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Guy frequently keeps this blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Author: Guy Windsor

I’m delighted to let you know that From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Wrestling Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi is now out on the Swordschool shop! For the next week only, you can get 10% off the hardback, paperback, and ebook here. Use the code wrestle10 at checkout to apply the discount.

This book is the academic basis of my interpretation of Fiore’s wrestling plays, following the format I pioneered in the first book to come out in this series, From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi.

I start at the very beginning, and provide a transcription and translation of the full introduction from the Getty Manuscript, then for each play, I provide the drawing from the manuscript, transcribe the text, translate it, and interpret it, with a video clip of the action in practise. The book also includes an essay by Jessica Finley comparing the Italian wrestling with German medieval wrestling, and a bonus section where I transcribe and translate the wrestling plays from the mounted combat section.

The book provides the “what” and “why” of Fiore’s wrestling plays. For instruction in how to train Fiore’s wrestling, you will need my online course which I created with Jessica Finley, so I have also discounted that by 45%, here.

These discounts expire on March 14th.

For an academic, it is the best feeling in the world when the ground you have built a mansion on starts to tremble. (Less so for an architect, I’d imagine.) I had that experience on my recent trip to the Panoplia Iberica where I finally met Dario Magnani in person. He runs the THOKK gloves enterprise, and is a keen Fiore scholar. We talked for literally hours about the most minute details of our interpretations, starting with his take on the famous “three turns of the sword”. It was so much fun I got him onto my podcast to revisit the topic, which you can hear here:

What is a volta? A very detailed examination of Fiore, with Dario Magnani

I’ll go through the passage first, then describe my current interpretation of it, then his take on the same text, and then sum up. We’re talking about folio 22 recto from the Getty manuscript. I’ll quote the transcription, translation, and interpretation from pages 116-117 of From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi.

The text reads:

Noy semo doi guardie, una si fatta che l’altra, e una e contraria de l’altra. E zaschuna altra guardia in l’arte una simile de l’altra sie contrario, salvo le guardie che stano in punta, zoe, posta lunga e breve e meza porta di ferro che punta per punta la piu lunga fa offesa inanci. E zoe che po far una po far l’altra. E zaschuna guardia po fare volta stabile e meza volta. Volta stabile sie che stando fermo po zugar denanci e di dredo de una parte. Meza volta si e quando uno fa un passo o inanzi o indredo, e chossi po zugare de l’altra parte de inanzi e di dredo. Tutta volta sie quando uno va intorno uno pe cum l’altro pe, l’uno staga fermo e l’altro lo circundi. E perzo digo che la spada si ha tre movimenti, zoe volta stabile, meza volta, e tutta volta. E queste guardie sono chiamate l’una e l’altra posta di donna. Anchora sono iv cose in l’arte, zoe passare, tornare, acressere, e discressere.

We are two guards, one made like the other, and one is counter to the other. And [with] every other guard in the art one like the other is the counter, except for the guards that stand with the point [in the centre], thus, long guard and short, and middle iron door, that thrust against thrust the longer will strike first. And thus what one can do the other can do. And every guard can do the stable turn and the half turn. The stable turn is when, standing still, you can play in front and behind on one side. The half turn is when one makes a pass forwards or backwards, and thus can play on the other side, in front and behind. The whole turn is when one goes around one foot with the other foot, the one staying still and the other going around. And so I say that the sword has three movements, thus stable turn, half turn, and full turn. And these guards are called, one and the other, the woman’s guard. Also there are four things in the art, thus: pass, return, advance, and retreat.

Let me unpack this:

1. The two guards shown are both posta di donna. One is shown forward weighted, the other back weighted. I interpret the difference between them to be a volta stabile (more on that later).

2. Any two guards that are alike can counter each other.

3. Except for guards that have the point in the centre line (longa, breve, and mezana porta di ferro; more on those in the next section). This is because the longer sword will strike first. Here I’m translating punta as point (stano in punta, stand with the point), and thrust (punta per punta, thrust against thrust). The meaning is obvious whichever way you translate it though: don’t stand with your point in line against someone else who has their point in line unless you have the longer sword.

4. Any similar guards can do what the guards they are like can do.

5. Every guard can do the volta stabile and the meza volta. (I use the Italian terms for technical actions, guards, etc. where possible. Refer to the glossary [link] if you need it.)

6. The volta stabile: I interpret stando fermo, standing still, to mean without stepping, or moving a foot. As I do the volta stabile, the balls of my feet stay on the same spot on the ground. It makes no sense for a turning action to involve no movement at all, so standing still cannot mean literally ‘not moving’.

7. The meza volta: this is a passing action, forwards or backwards. I interpret that to include a turn of the hips and body, so you go from one side to the other.

8. The tutta volta: here again we have a ‘fixed’ foot, that, unless your legs are made of swivel-joints (top tip: they’re not), must at least turn around itself for the action to occur. This supports my reading of stando fermo above. Simply, this is whenever you pivot on one foot by turning the other one around it. There is a video of me doing these three movements linked to further on in this chapter.

9. The sword also has three movements: stable turn, half turn, and full turn. Unfortunately there is no further discussion of this, and these terms simply aren’t used in the rest of the book. Fiore will tell us to ‘turn the sword’, for instance in the play of the punta falsa, on f27v, but never with the qualifiers stable half or full. So I simply do not use these terms to apply to sword actions. Other instructors and interpreters do, but you should be aware that there is no evidence supporting any one interpretation of these turns over another.

10. In case you missed it the first time: both these guards are posta di donna. Both of them. Got that?

11. There are four things in the art: pass, return, advance and retreat. See the video: three turns, four steps: https://guywindsor.net/lgg01

Okay, so that’s the current state of affairs, and it accords with what most Fiore scholars I know think of the three turns.

Dario’s reading is different though. In essence, he thinks that the volte Fiore is describing here are specifically the turns of the sword. Or better, the movements of the sword.

In other words: a volta stabile is what you can do moving the sword forwards and backwards while standing still. For example, thrust from breve to longa without stepping at all.

A meza volta is what you do with the sword when passing forwards or backwards, and the sword goes from one side of the body to the other. This could be a blow, or just changing guard.

A tuta volta is what you do with the sword while turning one foot around the other.

This makes sense for the following reasons:

1. Why would footwork come between the sword in one hand and the sword in two hands? Surely if this was meant to be a purely footwork description, it would be earlier in the manuscript.

2. The volta stabile as we do it as a footwork action cannot reasonably be described as ‘standing still’. It took some wrangling to get it to apparently mean that (as you can see in points 6 and 8 above).

3. The line “And so I say that the sword also has three movements, thus stable turn, half turn, and full turn” can be read as a summary of the preceding sentences, not an application of footwork actions to the sword. The “also” there doesn’t come from “anchora”, it’s more pleonastic: it comes from E perzo digo che la spada si ha tre movimenti, zoe volta stabile, meza volta, e tutta volta. That bit “la spada si ha” literally means “the sword it has”. There’s really no “also” in that sentence, thought I’m not alone in inserting one: Leoni translates it as “the sword also has” (Leoni and Mele, Flowers of Battle vol. 1 page 252). Drop the questionable “also”, and the sentence reads as a summarising of the preceding three turns as turns of the sword.

4. Volta has many meanings and shades of meaning. You can find literally dozens of meanings for it on pages 1000-1002 of Battaglia’s dictionary, online here: https://www.gdli.it/sala-lettura/vol-xxi/21 Dario’s contention is that these actions don’t have to be read as specifically turning actions (which allows for a simple thrust from breve to longa to be a ‘volta’). To be honest, that’s the hardest part of this for me- I haven’t found a solid linguistic reference to justify a non-circular interpretation of the word, though the expression “dai volta”, lit. ‘give turn’, means “get a move on”.

It is very convenient to translate words that may have many meanings into simple, specific, and concrete technical actions. The volta stabile then gets to be one simple thing, easy to explain and teach, rather than a class of things (what you do with the sword while standing still). But this can be a false sanctuary. Likewise with the final sentence of this troublesome passage: “Anchora sono iv cose in l’arte, zoe passare, tornare, acressere, e discressere. Also there are four things in the art, thus: pass, return, advance, and retreat.”

These have long been interpreted by me and just about everyone else as passing forwards, passing backwards, stepping forwards, stepping backwards.

We know from the definition of the meza volta that ‘passare’ means to pass forwards or backwards. What is ‘tornare’ then? It means return, and when we see it in action, such as in the defence of the dagger against the sword thrust on f19r, “Lo pe dritto cum rebatter in dredo lu faro tornare”, it isn’t a pass at all: it’s the withdrawal of the front foot (see From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice pages 44-47 for the transcription, translation, and video).

Likewise the discrescere that we find on f26r when we slip the leg against a sword cut; it’s not a step backwards; your back foot doesn’t move.

So our neat classification of footwork actions starts to fail.

So is this passage, the beginning of the sword in two hands section, all about how the sword moves? That would not be a stretch. And for sure the volta stabile is not a great big movement of the body. I’ve started calling that movement (which is still a fundamental part of the art) a “volta stabile of the body”.

I’m not sure where I stand on all this yet. I’m convinced of one thing though: it’s past time to return to the assumptions that I have based my interpretations on and work through them with ever-closer attention to the text.

And if you listen to the podcast episode, you'll hear the moment when I'm convinced that the “also” has to go!

Academic research is the foundation of Historical Martial Arts. When you try to recreate an action described in a book, that’s academic research. When you try to figure out what a particular phrase in a source means, that’s academic research.

Most mainstream academic research is presented in a way that is deliberately hard to get access to, and often deliberately hard to read. The only reason to publish that way is to get jobs at universities.

Historical martial arts books are usually written for practitioners. All of mine are, so I need my research to be perfectly clear and easy to distribute among the active historical martial arts community. I want my work to be accessible to beginners, experienced fencers, and my fellow instructors.

If you want your academic work to appear in academic journals, you need to find out what that journal wants, and present your work the way they ask. But if you want it to be of maximum use to the HMA world, this post will show you how I think you should go about it.

This is a big post, and not all of it will be relevant to your needs, so here's a table of contents to guide you through it. I've written each section to be reasonably independent, so cherry-pick what you need:

Introduction

Many historical martial artists generously share their interpretations, but do so in a way that makes it impossible to check their work. Simply doing the action in a video and posting it online is helpful to people who want to know how you do it, but useless for establishing whether it’s an accurate interpretation of the source. For that you need at the very least to quote the source, and explain any interpretive decisions you made. Video is not a good medium for that; it’s far too slow, and far too difficult to check the text. Books are better, but suffer from other limitations, such as being unable to show movement. The ideal way to show your work is to combine books and video. This post will show you how I do that.

