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

Tag: fiore

Memory is the key component of mastery. Being able to effortlessly recall and recombine elements held in long term memory is the essence of creativity and expertise. This is why I have deliberately crafted my School’s syllabus to be a memory palace. It is obvious when reading Fiore that his system has been organised for memorisation, which is especially apparent in his use of numbers: the 4 guards of abrazare; the “8 things you should know” for abrazare; the four blows of the dagger, and the “five things you should know” to do against the dagger… five plus four is nine, so is it any wonder that there are nine remedy masters of the dagger?

The basic level classes in Helsinki have been focussing on these aspects of the system for the last couple of weeks. Just as Fiore loves us and wants us to be happy, and so provides an answer to every sword-related problem, so too do I love my students, and want them to be happy, so have created all sorts of devices to help them remember the things they wish to learn. Among these efforts are a set of memory verses, published in 2010 as The Armizare Vade Mecum.
By way of a wishing you all a merry Christmas, here is the verse on the nine masters of the dagger. The full text is below the video.
See you next year!

Here we are, Nine masters we,
Teach you all to remedy,
Safe defence for any threat,
We have ne’er been beaten yet!

When the blows come from above,
From right or left, or with a shove,
Left hand, crossed hands, right hand then
Both hands high we win again!
When he comes to collar grab,
Fifth will cover any stab!
Dagger high, it’s sixth you see,
Disarm, stab him, done with glee!
Seventh has the dagger crossed
In armour he has never lost,
Dagger low, eighth of course,
Also done hands joined for force.
Then both hands down for number nine:
See that player wince and whine!

But watchful for the counters thus:
See he comes to elbow push,
Or trap your wrist, or feint you see,
Or see it not! Then one two three!
When he wants to give you strife,
Go fast against his dang’rous knife!
Hands arms and elbows, all must play
And surely you will win the day.

O scholar you must heed our call
Arms crossed armour; never fall;
Make your cover, make your strike,
Then to break him as you like.
The five things all go together:
Like sword and dagger, steel and leather:
Disarm locks breaks throw him down,
Strike to win the master’s crown!

I have a special place in my heart for novelists who actually practise the skills that their characters need. Of these perhaps the best example alive today is Christian Cameron. His US Navy aviation thrillers (co-written under the nom-de-plume Gordon Kent) are informed by his 12 years in the Navy; his ancient Greek novels (the series Tyrant  and The Long War and his stand-alone biographical novel on Alexander the Great Alexander: God of War) are informed by his years of ancient Greek re-enactment. And to write his current two series, one strictly medieval, the other medieval-fantasy (the Traitor Son cycle under the incredibly impenetrable nom-de-plume Miles Cameron), he came all the way from Toronto to Finland to train with me in Fiore’s Art of Arms. He has been training daily ever since, and has fought in armoured tournaments in Canada, the USA, and Italy.

That's him on the left belting someone in the head.
That's him on the left belting someone in the head.

It’s really no wonder then that his descriptions of armoured combat are the best in the business, bar none. I have written elsewhere about how I first came in contact with his work, and how from the first, I was impressed with the accuracy and depth of his fight scenes.

So you may imagine the degree of anticipation I felt on getting my copy of his latest, the first in the Ill Made Knight series. This is right in my home turf, set in the 100 years war, and, get this, a young Fiore dei Liberi appears as a character! I had very high hopes for this book. And Christian delivered. The book is a triumph of plot, character, and action. It works as fiction, and it works at all the sword-nerdy levels you could possibly want. It is accurate enough, I think, to be used on a history curriculum, with the main features of the campaigns (Poitiers in 1356 and Brignais in 1362) rendered in detail. We see Chaucer, Froissart, Jean le Maingre, Geoffrey Charny, and a host of other well-known 14th century people, alive on the page as they have never been before. The main protagonist, William Gold, was a real lieutenant of Sir John Hawkswood, perhaps the most famous condottiero of them all, and yes, another character in the book.

