Of fight the disciplyne and exercise,
Was this. To have a pale or pile [pell] upright
Of mannys light [of a man's height], thus writeth old and wise,
Therewith a bacheler, or a yong knyght,
Shal first be taught to stonde and lerne to fight
And fanne [shield] of double wight tak him his shelde,
Of double wight a mace of tre [wood] to welde."

So we’ve established that test cutting has no historical provenance and no relationship to sword training. Now let’s look at what it does to your technique: When people practice test cutting they strive heroically to make a cut that’s smoother than the last time and which slices effortlessly through the target. Read any review of a new sword on the internet written by someone who believes in test cutting and a significant portion of his review will discuss how well they were able to do test cutting with it. But in order to get these smooth, perfect cuts the practitioners invariably (look at any video on YouTube) make huge, overblown cuts reminiscent of suemonogiri. They learn to make cuts that start from a high guard and end up with the point near the ground because this kind of follow through yields the smoothest cut.

But Hanko Döbringer (or whomever wrote Hs. 3227a) tells us this about cutting:
“And this art is quite earnest and righteous, and it goes from the nearest in search of the closest and goes straight and right when you wish to strike or thrust. So that when you want to attack someone it is as if you had a cord tied to the point or edge of your sword and this leads the point or edge to an opening.” (fol. 13v). This means we’re supposed to cut in a straight line from guard to the target, not a big swing. He adds to this later when he says: “For you should strike or thrust in the shortest and nearest way possible. For in this righteous fencing do not make wide or ungainly parries or fence in large movements by which people restrict themselves…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.” (ff. 14r-v)

In other words, real swordsmanship is about making cuts as small and controlled as possible; not to the ground, but to a position usually called Langenort (“long point”). In fact, the earliest Fechtbuch, I.33, specifically says: “Note that the entire heart of the art lies in this final guard, which is called Longpoint; and all actions of the guards or of the sword finish or have their conclusion in this one and not in the others.” (Forgeng, J., The Medieval Art of Swordsmanship, Chivalry Bookshelf, 2003, p. 23). You see, when you cut to Langenort you’re stopping in a position in which your point threatens your opponent if you’ve missed, and thus you maintain control over the fight. If you cut to the ground you’re not really threatening him at all. (NB: You can cut to the ground on purpose as a way to lure your opponent into acting as you want him to; this technique is called the Wechselhau and is seen, among other places, in Lignitzer’s third play of the buckler, but note that it’s a special case in which you’re deliberately acting to provoke a response.)

Not only that, but cutting to the ground is dangerous because it gives your opponent an extra “fencing time” in which to act. The masters tell us to react to someone who does this with a technique called the Nachreisen (“following after”): “When he strikes an Oberhau and brings the blade down with the strike, travel after him with a strike on the head before he can get his sword up again.” (Tobler, C., Secrets of German Medieval Swordsmanship, Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001, p. 93)

Why do we cut to Langenort instead of to the ground? Simple: Not only does cutting to the ground expose you to a Nachreisen, but it isn’t necessary. That’s right, there’s no reason to do so. Medieval swords were sharp; not as razor-like as people like them today (such edges are usually brittle), but sharp none the less. It takes very little strength or effort to cut into a skull or hack into an arm with a good sword. The cut may not be perfectly clean, and the head or arm may not be cut completely off, but then you don’t need to do that to win the fight, and avoiding giving your opponent the initiative of the fight more than outweighs the loss of a perfectly smooth cut.

Another ugly habit that test cutting fosters is pulling the hands back slightly to prepare for the cut. It should be obvious why this is incorrect, but I have recently read people arguing in favor of it on various Internet sites. If you pull your hands back to “wind up” for a cut, even the most miniscule amount, you’re telegraphing your intentions to your opponent. Fencers who did this in the middle ages were called Buffel (“buffalos”; slang for a fighter who relies on huge, powerful strokes). They could be defeated either with the Meisterhau known as the Schielhau (“squinter”) or by a different variation of the Nachreisen: “If he raises the sword to strike, travel after him with a strike or a thrust and hit him in the upper opening before he can complete the strike. (Tobler 2001, p. 92).

