Saturday, March 14, 2020

Armored Sword and Shield Combat

I have written a small essay surveying what little we can know about armored sword and shield combat in the High Middle Ages.  In it, I discuss how the efforts at interpreting sword and shield combat by other authors have been deeply flawed by their reliance on specious connections between unarmored Fechtbuch techniques using dissimilar equipment.  I also examine what we are capable of extracting about how the sword and shield form was practiced by considering the non-Fechtbuch iconography of the period along with analyses of certain chronicles.  The article can be found here:
 http://www.schlachtschule.org/instruction/SwordandShield.pdf

5 comments:

Joe said...

What a great read, thank you.

What sources would you recommend for unarmoured arming sword?

Hugh Knight said...

That depends upon what you want. Sword and buckler is covered extensively in the Fechtbücher, and that is an unarmored form. If we view the Messer as an arming sword (i.e., a single-handed sword form), the Messerfechten is also covered extensively. See Lignitzer, Talhoffer, Kal, Lecküchner, Paurñfeyndt, the Glasgow Fechtbuch, and more.

Joe said...

Thanks again for the info.

For someone pursuing Arimazare would you consider these Liechtenauer sources more historically plausible than say the later Bolognese sources?

Hugh Knight said...

No, absolutely not. Mixing sources is one of the worst sins a person can commit. If you are going to study an Italian school, then stick with Italian masters. Marozzo has a great deal of material for unarmored arming sword (side sword in his case), so if you want to study the Bolognese school, that's the way to go. I study and teach the German masters, so that's naturally what I recommend when someone ask for advice without telling me what he's working on. But these arts must be seen as organic systems: It is worse than useless to cherry pick one kind of thing from one system and another thing from another.

shirathomas said...

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