It is in the minutiae of camp life that this book really stands apart. Sewing. Cleaning equipment. Cooking. Dealing with cheap weaponry when you can’t afford good stuff. This book takes you on campaign like no other ever written, except perhaps God of War.

Buy it, read it, tell your friends. Historical fiction was never closer to fact, or more rewarding to read.

Did I mention that Fiore is in it?? 

The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.
The first play of the dagger, from the Getty MS.

The real thing is the only bullshit-free scenario in martial arts. If you’re an MMA fighter, that’s the ring on fight night. If you’re a soldier, that’s being in the presence of the enemy. And if you are a swordsman, that is someone trying to take your head off with a blade. But the real thing must be prepared for, so we have drills, exercises and training. Problems only arise when we mistake one scenario (a training drill) for another (the real thing). To properly understand any drill, you must have a clear idea of exactly how it deviates from reality. I call this spotting the bullshit.

Let us take a simple example, a drill that is usually included in day one of our Fiore beginners’ course: the basic execution of Fiore’s first play of the dagger. This technique is a disarm, done against the common overhand blow.

In its basic set-up, the drill goes like this:

“Both players start left foot forwards, hands down, in a proper guard position. This is very artificial, and is intended only to create a consistent starting point for beginners.

Disarm and counter

  1. Attacker and defender both in porta di ferro, left foot forwards.
  2. Attacker passes to strike with a fendente. Aim it at the mask!
  3. Defender intercepts attacker’s wrist with his left hand and
  4. Turns it to the left, creating a leverage disarm with the dagger against the back of his wrist.
  5. Defender collects dagger and strikes”

(Quoted from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger page 51)

There is nothing wrong with this, as a starting point. But it has at least the following dollops of bullshit in it:

  1. The attacker is not trying to kill you.
  2. The weapon is not sharp.
  3. The roles are pre-set, attacker and defender.
  4. You can’t run away or call the cops.
  5. You have to wait for the attack.
  6. You are wearing protective gear, that will allow the attacker to make contact, but would not work against a real dagger (we tried this with a mask on a dummy: the mask failed against all medieval weaponry).
  7. The line of the attack is pre-selected.
  8. Your defence is pre-selected.
  9. The attacker is not allowed to counter or continue.
  10. The attack is done with little force.
  11. The attack is done slowly.

I am sure that you can think of other dollops, but 11 is enough to be going on with. So, how do we deal with this? How can we eliminate the bullshit without killing students?

To start with, number one cannot be trained outside of the real scenario. Don’t even try. It is this one element that really makes the difference between those that have done it for real and those that haven’t. (I haven’t and don’t intend to.) Regarding combat sports, you haven’t done it till you’ve been in the ring or competed in a serious tournament. Fortunately, those are much more survivable environments, so anybody who trains seriously enough can get there and do that art “for real”. This is one of the big attractions of combat sports I think: the real environment is available. I will never forget my first fencing competition. It was an eye-opener, to say the least!

So, if my drill above is so full of bullshit, why do we do it?

It does:

  1. Teach core mechanical principles, such as grounding, finding lines of weakness, etc.
  2. Teach core tactical principles, such as control the weapon before you strike; timing, and control of distance.
  3. Given the source of our art, it gives beginners a chance to reconstruct a technique from the book.

It is a perfectly good starting point. Just as a child learning to read sounding out the individual letters and creating the words is not really reading yet, we don’t say that they should just recognise the words straight away. This level of practice is a necessary step on the way to expertise.

But be aware that this drill does NOT:

  1. Teach a survival skill.
  2. Teach situational awareness.
  3. Teach decision making or judgement.
  4. Teach the ability to execute the action under pressure.

But given our list of eleven dollops of bullshit, we can map a route through training to systematically eliminate each of them in turn (except for the first). By applying the “who moves first” multiplier, for instance, we can eliminate point 5, so the “defender” is not required to wait, but can enter or move away, gaining some control. By allowing degrees of freedom for one or other student, we can eliminate 7, 8 and/or 9. By applying the rule of c’s you can increase the intensity in a systematic way, so eliminating 10 and 11.*

It is very important not to eliminate all the bullshit all at once. Especially when eliminating no. 2 by practising with sharps, you should absolutely keep all sorts of other bullshit present to avoid serious injury.

