Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for September 2015

Back from the dead: P.J.F. Girard’s Traite des Armes!

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Last November I finally made a long-awaited pilgrimage to the antiquarian bookshop Collinge and Clark. They have by a long way the best collection of fencing treatises for sale in London; not one but two copies of Fabris, for instance. And the 1763 first edition (in French) of Domenico Angelo’s Ecole des Armes. I was in there for about three hours, chatting to Oliver Clark. And I looked at everything. Many times.

I was upfront about one thing though; I had promised my wife that there would be no more treatise purchases until after the new kitchen was bought, fitted, and paid for. So I wouldn't be buying anything. Really.

Then Oliver suddenly remembered something… At the back of a dusty drawer was a pile of unbound paper. I held my breath as he pulled them out and laid them on the table. It couldn’t be! It was! An unbound copy of the 1740 edition of P.J.F. Girard’s Traité des Armes, one of my absolute favourite fencing treatises. Not least because Girard was an officer in the marines, and includes such things as how to light and throw a grenade.

Girard grenade
That is a man holding a ball full of gunpowder and a length of slow match. i.e. an open flame. Brave?

The pile was missing the title page and the dedication to the king, but other than that was complete.

So I asked him what he wanted for it, and he thought for a moment and came back with a very reasonable offer. But I am a man of my word, and asked him to please not sell it to anyone else until I’d fitted my bloody kitchen.

When I got back to my sister’s, I told her and her husband about my glorious find. And my sister, bless her, in a characteristic fit of generosity, offered to buy the pages for me for a Christmas present! I nearly collapsed in a paroxysm of glee.

But my promise still held; no treatises until after kitchen.

I spent much of May and some of June this year fitting a new kitchen, shiny and open and lovely. Really, it’s a nice kitchen. And I was soooo motivated to get it done. A family event took us back to London in July, and I was off like a shot to Collinge and Clark…

Oliver was unflatteringly surprised to see me. Perhaps he underestimated my kitchen-fitting skills?

I had Oliver send the pages to his preferred bookbinder, Chris Hicks. And it occurred to me that there was an opportunity to make the book whole again. Because in the Helsinki University Library special collection there are both the 1736 first edition, and the 1740 second edition, both in their original bindings. So I asked my friend Jaakko Tahkokallio, who just so happens to be the head of the collection, to scan the missing pages from the 1740, and the front matter from the 1736 (it has an additional one page preface, a snazzy etching of the author, and differs in some other minor details). I sent these scans to Chris, with a note about where they came from. Chris printed them out onto the right kind of paper, and put the title page and dedication at the front, then my note and the front matter from the 1736 at the back.

Then he bound the whole in quarter leather, and, as I asked him to, made it look like the bindings typical of the mid 18th century.

This glorious, restored, rebound book arrived on Monday last week. My goodness, that Mr Hicks knows his craft.

Here are some images from the book.

The cover; quarter leather with marbled paper.
The cover; quarter leather with marbled paper.
Girard new
The last page of the 1740, showing some of Chris' repair work. The facing page is my explanatory text, detailing where I got the book and the missing pages.
Girard open
Classic stuff!
Girard spine
The spine, showing the black labels with gold lettering.

And you can download the complete book, which I scanned in last year for Phil Crawley (who was doing a translation, which you can get here), with this handy button from my webshop:

 


 

This project is right on every level. We (Oliver, Chris, my sister and I) have saved a valuable part of our shared martial heritage; we have supported a master craftsman in the practice of his work; we have brought a book back to glorious life.

 

How to solve your fencing problems: with flowcharts!

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I think that training ought to be focussed and goal oriented. The goal in any fencing context is to strike without being struck, so any problem can be thought of as “I’m getting hit” or “I’m not hitting”. Drills are the means by which we fix either of these core problems.