It’s important to note that academic work is the foundation of our knowledge of Historical Martial Arts. But it has no necessary connection to our martial skill. You can be highly skilled in an interpretation and be able to teach it, fence with it, and apply it in all sorts of situations, without even knowing the name of the source it is originally based on. Likewise, you can be incredibly knowledgeable about a given source and be able to perfectly recreate the choreography of every action, without having any fencing skill at all. Most historical martial artists are somewhere in between.

In this guide I am only dealing with the academic side of things. I have a whole other book on creating training manuals for developing skill. You can find it at here.

What kind of work are you doing?

Before you present your work to the world, you need to know what kind of book it is. There are at least five different kinds of modern HMA publication.

  1. Facsimile. This is a printed copy of scans of the source. The ideal is to make it as close as possible to owning an original copy of the source. This is not an academic work, usually. It’s much more of an art project.
  2. Transcription. You take the trouble to type out the entire source (or part of it). This makes it much easier for people to use the source, because the electronic version of the transcription is now searchable.
  3. Translation. You translate the source from one language to another. Personally, I much prefer a translation to include at least a transcription, or a full facsimile, so I can check the translation against the source. This should also include copies of the images in the source if there are any.
  4. Interpretation. You demonstrate how you think the actions in the source should be done in practice. This can be through text and images, or through video.
  5. Training manual or workbook. You teach the student how to execute your interpretation as a living martial art. This can also be done through online courses.

It is generally not practical to create a book that is all five of these things in one volume. It would simply take up too much paper. It is much easier to demonstrate movement on video, but video is hopeless for sharing a transcription or translation. And a facsimile is by definition in the same general format as the source, which is some kind of book. But these five categories can overlap considerably. My From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice includes transcription, translation, and interpretation. But it’s not a facsimile, and it’s not a training manual.

I have produced all of these types of publication, in one form or another. Such as:

Facsimiles: I have published facsimiles of Fiore dei Liberi’s Il Fior di Battaglia (Getty Museum MS Ludwig XV 13), and Philippo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, (Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma MS Vitt.Em 1324). These are both affordable un-fiddled-with reproductions of the manuscripts, with a single-page description of what they are and where they come from at the back. It’s as close as you can get to owning the manuscripts themselves for under $50.

Michael Chidester at HEMA Bookshelf does much fancier facsimiles, in gorgeous leather bindings, and much higher production values, which is as close as you can get to owning the manuscripts, for under $500.

Transcriptions: I include transcription in my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series, and also produced a transcription of Vadi which I released free online. There are many other researchers who do the community a huge service by producing and releasing transcriptions of all sorts of other works. These are usually available online somewhere.

It’s actually quite unusual to find a pure transcription (with no facsimile or translation) published as a commercially available printed book.

Translations: my first properly published translation is in The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest. This is my translation and commentary on Vadi. I licensed the translation under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it is free to use and share in any way, you just have to give credit. Perhaps the gold standard in translations are Jeffrey Forgeng’s translations of the Royal Armouries MS I.33,  published as The Medieval Art of Swordsmanship and of Joachim Meyer’s treatise published as The Art of Combat.

Interpretations: they say there is no translation without interpretation, and that’s largely true. How you understand the text will influence how you translate it. I include interpretation in most of my works, including From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice, and The Duellist’s Companion. There are many, many, published interpretations out there.

Training manuals: a training manual teaches you how to train in a particular interpretation. It does not usually include much about why you think the source means what you think it means. It must by default include your interpretation, but it does not usually show your working. The three books in my Mastering the Art of Arms series, The Medieval Dagger, The Medieval Longsword, and Advanced Longsword, are all training manuals.

Workbooks: a workbook is a training manual that is formatted for the student to make notes in. The difference is primarily in the format, though a workbook will usually have even less academic content than a training manual. I have a series of four workbooks for the rapier, combined into The Complete Rapier Workbook, and the first in what will probably be a series for Fiore’s Art of Arms, The Armizare Workbook, part one: Beginners.

As you can see, I’ve produced works of all five kinds (not to mention a book of mnemonic verses: The Armizare Vade Mecum).

Now that we have defined some terms, let’s go through the list and have a look at how to present your transcription, translation, and interpretation. Facsimiles are a separate category, and so are training manuals. I’ve written a whole other book (From Your Head to Their Hands: how to write, publish, and market training manuals for historical martial artists [link]) on, you guessed it from the title, how to write training manuals, because it’s the one kind of book that you actually write from scratch. Each kind of book will need a somewhat different introduction, so I’ll include specific instructions for the introductions too.

Transcription

Transcription introduction

Your introduction should answer the following questions:

  1. What book or other source are you transcribing?
  2. What versions of the source exist, and why have you chosen this one?
  3. Where can that source be found?
  4. Who wrote it?
  5. What do we know about the author?
  6. What images do we have, and are you reproducing them?
  7. What kind of transcription are you trying to produce? Where on the “diplomatic” scale do you fall?
  8. What conventions will you be following regarding contractions, suspensions, brevigraphs etc.?
  9. Who are you and why should the reader trust you?

You can find a very useful guide to transcription conventions, published by the University of Hull, here: guywindsor.net/transcriptionconventions (that's a redirectable link in case the article gets moved).

Transcription layout

You need to make a decision about whether to include scans of the original sources in your work. In general, if you can (due to copyright restrictions etc.), do. It’s much better to present the reader with the chance to check your work. This is especially true if you are transcribing a manuscript. If you are making a machine-readable copy of a perfectly clear-to-read source, then you don’t need to include the original.

If you are going to include scans of the original source, then layout becomes an issue. For instance, the first page of Fiore’s introduction is laid out in two columns, with a fancy capital. The text also continues onto the next page mid-sentence.

You basically have two options. You can reproduce your transcription and keep all of the layout decisions, so arrange your transcription on the page the same way Fiore does. Or you can arrange it separately. My preference would be to reproduce the whole source intact, and then present the transcription separately but with the same basic layout. That makes it much easier for readers to find the original source for any give bit of transcription.

If you are quoting from a part of the transcription that includes a page break, note the point of the break by putting the page reference in square brackets, such as:

… l'o mostrada sempre oculta mente si che non gle sta presente alchuno [page break: F1r to F1v] a la mostra se non lu Scolaro,…

Or more simply:

…l’o mostrada sempre oculta mente si che non gle sta presente alchuno [F1v] a la mostra se non lu Scolaro,…

Translation

Translation introduction

Your introduction should answer the following questions:

  1. What book or other source are you translating?
  2. What versions of the source exist, and why have you chosen this one?
  3. Where can that source be found?
  4. Who wrote it?
  5. What do we know about the author?
  6. What images do we have, and are you reproducing them?
  7. What kind of translation are you trying to produce? Where on the “literal” to “analogous” scale do you fall?
  8. Who are you and why should the reader trust you?
Translation choices

Because of the interplay between translation and interpretation, we should discuss what kind of translation you doing. However you choose to do your translation, you need to make your approach clear in your introduction, so readers know what to expect.

A strictly literal translation translates each word in the source in turn, without reference to the meaning of the phrase, sentence, paragraph, or rest of the book. This is also called a direct translation, a word-by-word translation, or a metaphrase. Generally speaking, this is not a useful approach. How would you translate the word “match” in this sentence: “I met my match while striking a match at a football match”?

Beginners are often surprised or even upset to find that the same word is apparently translated differently in different places; this is only because they don’t understand that the context the word appears in is different. Languages are not ciphers of each other- you can’t simply convert each word and expect to find the meaning.

An analogous translation translates the meaning of the source into the target language. This is also called a paraphrase. This would allow you to translate “match” in three different ways based on those three meanings, as made clear from the context. Taken to extremes though, this can lead to translation decisions that fail to properly convey what the original author said.

All translations exist on a spectrum from 100% metaphrase to 100% paraphrase. You have to decide where on that spectrum you want to work, and what point is most useful to your target readers.

To my mind, it’s more useful to translate a bit too literally than a bit too freely. A lot of the readers of these translations are using them to teach themselves to work with the original sources. Over-interpretation makes that much harder.

Let’s take this phrase from Fiore, for example. It is part of the text regarding the punta falsa play, on f27v.

…Io mostro d’venire cum granda forza per ferir lo zugadore cum colpo mezano in la testa. E subito ch’ello fa la coverta, io fiero la sua spada lizeramente. E subito volto la spada mia de l’altra parte piglando la mia spada cum la mane mia mancha quasi al mezo. E la punta gli metto subita in la gola o in lo petto…

My translation in From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice:

I show that I am coming with great force to strike the player with a middle blow in the head. And immediately that he makes the cover I strike his sword lightly. And immediately turn my sword to the other side, grabbing my sword with my left hand at about the middle. And I place the thrust immediately in the throat or in the chest.

Tom Leoni’s, in The Flower of Battle, vol. 1, page 275

… I feint a strong mezzano to the opponent’s head. As he forms his parry, I lightly strike his blade, then immediately turn my sword to the other side, grasping it almost at mid-blade with my left hand. I can then place a quick thrust to his throat or chest…

I have a huge regard for Tom’s translation work, but every now and then he strays a bit too far in the analogous direction. Fiore’s description “I show that I am coming with great force to strike the player” becomes “I feint”. He also uses “forms the parry” for “makes the cover”, “opponent” for “player”, and I’d have to say that “mid-blade” is clearly not in the text (it’s just “at the middle”).

I should note that The Flower of Battle quoted here is an absolute gem of a book, and a must-read for any Fiore scholar. And I agree very much with most of the translation.

If you are faced with a phrase that has no meaning in the target language, then I would still translate it as written but add its equivalent phrase in a footnote. For instance, when Vadi wrote Et romperoti il brazo al diri dunave (on f20r), it means ‘And I will break your arm while saying a Hail Mary’. So that’s how I translated it. But I included a footnote which reads:

Though the Hail Mary prayer is quite long, the expression means “in a jiffy”. If you’re running late, you might say (in Italian) “I’ll be there before you can say a Hail Mary”, which is equivalent to “I’ll be there before you know it”.

That way, the reader knows what Vadi said, and also what I think he meant, where it might not be clear. This is very different to the modern English meaning of “Hail Mary”, which is a desperate last-ditch attempt.

You may also come across a word or expression that you can’t translate because you can’t find it in your various dictionaries. In many historical martial arts translations, the common practice is to throw in a word that might be right and hope for the best. A hail mary translation, if you like. But best practice here is to translate as much of the sentence as you can, and leave the untranslated bit in square brackets. Such as in this line describing the guard bicorno, in the Getty ms:

Questa e posta di bicorno che sta cossi serada che sempre sta cum la punta per mezo de la strada.

I translate this as “This is the guard of two horns that stands so closed that it always stands with the point in the middle of the way.”