So, by carefully considering all the ways in which a set drill is not a real fight, you can design variations to the basic version to systematically clean up some of the bullshit. You will need lots of different drills, each with a different bullshit profile, to make sure that you are training in all of the attributes of the “real” technique. (For more on customising drills, see Mindful Practice).

Just for fun, and to see if you are paying attention, I have inserted one deliberate dollop of bullshit in this post: a deliberately misleading statement made for pedagogical purposes. Can you spot it?

* The “Rule of Cs” (abridged from Mastering the Art of Arms vol 1: the Medieval Dagger p136) every drill is first worked through with the players:

  • Cooperating in creating correct choreography

This is means exactly what it says: the students are just co-operating in going through the motions of the technique.

Once that is easy, increase the difficulty by increasing intensity, or introducing a degree of freedom (e.g. is the attacker might vary the line of attack), with one player adjusting the difficulty for the other to learn at their most efficient rate- if it works all the time, ramp it up- if it fails more than twice in ten reps, ease off a bit. This is called:

  • Coaching correct actions

Finally, the players each try within reason to make the drill work for them. When coaching, the attacker would try to make sure the defender can usually counter him; when competing, you just try to make your action work. This can be dangerous if it gets out of hand, so be careful, and wear full protection just in case. In practice, the more experienced scholar should get most of the hits, without departing from the drill. This is fine, and gives a good indication of whether your training regime is working. So,

  • Compete.

 

Despite my reasonable and gently-worded objections, the USFCA have gone ahead with their plans to create a pedagogical certification system for historical swordsmanship. I am clearly not alone in my feeling that this is a bad idea, as it has created something of a shit-storm on social media, including a series of vicious ad hominem attacks on the character of Dr. Ken Mondschein, who is largely credited as the architect of the certification system, and is the only person in the USFCA who is known to the HEMA community.

Ken’s work over the last decade or so includes a quality translation of Agrippa, a work on the two handed sword material of Alfieri (which I haven’t read yet, so can’t comment on), and a brief but pretty overview of Fiore’s life and work. He has been teaching swordsmanship for a long time now, and whatever differences of interpretation and approach we may have, I don’t doubt for one second his sincerity in serving the Art. He is also not in control of the program. There is a committee…

It does not help matters that the committee in charge includes one Mr Green, who seems to have black belts in every system that give them away free with a cup of coffee. I may be woefully wrong on this (they may be quite expensive), but check out his wall of certificates. I am frankly astonished that an academic of Ken’s standing (PhD, Fulbright scholar, multiple publications) would keep such company. To have a certification system in the hands of someone with so many dodgy certificates is irony indeed.

The central objection on FB seems to be that this program is creating masters. As if that title is somehow important. Now to be fair, the HEMA world was badly burned a decade and more ago by some false masters who used their self-appointed status to try to acquire control. One of them even said to me long ago “only a classically trained fencing master is qualified to read the treatises.” Yes, really. These people actively stood between students and the sources, which is profoundly abhorrent to me. But this is a different situation: at least here the process and qualifications seem to be reasonably transparent. Given the level of response, though, one would imagine that the USFCA “masters of historical swordsmanship” were stating that their “mastery” entitled them to screw your spouse and sell your children into slavery. (They are not, at least as far as I know.) It is also deeply inconsistent: Why no outrage over all the other masters out there? Massimo Malipiero, who produced the first ever publication of the Getty MS, was appointed a “Maestro di scherma antica” by the (Italian) Accademia Nazionale di Scherma in 1999. Where was the explosion of rage? And his group appointed  Andrea Rudatis a Magistro Medievale & Rinascimentale. Why the hell shouldn’t they? It’s their group. But why no character assassinations on Facebook? Alberto Bomprezzi was appointed a maestro by his students. Who had every right to do so. But why no great mockery from the twitterati? And my students in Singapore presented me with a Master at Arms rank in their organisation in 2006. Which is valid within their group. And nobody has had a go at me about it either. Why not? Perhaps because nobody felt threatened. Yes chaps, I think we have a bunch of very frightened people out there, because the big bad USFCA is coming for them. Only… they ain't.

