Guy Windsor's blog: articles on historical martial arts

Lessons from Mum

23rd June, 2026

Some time after my dad died, I asked my mum what she wanted to do. She could come to Ipswich and live with us? or go to London and live with my sister? or downsize from the large house we moved to in 1992? or stay in the house? Her answer:

“You’ll carry me out of this house in a box.”

Mission accomplished.

She was living on her own in that house (with a steady stream of friends and piano pupils coming by) until mid-March, when, after we got the “no further treatment available” talk from her oncologist, she started to get rapidly weaker, and we her kids decided that one of us had to be there all the time. It’s a testament to how ill she was that she didn’t fight us on it.
She taught her last piano lesson on March 23rd, and died on April 28th.
She used to say that every morning she’d wake up and think how lucky she was, and every night she’d go to bed thinking how lucky she was. And I have to say, she was right. Stage 4 cancer diagnosed in 2022, at age 81. Independent to the last month, and in all that time, two nights in hospital. She died in her own bed, with excellent support from the Macmillan nurses, with me on one side of her, and my sister on the other. They are both very churchy, so Claire was singing hymns (thankfully she can actually sing or that could have been an awful way to go).
While we’ve been sorting through the house we’ve found lots of old photographs. Here’s my favourite, which sums them up beautifully. My dad, the vet, is spoon feeding a baby leopard.

Mum holding a baby leopard while Dad spoon feeds it. Kenya, probably 1965.

My mum is holding the wild animal so the vet can do his work. As a pianist mum was well known in the area as the person to call when somebody let you down or there was a problem you couldn’t fix. Need an accompanist for an exam? Call mum. Need a soloist for a concert? Call mum. Your violin student has no sense of rhythm? Call mum. We were fielding such requests the day she died (and for days afterwards, until word got round). She was a good pianist, but she was a great teacher. So what lessons can I draw from her life and death? Here are a few:

Filling the void

We really were very lucky. This could have been a million times worse. She was herself to the very end, and on the really serious class-A drugs for only a couple of days. We knew it was coming, and were prepared. But still. It feels like someone has broken into my home and emptied one of the rooms. There’s empty space where there shouldn’t be. This is just bereavement, I guess. But it’s also an opportunity. Left to itself, I can fill that void with whisky and chocolate (I can hear my mum telling her oncologist that she’ll be having her glass of wine with dinner every evening regardless). An empty room can quickly fill up with shit. Or, I can deliberately, carefully, redesign that interior space into something useful, beautiful, and kind. I've spent a lot of time since she died pottering about in my shed doing more or less useful things, and even more time de-cluttering and re-organising my workshop, study, and home. This is externalising an internal process.

Know your goal

It’s very useful having a goal. She wanted to die in her own home, and we did all sorts of things to help that happen. As irony would have it, the men came to measure up for a stairlift for my father the day he died. He went much faster than expected, and we could have cancelled the order, but I told mum it would future-proof her house. What if she twisted an ankle and couldn’t manage the stairs for a bit? In her last month that stairlift was absolutely critical for her to be able to sleep in her own bed, and have a social life.
In four years of cancer, she spent two nights in hospital. Very lucky, but also partly down to having a goal and working accordingly. In her last week she was still a bit reluctant to take my arm to get from the music room to the kitchen. I told her that if she had a fall, she’d probably have to go to hospital, and would probably die there. “Oh all right then”.

How lucky we are

Her short-term memory wasn’t great, thanks to the chemo, so she’d repeat herself quite a lot. One thing she’d tell us over and over is ‘every morning when I wake up I think “how lucky I am”, and every night when I go to bed I think “how lucky I am”’. She was resolutely focussed on the positive things in her life. Never mind the cancer, concentrate on Mozart, and friends, and family.

You just have to get on with it

She would also say, when asked how she was, “well, you’ve just got to get on with it.”
That’s the attitude she took when dad was in bed with hepatitis, I was in hospital with paratyphoid, and my brother fell off a horse, all in the same happy week in Argentina in 1979. She just got on with it. I try to channel that when things get tricky.