So, test cutting has no historical provenance, no relationship to sword training, and teaches sword habits that can, at best, be termed “dreadful”. All it does is pander to a misplaced romantic desire to “cut something” with your sharp new sword, and there’s simply no value in that. Is there ever *any* value to be had in test cutting? Perhaps; people have, as I’ve said, an exaggerated sense of the lethal sharpness of swords (and I see the contradiction; I wish they did). The German tradition recognizes three primary kinds of attacks with a sword: Cuts (or blows with the edge), thrusts and slices. Many people believe that the merest touch of a blade on the flesh will give a lethal cut, and this simply isn’t so. This misconception leads to mistakes in the practice of slicing cuts, called Schnitten in the German tradition, in which the swordsman merely lays his edge on the target and pushes or pulls it along his opponent’s flesh. As anyone who’s ever carved a roast at dinner should know, this won’t be enough: you have to Schnitt powerfully with a heavy pressure of your hands to make a deep enough cut to be effective. There may be some justification for learning such techniques by test cutting, provided a realistic material can be found.

In general, however, the simple version is this: Just say no to test cutting.

A New Book on Medieval Grappling and Dagger Combat

2008-02-26T17:22:00.000-08:00

I am very proud to announce the publication of the second book in the die Schlachtschule unarmored combat series entitled The Last Resort: Unarmored Grappling and Dagger Combat by Hugh T. Knight, Jr.

This book is intended to introduce the reader to the sophisticated techniques of medieval grappling and dagger combat as communicated to us from fifteenth-century German fighting manuals such as Hans Talhoffer’s fight books, Sigmund Ringeck’s “Knightly Art of the Longsword”, the anonymous “Codex Wallerstein”, Peter von Danzig’s fight book, the anonymous Gladiatoria fight book and several others. The intent of this book is to use a “dossier” approach to combine the techniques of several masters whose work is similar both stylistically and temporally to show a unified system of grappling and dagger combat as it would have been practiced in fifteenth-century Germany.

Mr. Knight begins with a discussion of the root principles of the German school of martial arts and how they apply to grappling to build a strategic framework for the art. He then goes on to use more than four hundred fifty photographs to take the reader step-by-step through breakfalls (not described in the fight books but necessary for safe practice); fundamentals such as stances, footwork, breaking your opponent’s balance, and strikes and kicks; more than forty grappling techniques, including counters and ways to counter resistance to your techniques; counters to common holds and strikes; dagger combat, including techniques for dagger-against-dagger fighting as well as unarmed techniques to use against a dagger-wielding opponent; and finally a section detailing groundwork techniques for finishing a fight.

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in medieval combat, history or martial arts in general.

The Last Resort: Unarmored Grappling and Dagger Combat has been published through Lulu.com and is only available for internet purchase at this time:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2077141

The author is the founder and head instructor of die Schlachtschule: The School of Battle in North Hollywood, CA, a school dedicated to rediscovering and practicing the knightly arts of combat from medieval Germany. He has more than 30 years of martial experience ranging from traditional Japanese sword and grappling arts to over ten years of German martial arts. He founded die Schlachtschule in 2003 and teaches a curriculum that includes sword, spear, pollaxe, grappling and dagger combat both in and out of armor. More information can be found on the school’s web site:
www.schlachtschule.org

From the Bind of the Zwerchau

2008-02-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a brief essay on the Zornhau in which I argued that Fühlen, the process of feeling a bind to see if your opponent is hard or soft in the bind, is not a passive process in which you actually wait for moment while bound to see what you can feel through the bind. I argued that in order to act Indes—instantly, or simultaneously—as the masters direct us to you must *test* the bind by immediately trying to use a technique designed for use if your opponent is soft in the bind—the Zornort—and then, if that fails, using that test result to tell you about the bind and what to do next.

I don't know how many others have noticed this, but it turns out that there are only two Meisterhau in Ringeck in which the master tells us to do "A" if our opponent is soft in the bind and "B" if he's hard in the bind: The first I've described above, the Zornhau. The only other is the Zwerchau.

In the Zwerchau we're told that if you strike with a Zwerchau and your opponent cuts into your blade to displace your cut you are to feel the bind (Fühlen), and if he's hard in the bind you do a Cross Knock (or a Duplieren, but we’ll save that for another time), or, if he's soft in the bind, you place your edge against his neck and Schnitt (or do a Back-lever Throw, but I dislike that play as being overly fussy and complicated). Just as with the Zornhau you simply don't have time to stop and smell the Fühlen after the bind happens. Your opponent isn't going to stand there passively awaiting your next act, he's going to move from the bind to do something else. Thus, again like the Zornhau, you must make your Fühlen an active test, not a passive "feeling out."