Let’s say “serada” was unknown. Then it would read: “This is the guard of two horns that stands so [serada] that it always stands with the point in the middle of the way.”

It is perfectly alright to publish a translation with a few mystery words in it, so long as you’ve done due diligence to find them out. If they are commonly understood by native speakers, or easily found in a proper dictionary, then your reader will understandably lose faith in you.

It is common practice to leave some words untranslated, especially technical terms. As the translator, it’s your job to make judgement calls, and this is one of them. Some translators translate everything. Some leave far too much untranslated, rendering the translation useless to the reader. When I’m translating, I have my students in mind. What do they need? What do they already know?

So I often leave technical terms that we use in class all the time untranslated. This includes the names of blows (mandritto fendente for example), and the names of guards, and the names of certain techniques (colpo di villano, for example).

But I don’t do this the same way in every book. In a training manual aimed at practitioners, I’ll leave the terms untranslated throughout, and define them only on the first use. The students are supposed to learn them. But in a book billed as a translation (such as From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice), I’ll translate everything (as you see in the punta falsa and bicorno translations above).

However a lot of words that appear to be technical terms wouldn’t appear so to a native speaker, and it’s critically important that the target reader gets what they need, so I think it’s better to err on the side of translating everything.

Translation layout

Wherever you choose to fall on the analogous translation spectrum, you have choices about how to present your work. If there are large chunks of text with no illustrations, you have the following options:

Reproducing the layout of the original. This is excellent for making a version of the original text that’s simply more accessible to the reader. The trickiest part is the page breaks, where you have to decide where exactly in the sentence you make the break.

Side-by-Side with the original. This can make it even easier for readers to find which bit of the translation applies to which bit of the source, but will often compromise the layout of the source. The team at Freelance that produced The Flower of Battle went with this option, sacrificing the page layout of the source, but presenting each page with the transcription and translation in about the same place as on the facsimile.

Side-by-Side with the transcription. This is great for readers trying to learn to work with the original source. You can break up the transcription into paragraphs or even sentences, to make it even clearer. I used this for my transcription and translation of Fiore’s introduction to the Getty ms, in my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the Wrestling Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi.

Where you have images, you must make it absolutely clear which image your transcription and/or translation refers to.  Many sources simply have one image per page, which makes things quite simple. But where you have multiple images per page, you must arrange the transcription/translation so that it is crystal clear which image the text refers to.

Using other people’s transcriptions and translations

You have to be very careful about copyright, and giving credit, when using somebody else’s work. If you are going to quote more than a few lines, you absolutely must have permission from the rights holder. In some cases, the work has been published under copyright terms that allow for unlimited non-commercial use, in which case have at it, just give credit (whether it’s required or not).

In most cases, you need permission from the publisher. I always check with both the author and the publisher, assuming I can get hold of both.

This is true regardless of the format you are using. For instance, I checked with Reinier van Noort before quoting his translation of Johan Georg Pascha’s jaegerstock material in a series of jaegerstock videos I was doing.

My quotation of the few lines of Leoni’s translation above falls squarely within fair use, but as a matter of courtesy I let the publishers know. It’s always better to be open about what you’re doing, and to give more credit than is strictly required.

It’s very common for HMA researchers to use other people’s translations. Translation is hard, and you may not have the language skills to do it yourself. There are some drawbacks though:

  1. You may have no way to know how accurate the translation is
  2. You may be using an out-of-date or inaccurate version
  3. Every translation is also an interpretation, so the translator may be coming from a completely different point of view, or have unfortunate ideas about how swords work that lead them to translate things incorrectly
  4. You have no right to use the translation without permission unless explicitly stated (which is unusual)
  5. You have no right to alter, correct, or change the translation, even if you find a mistake. You have to quote it precisely, and add any corrections in the commentary or footnotes.

I think that a professional instructor is morally obliged to be able to work with the original source in its original language. You simply can’t trust somebody else’s translation, unless you are able to at least check it yourself. But it would be absurd to require amateurs to master a long-dead dialect of a foreign language before getting to work on the interpretation.

Just be aware of the pitfalls.

Incidentally, the reason I only teach from sources in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Latin, is because those are the languages I can reasonably work in. The only foreign language I would publish a translation of would be Italian, but my skills in the other languages are at least sufficient to have an informed opinion about the translator’s choices. If you’ve ever wondered why I don’t publish work on German medieval combat, this is the reason.

Interpretation and Commentary

So far this has been fairly simple. There are tried and tested ways of presenting transcriptions and translations. But presenting your physical interpretation of the actions in the source takes us to relatively uncharted territory. There is no established academic model to follow, so I have created one. We should start with the questions your introduction should answer.

Interpretation introduction
  1. What book or other source are you translating?
  2. What versions of the source exist, and why have you chosen this one?
  3. Where can that source be found?
  4. Who wrote it?
  5. What do we know about the author?
  6. What images do we have, and are you reproducing them?
  7. Are you intending the reader to actually reproduce your interpretation?
  8. If yes, what equipment and prior training will they need?
  9. If no, have you provided other resources for readers who want to have a go?
  10. Who are you and why should the reader trust you?
Interpretation layout

Here is the ideal layout for presenting your interpretation:

  1. Source image where available.
  2. Transcription of the text if necessary.
  3. Translation of the text if necessary.
  4. Commentary on your translation and the play it represents.
  5. A blow-by-blow description of your interpretation.
  6. A video clip of how you enact that interpretation.

If you follow this format, people can see what you are basing your interpretation on, and why. They may agree with you 100% right up to the video clip. Or they may see an error in your translation that affects everything downstream from there.

You can see how this looks on the page here:

You may need to go into some depth and detail about a concept, rather than an action. In that case, it is best to separate that out into its own chapter. In From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice, I have a 13 page chapter on what largo and stretto mean, and conclude each section (such as the sword in one hand, or the plays of the zogho largo) with a chapter on how the plays fit together.

It’s necessary to separate these things out for three reasons:

  1. It makes it easier for readers to find
  2. It maintains the distinction between theory and practice
  3. Your physical execution is ‘what’ and ‘how’. The theory explanation is about ‘why’. It’s clearer to keep these separate.

For the blow-by-blow description, I would suggest using the same format as for teaching drills in a training manual, with the prerequisites clearly stated, and the actions carefully ordered into a numbered list. Here’s a sample from the second edition of The Duellist's Companion.

Creating video clips

Let the text do the work of explaining the ‘why’ of your interpretation. It’s simply miserable to sit through a video of somebody trying to explain why they do an action a certain way, unless it has been carefully scripted and beautifully produced. The video’s purpose is to show the action. If the clip is more than a minute long, you’re talking too much.

Set up a camera on a tripod, make sure there’s enough light and you’re in shot, and just record you and whatever training partner may be required doing the action. Record it from both sides (so, you facing right, you facing left). Edit out everything that isn’t clean or necessary.

You can add title cards and end cards too. This is a good idea if you plan to release the videos publicly, so people watching have an idea of why you’re NOT TALKING. And you can advertise your work to them. Your title card text should include:

  1. The name of the project.
  2. Your name and the name of any assistants
  3. The name of the specific action you are doing and where it comes from
  4. The date you shot the video (in case your interpretation changes later)
  5. My video clips are usually extracted from my online courses, so I also credit the course at the end. That also tells people who like the interpretation and want to be taught how to fence with it where to look for instruction.

You now have a video example of your interpretation of that specific action. How do we embed that into the book?

Embedding video clips into your work

It is tempting to just produce the book as a very large PDF, with the video clips embedded in it. Don’t do that. So many people will tell you it didn’t load, or doesn’t work, that you’ll spend far too much time answering emails and not enough time swinging swords. Instead, the best approach is the following:

  1. Upload your clips to an online hosting service. I use Vimeo, but you can use a free service if you don’t mind advertising other people’s stuff.
  2. Create a redirectable link that is easy to type, and paste the clip’s address as the target. I use PrettyLink, through my website hosted at guywindsor.net. So every link is guywindsor.net/somethingeasytotype and points to the specific video clip I want.
  3. For academic content, that is sufficient. But for training manuals and workbooks I also use a free online tool (easy to find with basic search skills) to create a QR code of the link, and include that in the book. Here’s an example from my Complete Rapier Workbook:

It is critically important to use the redirectable link. Do not ever just use e.g. a YouTube link. Unless you own YouTube and can therefore control what happens to it. The point is to future-proof your book. If I change the way I do an action, or create a better video, I can upload it somewhere, and go in to my website’s dashboard and redirect the link. If my Vimeo account was suddenly destroyed, I could upload the clips somewhere else, and redirect the links.

Using Photos

I highly recommend hiring a professional photographer if you can possibly afford it. It is really hard to take print-worthy photos without high-level gear, and without high-level post-production. You may have students, friends, or colleagues with a serious interest in photography, in which case by all means let them help. But be aware of what you’re asking for. The weekend it takes to pose and shoot a book is perhaps a fifth of the time needed to do the post-production.

Clarity is the watchword here, as always. Don’t go for artistic, don’t go for fancy. Make the photos crystal clear, and at a resolution that allows you to print them as large as possible. Shoot on the plainest background you can find, not the prettiest.

Do not insert the images in your text file. It will make the whole process horrendously difficult. Instead, name your pictures in a sensible way, and insert an instruction to layout, in square brackets, like so:

[pic: Getty fol 6v 4 4th play]

That tells me that it should be an image from folio 6v of the Getty MS, 4th image on that page, which happens to be the 4th play of the Abrazare.

If you have hundreds of images from a photoshoot, you might just go with the automatic image numbering from the camera. That’s fine, so long as you are very strict about getting the right numbers in the right place. I copy and paste the file names rather than typing out digits.

This way, even when your layout designer has no idea about your subject, if they can’t find an image, or they put the wrong image somewhere, you can find the correct image easily. Do not try to number your images in order (figure 1, figure 2 etc.) because you will end up having to redo the numbering many times as you edit the text. If you want figure numbers, put them in at the very end, after the first layout draft has been done.

For showing actual movements, I use video clips. Unless you are writing a training guide for videography, the video just has to be clear. Shoot it in the highest resolution you can, and edit it as short as you can make it without losing the necessary detail, and you’re done. The point is to replace the need for photos, not to create instructional videos.

Adding a Glossary

Are there any terms a lay reader may need to look up? If there are six or more, I’d suggest including a glossary at the back of the book. Such as my Academese glossary, reproduced here:

Academese Glossary v.1.02

Citations and Bibliography

Your research will no doubt refer to other people’s work. The modern standard is for in-line citations. This works by simply putting the author’s name, the year of publication of the source you’re citing (if necessary- see below), and the page reference in brackets, in the sentence or immediately after a quote. For example:

Guy’s completely erroneous interpretation of Fiore’s sword draw (Windsor 2018, 52) sets the seal once and for all on his reputation as a complete turnip-head!