A beautiful death

Death is often squalid and ugly. Hers was, in its own way, beautiful. This was possible thanks to the really stellar support she got from the NHS and the Macmillan nurses. But it also required that everyone around her, including her kids, were able to accept that she was dying. No denial, no false hope, no desperate pleas to the doctors for last-second miracles. We had our miracles: state of the art treatment that gave her four extra years. Years in which she taught maybe 3000 more piano lessons, and most importantly saw her youngest grandchildren grow to an age where they’d have their own clear memories of her. Once you accept that death is inevitable, you can stop scrabbling about for extra days or weeks bought with needles and pain, and make the last days and hours worth living.

The Saga of the Balloon Back Chair

2nd June, 2026

I was in Dumfries in April visiting my mum, and a friend of the family there happened to buy a set of four balloon-back chairs, and mentioned it when they came over for dinner. I immediately asked whether they were coming apart in the usual place (where the balloon top rail meets the uprights). Of course they were. So I naturally offered to have a look…

Three of the balloon back rails needed fixing.

(The black and white photo of two kids in a pram are me and my sister in about 1976. Guess which one's which!)

Two of the chairs needed their rear joints (where the rails meet the backs) tightened up and their corner blocks re-fitted.

But one poor chair, oh my. This chair had been broken more than once in the past, most notably having the front left leg shattered at the top, the critical bit where it’s jointed to the rails. I didn’t take a photo of the chair in its original state, but take my word for it, this chair needed some love.

The original repair was done by a professional working fast (as professionals must). The two-part break was glued up in one go, and held together by screws. One part remains stuck fast, the other worked its way loose again. All four corner pieces were loose, two of them actually broken at the dowel holes. The one at the broken leg was broken in two places, and had been stuck back together with hide glue.

The rear joints where the rails meet the back were also very loose. They wouldn’t quite come apart without violence, but they had been very clearly repaired at least twice in the past. Two out of three of the ⅜” dowels on one side had been replaced with ½” ones. In the end I had to cut through all the dowels to take the joints apart.

The rear joints had been fixed at least twice: once properly-ish, including replacing those two dowels, and once by someone opening it up a bit, squooging in some white glue, and hoping for the best. They had done the same with the rear corner pieces. Very helpful. Really. Do that with all your nice old furniture. Future restorers will thank you.

This is exactly the kind of fun restoration that is simply uncommercial. There is no way to do a proper job on it in an amount of time that costs less than the chair is worth. I’m not a professional restorer any more, so I had no need to do this quickly. Where the previous restorer did the whole thing in one, maybe two, glue-ups, I did at least eight separate glue-ups. And a bunch of colouring in, as you shall see.

My overall goal is to return the chair to active service, and have the repairs un-datable. There is no way to tell whether they were done the day after the chair was made, or last week. To this end the only glue I use (and the only glue I would ever use on an antique because I’m not an animal) is hide glue (aka scotch glue, horse glue, hot glue, etc.). I cleaned out my glue pot (which took a while!), got a fresh batch warming up, and got to work.

Firstly I cleaned up and re-fitted the front right corner block. This was to stabilise the only unbroken joint while I was fiddling about with the broken ones. Once it was glued in, I re-drilled the dowel holes and glued the dowels in. Doing this in two separate glue-ups makes it much easier to be certain of a perfect fit. One issue with the original assembly and the subsequent professional repair was the old habit of just dipping the end of the dowel in glue and tapping it into the hole. The edges of the hole scrapes almost all the glue off the dowel, leaving it basically loose in its hole. I was careful to use a small brush to get a thorough coat of glue inside the hole, and painted more on the dowel, before knocking them home. Pro-tip: the dowel must have a groove cut in its side to allow glue to squeeze out, otherwise it can pool at the bottom of the hole and stop the dowel getting all the way in. Modern mass-produced dowels for dowel-joints are grooved all round for this reason. But they would date the repair, so I cut my own dowels from clean dowel rods, and cut the groove in by hand with a chisel.