Also as with the Zornhau, what you test with matters: If you use a technique that you're supposed to use in a hard bind when your opponent is soft in the bind he will be able to react because techniques from a hard bind depend upon your opponent pushing into the bind to work. Someone who's soft in the bind can simply lift his sword away and do something else. To put it another way, techniques intended to be done when your opponent is hard in the bind depend upon his commitment to the bind.

Thus, in a bind from the Zwerchau you should first try to lift your hands slightly as if you were about to lift your point over your opponent's head for the Schnitt to the neck. If it works, fine--slice the bastard and go home for beer and pretzels. If it doesn't work, however, it's *easy* to convert that slight lift of your hands into a cross knock to your right (as long as you planned for that from the beginning and were ready to change gears). So we test the bind with the Schnitt technique, and if the bind is hard enough to stop the Schnitt we simply move right into the Cross Knock. Active testing, not passive; simple, fast and elegant.

That brings us to a related issue: I'm sure some of you have been practicing these techniques and found problems with them. Maybe your opponent's sword is too close to your hilt and the cross knock doesn't really work well, or his sword is on yours in such a way that it's hard to reach his blade to cross knock it. The answer to these problems (and numerous others I've seen people have with this set of plays) lies in where the displacement occurs on your blade when you Zwerchau.

If you cut with a Zwerchau and your opponent displaces from above such that he hits your blade just above the cross you'll find it almost impossible to get a crisp, sharp cross knock. That's not a problem, however, because the only reason it seems like an issue is that you're doing it in practice. If you were cutting for real and really trying to hit your opponent's head you'd find that your sword simply pivots on his blade and strikes—his displacement wouldn't do a thing. This is only an issue in practice when you don't practice realistically; you stop your attack because you *know* your Zwerchau is supposed to fail and you're supposed to do a cross knock. Even if the blow didn't land, since it would be his weak on the very strongest part of the strong of your sword if you follow my advice above and test with the Schnitt first you'd find that the Schnitt would work beautifully because having his weak on your strong makes the bind weak regardless of whatever else happens. So the Cross Knock should never happen from this sort of bind.

Alternatively, if your practice partner is binding too far out on your sword toward your point neither of these defenses will work because you won't have the leverage for the Schnitt and his sword will probably be out of reach for the Cross Knock. But while Ringeck doesn't specifically mention it in this particular case, you should already know what to do from other plays: You Durchwechseln under his sword! *Any* time your opponent binds down hard against the tip of your sword you should *automatically* Durchwechseln; it's an almost unbeatable defense when done correctly.

So the Schnitt to the neck and the Cross Knock should only be used when your opponent binds with the middle of your blade.

Thus, we see here a set of precisely-scripted actions from the displacement of the Zwerchau that are much like the ones from the Zornhau. They shouldn't be seen as a collection of random, unrelated techniques to choose from, but rather a way of limiting what you have to think about in the fight. Again, follow Döbringer's instructions to have a plan in place before you act. Know what you're supposed to do in every situation that can arise, and act in such a way as to limit the number of situations that *can* arise, and you'll find it's easy to have a well thought-out plan in every case, while your opponent will be floundering, trying to think of what to do in response to each of your actions, and he'll die while trying to decide what to do. That is die Edle Krieg—the Noble War.

Did Medieval Commoners Practice with Fighting Masters?

2008-02-05T10:36:00.000-08:00

Did common soldiers practice der Kunst des Fechtens (lit. “the Art of Fighting”, that is, formal martial practice under a Fechtmeister or “fight master”), or was it reserved for the upper classes? The simple answer is that it's tough to be certain; sadly, that's the answer to most questions on this frustrating subject. Having said that, I think I have a pretty good idea of the generalities of the issue as long as we bear in mind that we can only speak in broad generalities.

One of the most important issues in that question is unstated but implicit: You have to ask "trained in what?" for the question to have any meaning. If you mean trained to fight with pollaxes in full harness or with lances on horseback then the answer is categorically *no*, but, of course, there are other kinds of combat.

In Alfred Hutton's important work, _The Sword and the Centuries_, he pointed out that our modern pseudo-democratic notion that the great warriors were all common men and that upper-class men were all sissified fops is pure nonsense. The simple fact is that members of the nobility were the only ones who had *time* to really study martial arts; the common man usually worked from sunrise to sunset in often backbreaking labor for most of the middle ages. This is even true of soldiers: remember that most armies prior to the 15th century weren't *standing* armies, and were mostly composed of nobility anyway, except for commoners who were mostly laborers. (Note the "mostlies" and "usuallies" in that paragraph, of course.)