Or:

Questo zogo sie del magistro che fa lo partito qui dinanzi. Che segondo chello ha ditto per tal modo io fazo. Che tu vedi bene che tua daga tu no mi poy fare nissuno impazo.

This play is of the master that does the technique before this one. I do it in the way that he has said. You can well see that your dagger cannot cause me any trouble. (Windsor 2018, 52)

Note that I indicate the quotation with a change of text formatting. Whatever you do, make it abundantly clear what you are quoting, and exactly where your reader can find it.

Bibliography

What books have you referred to in your book? List them here. I usually divide them up by type, then organise by author’s last name. Include the author’s full name, the title of the work, the publisher, and the date published. Such as:

Windsor, Guy. Mastering the Art of Arms, Book 1: The Medieval Dagger. Freelance Academy Press, 2012.

Windsor, Guy. Mastering the Art of Arms, Book 2: The Medieval Longsword. The School of European Swordsmanship, 2014.

The date is especially important if the author has more than one book in your bibliography. That way when you are citing them in your text, you can use the standard in-line format, for example (Windsor 2012, 147) which means page 147 of the book this Windsor chap published in 2012.

If they only have one book in your bibliography, you can leave out the year. Such as (Windsor 147).

If they have produced more than one book in the same year, then format it like so: 2018/1, or 2018/2 etc.

Other Things to Include

These are less critical to making your research available, but they are good practice to include. Your work should have an acknowledgments section, a list of your other works, and some biographical information about you. I summarise this like so:

Acknowledgments:

Who helped you learn this stuff in the first place, and to produce the book?

More books by Guy:

If they liked this one, they may like the others.

About the Author

Who am I, and why should you listen to me?

How can they find you online?

And how can they get on your mailing list? [top tip: you can get on my mailing list with the form at the bottom of this post]

Publishing and Distribution

There is no sense in putting all this work into writing up your research if nobody ever reads it. So you need to make some decisions about distribution. Let’s start with copyright.

Copyright options

As the author, your work is automatically protected by copyright law. But, you have various options available to you whether you want to give it away, or get paid for it.

If you want to sell your work it is not strictly necessary but still a good idea to register your copyright. This can be done through various agencies. I use protectmywork.com.

If you publish your work yourself, then you don’t need to get anyone’s permission. If someone else publishes it for you, then you will need a contract with them that licenses your copyright to them. Freelance Academy Press has licensed the copyright to my book The Medieval Dagger for English language only, paperback and ebook only, worldwide distribution. I have the rights to the hardback and to foreign language versions. This is why you can find a German translation of the work, and you can only get the hardback from my online store (swordschool.shop), not the paperback or ebook.

Releasing the work for free can be done by simply stating your terms in the form of one of the creative commons licences. You can for instance allow:

  1. Free use to anyone for any reason, with no need to credit you (CC0)
  2. Free use to anyone for any reason, but you want credit (CC BY)
  3. Free use for non-commercial use, but anyone selling your work needs your permission (CC BY-NC)

And there are other options, allowing for the work to be changed or not. You can find the entire list here: https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/

You apply the licence you want by simply stating it somewhere in your work, with a link to the licence terms. This booklet Show Your Work, for instance, is © 2023 Guy Windsor. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Which allows allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.

Note that this noncommercial licence stops other people selling the work. I can still, for instance, produce a version of the book for sale.

For free distribution, you simply need to produce the book to a reasonable standard of editing and layout (any word processing software will do that), and export it as a PDF. Then share that PDF wherever you like. I would suggest including the following, which are easily forgotten:

  1. Your name
  2. Your copyright terms
  3. Page numbers
  4. A link to your website or anything else of yours that the reader may be interested in.

I cover publishing books and marketing them in detail in From Your Head to Their Hands: how to write, publish, and market training manuals for historical martial artists, so if you are planning on producing an actual book that people can buy, please refer to that.

I’m just back from the Panóplia Iberica, held in Alconchel, a village in Spain near the border with Portugal. This was an utterly delightful event, all the more impressive for being the first time it has been run. Hats off to the organisers Pedro Velasco, whom I met in Warsaw in June; Jessica Gomes, whom you may recall from episode 38 of the podcast, and who also looked after me in Lisbon before and after the event; and Diniz Cabreira, from episode 157, who runs AGEA Editora, publishing historical martial arts books, primarily on La Verdadera Destreza in Portuguese.

Diniz, Pedro, and Jessica, with some bloke in a hat.

Every event has its own character, and its own strengths and weaknesses. The primary strength of this one was the tone in which everything was conducted. The organisers made it very clear what sort of behaviour they wanted. Collegial; friendly; competitive when fencing, perhaps, but in the spirit of seeking after truth, not climbing the hill of renown over the injured bodies of your opponents. There were a lot of attendees- it felt like something north of a hundred, many of whom taught classes or gave lectures in addition to attending classes and fencing a lot.

There was a lot of fencing. Everywhere you looked, all the time, there were people crossing swords. With so many hundreds of fencing hours, it’s astonishing that there were no injuries, and no falling out. I didn’t see a single disgruntled fencer at any point over the three days. Anyone who has been to a fencing event will know how unlikely that is. Fencers have egos, and fencing instructors have bigger egos. (Ask me how I know.)

Just one example: a smallsword instructor was disarmed three times by another smallsword instructor in friendly but competitive fencing. You might expect a bit of wounded pride there. But all I heard in his voice was a kind of glee to have been shown an area he could improve on, and respect and admiration for his opponent.

This is how it ought to be. And it didn’t happen by accident. Pedro, Jessica, and Diniz deliberately created the environment in which that attitude was natural. It started with a short introduction from Pedro, followed by an entire class, the only one in that first time slot on Friday morning, in which Pedro instilled the attitude in the attendees. I wasn’t paying close attention to the class because I was eyes-deep in the best Fiore nerd-athon discussion I’ve had in years (more about that later), and I wondered at the time why Pedro was running such a general and somewhat odd session. Then it dawned. He wasn’t trying to teach them a particular martial art. He was getting them to behave the way he wanted the event to run.

My own classes went well, I thought. I was invited because Pedro happened to be sitting across from me while I was chatting with Ton Puey (who sadly couldn’t attend this event) about creating scalable assets (like books and courses) and making passive income (so if you’re ill or injured you can still pay the bills).  So on Friday night I gave a talk about how to make a living as a historical martial arts instructor. I plan to write that up properly, as it’s probably useful to a lot of people who run clubs, and are thinking about turning pro, or who are already scraping a living teaching the noble art. I focussed on models and strategy, not specifics, because the specifics change greatly depending on your location, goals, and style. In the meantime, my not-terribly detailed presentation slides are in a pdf for you here:

Let them help Panoplia 2023

My second session was a rapier and dagger class on how to teach students to get comfortable using the dagger, and avoiding their opponent’s.

Some of my class after rain moved us indoors

You can find the basic content in section four of the Complete Rapier Workbook. The class went pretty well, I thought, with a range of experience levels in the students, from ‘never used a sword and dagger together before’ to ‘have taught rapier and dagger for years’, all of whom were a delight to have in class.

My goal when attending events like this is to make sword-friends, teach good classes, and to help at least one student make a game-changing breakthrough. As always, this mostly happens between classes, in the conversations and spontaneous private lessons that occur.

Such as passing a student who was practising something that looked a little bit like my Farfalla di Ferro drill, and spending some time with him getting it actually correct (Ibrahim, I’m expecting that video next month of you doing it flawlessly!).

Or spotting a mechanical error in a student’s lunge that would lead to injury eventually, and spending time with her correcting it (Anna, keep your knee tracking your foot, okay?).

Or showing the instructor who got disarmed three times a tiny adjustment to the way he was holding his sword that would dramatically improve his control over it (give it the finger, Rui).

Perhaps my most useful interaction, in terms of my fencing, was the aforementioned nerd-athon in which Dario Alberto Magnani blew my tiny mind with a re-reading of a critical passage in the Getty manuscript.  I will certainly be writing up what happened in depth and detail, but it will take a little while as I need to run it by him before publishing to make sure that I’m representing his position properly, and I need time to figure out how much of his position I actually agree with. There is nothing better in academia than finding the ground you’ve built on starting to shift under your feet. Watch this space…

It’s impossible to mention everyone who made a positive difference- there were so many! But I’d be remiss to not also thank Rui for long conversations about art and British sabre; Christina for showing me her astonishing paintings and making sure I knew where the wheatless food was; Dario (again) for discussing the business side of running the Thokk gloves empire; the entire Mexican contingent (Anna, Jorge, Sebas, Adrian, Yakimi and Eduardo) for making me even more excited to visit Mexico next year (it’s planned for March); Alex the vintner behind Portos dos Santos port (of which I now have a bottle in my house) for discussions about wine making and history, Ricardo Macedo for continuing a conversation and friendship that began in lockdown; and the list goes on.

All this in addition to spending some quality tourist time in Lisbon. Jessica picked me up from the airport and we went straight to the Gulbenkian museum for a spot of lunch and a massive art injection. It’s a truly fabulous collection, which while light on swords and armour, is really heavy on gorgeous furniture, paintings, sculpture, and tapestries. And a clock from 1745 that’s still running.

And an Assyrian relief sculpture that practically knocked me on my arse.

Abyssinian relief of Nimrod

The next day I went for a wander on my own, and ended up in the Coaches museum. It’s an extraordinary collection of magnificent coaches, with incredible craftsmanship, housed in a state-of-the-art new museum building. And it’s a crap museum. The coaches are just sitting there, like they’re parked in a warehouse. There is no sense of flow, or mystery, or history, or discovery, or story.

The Coaches museum

That evening we drove off to the Panóplia, and got back on Sunday evening. I was on the last flight home on Monday, so Jessica very kindly took me into the centre and we touristed the place up. (Yes, that’s a verb.) The view from the top of the Arco da Rua Augusta was superb, and lunch in a fabulous little restaurant that you’d never find without a guide was a cultural and gastronomic delight. Get this: they set fire to their sausages!

the waiter left me in charge…

There is nothing like wandering around a city to get a feel for the place. And having a glass of Ginja from the same little shop where Manuel dos Reis da Silva Buíça had a dram before heading off to shoot Carlos I (the last reigning King of Portugal; his younger son Manuel was technically king, but in exile, which in my view doesn’t count unless you mount a successful counter-revolution) in 1908. I’m happy to say that I’m feeling no more regicidal after the ginja than I was before.

So to everyone who made the trip such a spectacular success: gracias, grazie, obrigado, and thank you!