Then I cleaned out all the dowels in the rear joints.

This involved drilling a smallish hole and cutting them out with a small chisel, then cleaning the holes out with a drill. I wanted to do this before repairing the leg break so there would be minimal fiddling with front legs after the break was repaired.

Then I dismantled the big leg break.

One of the screws was absolutely welded in place, so I heated it up with the heat gun and let it cool a few times to break the seal, got one of my biggest screwdrivers out, and it eventually yielded without damaging the wood. Here are the two halves before cleaning off the old glue:

Then I cleaned it all up and glued it back together with moderate clamping force.

Because I couldn’t open up one part of the previous repair without doing more damage the break is still slightly off, but it’s much more together than it was.

After it had dried I then I drilled 10mm dowel holes where the screws had been, and glued them in. They should make the repair much more stable.

They then had to be cut down, the ends shaped to the form of the rail, and stained and polished. This could have been done at the end of the job, but I felt like doing it then and there. I also disappeared the cracks with some coloured hard wax.

I decided to replace the front left corner block with a slightly beefier version. It will always be a somewhat weakened area, but at least it has a solid, unbroken, properly-fitted corner block helping to keep it together. You can see the new block next to the shattered old one here:

I decided to do the main glue-up in two stages. First I cut and fit the six new dowels, then glued them in to the rails.

You'll notice they're all different lengths. This is because the dowel holes are very irregular. I then did two dry-run assemblies, adjusting the dowels slightly each time to get an immaculate fit.

Then I glued up the rear joints. I used light trigger clamps for this, because I don’t want to introduce any tension into the system which will work away at the joints over time.

At this point I decided to fill the dowel holes for the corner blocks, by gluing in new dowels and trimming them down. The blocks will be slightly re-shaped to fit, so the original dowel holes won’t line up quite perfectly. This way I can glue them in, re-drill the holes, and the patches will accommodate any shift in the holes so the dowels will fit perfectly.

Having glued in the two rear corner blocks, and the new front corner block, I let the glue dry before re-drilling all the dowel holes, and fitting new dowels. Once the dowels were in, I cut them down and coloured all the new wood, then gave the whole thing a clean and wax.

I left the new glue block uncoloured on the underside so it is clearly a replacement. Back when I trained there was a boom in antique furniture, so it was quite common for restorers to get into trouble for faking. Unscrupulous dealers would get you to fix up a nice old piece, and then sell it as being in immaculate condition, which is fraud. The difference between ‘immaculate’ and ‘nicely restored’ could be thousands of pounds. While there should be nothing in the repair itself to date it, any new pieces really ought to be discreetly named and dated. And besides, I’m quite please with how this chair turned out, so don’t mind putting my name to it!

If you’re on my mailing list you’ll be aware that I’m currently on compassionate leave. I’ve had no brain for dealing with proper work stuff (books, courses, podcast, etc.) but having a project like this to tinker with has been very good for my mental health. It’s straightforward, you can see your progress, and it’s very satisfying to see a nice old chair brought back to life.

25 Years of Swordschool: what actually happened?

8th April, 2026

Swordschool students in our salle in 2001 — Students on guard, in our first proper salle, 2001.

When I started Swordschool in 2001 I had no business plan, nor any other kind of plan, really. Just a clear idea of what I was supposed to do: show up and teach classes.

From that unstructured beginning, the School grew. It’s hard to separate “The School” from “the Guy”, because especially in the early years they were very much one thing. Was my first book a “school” project? Well, yes and no. Were my seminars in other countries part of the school? Yes and no.

The School, as I see it, is the emergent property of students, space, curriculum, and instructor. Remove any one element and you don’t really have “The School”.

Whatever it actually is, the School has attracted helpful people every step of the way. I won't list them all here, but everything from finding training spaces, to setting up websites, to building the wiki, to covering classes for me, to sourcing equipment, to getting the word out, to organising photo shoots, and on and on, whatever it was we were doing, there were people stepping up to help. Without them the school would have died in infancy. Just in case you thought I did it all by myself.