Having said that, the common men of Flanders kicked the crap out of the French nobility in the early 14th century at Flodden (and while most people have done that since then, up to that point the French didn't lose all that often). Likewise, Swiss commoners beat the hell out of Burgundian knights at Sempach in 1386. How did they do that? Partly through playing to the French weakness of relying on cavalry, but probably it was also due in part to some skill at arms. The thing to note, however, is that the Flemish and Swiss citizenry were largely middle-class townsmen, and that's a fact to hang on to; while the growing middle class of the later middle ages had more free time than your average serf farmer, they still weren't working 40-hour weeks with 3 week vacations! Still, they had some free time to devote to arms, and after all, emulating the upper class was a big deal in that period.

We also know that Swiss citizens, for example, held regular practices on weekends and feast days in the common square. It's likely they practiced drill more than anything else, since drill was the key to their kind of fighting, but they probably practiced the basics of the use of the halberd and may have practiced sword & buckler as well. There's nothing to tell us that these training sessions were held under the eye of a recognized Fechtmeister, however. My guess is that guys who had some experience passed on the basics of what they knew and that was that.

Writing at the end of the 14th century, Fiore wrote that:
"Moreover, any nobleman who studies this work of ours should take great care for it as it were a treasure, so that it will not be divulged among the peasantry, which Heaven created dull and only for the use of heavy work, like animals of burden. Therefore, one must keep this precious and secret science away from them and bring it to Kings, Dukes, Princes, Barons and other noblemen entitled to dueling." Ringeck wrote something similar in his prologue, although less explicitly, and later in his text he wrote: "Princes and Lords learn to survive with this art, in earnest and in play."

The extent to which they meant this seriously isn't clear; it might have been largely pro-forma. Certainly by the end of the 14th century the lines between commoner and nobleman were blurring more and more from a practical point of view, and this blurring of practicality led to a "firming up" of the rules and privileges of nobility; it was much harder to rise from commoner to nobility in the 15th century than it had been in the 14th century. That being the case, perhaps this kind of thing was a reaction to "uppity" commoners (like the burghers of Flanders?) who were encroaching on noble culture.

By the time we get to Talhoffer, however, things seem to have changed. In his 1459 Alte Armatur und Ringkunst, Talhoffer explains in detail how regular folk (or so it seems) are to prepare for a judicial combat. They have a complicated court proceeding to go through, then if the judges agree to the combat the principals have six weeks and four days to prepare for the combat, and Talhoffer specifically tells people they should find a reputable Fechtmeister to train them for the upcoming fight. Since Talhoffer also includes forms of combat specifically intended for lower-class participants (e.g., the 6-foot Hackenshilds shown in the picture accompanying this essay), we can take from this that he taught lower-class men how to prepare for formal judicial duels.

Moreover, this kind of dueling predates Talhoffer: In the second section of Codex Wallerstein, which dates from approximately 1415 (almost 30 years prior to his first published work), we see these same kinds of dueling shields. How, or if, they trained to use these shields that early is anyone's guess, but they may have, and their presence in such an early Fechtbuch suggests at least some had formal training, although, as with Talhoffer, I suspect their training was a last-minute thing and only for those who had need.

Moving on, by the early 16th century it's clear there were fencing guilds composed almost entirely of commoners (again, mostly middle-class townsmen; the goldsmiths were, for some reason, particularly active). The two most famous were the Marxbruders and the Federfechters. They practiced a variety of forms of combat, some of which were "noble" forms, such as the longsword, but note that the longsword was largely out of fashion by this time, and that most of their forms were for commoners, such as the staff and halberd.

There's no hint of such guilds prior to the 16th century. My guess is that a master such as Talhoffer would get himself hired by a noble patron (in his case Leutold von Königsegg) and would provide most of his time to him and his retainers in formal regular classes, but that he'd make some money on the side tutoring wealthy townsmen and those preparing for a judicial duel—not a formal guild, nor even a "school", really, outside of his duties to his lord and the retainers, but a student-teacher relationship. There's a rumor around that someone has documentation to the effect that several of Talhoffer's students were arrested or charged with getting into fights or disturbing the peace, or something, and I have yet to find the data in question, but it might give some interesting insights into this question.