I get asked all the time what movies and tv shows have “good” sword fights in them. This begs the question, “what is good?”
We can all agree, I hope, that the Princess Bride duel on the top of the cliffs of insanity is perhaps the best screen rapier duel in history. In terms of action, character, and tone, it's unmatched. But it ain't the slightest bit historical. References to historical fencing masters aside, there's not a breath of history in it.
The Duellists, by Ridley Scott, is probably the best, most accurate, historical duelling on the screen, with smallsword and sabre. It seems that sabre and smallsword duels are generally done better than earlier styles, probably due to the way all fight directors get taught sport fencing.

So, rather than suffer my way through endless terrible movies and tv shows in search of a decent longsword, rapier, sidesword, or anything else pre-1750 duel, I sent out an email to my mailing list a few weeks ago and asked them what they thought, and created an online form to collect their answers, which you are welcome to add to here:

https://forms.gle/hquTCZVW8ENjymJZA 

The advantage of the form is it allows you to see everyone else's answers (once you've put your own in), so you might also pick up some useful tips. I've set the form to not collect email addresses etc., so you should be able to use it without being inducted into an evil cult.

The results have been interesting. There were quite a few I was expecting, such as Rob Roy, The Three Musketeers, The Princess Bride, Scaramouche, and The Seven Samurai. But there were also some I'd never heard of, such as Black Sails and Vatel; and some I've heard of but not seen, like The Witcher.

I promised I'd find a way to share the results, so I've double-checked for no identifying data, and created a csv file which you can download from here:

The best HISTORICAL swordfights on screen CSV

Now I do have to say, because I'm a historical pedant, that very few of the recommendations are remotely historically accurate (though I don't suppose that applies to the Star Wars recommendation!). So as a way to find historically accurate sword fights on screen, this has not been very successful. But it has certainly been a lot of fun, and may lead you to discover new shows to enjoy.

You may also enjoy my analysis of The Princess Bride duel here, or an analogy between historical martial arts and Mary Poppins (yes, really), here. And if this sort of thing is your jam, you should sign up to the mailing list with the snazzy form below.

German longsword

In July I flew to Kansas to shoot video with Jessica Finley. I originally intended to just get the material for my medieval Italian wrestling course, but when I saw this amazing mural on Jessica's salle wall, I was hit by a really good idea- why not use this memory-tree of the 12 hauptstucke (“chief pieces of the art”) as a course plan?

12 hauptstucke mural

Jessica is one of my oldest sword friends, and a highly respected colleague. We first met at a Western Martial Arts workshop event in about 2007. She was my first choice for a podcast guest (and has been back on the show twice since then). She started out as Christian Tobler’s student, and used the training he gave her to develop her own areas of expertise, notably in medieval German wrestling. She wrote the book Medieval Wrestling, published in 2014, which was one good reason why I shot my own medieval wrestling course with her. And she has her own way of organising and interpreting Liechtenauer’s longsword material, based on Liechtenauer’s own categorisation of the hauptstucke.

You can find the course here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/medieval-german-longsword-the-hauptstucke-of-johannes-liechtenauer?coupon_code=GERMANLONGSWORDYAY&product_id=5107732

It's currently 40% off, until Friday 10th November.
We have quite different teaching styles, as you can see in this video where she teaches the guard Ochs:

I think it’s important to expose your students to other instructors, and this is no less true in online courses as it is in person. When I ran my school in Helsinki, we averaged 3-4 visiting instructors per year.
But there is a very small overlap between the quite large group of instructors whom I would deem worthy to teach my students, and the much smaller group who have the skills to produce a course like Medieval German Longsword: the Hauptstucke of Johannes Liechtenauer. To be clear- Jessica herself doesn’t have the technical background to produce a course either (though she is solidly in the first group, and indeed taught a seminar for my students in Helsinki in 2015). But I do, and we had the time, the space, and the very clearly organised system that you need for producing a course, when I was over in Kansas in July this year.
My part in this course includes directing, producing, editing, and providing the Fiore perspective in each section, so the course itself is very much a collaboration. But every bit of Liechtenauer interpretation is 100% Jessica.
Here’s the next video in the sequence: Thrusting from Ochs and Pflug:

And yes! the launch window is closing, so if you’d like to get 40% off the course, you can do so with this link: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/medieval-german-longsword-the-hauptstucke-of-johannes-liechtenauer?coupon_code=GERMANLONGSWORDYAY&product_id=5107732
The discount expires on November 10th. Tell your friends!
See you on the course!

This post is intended to be useful to the attendees at the recent seminar I taught with Chris Vanslambrouck in Madison, Wisconsin. It may also be of interest to folk who couldn't make it.

First up, huge thanks to Heidi Zimmerman who organised the seminar. It literally couldn’t have happened without her. And thanks also to Chris Vanslambrouck, who co-taught the seminar, with related plays from Meyer. Given that there was also a lot of Meyer technique being taught that weekend, it’s a miracle we covered so much ground, so hats off to the students. I’ve assembled a list of the material we covered, some planned, some answers to questions posed by the students.

Saturday: Fiore Longsword

We started with the most  basic blows, and saw how they created the guards.

The blows were:

  • Mandritto fendente
  • Roverso fendente
  • Mandritto sottano
  • Roverso sottano
  • Thrust

You can find a more complete version of the drill we used here:

And the guards they created were:

  • Posta di donna destra,
  • Posta di donna lasinestra,
  • Posta longa,
  • Tutta porta di ferro,
  • Dente di zenghiaro, coda longa

You can find all the guards here: https://swordschool.com/wiki/index.php/The_12_guards

We then did a parry and strike from donna, against the mandritto fendente, and a parry and strike from dente di zenghiaro, against the same blow. The latter is the beginning of our Second Drill:

 

This lead us to the universal counter-remedy: the pommel strike (as shown in the 8th play of the master of coda longa on horseback).

We then defended against thrusts with the Exchange of thrusts:

Then Breaking the thrust:

In the afternoon session we covered the rear-weighted guards (donna and fenestra), and briefly went over the 3 turns (volta stabile, meza volta, tutta volta), and the four steps (accrescere/discrescere; passare/tornare).

We then did a not-very-deep mechanical dive into the guard bicorno, including how to use it to prevent an exchange, and as a feint. This included an introduction to the woman in the window drill:

 

We finished up our survey with the 4 corners drill: https://swordschool.com/wiki/index.php/Four_corners_drill

All of this material can be found in book form in The Medieval Longsword, as an online course here.

The following day, Sunday, we did a pretty thorough overview of Capoferro's rapier. We began with basic footwork:

  • passes,
  • lunge,
  • step,
  • lean

Which you can find here:

Then played Hunt the debole (to get an idea of what the sword is supposed to be doing- keeping you safe!).

We then worked through Plate 7 (stringer on the inside, thrust through the left eye):

 

And plate 16 (stringer on the outside, thrust to the neck):

Plate 8 (slip the leg)

Plate 10 (enter against the cut),

Plate 13 (the scannatura)

And plates 17 and/or 19, the avoidances of the right foot or waist:

We also did a pretty deep dive on the mechanics of the lunge. We didn't video the Madison seminar, but I covered the lunge in a similar way in this seminar:

 

We also looked at the mechanics of passing, specifically the difference between the passing foot pointing forwards or out to the side.

Then we constructed a mechanically sound seconda position, starting from first principles. I covered this in a blog post, here: Function First, then Form

We then went through my system for teaching students the basic skill of parrying with the dagger, in four stages. You can find the four stages on this wiki page: https://swordschool.com/wiki/index.php/Rapier_and_dagger_drills

And we then applied those skills in executing Plate 23:

And then had a look at murdering left-handers in Plate 38:

All of this rapier material is covered in the Complete Rapier Workbook, and in the new Duellist’s Companion 2nd edition. If you prefer an online course, you can find it here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/rapier

Thanks again to the lovely Heidi for organising it, Chris for introducing us all to Meyer, and to the most excellent students.

I’m just back from the International Rapier Seminar, held in Warsaw last weekend. It was an absolute blast, so the first order of business is a heartfelt dziękuję/gracias/thank you to the organisers, especially Lorenzo Braschi for inviting me (he was the very man who introduced me to the mighty porrón in Spain in 2012), and to Karol for driving all the way out to the Ryanair airport to get me, which was only marginally closer to Warsaw than it is to my house.

The event kicked off at 5pm on the Friday, so I spent the day in Warsaw being a tourist, mostly at the Warsaw Museum, which had a special exhibition on the reconstruction of Warsaw after the Nazi’s wantonly destroyed it (as in, 65% of the city completely levelled, 80% badly damaged) after the Uprising of 1944. I didn’t know much about the city before I got there, and it frankly blew me away. The sheer scale of the clearing and rebuilding beggars the imagination, especially when you realise it was done with picks, shovels, and horse-drawn carts, in a country ravaged by the war.

Walking around the old town, you wouldn’t immediately guess that the buildings were built 70 years ago.

The event began with a get-together, a bit of sparring and lots of chatting, and I got to meet a student I’ve been interacting with pretty much weekly since 2020 (hi Jas!). I taught two classes on the Saturday: How to Train, followed immediately by How to Teach. I can summarise them for you like so:

1. Run a diagnostic, fix the weakest link, run the diagnostic again

2. Generate the optimal rate of failure in your student/s.

Simple, yes. Easy? Not so much. But that’s why we practice, right? The classes were well attended, and I think well received. During the afternoon I dropped in and out of watching classes by the other instructors, and got to fence with Emilia Skirmuntt, she of episode 75 of the podcast. Plus a great catch-up with Alberto Bomprezzi, whom I haven’t seen since my trip to Spain in 2012, and meeting Jorge from Mexico who persuaded me to part with my proof copy of The Duellist’s Companion Second Edition.

There may or may not have been much carousing and revelry that evening…

Sunday was given over to the tournament, which had two excellent features: it didn’t occupy all the space, and I didn’t have to do any work on it. So I spent the day fencing people! Elmar, Radek (who went on to win the tournament, congratulations!), Chris, Heikki (the one Finn at the event), Cornelius, and Martin. Each bout was different, each one delightful in its own way. If I had them to give, I’d give out the special technical “this feels like fencing a specific historical system” award to Martin (organiser of Swords of the Renaissance, which I attended last year and will return to in September this year). We were both really tired (these events are exhausting), but there were moments when it felt like Capoferro and Fabris might not have been ashamed of us. Another highlight was working with Damian on grounding and mechanics. He’d asked for it in my class the day before, but we didn’t have time to go into sufficient detail. There's no substitute for working one-on-one with students.

I was too knackered by the heat to fence everyone I wanted to, so Pedro Velasco and Tomasz Kraśnicki, here’s your rain-check for my first two bouts next time!