Table of Contents

The Swordschool Salle(s)

From a martial arts school perspective, we started out as a single salle under a single instructor.

Guy pretending to kick Tomi in the nuts — Guy, the very serious instructor, with Tomi the very serious student.

Within a couple of years the first branch opened, in Linköping, Sweden. I had nothing to do with it directly— I was approached by three enthusiasts who wanted to start training under my direction.

This was the pattern for all the branches that followed: local people starting something and wanting help to make it more organised, more official. The Singapore founders originally got in touch because they needed a bit of paper to show the police that would allow them to import swords! Branches opened in many Finnish cities too.

I don’t take credit for any of that growth. It was always and entirely the idea and the work of a person or group that wanted to be able to train closer to home.

Over time just about all of these groups became independent, as founders moved on, and those that kept things going wanted either to keep training using my interpretations and syllabi but without the formal connection, or wanted to go off in other directions, such as focussing on tournaments or taking up a different style (such as German longsword).

It’s a simple fact that thousands of people owe their training, and dozens of clubs owe their existence, to their current or previous connection with the School.

That is beyond awesome.

The effect is especially noticeable in Finland, where just about every person currently training in historical martial arts has trained under me, or one of my students, or one of my students’ students, at some point.

None of that was part of the original plan. There was no plan.

Key milestones

Over time the School expanded in ways I could never have predicted. Here are some of the milestones along the way (leaving aside book publications, of which there have been over 20):

• August 2000: I decided to move to Finland and open a school of historical swordsmanship.

• January 22nd 2001: I registered the swordschool.com domain.

• March 17th 2001: the first, free, taster class was held at the Olympic Stadium.

• June 1st 2001: we move into our first permanent training space, in Jakomäki, Helsinki.

• 2001: demos and classes at Finnconn, Jyväskylä, brought in a lot of new students.

Gareth Hunt and Guy doing demo fights at Finnconn, 2001

• 2002: the first branch opens, in Linköping, Sweden.

• 2004: The Swordsman’s Companion is published in the USA.

• 2006: The Duellist’s Companion is published in the USA.

• 2010: I began uploading free videos of the School’s syllabus, published the entire school syllabus online for free, and later pioneered the use of crowdfunding for HMA projects.

• 2012: I began blogging, providing useful free content to the HMA community.

• 2013: I published Veni Vadi Vici, a translation of Philippo Vadi’s manuscript De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, and released the translation online for free.

• 2014: The number of free training videos online passed 100, including many full-length seminars. I also published the first two decks of Audatia, the first ever card game that teaches historical swordsmanship.

• 2016: I released the first online course to help students research HMA, called Recreate Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources. We also moved to the UK.

• 2018: I was awarded a PhD by Research Publications by Edinburgh University.

• 2020: I started The Sword Guy podcast, which also led to the newsletter becoming much more regular.

• 2022: The Sword People social media platform launches.

• 2025: The Helsinki Salle is sold to the SHMS Ry. Major overhaul of the Syllabus Wiki and the blog begun.

The Swordschool “Business”

From a business perspective, the School has been:

2001–2007 my toiminimi, or sole tradership, “The School of European Swordsmanship, Helsinki tmi”.

In 2002 my students created the Suomen Historiallisen Miekkailun Seura Ry, a non-profit, which simplified things greatly and also enabled us to apply for certain grants.

For legal and practical reasons in 2007 I folded the sole tradership and created a limited liability company, “The School of European Swordsmanship Oy”, which trades under Swordschool Oy, and which is still running.

I bought a larger space in the same building in 2007, and we moved across the hall. I had to buy it personally because the bank wouldn’t lend money to the tiny wee company. The SHMS paid me personally rent on the space, and paid training fees to my company.

In 2016, after moving to the UK, I created Swordschool Ltd, another limited liability company here in the UK, because it’s much simpler to run everything through a company in the same country that you live in.

None of these legal entities are “The School”. They are necessary legal fictions that allow me to get paid and pay taxes without going to jail, while keeping a legal wall between me personally and the business activities (publishing, teaching, etc.) that I engage in.