So, to answer the question, my guess is that most lower-class soldiers in the mid-15th century and earlier had almost no formal training of any kind prior to their military service (other than some weekend drills composed mostly of training to drill in formation, and even that only in largely middle-class environments such as the Swiss Cantons). Those who stayed in service for a long period (and that would be a relatively small number in the days prior to standing armies), especially garrison troops, would probably get some kind of training in his specific weapons (bow/crossbow, matchlock, halberd, pike, sword and buckler) from his more experienced compatriots, but that training would never be even nearly as extensive nor as broad as that received by most men at arms in the same period. Gentlemen, on the other hand, were quite likely to have had formal, regular practice with a licensed Fechtmeister in their liege-lord's employ. By the 16th century, however, formal Fechtbuch training would be fairly common for the middle class.

Another thing to remember which may have a bearing on the question is that *none*, no, that's right, not a single one, of the 14th-15th century fighting manuals showed many techniques designed for war, not even that of Fiore, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. There were some incidental things, of course; for example, Talhoffer shows how a lightly-armored crossbowman should shoot his crossbow on horseback when faced with lance-wielding opponents, but even those are all “stand-alone” techniques, not an expression of a system per se. But the majority of the techniques shown were very clearly and obviously single combat techniques, not those to be used in the massed formations of war.

For example, the pollaxe techniques in all the manuals show the pollaxe being held in the middle, not at the end. If you try that in a line you'll discover that you smack your buddies on either side and entangle yourself. I believe that in war (and the iconography supports this) the pollaxe was held at the Queue end, but not a single manuals deals with this. Likewise, halfswording is almost never seen in paintings of war; why? because swords are almost useless in armored combat. That they were used in judicial duels reflects tradition and specialized applications more than anything else. In war the spear, halberd and the pollaxe were kings.

Are We Always Supposed to Attack First?

2008-02-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

On the subject of initiative, it has become apparent that some folks have become a bit too dogmatic as regards to the idea of the Vor, or “before”. Some people labor under the mistaken view that the Liechtenauer school of fighting requires you to attack first and continue attacking at all times.

Döbringer seems to tell us we should always attack first:
"The first strike [Vorschlag] is a great advantage in the fencing as you will hear in the text." (fol. 14v)
And:
"The word before [Vor] means that a good fencer will always win the first strike [Vorschlag]." (fol. 20r), etc.

Some people take that to mean you never await an attack, but should always try to make the Vorschlag. And after the Vorschlag, you should always act, keeping pressure on, never waiting. Döbringer says:
"Here note that constant motion [Frequens motus] holds the beginning, middle and the end of all fencing according to this art and teaching. That is you should quickly do the beginning, the middle and the end without delay and without any hindrances from the opponent and not letting him strike at you." (fol. 17v)

So by telling us to keep in constant motion, Döbringer is saying that once in the Krieg phase of an engagement you should keep constant pressure on your opponent with attack after attack after attack until your opponent falls.

Just reading this source, then, we are driven to conclude that we are supposed to attack first from the Zufechten and then, if that attack is displaced, to stay in constant motion with attack after attack in the Krieg until our opponent is defeated. Then we go have beer and pretzels.

But here's the thing: Von Danzig and Ringeck both include techniques that require you to wait. This is from Goliath relating to the Sprechfenster:

"And this is also the Sprechfenster. Mark when you have come to him with pre-fencing, then set your left foot forward and hold your arms in Long Point toward his face or chest, like when you bind onto his sword, and stand freely against what he would fence to you. If he strikes long and high to your head, then drive out and wind the sword into the Ochs against his strike and stab to his face; or if he strikes to your sword and not your body then change through and stab him on the other side; If he strides in and his arms are high, then drive below the cut or charge through to him with wrestling; if his arms are low, then resort to grappling the arms; thus you drive all aspects of the long point." (fol. 61r)

This isn't subject to misunderstanding: We're clearly being told to adopt Long Point prior to the bind and to wait for what our opponent might do. Moreover, we also have instructions that tell us to wait an attack not only in the Zufechten, but also in the Krieg:

"How you shall put yourself in the Sprechfenster
When you go to him in pre-fencing with whichever strike, coming then onward as with a low or high strike, then let your point always shoot in long to his face or chest by which you force him to displace or bind on the sword and, when he has thus bound, then stay freely with the long edge strong on his sword and straight into the intent of what he would fence against you. If he seems to go back off of the sword, then follow with it or to an opening; or if he flies off the sword striking around to your other side, then bind strongly against his strike high to the head; or if he will not pull away from the sword after striking around then work by doubling or with other similar elements afterward as you find him weak or strong on the sword." (Goliath fol. 60v-61r)