Let’s start with the “I got hit” problem. Here is a snazzy little flowchart:

The Fencer's Flowchart

Yup, it boils down to this: the only reason you ever get hit is because you failed to parry. The hit is never wrong. This is really important. When we are past the point of teaching beginners the absolute basics, we don’t solve the problem of being hit by changing the attack. The attack is supposed to hit.

So whatever your current fencing problem is, here are the steps to fix it:

1) Reproduce the problem. If you can’t reproduce it, it was either a fluke, and so not something that can be trained against, or you didn’t understand what happened. You can’t fix training problems you don’t understand, so if that happens, find somebody to explain what happened to you. Your opponent might do that, or your teacher.

2) Analyse why you are getting hit. You are either doing the right thing, but not well enough, or you are doing the wrong thing. So the problem is either technical, or tactical. These have quite different solutions.

Technical problems are solved by training the technique in increasingly challenging contexts. In short, slow down until it works, then ramp up the speed and power gradually until you can do it at the necessary level. I think of this as solving problems of incompetence.

Tactical problems are solved by choosing a better solution at the critical moment, which you learn to do by using drills with ever increasing degrees of freedom. I think of this as solving problems of ignorance.

So whatever drill you are doing should be solving a specific problem of either ignorance or incompetence making you wiser and better.

(The specific details of how to use pressure and degrees of freedom are in Preparing for Freeplay. They are also described in The Medieval Longsword.)

I have put all this together in another nifty flowchart. The original was done by me in Scapple, which is a great app for thinking with, but doesn't do pretty charts. Several kind and lovely readers have sent me much prettier versions, of which this, by Andrew R. Mizener, is the clearest.

Fencing Troubleshooting Flowchart 2

And for extra clarity, you can even download it as a pdf.

Fencing Troubleshooting Flowchart

Thanks Andrew! (I absolutely love it when my readers step up and help. Really, it's the best feeling.)

If you’d like specific examples of drills that solve technical or tactical problems, let me know in the comments.

Why I love the HEMA tournament scene

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Sport longsword is not a new phenomenon.
Sport longsword is not a new phenomenon. Meyer, 1570.

I love the HEMA tournament scene. This will come as a surprise to many people, because I am not really involved with it in any direct way. In fact, I have seen people referring to me as “anti-tournament”.* Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because I am not personally interested in entering or organising tournaments, does not mean that I don’t understand their value.
My own tournament life extended from 1987, when I entered my first foil tournament, through to 2002, when I entered (and won) a rapier tournament in Italy. The sport-fencing scene is especially tournament-dominated. It is fair to say that tournaments are the only meaningful measure of success in that sport (and most others). I was never a great sport fencer, but I won a local competition or two, and ended up in the last 8 in sabre at the Scottish Universities tournament in 1993. Tournaments were great if you did well, but it was equally possible that you would travel for hours, and wait around for hours, and get a few bouts in, then wait for more hours while your more successful teammates got to fence, and then travel for hours back home again. The ratio of time spent to fights fought always bugged me; you got far more bouts in far less time in less formal environments.
At school I was involved in organising our annual tournament, and so I have a pretty good idea what a huge amount of work it is to set up and run a tournament. That’s why I’ve never organised an open tournament in Finland; it’s way too much work for something I’m only peripherally interested in. But I do encourage my students worldwide to enter tournaments if they are interested, and it’s always nice to see a current or past student doing well in that environment. I do tell them not to expect to do very well though, as our training is not optimised for tournament success. (Perhaps I should write a post about how to train for tournaments sometime?)