The great thing about all the bouts, and the event itself really, is that it was all very collegial. There was plenty of competitive spirit, but none of the personality-driven jockeying for status etc. that can make fencing unpleasant. That’s down to the attendees, in part, but also to the spirit of the event itself, for which the organisers should be thoroughly applauded.

Dinner on Sunday night was a blast too; most of the attendees had gone home, but on my table at a restaurant in a square in the old town, there were 8 people, no two of them from the same country. We had the USA, UK, Denmark, Serbia, Bosnia, Finland, Denmark, and Italy represented. If I went on a bit much about flying and woodwork, then Marc, Nic, Nicole, and Vicky, my apologies. Blame the vodka! But to be fair, they did ask…

And breakfast on Monday involved an hour-long chat with Ton Puey, Chris Lee-Becker, and Pedro Velasco. I think that a huge part of the value of events like these is the unscheduled serendipitous interaction with colleagues and friends. I also found at least two new guests for the podcast whom I had never heard of before the weekend!

My main takeaways from this trip are 1) I should do more of them and 2) I need to work on my fencing fitness. My legs are killing me!

As is now traditional, the day after an event like this I'm flooded with Facebook friend requests, which is lovely, but I don't use Facebook. So, if you'd like to find me on social media, come to swordpeople.com and say hello!

It's the beginning of “Mental Health Week”, so I thought I'd share the chapter “Mental Health” from The Windsor Method: The Principles of Solo TrainingThis comes after a chapter on visualising your mental model for training as a tree, with mental health as the roots, physical health as the trunk, and specific attributes as the branches, and is followed by a similar overview of physical health, before we delve into the details of goal setting, how to practice, etc. I am currently working on the audiobook version of The Windsor Method, and have attached the audio for this chapter here, in case it's better for your mental health to listen rather than read. Just click the play button:

 

If you'd like to know when the rest of the audiobook is available, please sign up to my mailing list.

Mental Health

Mental health is the foundation of all your training. If you’re too depressed to get out of bed, or too anxious to concentrate on your striking drills, it will be very hard to train effectively. I’m not a psychiatrist, and if you are struggling I hope you will get professional help. I did, and it works, or at least it worked for me.

If we were talking about physical health, you would agree that there are many things you can do to improve your general likelihood of avoiding disease and injury. Don’t smoke. Eat healthily. Exercise regularly. I think it’s the same for mental health. There are things you can do that will reduce the severity of mental health issues if they arise, or even avoid them altogether. But there are no guarantees, and all interventions carry some risk.

Meditation can reprogramme your inner voice, can reduce depression and other conditions. It can teach you how to control where your attention goes. But it can also make things worse, depending on how you do it and what you focus on.

Breathing exercises are particularly effective at reducing stress levels, and inducing a feeling of well-being. They are excellent for bridging the gap between conscious control and autonomic processes. But they can be frustratingly slow to work and don’t work for everything.

Exercise is a great mood enhancer, and is a simple way to boost endorphin levels which help with mood. But it comes with a risk of injury.

Spending time doing things you actively enjoy (like swinging swords?) is good too – and swinging swords can include meditative, breathing, and exercise components that are a feel-good triple-whammy. But everyone who has trained for any length of time knows that you can have bad training days. Understanding the foundations of mental health will help you figure out why. As I see it, they are:

1. Agency. A sense of control over your life and its direction. In many ways practising weapons drills is an externalised form of this. See! I can control this blade – I am in control. Control is always an illusion (you could drop dead at any moment), but it’s a very useful and necessary one.

2. Meaning. If you feel your life means something, you can tolerate a great deal more stress. Sacrifices you make for a greater good are much more bearable than those that are just taken from you.

3. Connection. We are social animals, and a great deal of our sense of meaning comes from the impact we have on those around us and our connections to them. The pandemic has highlighted this to an extreme degree. We need each other, and we need others to see that our existence has meaning. Believing that nobody would care if you disappeared is perhaps the worst feeling a person can have.

4. Sleep. The one natural process that is most key to your health and wellbeing. It only takes one bad night’s sleep to ruin your day. Sleep is a process and a skill, so I’ll discuss it separately from the other three branches, in Part 2: Practices.

Agency is the feeling of being in control.

It’s often reasonable to be upset, depressed, sad, angry, annoyed, or frightened. But none of those feelings are fun, healthy, or helpful so do what you can to avoid them. This has a great deal to do with what you focus on, and your sense of agency. The one single most important tool in your mental health toolbox is the ability to focus on your area of control. You don’t control the pandemic, or the weather. You do control whether you did push-ups today, or how you speak to the people in your life. Steven Covey popularised the idea of area of control (which dates back to the Stoics), in his 1989 book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He uses the terms “circle of concern” to cover all the things you are interested in or concerned by, and “circle of influence” to cover those things over which you can exert some control. The circle of influence is always much smaller than the circle of concern, but by focussing on your circle of influence, you actually grow it, and become more able to affect the things in your circle of concern.

The key skill then is being able to control what you focus on, to keep your focus within your circle of influence. A great tool for becoming better at choosing what you focus on is mindfulness meditation. As with any skill, it gets better with practice.

One way to focus on your area of control is to make good art. Neil Gaiman was, and always will be, right on this. In his commencement speech on May 17th 2012 at the University of the Arts, he said:

“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.” (Published in The View from the Cheap Seats, 2016).

Over and over again, I’ve found this to be good advice. I don’t know what your art is: writing code, painting, baking cookies, it could be anything. And it may well be that it feels like you can’t do your art right now, but there are related things you can do, to prepare for when things get back to normal. And ideally, whatever it is, share it. Which brings me on to my next thought: for mental health purposes, you’ll get the most profound sense of agency from helping others. There is nothing more empowering. It can be super-simple, such as Sir Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard himself, deciding at the beginning of the first UK lockdown, to read one Shakespeare sonnet per day aloud . You can find it on the internet. It’s very interesting to compare this shot-at-home Sir Patrick sitting on a sofa in comfortable clothes reading out of a book, with the more polished professionally produced sonnet readings of his which you can find on YouTube. To be honest, I actually prefer the homemade version. You don’t have to be producing content like this. There are a million ways to help people, and there is nothing that is better for your sense of agency, and connection.

Meaning is the story you tell about the things you focus on.

In 2015 my family and I moved to Lucca, in Tuscany, for three months. We spent a lot of that time eating pizza, but also a great deal of time in museums, “looking at old stuff” as my kids would put it. They were aged 6 and 8, and so didn’t have most of the background stories that bring meaning to a statue or a painting. The thing was either pretty, or not. We went everywhere with art supplies, so they would often sit on the floor and draw and paint the marvels around them. My wife and I would take it in turns to hang out with them while the other went exploring.

We learned early on that it made for a much better museum experience if we prepared the kids with some stories, pitched at their level. One very successful example was a YouTube video that dramatised the story of how Michelangelo created his David. When we got to Florence and took them to the Gallery of the Academy, and there David was towering over us, it had meaning for them.

Meaning is primarily mediated through story. The meaning of a piece of art is mostly in the story it tells, and the story of its creation. The meaning of your life is entirely in the stories you believe about it.

Imagine the difference between a scrap of wood on the trash heap, and an identical scrap of wood that a devout Christian believes is a piece of the True Cross. The meaning the Christian brings to the scrap of wood determines the quality of their experience seeing it.

I have a thought experiment for you, to illustrate this. I call it “three broken legs.”

You wake up in hospital in a lot of pain. You have a broken leg. There are three possible stories to explain why.

1. You went skiing/hang-gliding/mountaineering/insert fun but dangerous activity of choice. You had an accident, and your leg is broken. It happens, you knew the risks and took them.

2. You were walking down the street one day, when somebody came up to you with a baseball bat, shouted hate into your face, and broke your leg with the bat.

3. You were walking down the same street one day, and saw a truck about to run over a child. You leap into action, you save the child, but the truck breaks your leg.

One of these injuries is neutral; one is likely to require some serious counselling and may result in long-term psychological problems, and one is a badge of honour that you will draw strength from for the rest of your life. The broken leg is the same in each case.

Your emotional response to the injury is at least as important as the injury itself. The story that comes with the scar determines your experience of the scar.

And mental health is entirely about your experience, your subjective response to external factors.

So how does this apply to training?

From an entirely rational perspective it is absolutely pointless to study most martial arts most of the time. You are never going to use them. I certainly have no intention of ever fighting a duel. My sword training is in that sense a giant waste of time. But it resonates with a depth of meaning for me that every sword person understands intuitively, and no non-sword people will ever fathom. I am wired to see meaning in swordsmanship. I’m guessing that if you are reading this, so are you. Or maybe it’s some other martial art that turns you on. It doesn’t matter which one; it matters that it has meaning to you.

The sword is a sacred object. With its sharp point it pierces the veil of illusion, and with its sharp edge it separates truth from falsehood. It demands balance and justice. It focusses my being on a single point.

But literally every object is sacred, if you see it through the eyes of the right story.

So why are you training? What meaning do you bring to the arts you practise?

It’s perfectly all right if they are just a fun way to spend time and stay reasonably fit. But you need to bring meaning to some area of your life. Endless contemplation of the infinite void in which people are meaningless specks of agitated matter and we might as well not bother might have the satisfaction of being kind of accurate, but it’s not conducive to mental health.

Connection is our relationship to the people around us.

We are social animals. Without our place in society, we are nothing. In every culture banishment is a severe punishment, and in many times and places was equivalent to or considered worse than death. For most of pre-history our place in our tribe was literally how we survived. This is as true for hermits as it is for the most gregarious among us. Having very limited connection is not at all the same as having none.

Loneliness is a plague in our society, at least as damaging as the global pandemic, and of course it has been made worse by the pandemic. It is literally better for our mental health to be hated than to be ignored.

Of course, it’s better to be loved.

But what has this got to do with training?

Simply this: a large component of martial arts training is social, and as with any other human activity, it creates tribes and societies. This is good, in that we need to feel part of a tribe, but comes with the risk of cultish behaviours. Once we are deeply connected to the people in a tribe, staying part of the in-group becomes more important than other factors like rationality, morality and kindness. Martial arts are as vulnerable to becoming irrational cults as any other kind of human organisation. All this means is that we must be mindful of our need for connection, and make sure that we are connecting with the kinds of people who will bring out our best selves. When evaluating a school or club, see how the senior students behave – do you want to become like them? Because if you stay, you probably will.

It goes deeper than our need for social interaction though. Creativity is intimately linked with connection, because we create primarily through connecting previously separate ideas. Great writers aren’t great because they invent a lot of new words – they are great because they connect old words together in new ways. When growing your tree, you need to draw on the ideas of those around you. You can do this through personal interaction, but also through books, videos, and other forms of idea-spreading.