In essence, this is saying to attack from the Zufechten with a Vorschlag, then, if your attack is displaced, to put yourself into Long Point and *wait* to see what your opponent will do. You clearly aren't supposed to wait long; if your opponent doesn't act you're instructed to Duplieren or use some other technique "am Schwert", but there must still be a noticeable pause in which you must, perforce, yield the Vor to your opponent.

There are only a couple of conclusions we can reach from these sources: Either we're taking Döbringer too literally, and he means you *usually* (rather than always) take the initiative, or else von Danzig et. al. changed the art (as we know they did to some extent; see previous discussions regarding the Nebenhut, etc., but this is rather more fundamental), or else Döbringer simply wasn't interpreting Liechtenauer correctly in the first place (as we suspect to be at least partially true from his guards, etc.).

Part of the answer may lay within Döbringer itself. In the last section of the longsword material he writes about waiting for an attack when faced with multiple opponents:
"Here rightly begins the very best fencing by the aforesaid master know, this I tell you that it is called the Iron Gate [Eyseryne pforte], which you will understand soon. If you are set upon by four or six peasants, then place either foot forward and with the gate you will create a shield by placing the point towards the ground. Hear how you should do this, place yourself so that they are right in front of you and that no one can get in behind you. Now hear what you should do, when they strike or thrust at you, set them aside [Absetzen] with strength going up from the ground and then you will shame them well." (fol. 44v)

So what he's saying is to stand in Alber and await an attack, lifting your sword for a single-time thrust with opposition (Absetzen) as each cut comes in. Now granted, this technique is from the section of the manuscript wherein Döbringer gives us instruction from non-Liechtenauer masters (Hanko Döbringer himself, Andres the Jew, etc.), so you might argue this has no relevance to a discussion about Liechtenauer's art, but the Absetzen is a central technique in the Liechtenauer tradition, too, and is mentioned in his verses.

My take on this remains what it has been: That those who argue Liechtenauer's art requires us to attack first all the time whenever we can and then to continue attacking unceasingly after the initial bind are mistaken; it is a matter of assigning too much precision to medieval writing styles. We have to read *everything* to make sense of any of it (another reason it's so hard to make any sense of the Italian style since it had only two authors).

Of course, having decided that issue, the question then becomes how to decide when to wait and when to press; that I leave for another time.

Pollaxe Configurations

2008-02-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

As I was working on my pollaxe book I had a revelation: As most of you know, almost all Fechtbücher (with the exception of Codex 11093 and Mair, who treats it more like a halberd than a pollaxe) show pollaxes of the hammer and spike variety, whereas the vast majority of non-Fechtbuch iconography from the 15th century show the hammer and blade configuration (after the 14th century; the earliest pollaxes seem to have been of the blade and spike sort). This has long bothered me, but I have a suggestion of an answer:

Many pollaxes have Languets, or straps of metal that run down the sides (and less commonly, the front and back) of the shaft. I've never seen a lot of value in these because I've always thought of swords hacking into the pollaxe shafts (which wouldn't be that effective), but that's stupid: swords weren't that useful on the 15th-century battlefield (on foot) except among lightly-armored support troops. But what if the axe blades on pollaxes were used to hack opponent's pole weapon shafts (including but not limited to pollaxes), much as Doppelsoldner's among the Landesknechts used Zweihanders to hack the heads off of pikes in the next century?

That would explain the discrepancy: That sort of tactic would be of relatively little value in single combats of the sort covered by the Fechtbücher (it's too easy to simply pull your axe away from such a heavy blow), but highly useful in war. And we've already established that relatively few men probably had extensive Fechtbuch training in the middle ages, so naturally when they did enter into single combats they'd choose the sort of pollaxe with which they were most familiar--the one they'd have used in war. That explains why most non-Fechtbuch iconography, even single combats, shows the axe and hammer sort of pollaxe!

