The Gladiatoria Fechtbuch

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

EDITED:  Please note that I no longer use the free-form style of drill discussed in this post.  There's nothing wrong with this approach, except that newer people don't understand what goes together correctly well enough, and usually end up with unrealistic drills.  Instead, I have developed a set of 12 structure drills which teach almost every kind of situation that a student should know and understand.  Look for my upcoming training book for more.

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

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

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

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

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.

More Videos

Well, I haven't gotten many comments on the pollaxe video except from people who apparently have never opened a Fechtbuch in their entire lives, but in spite of the tears of sorrow their comments have brought to me, I've done the foolish thing and uploaded 12 halfsword video clips to our YouTube site. I still can't get combined videos to work properly once they've been uploaded, so until I can get help combining these videos correctly you'll have to look at them one at a time. Enjoy.

The videos can be seen here.