Connection is necessary for your emotional wellbeing, but also for your creativity. I wrote my first book because a friend suggested I should. I wrote my second because a student from my old club happened to complain about there being nothing out there for the rapier. Without these chance connections, I doubt I’d have started writing; I never had “be a writer” as a goal in life. But look how that turned out! Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas explores the relationship between broad social connections and creativity in depth.

During the pandemic I have had a hard rule of at least one social call with a friend every week. Most weeks I have two or three. And if any of my friends contacts me wanting to talk, that takes priority over any work I may need to do. Connection is so fundamentally important to human wellbeing, way more so than any specific project I may be working on.

Our need for connection has many downsides, such as comparisonitis. We compare ourselves to those who are richer, prettier, stronger, luckier, more charismatic, more “successful”, whatever success means to you. My books do ok, but Stephen King probably wouldn’t be impressed by my figures. I find it helpful to be mindful about whom I compare myself with, and the metrics I use for comparison. Most people I know make more money than I do. I don’t care; I have way more free time. And my job description is infinitely cooler. If it comes down to money, I prefer to compare myself to the several billion people on the planet who make less than I do, rather than the much smaller number who make more.

If you are mindful of the categories you compete in, you can optimise for your mental health.

If you are living a life you believe to be meaningful, and have a sense of agency over it, and have strong connections to those around you, then you are in the best position to have solid mental health. If your training feels meaningful, gives you a sense of agency, and fosters connections with other people, it’s likely to help your mental health. This is why it is so very important to train in such a way that you are getting meaning, agency and connection. Because otherwise your training could feel meaningless, reduce your sense of control, and sever your connections with others.

After a session that goes really well, reflect on why. The chances are good that it scored highly in one or more of the three pillars. And if a session goes badly, which pillar did it fail to strengthen? How can you correct that next time?

I should also mention that your mind needs rest too. A bit of boredom is very good for you (see Bored and Brilliant, by Manoush Zamorodi if you don’t agree).

Swords have been a major part of my life since I was a kid and I still have days when my training feels meaningless. It’s normal, and we have ways round it. My own particular fix is having students. They depend on me to have decent sword skills, so on days when I can’t see meaning or value in training, I train for them.

Physical health is important primarily because it impacts on mental health. Would you rather be blissfully happy but disabled, or utterly miserable but physically fine? A great deal of your experience is mediated through your body. To take a straightforward example: adrenaline and cortisol are produced in the adrenal glands, which are connected to your kidneys. The adrenaline rush we get from a roller-coaster or falling in love? You can thank your adrenal glands. The grinding long-term damage from elevated cortisol levels? That’s your adrenal glands too. It is artificial to separate mind and body, they are deeply intertwined. This is why in many cases changing what you do with your body can deeply affect your mental health.

You can  find the complete book here: https://swordschool.shop/collections/the-windsor-method-the-principles-of-solo-training

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The AI revolution has been growing behind the scenes for a very long time, and now with chat bots like Chat GPT and image bots like Midjourney, the iceberg is breaking the surface. It puts me in mind of the machine-tool revolution in woodwork that occurred in the 60s and 70s, and the quartz revolution in watchmaking around the same time. The short-term result of both of these was that a lot of old-fashioned craftspeople went out of business, and it became much easier for lower-skilled workers to make decent quality furniture and watches, and much cheaper for ordinary people to buy a functional chair or timepiece.

What we see in both cases, and indeed in just about every case I can think of where new technology comes along, was a change in the market, which became much more democratic, and much broader, with a lower low end, and a much higher high end.

Let’s start with the woodwork example, as woodwork is millenia older than horology.

There is nothing in woodwork that you can’t build with just hand tools. Ships? Check. Lace cravat in limewood? Check.

This is Grinling Gibbons’ cravat, hand carved in about 1690, currently held in the Victoria and Albert museum

You can see how he (probably) did it in this astonishing video of Clunie Fretton’s partial reproduction.

Until recently, every woodworking project, including that cravat, went from tree to finished product with practically no mechanisation. All power was muscle power, human or animal. The tree was felled with axes, split with wedges, sawn by hand, planed by hand, and finished by hand. The circular saw dates back to the 18th century, when it was driven by wind or water power, and used in saw mills to cut trunks into planks, but it took a century or so to become widespread.

Mechanisation first occurred at the largest scales of woodworking: tree felling with chainsaws, ripping with giant circular saws, the planer-thicknesser (known as a jointer-planer in the US), and so on.

At one extreme, we have craftspeople making extraordinary things out of wood entirely with machines; at the other, we have craftspeople making extraordinary things out of wood with no machines at all. One great example of the latter is Tom Fidgen, author of a wonderful book The Unplugged Woodshop, who doesn’t use any machines at all! Yet he does run an online woodworking school… I wonder which makes more money?

At the level of the individual artisan working at the bench, the cataclysm of modernity didn’t really strike until the 1960s, with the development of smaller electric tools such as hand-held routers. This quickly lead to the demise of many companies making professional grade hand tools. It became very difficult to buy a decent saw or plane; all you could get was mass-produced low-grade wobbly crap. Just compare a Record plane from 1950 with one from 1975, and the cost-cutting is obvious. Plastic handles, parts made of bent mild steel rather than cast, etc. This was not the companies’ fault: the market for the high quality stuff just wasn’t big enough any more to be profitable.

But from the ashes of rubbish hand-tools, phoenixes have emerged, beginning with Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, founded in 1981. The top end of the market is now way, way, higher than it ever was before. Such as this saw from Skelton Saws:

The Chippendale, from Skelton Saws, a snip at £750

And planes from Karl Holtey, that begin at around £1k, if you can find them. Most are much more expensive.

Karl Holtey planes: the pinnacle of the art

Which make my beautiful, immaculate, Florip saws  look very cheap! I have five: their bench saw, tenon saws both rip and crosscut, and dovetail saws rip and crosscut. Oh my goddess, these are amazing, and all five together cost about the same as one Skelton. But of course, about ten times what I'd pay for the cheapest options. Likewise, you can get a really high end plane from Clifton (an old brand that was going bankrupt, and was rescued by one of the few surviving handsaw makers in the UK, Thomas Flinn), Lee-Nielsen, Veritas, etc for a tenth of the price of the equivalent Holtey, but yes, about ten times what the crap in the big box store will cost you.

You can get an idea of what it takes to make a really cheap plane work properly in this video by Rex Krueger.

Putting these tools to use, most craftspeople fall somewhere in between the high-tech and the hand tool-only. I have always had a romantic and aesthetic preference for hand tools, so avoid machines where practical. But here’s the thing: from the perspective of the end-user, it is impossible to distinguish a board that has been dimensioned by machine and finished by hand, and one from which every shaving was taken away through manual labour.

There is no difference- you only get to see the final surface. Likewise, an article written by ChatGPT will be like a rough-sawn board. Usable for some applications, but by the time a craftsperson has planed it smooth, sanded it, and applied some polish, nobody will know if she wrote it from scratch, or edited it from an AI generated draft. Most end-users, most of the time, couldn’t care less how their book was written or their furniture was made. It either meets spec, or it doesn’t.

It’s also worth noting that mastering woodworking machines is in its own way as demanding and difficult as mastering hand tools. You can’t just dump a load of wood in the machine shop, turn everything on, and hey-presto! Out comes new furniture. It’s just that it expands the lower end, and speeds up production: less-skilled workers can get useful work done, and more skilled workers can work dramatically faster, especially in getting sawn lumber dimensioned and planed all round.

The major downside of machines in woodworking (other than the noise and the dust) is that one can tend to make the furniture that the machine can handle. The machines become a limiting factor. If you can’t fit a board onto your planer, you might rip it down the middle so it will… when cutting dovetails, I usually lay out the tails so close together that it’s impossible to cut them with a router (the cutter shank won’t fit through the gap between the tails).

Anyone who knows about such things will immediately see that these were hand-cut. This has nothing to do with practicality, and everything to do with satisfaction. It’s sticking one finger up to the machine-tool revolution, and quite silly because a) it doesn’t make the joint stronger and b) I’m perfectly happy to use machines for other things. The groove for the drawer bottom in this very drawer was cut with a router, and I used a planer-thicknesser to bring the front and sides to thickness.

If you are unfamiliar with woodworking machines, you can see a state of the art modern set-up here in Matt Estlea’s overview video of the making of his Roubo-style workbench, “Bertha”.

And compare that to his traditional dovetail cutting tutorial.

Same craftsman, different jobs, so different tools.

Of course, most furniture isn’t made by any kind of craftsperson. It comes from factory assembly lines, in massive quantities at an extraordinarily low cost. It is literally cheaper to buy a table from IKEA than it is to buy the wood to make the same table yourself. The same people who are (probably rightfully) worried about how AI will steal their jobs are almost certainly wearing clothes made on machine looms, and using furniture mass-produced by industrial processes. And probably wearing quartz watches.

Speaking of watches, here is one of the best watches in the world:

from https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/casio/product.AE-1500WH-1AV/

The Casio AE1500. Yours for about £30. Reliable, waterproof, multi-function, does everything you could possibly ask of a watch… Except make your craftsmanship spidey-sense tingle with glee. Which this handmade IWC perpetual calendar watch (you won’t need to adjust the date, month, or moon calendar until the year 2100) certainly does.

https://www.iwc.com/en/watches-and-wonders/pilots-watch-perpetual-calendar.html

Get this: using only gears, springs, and levers, this watch can handle date changes, including leap years. It’s all 100% mechanical. The mind boggles. Is that worth paying about a thousand times as much for the watch? Some people certainly think so. The Casio does all that the IWC can do with ease, and more, at about a thousandth of the cost. Though, if I’m 100% honest, if money were no object, the high-end watch I’d get would be the Rolex GMT Master II, with the pepsi bezel. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants. Rolex got me with their advertising in the 80s, and I’ve never quite lost the urge. I found this genuine ex-dealer wall clock on Etsy, and I love it to bits:

Getting back on track now (please admire the deftness with which I didn’t go down the wooden timepiece rabbit hole), the quartz revolution almost destroyed the Swiss watch industry. Before those cheap, reliable, tacky watches came along, all watches were purely mechanical. The fancy ones were self-winding, and had interesting complications like GMT functionality and/or showed the date, but that was about it. And when cheaper, more reliable, tackier watches became available, there was a winnowing of watch companies that is heartbreaking to contemplate. In 1970, there were approximately 1600 Swiss watchmaking companies. By 1983, there were about 600 left.