Titles are currency, and have precisely the value we accord to them. I give no value to “Doctor” Gillian McKeith’s “PhD”. It comes from an unaccredited college. The fabulous Ben Goldacre got a qualification for his dead cat from the same source! I give much credit to my doctor’s qualifications, or I wouldn’t let him poke and prod me. I have no respect at all for the qualifications in historical swordsmanship that the USFCA may see fit to bestow, but I respect their right to call their members Il Gran Maestro di Maestri if they so choose.

Should the USFCA try to tell anyone outside their organisation that they cannot teach, then I will be first on the barricades, and lead the charge to have them taken down a peg or two and given six of the best with the swishiest cane we can find. Yes, we must be careful not to let the sports organisations take control of our art. But these unfair and utterly unfounded attacks on Ken’s character serve no useful purpose, and will achieve nothing. I think in the end Ken will come to regret his association with the historical fencing masters project, not least as he has far less control over it than most people seem to think, and so it will likely never produce much in the way of good teachers of the art. But an error of judgement does not make one a villain, and I think Ken is trying to use his position with the program to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Good luck with that.

I do not recognise the qualifications offered by the USFCA. They have no currency with me or my school. But Ken himself is always welcome, to train or teach.

Further reading:

Ken has written an open letter about this kerfuffle, which you can read here: http://historicalfencing.org/PDF/USFCA.pdf

Roger Norling makes several excellent points here: http://www.hroarr.com/regarding-the-usfca-hema-instructors-program/

I would also recommend you read all of these posts from Randy Packer at BoxWrestleFence.

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/08/27/bitter-beans-make-smooth-coffee/

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/08/26/bitter-words-black-hearts/

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2012/10/23/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-certification/

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2012/10/24/certification-pas-de-deux/

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2012/10/25/certification-avec-la-fouette-rond-de-jambe-en-tournant/

GaleazzoVBoucicault

Swordfights are resolutely, absolutely, analogue. It is random, chaotic, non-linear to a degree. But for centuries, millennia even, man has been imposing order on the chaos, cataloguing the actions, naming the techniques, systematising the Art of Combat. This begins with taxonomy- such as naming the positions swordsmen use or find themselves in, the blows that they strike, and the various ways in which they defend themselves. Understand this though: there are really no hard and fast rules. If I am in position A, and you are in position B, and I attack with a strike X and you are supposed to defend with action Y, you might do the right thing and win, or do the right thing and lose, or do the wrong thing and win, or do the wrong thing and lose, or do nothing and win, or do nothing and lose, or do any of the above and come to no conclusion.

I have consulted for enough game designers to know that the only accurate answer to any of their questions is “it depends”, but what they need and demand is a hard and fast instruction: if X, do Y. Games are, in their underlying mechanics, always digital. And usually binary. So making a sword fight in a game model a sword fight in reality is basically impossible. It can’t even be done sword-in-hand at the Salle, even if we were using sharp swords, because the critical stress of having someone actually trying to kill you is absent. But we can make the game such that the action sequences in the game model those in the source material precisely. The game can represent the ideal of the Art in a way that cannot be replicated in messy reality. So we cannot be accurate, but we can be true.

Let’s look at the blows of the sword. Fiore describes “seven blows”, six cuts (forehand and backhand, descending, rising, and across the middle) and the thrust. The thrusts are “of five types” (forehand and backhand, rising and descending, and one up the middle). So a total of eleven defined blows. He even goes so far as to determine the paths of the blows: fendente (descending), for instance, “breaks the teeth, exits at the knee, leaving a sign of blood”.

Fiore's lines for the descending blows.
Fiore's lines for the descending blows.