For the first dozen years the business of the school was only and entirely me teaching in person.

My books were published by small presses in the USA, and brought in no real income at all (there's a story there, but also a legal settlement preventing me from telling it). When I started publishing my own books (starting with Veni Vadi Vici, in 2012), they began to bring in real income.

By 2016 we could— with a lot of belt-tightening— live off my book earnings, the salle rent, and occasional weekend seminar fees, to the point that we could move to the UK to look after elderly parents.

In 2016 I got the idea to create online courses, which swiftly overtook books as the single biggest income stream.

Leaving Helsinki

My family left Helsinki in 2016 primarily due to ageing parents in the UK.

I officially retired as the School’s director in November 2015, to give my students time to adjust while I was still around to help as needed.

The original branch is still running in the salle in Jakomäki, Helsinki, and is solely owned and operated by the Suomen Historiallisen Miekkailun Seura Ry. We figured out a way for them to buy the salle off me without involving bank loans, and they now own the space.

Swordschool Today

The School currently offers a ton of free and paid resources for anyone interested in the Art of Arms.

Free resources

The Syllabus Wiki

We are currently rebuilding it, but it’s as usable as it ever was during the process. It’s how we host and organise our free reference resource for syllabus and interpretation. We started it in 2011, and while it was neglected somewhat as we built the online school, it’s still useful and is being thoroughly reorganised, expanded, and brought up to date. We have added over 200 new pages this year alone.

The Sword Guy Podcast

I started this during lockdown so that sword people stuck at home and missing the social aspect of training could virtually hang out while sword geeks chatted about swords. It now boasts over 200 episodes with a range of well-known and less well-known guests.

GuyWindsor.net

I started this blog in 2012, and it now has over 500 posts on various topics. I recently reorganised it and created a “start here” page.

Swordschool Vimeo channel

With over 500 videos, it’s a monster and hard to navigate, which is why we have the Syllabus Wiki. Almost all public interpretation and training videos are on the wiki (or will be soon). It also hosts backups of our online courses in case that platform goes down, so not all of those 500 videos are public.

Guy’s Newsletter

This has existed since about 2015, but I didn’t do much with it until lockdown. Since then it’s been a regular fortnightly bit of swordy positivity in your inbox. About 6,000 people subscribe at present—you should join them.

Paid resources

The Swordschool Shop

This is the best place to get my books. The fact is that most online retailers of ebooks, audiobooks, and print have pretty bad terms of service, and like to hide your work unless you pay them to advertise it. So this is the place to go to get ebooks, audiobooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and even T-shirts.

Swordschool Online

I began creating online courses in 2016, and they have proved extremely popular. You can get online courses on a huge range of topics, from Solo Training to Fiore’s art of arms, Vadi’s art of arms, Capoferro rapier, I.33 sword and buckler, and more.

Buying courses individually can get quite expensive, but you can get access to whatever you are interested in through one of our subscription packages at very reasonable prices. All courses are fully downloadable, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Seminars

My favourite thing to do is teach classes. I’m a consulting swordsman, so you tell me what you need, and I deliver it. Drop me an email to discuss your needs.

Looking back

When I started in 2001 I had no thought beyond teaching full time in one place. What actually happened was something much bigger: a network of people, clubs, books, courses, and conversations about the Art of Arms that has now been growing for a quarter of a century.

The School has never really been a building, or a company, or even a curriculum.

It’s the people who show up to train, to teach, to research, and to share what they’ve learned.

Now the real question is: what about the next 25 years?

Swordschool Turns 25! Birthday presents for all

17th March, 2026

On March 17^th 2001 I ran the first official class of what was then called “The School of European Swordsmanship, Helsinki”, or SESH, in a small room at the Olympic Stadium, in Helsinki, Finland. So today is our 25^th birthday: happy birthday to us!

Our classes were held in primary school sports halls:

Sword class in 2001 — Training in Töölön Ala-aste koulu, 2001

And even outside, when the Finnish weather allowed:

training outside — Training in Sibelius Park, Helsinki, May 2001

It's fair to say we've come a long way since then!