The things I like about the tournament scene are:
1) It provides a sense of community for a very widely distributed group of like-minded people. Other events do this too, but the advantage of the tournament scene is that anyone can show up and take part, with any background, and every competitor is (at least in theory) equal and welcome. Your club or style don’t determine your value.
2)It provides external validation for fencers who need it. This can hurt as much as it helps, because poor performance on the day can be hugely discouraging. In the long run, internal validation is much better, but most fencers go through a stage of needing to test themselves, and tournaments provide one easy way to do that.
3) It creates an easy-to-explain model of what we do for the casually curious. One of the most common questions I get asked is “do you have tournaments?” If I don’t want to explain exactly what I really do, then I can just say “yes, there’s a big international circuit now, though it’s not really my focus”. Saves me so much time. Tournaments also attracts media attention, because everyone understands them.
4) It creates a much, much bigger market of fencers with particular equipment needs: the current availability of (for example) longsword free-fencing kit is directly due to the tournament circuit that has developed. This is huge: those of us doing HEMA in the early 1990’s will remember that our equipment was a hodgepodge of sport fencing kit and some dodgy re-enactment or SCA gear. Without sport fencing, there would have been no masks. How much would that have slowed our progress?
5) It provides training opportunities for working under pressure, and developing attributes such as timing, measure, speed, and tactical sense.
6) It demonstrates the effect of rule-sets. One of the hardest things to explain to beginners is how much rule-set affect behaviour. Tournaments have clearly-defined and published rule-sets, and that determines more than any other factor what kind of actions work.
7) As we saw in my last post, tournaments shine a spotlight on diversity. Who, exactly, is really welcome?
8) Most people like the idea of tournaments to give them something to train towards. So the sport-HEMA scene is always going to attract lots and lots of people. Excellent. For me and many others in the early nineties, sport fencing (and the SCA for many of my friends) provided our first entry into the sword world, but in the end proved frustrating. It was not real enough. So we left to create HEMA from scratch. The tournament scene provides a similar easy-entry route into the sword world. I look at the sport-HEMA scene as a massive pool of potential future historical-HEMA students and teachers.

The final in the rapier tournament. That's me on the right.
The final in the rapier tournament, 2002. That's me on the right.

As with every training environment, tournaments have their limitations.
1) they serve no useful research purpose, unless you are studying historical tournament rule-sets and applying them. “It works/doesn’t work in tournaments” is just not a relevant statement when considering martial arts that have been developed for other purposes.
2) they privilege the gifted. In any sport, there is an optimum body type. As the tournament scene develops and the stakes get higher, we will start to see the different rule-sets privileging certain body types. Read The Sports Gene for super-detailed information on this phenomenon.
3) they are good for highlighting areas of weakness, but do not provide an ideal environment for fixing those weaknesses. From a training perspective, it’s more useful to be able to stop testing and start fixing immediately.
4) they privilege outcome over process. The people who “succeed” are by definition winning specific bouts. It doesn’t take into account how much they have improved or how hard they have worked. With a long enough head start, somebody could (in theory at least) win many tournaments without improving at all!

So, given how useful I think they are, and with the limitations I listed above taken into account, you might very well ask why I don’t take part? Here are my reasons:

1) I’ve been there and done that. In my current phase of training, formal tournaments are not an efficient learning environment for me. I can get just as much pressure from a demonstration bout, for instance, or from using sharp swords.
2) The stakes are not equal. I became a professional in 2001, and fought my last tournament in 2002. I won it. As a professional in a field of amateurs, I felt that I had robbed the top amateur of his deserved victory. If I win, so what? it’s my job. If I lose, then I have more to lose than the amateurs out there.
3) I don’t do things by halves. If I was to enter tournaments regularly, I’d take them seriously, and train for them seriously. But it’s not the combat environment I’m most interested in, so it’s not the one I want to train for.
4) It’s dangerous. The full-contact environment is one I enter only when necessary, because of the risk of injury. (Readers of The Seven Principles of Mastery will understand my attitude to injuries.) The tournament scene has an ok safety record, but is much more dangerous than most other training environments. All the broken bones I’ve seen since starting my school have come from one tournament or another. I’ll do it if I need to for my own training purposes, but not otherwise.

In conclusion then, I’m very pleased to see the worldwide development of the sport-HEMA scene. It grows the  wider sword community faster than any other factor: what’s not to love?

 

* I wrote about this in Swordfighting, pages 82-83.