One brand that made a tremendous success out of cheap quartz watches was Swatch. They went on to buy up some of the struggling fancy brands (Breguet, developer of the Tourbillon escapement (patented in 1801). Breitling. Even James Bond’s Omega) and made them profitable. At the same time, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, and Rolex doubled down on the exclusive luxury end of the market and went from strength to strength, because they are not competing on price or time-keeping accuracy. They are competing on craftsmanship and artistry. It’s worth noting that Rolex and Patek Philippe particularly were actively developing their own quartz movements in the early days, so they were not in any sense Luddite about their approach to watchmaking. But they recognised a fight they'd never win, and so chose new ground to compete on.

Since the quartz apocalypse, there have been some astonishing new entrants into the field, such as Richard Mille and Kari Voutilainen (whose watches start around the 200 thousand dollar mark, about ten times what the IWC watch costs), or Finnish watchmakers S.U.F Helsinki, whose watches start at about a tenth of the IWC. These newcomers are not just filling the gap left by the older brands that failed and were bought up; the market for this kind of art/craft is much, much, larger than it ever was. In terms of price, it goes approximately like so: Casio: x 100 = S.U.F Helsinki: x 100 = Voutilainen. The gap between the bottom end and the top is almost infinite: there are new watches by new makers out there that cost millions.

What does all this have to do with AI? Well, it’s the power-tool, quartz movement, equivalent for knowledge workers of all kinds, including programmers, graphic designers, and writers. Bill Gates reckons (in his article The Age of AI Has Begun) that this is the biggest thing since the graphical user interface, and he’s pretty well placed to make that assessment.  The article is relatively fair-minded, and highlights some pros and cons. Pros include better cheaper healthcare, cons include the risks of AIs being misused by the malicious, and major disruption to the livelihoods of knowledge workers.

Here is what will happen, because it’s what always happens:

The market will split. There will be some people out of work because AI does their job better and faster than they can, and they can’t adapt fast enough. There will be some people who successfully position themselves as the hand-tool/mechanical watch artisan equivalent: poets, literary fiction writers, and so on. And there will be most people in between who learn to use the new tools, and use them to make more stuff, faster, and better.

There is space in the market for the cheap, practical, gets the job done for not much money solution. And there is space for the artisanal, bespoke, gets the job done for a lot more money solution.

On the left of my wall clock, there’s a version of my publishing imprint Spada Press’s logo, done on vellum, by the incomparable Nora Cannaday (whom I interviewed in episode 28 of The Sword Guy podcast).

Spada Press logo by Nora Cannaday (nee Kirkeby, hence the signature), at https://noracannaday.com/

It’s a one-off work of art. I also have this one, that I use in all my books:

Spada press logo, by Robert Simpson, at https://www.squircle.co/

Done precisely to spec, by the excellent Robert Simpson, using digital tools (which graphic designers were up in arms about in the 80s and 90s), and which has now been reproduced thousands of times in printed books and ebooks.

Which one is “better”? That really depends on what you want. They are both exactly what I asked for and are both excellent.

The real question is, who benefits from all this progress?

Back in the 80s, one teacher at school was banging on about how, with the new desktop publishing, you could do in a morning what used to take a week. I asked if you’d expect to get the rest of the week off, then? He said no…

And this is how it will go. If you are working for yourself, or it’s your company, then increasing productivity is usually a good thing, up to the point that it decreases the value of your product, and until your competitors become similarly more productive. If you work for someone else, this will just mean that you are expected to produce x times as much, for the same money or less.

In Gates’ article, he wrote:

“When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.” (Emphasis mine)

This is the most egregious rubbish. When productivity goes up, people are expected to do more work in less time. End of story. AI will mean either redundancy or more product for the same pay, for most employees affected by it.

Mark Hurst at Creative Good is a technologist who is usefully sceptical of various aspects of the modern techscape, including AI. He makes the point in his article ChatGPT’s dangers are starting to show that the companies involved in AI development are working to “privatise the gains, and socialise the losses”. 

One critical area where the law has simply not been written yet is the use of copyright material to train AIs. To my mind, it’s a blatant violation of the rights of the creator to use their work (usually writing or graphic art of some kind) to train a machine to create other art in that style. Creators should have the right to decline such use, or to get paid to allow it, just as they might licence a film studio to make a movie out of their novel. I think it will be extremely difficult to prove what material the AI has used- for instance, any chatbot AI probably has access to every blog post ever written. But those posts are in most cases copyrighted to the writer. How do you prove that the AI stole your work? This is a solvable problem, I just hope that our society does the work to solve it. Making the owners of the AI liable for any infringements would go a long way towards motivating them to program the bot to behave ethically.

I think that dangerous new technology requires some kind of regulation. Cars, for instance. You need a licence and insurance to drive one. With AI, the primary worry is that ignorant people will mistake an algorithm with access to a finite (though very large) database for the arbiter of truth. And unscrupulous people will use AI to manipulate us into buying more stuff we don’t need, or voting for the wrong people. These are genuine concerns, but I am more concerned with the people who will become redundant, because they either don’t adapt, or re-brand, or their specific area is simply no longer needed by anyone. There can and should be some provision for them.

There is nothing inherently moral or immoral in AI. It’s a tool. It can and will be used to make our lives easier and better; and it can and will be used to make our lives worse. This is true for every tool ever made. Swords bring justice and defend the weak. Swords murder the innocent. It’s not the tool, it’s what we do with it. I could brain you with my #7 plane, stab you with a chisel, or use a chunky steel watch as a knuckleduster, which is how Mr. Bond broke his Rolex in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the book, not the movie). Though the tools you have access to will tend to guide your choices, whether you're conscious of it or not. When you're holding a hammer, you look for nails. I'm much more likely to joint an edge with my #7 that I am to hit anyone with it.

When I was thinking about getting a new (to me) car back when I lived in Finland, I considered getting a four-wheel drive, because it's that much less likely to get stuck in the snow. I asked a friend who really knows cars, and he said: “with four-wheel drive, you still get stuck, but in worse places”. Tools guide choices.

It's also true that all new technologies have unanticipated, often unanticipatable, consequences, for good or ill. I'm not a prophet, so won't make any predictions about the unanticipatable. But the obvious (to me at least) negative consequence of chatbot AI, like ChatGPT, is that we will outsource our thinking, and so become less good at it. Plato famously decried writing things down as bad for the memory. Folk are continuously ascribing all sorts of things to Plato and others (as Abe Lincoln famously tweeted: don't believe everything you read on the internet), so I'll quote him at length. He puts this story into Socrates' mouth:

The story goes that Thamus [a mythical inventor of writing] said many things to Theuth [a mythical king of Egypt] in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (Source: http://www.antiquitatem.com/en/origin-of-writing-memory-plato-phaedrus/)

He was right, but I think we'd all agree that the loss of memory skill is worth the upside of writing. I think ChatGPT threatens to create a net dumbing effect on its users. Nicholas Carr warned of a similar effect of the internet itself, and most particularly Google, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. He was not wrong. I don't know how many times I've explained to my kids that googling a search term is not the same thing as researching a topic. So we should be watchful for any feeling along the lines of ‘I'm too busy/tired/stressed to do this myself so I'll just get the bot to do it'. The main red flag for this is whether something you used to do yourself becomes “too difficult” if you don't have access to the AI helper.

Banning the new technology, as some people whose livelihoods are affected by it are calling for, is never an effective solution. It has been tried over and over again, just about every time a new, revolutionary, technology comes along. Banning nuclear weapons didn’t stop North Korea from getting their hands on them. It simply doesn’t work. I bet the horse-drawn carriage makers did their damndest to get those nasty mechanised car things taken off the streets. Or restricted to the speed of a horse. And guess what? Some carriage makers went into business making bodies for cars, and some people still drive horse-powered carriages for fun. But yes, an awful lot of them just went out of business. I don’t say ‘adapt or die’. But I do say ‘regulate and adapt, or die’.

Personally, as a self-employed swordsmanship instructor and writer, I can see how using AI could help me produce better books, faster, by (for instance) creating outlines, rough first drafts of specific chapters, back-cover blurb, etc. But there is no way for ChatGPT to run a seminar for me, or to conceive of the idea of a new training manual for the Art of Arms. Also, I’m very much at the bespoke, luxury, end of the market. Absolutely nobody has an existential need for a swordsmanship lesson, so automation is not a concern. You can probably tell from the headline photo, in which I'm wearing a vintage hand-winding Roamer watch from the 50s, and using a Record #4 hand plane from the 30s that belonged to my grandfather, that I'm aesthetically always on the side of the old ways. I teach swordsmanship, not shooting.

A Roamer watch, a Record plane. And the first five saws in the saw till are my Florips.

Swords, spears, and bows used to be state-of-the-art weaponry, but were superseded by guns. Swordsmanship and archery devolved into competitive sports (throwing javelins did too), and even twenty years ago there were precious few swordmakers in the Western world. But there has been a renaissance of historical martial arts, and a consequent renaissance in the craft of swordmaking. That doesn’t help those smiths who went out of business a couple of centuries ago, but it does suggest that there will be a resurgence of appreciation for older ways of doing things in the future. It’s hard to think of a technology where this doesn’t apply.

Music? CDs and tapes killed vinyl… but vinyl came back stronger than ever. We now have streaming at the bottom end, and vinyl at the top, with CDs in the middle.

Ebooks were supposed to kill print stone dead… only for print to survive, thrive, and for high-end leather bound editions to become more popular, and more profitable, than ever. Brandon Sanderson’s latest kickstarter, for a leather bound 10th anniversary edition of his Way of Kings, raised just under seven MILLION dollars! (I could get a thousand Breitling watches for that! not to mention a thousand Holtey planes!) But print is dead, right?

Midjourney image generation does not threaten David Hockney, or Lina Iris Viktor. It does threaten folk making a living producing graphics for websites. Chat GPT does not threaten poets like Simon Armitage or Amanda Gorman. It does threaten writers making generic blog posts for other people's websites (who, incidentally, keep pitching me to write completely off-topic crap for this site!).

It’s not my place to offer advice to people in different circumstances to mine (and unsolicited advice is usually obnoxious). But I see it, if you work in areas likely to be affected by AI, you have two options. Either master the new tool and use it to make your work even better, or brand yourself at the other end of the market. Both work, and both have value. There will always be people looking for the cheapest option, but there will also always be people looking for the hand made option, and who are willing to pay for it.

 

Further reading:

My brother Richard Windsor blogs about all sorts of tech stuff, including AI, from the perspective of investment advice. You can find his bearish take on GPT-4 here: https://www.radiofreemobile.com/gpt-4-the-law-of-diminishing-returns/

Joanna Penn got me thinking about AI as it affects writers, and she has written about it extensively on her blog, here: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/blog/

Wikipedia article on the “quartz crisis”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis

John Harrison, winner of the Longitude prize, and maker of clocks, including all-wood clocks (you can jump down that rabbit hole yourself!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

 

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