I think the timeline looks like this:
--Pollaxes developed from regular axes in the 14th century as knights sought ways to overcome heavier armor
--The 15th century saw the development of the hammer on pollaxes because experiment showed them superior for overcoming armor; axe blades were retained on pollaxes used in war because they were good at chopping through shafts, but were left off of dueling pollaxes such as those in the Fechtbücher because they had little value
--The 16th century saw a reversion to the axe blade on pollaxes because they were more often either ceremonial or used in unarmored or partially-unarmored combat

Of course there are *serious* exceptions to most of that; these statements represent apparent *trends*, not "facts". For example, the likely reason we see knights engaged in duels with axe and hammer pollaxes in non-Fechtbuch iconography might be that they never studied with a Fechtmeister and that was the kind of axe they were used to from military service.

I must emphasize that there's no evidence one way or other on this subject, and that this theory is purely speculative. It does, however, neatly answer the question, I think.

Bouting: How Does It Affect Our Art?

2008-02-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

With any martial art you have to practice as realistically as possible to get the maximum understanding of your art. Ideally, you would actually fight life-or-death with real equipment against an opponent who was actually trying to kill you in order to really learn your art. Of course, in our modern day and age this isn’t possible, so we have to try to come as close to that as we can and accept the shortfall as the price of living in a peaceful age or location.

There are three primary ways of making practice safe enough: Using “safer” weapons, wearing protection on your body, and reducing the danger of your actions. Unfortunately, all three of these practices reduce the accuracy of what you’re trying to do. Safer weapons usually handle nothing like the real thing, protective gear on the body limits motion and prevents you from moving as you should, and changing the way use your techniques obviously limits the reality of what you’re trying to do.

Students of the Japanese sword found themselves in a dilemma when peace became the norm in feudal Japan: there was no way to easily test themselves and their art, so as a result they began to search for ways to practice more safely. First they replaced their steel swords with wooden swords (as much to protect their valuable swords during practice as for safety), but they discovered that wooden swords are almost as lethal as steel. Then they created shinai; strips of bamboo joined together to form a flexible rod. These were fairly safe, but still caused some damage, so partial armor was added to the mix and the modern sport of Kendo was created. As anyone who has studied Japanese swordsmanship will tell you, however, Kendo bears very little resemblance to real Japanese swordsmanship. In one sense there’s nothing wrong with this, of course: Kendo is a wonderful sport enjoyed by many. But for those of us trying to recapture the essence of a lost art it’s not a meaningful approach.

Modern students of der Kunst des Fechtens (the art of fencing) face the same dilemma the Japanese faced; indeed, something of the same problem was acknowledged in late-period Germany. Schools of martial arts drifted away from Ernstfechten or “fencing in earnest” until all that remained was a martial sport called Schulfechten or “school fencing” (Schulfechten had existed beside its more martial cousin all along, but now it was all that remained). Schulfechten training involved blunted swords and they changed their art to forbid the use of the thrust and to limit the more dangerous grappling techniques (e.g., joint breaks) for safety’s sake. Even so, these limitations still left an art that is too dangerous for today’s sword students (surgeons made a good living sewing and splinting the injuries of a day’s bouting in historical fencing schools), so we see them taking the same route that the Japanese took: Instead of steel or wooden longswords, they fence with shinai that have been modified by the addition of crossguards and pommels to simulate European longswords and they add protective equipment that limits their movement more than true longsword fighting would have. As a result, I fear that modern longsword practice may become no more than Kendo and lose completely the tenuous connection we’ve been building with the lost arts of our ancestors.

Fortunately, however, students of Harnischfechten are in a somewhat better, although still not perfect, situation. Wearing safety equipment in armored fighting is not just a necessity of safety, it actually makes our practice more realistic. And while we haven’t yet come up with realistic metal training weapons that are safe to use as simulators, we can still make some pretty acceptable ones that, when combined with good armor, will allow us to fight at almost full speed and power.

Getting accurate and realistic armor, however, is problematic. The simple fact is that the vast majority of armor available today is so incredibly bad that it in no way simulates the way the real thing worked, nor does it provide the necessary safety. This means you really have to work hard to find an armorer who not only claims to be making highly-accurate armor, but who really is. Moreover, the armor has to match the kind of fighting you’re doing: Wearing the harness of a 12th-century crusader will in no way teach you anything about how armored duels were fought in the period of the Fechtbücher.

Assuming safe, realistic gear, all that remains is to put it into play. To do that, however, you have to know how it was used and create a rule structure for your bouts that adequately reflects actual practice and, at the same time, rewards historically-correct actions and punishes inaccurate ones (by which I mean the rules make it impossible to win a fight by resorting to inauthentic techniques). Most strikes are ineffective, and thrusts have an effect only to the openings between plates; even then, thrusts must be done differently against a gap in the plate covered by mail (e.g., the armpit) than they are against a target with no mail (e.g., the palm).