To celebrate, I’ve created a COOL FREE THING. (Well, I've caused to be created by paying the excellent Katie to do the actual work.) Would you like a full-colour facsimile of Philippo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, with a second copy with my English translation laid out like the original?

Of course you would. You can use these print files to get it printed wherever you like (I use BookVault in the UK).

While you are there (the files are hosted at swordschool.shop) use the birthday discount code SWORDSCHOOL25! to get 25% off all digital products (ebooks and audiobooks). The code also works on our courses platform: courses.swordschool.com

The code expires at the end of April, so no desperate rush.

Note: no purchase or sign-up is required to get the facsimile print files. It's entirely free. You'll need to put your email address in to download it, but we won't sign you up to anything unless you opt-in during the process.

Get my free facsimile!

Table of Contents

The Facsimile

Written in the 1480s for the court of Urbino, Filippo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi is a cornerstone source for historical European martial arts: concise, sharp, and packed with principles that still matter in fencing today—timing, measure, courage, deception, and decisive action. This book is designed to reproduce the experience of reading the original manuscript as closely as possible.

The first half is a full-colour facsimile of the 42-folio vellum original held in Rome. The second half is a layout-matched English translation, replacing Vadi’s text while keeping the manuscript’s structure and rhythm intact.

For clubs, instructors, and independent students, this is Vadi as he should be read: directly, clearly, and in context. And for practical study, every play has video support available via simple links keyed to the folio number.

Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution–Non Commercial–ShareAlike licence, this facsimile is free for anyone to print and share.

For deeper scholarship, footnotes, interpretation, and video-supported training for every play, see the companion volume (available for pre-order, due out in May).

Please note: You will receive a zip file containing the PDF download of the interior file, and a separate PDF cover file. Recommendations for how to have this printed into your own hardback book are included. You can download the zip file from the confirmation page after checkout, and you will also receive an email with a download link.

Please share this post, and the book, with anyone you think will be interested.

So what happened in the last 25 years? I’ll post a lengthy “history of Swordschool’ post next week. In the meantime, avail yourself of all our other cool free stuff:

Free Resources from Swordschool

The Syllabus Wiki. We are currently rebuilding it, but it’s as usable as it ever was during the rebuild process. It’s how we host and organise our free reference resource for syllabus and interpretation. We started it in 2010, and while it was neglected somewhat as we built the online school, it’s still useful, and is being thoroughly re-organised, expanded, and brought up to date. For instance, we have now got the first 20 plates from Capoferro represented with image, text, and video. And we've made a solid start on Fiore too.

The Sword Guy Podcast. I started this during lockdown so that sword people stuck at home and missing the social aspect of training could virtually hang out while sword geeks chatted about swords. It now boasts over 200 episodes, with a range of well-known and less well-known guests.

GuyWindsor.Net. This blog! I started it in 2012, and it now has over 500 posts on various topics. I recently reorganised it and created a ‘start here’ page.

Swordschool Vimeo channel. With over 500 videos, it’s a monster, and hard to navigate, which is why we have the Syllabus Wiki. Almost all public interpretation and training videos are on the wiki (or will be soon). It also hosts backups of our online courses, in case that platform goes down, so not all of those 500 videos are public. But feel free to dig around for something interesting.

The Newsletter. This has existed since about 2015, but I didn’t do much with it until lockdown. Since then it’s been a regular fortnightly bit of swordy positivity in your inbox. About 6,000 people subscribe at present- you should join them! Subscribe below, or click the link for access to all previous emails.

That's a whole lot of free stuff. It's all made possible by the people who actually buy our products: books, courses, seminars; or who support us on Patreon. Until the end of April you can get 25% off all digital products (sadly not physical books or t-shirts: they cost too much money to make and ship), with the code:

SWORDSCHOOL25!

This works on Swordschool.Shop (for ebooks and audiobooks), and on our courses platform at Courses.Swordschool.Com

Happy Birthday to us!

Hi, I'm Guy. Welcome!

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