The New Messerfechten DVD From Agilitas.tv

2008-02-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Mark at Gaukler’s Medieval Wares:
http://www.medievalwares.com/
I just received my new Messerfechten DVD from Agilitas.Tv.

My first reaction, after watching the entire thing, was “Wow!”; this is a great piece of work and is even better done, if that’s possible, than their earlier Longsword DVD (and *much* better than the DVD they misleadingly called “medieval wrestling” that turned out to be anything but). The production values are superb, the sound is great, the camera positions perfect for seeing each technique, and the way they “froze” the action while technical points were explained was really well done and very helpful.

Before I go any farther, let me say that I don’t study Messerfechten; not really. I use some of the Codex Wallerstein Messer techniques as part of my arming sword material and I use Talhoffer’s arming sword/messer techniques as stand-alone material (but with arming swords, not Messer), but that’s about it. And I certainly don’t know much at all about Lecküchner’s teaching other than spending a few hours staring at the hundreds of plates in the Fechtbuch, so I can’t comment on whether anything was “right” or “wrong” in this DVD in any specific technique sense.

Having said that, the DVD shows a discrete set of techniques and explains them very clearly and precisely. The DVD is organized well, with clearly-defined sections, each of which has a primary technique and then variations and counters clearly developing from the initial technique.

I found the techniques presented in the DVD to be fascinating. Some of them represent ideas I haven’t seen in any other German text but which I know from Japanese martial arts. Many of them are quite clearly taken almost precisely from Liechtenauer (albeit with modifications for the nature of the weapon) while others are clearly aligned with Liechtenauer’s principles but represent developments of the art specifically designed for the Messer. I confess some of the techniques seemed overly fussy, especially some of the grappling techniques; in some of the grappling techniques you are in contact with your opponent’s Messer, right on the edge, while you perform techniques that require two or even three fencing “times” without adequate control being applied to your opponent’s sword, implying, to an outside observer, that a withdrawing Schnitt should be possible. Again, without actually practicing any of this I wouldn’t want to make that sound like a condemnation—clearly this will require study and practice.

I missed the opening “duel” with steel swords between Alex and Hans with which the Longsword DVD opened, but its absence was more than made up for by the inclusion of a fascinating vignette done in a castle in period clothing which showed Master Johannes having two of his students demonstrate techniques while an artist busily drew out the Fechtbuch. I think this was a *fantastic* bit of business that should really show people how Fechtbücher were made, and it was very well done.

I also loved the “show fighting” chapter. Lecküchner includes a number of techniques that are intended more for showing off than serious combat, and these were presented very well, too, especially when Hans picked Alex’s pocket while holding him in a bind, and the one where Alex pinned Hans and then played backgammon while holding him down, which is *right* out of the Fechtbuch:
http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00002184/images/index.html?seite=186
And I *loved* the demonstration of how it’s easily possible to perform halfsword techniques even with a very sharp sword without cutting yourself. Just having that demonstration is almost worth the price of the entire DVD.

One thing really bothered me, however: The vast majority of the cuts did not seem to be performed according to Liechtenauer’s principles. Specifically, in the vast majority of cases the demonstrators did not “Follow the Blow” by starting their cut and then stepping as Liechtenauer instructs. Moreover, in a number of cases they actually moved the tip of the sword backward, then started to cut rather than cutting as if a string pulled the edge to the target; this is the behavior of a “Buffel” according to the masters. They also made most cuts that failed to connect with the target drive all the way to the ground rather than stopping in one of the Hengen or in Long Point (in spite of discussing this in one section), a point admittedly open to a great deal of argument among those who study the Fechtbücher, but to my mind a serious mistake. All of these mistakes are indicative of too much test cutting practice in which the art of swordsmanship is sacrificed on the altar of clean, neat cuts through tough targets. Admittedly, as I said, I don’t study Lecküchner and he may say to do these things differently, but I find that hard to believe. Yes, how far to go with a cut that doesn’t connect is a debatable issue, but the other mistakes are clear telegraphers and I was disappointed to see them.

All in all, however, this is a magnificent video and everyone should get a copy as soon as possible, even if you don’t intend to study Messerfechten.