There is our paintbox: the multiple possible strikes broken down into two main types (cut and thrust), further subdivided into forehand and backhand, then again into seven lines. The rising thrust is neither forehand nor backhand. This is a gift to game design, as we can just use these ready-made definitions. And our game has all of the cuts exactly as described. We reduced the thrusts to just forehand and backhand, as we would otherwise be swamped with blow options, and in practice sword-in-hand, the critical distinction to make when defending against a thrust is the side from which it originates.

Every now and then in freeplay, someone will actually use one of the blows, just like in the book. It does happen. Every now and then. But usually the line is a little off, the exact path not quite as illustrated. So then what? When does a mandritto (forehand) become a roverso (backhand)? Where is zero? And how many people have perfect plumb and can see exactly where the line goes? And when does a fendente (descending blow) become a mezano (middle, horizontal, blow)? At five degrees above the horizontal? 15? Of course, in real life, experience and training tell you when you can treat a blow as if it were a fendente, and when you must treat it as a mezano, taking into account a hundred extra details, of which its path is just one. Beginners learn the rules and follow them precisely or fail. Advanced students break the rules successfully all the time. Swordsmanship is a spectrum phenomenon.

So let us think of the light spectrum. It is obvious that purple is not blue is not green is not yellow is not orange is not red. But where exactly does blue become green? In this area only judgement can answer, and it will vary from person to person, without anyone being demonstrably right or wrong. But for the purposes of children playing with paints, or indeed teaching beginners swordsmanship, the spectrum is useless. We take exemplar versions of the thing in question and treat it as the thing itself. The blue in the tube of paint, the line of fendente in the book before us, become the “correct” version, the only true one. And this is what happens when swordsmanship meets game design. Nuance is lost, the thousand thousand subtle variations and shades are forced together under one lump heading. And that is fine, it’s what we do for beginners every day in the Salle.

The over-simplifications we use for communicating the Art to beginners are useful. So while a game based on swordsmanship cannot ever truly replicate the Art, there is no doubt in my mind that it is possible for such a thing to be a fair representation of the Art in another medium. Simulators for flight training are not flying, but they are very useful in pilot training. The difficulty we face when translating analogue swordsmanship to digital gaming is precisely where to draw those lines, how to chop up the spectrum into a paintbox.

The blows were an easy example. Flowcharts of move and countermove are much, much harder. Not least as they presuppose that every technique attempted will be a reasonable facsimile of the technique intended, something which anyone who has ever seen a fencing match, let alone a real swordfight, knows is pretty unlikely. Deriving general rules from the Art to the game is not hard— most swordsmanship styles have at their base a “if he does this, do that” heuristic structure. But any decent game must allow a degree of uncertainty. In our game, when the imaginary attack and parry meet, there is a built-in randomizer that determines whether the attack was beaten wide or remains close— so determining whether the defender can strike freely or must enter in. Neither player can control this, though the defender is in a better position to affect it. (When Samuli, the designer, told me about this over the phone I called him a genius. He did not disagree.)

We also introduce uncertainty by limiting the number of cards in the player’s hands. This reduces the number of blows the players can make, in a way that is not realistic, but it is a necessary condition of the game. If we allowed every player to make every blow, whenever they felt like it, there would be no gameplay. Instead, we would have an endless round of bish-bash-bosh, with no real structure or tactics. It would also be impossible to hold all those cards in your hand at once.

Within the constraints of a card game, there are compromises that have to be made, that are unnecessary when holding a sword. But on the other hand, there are compromises we make in training to avoid killing our training partners that are rendered unnecessary by the non-lethal nature of the cards (we will have killer art, but not killing cards). I will be discussing all these at my Realities of Steel lecture at Ropecon on Saturday 27th July, and we will be demoing the game there on Friday and Saturday from 4-6pm, and on Sunday from 12-2pm. You can also find the game's Facebook page here; we are working on the website even now. At the end of the month we expect to go live with an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds to finish the game: the mechanics are done, but we will need pots of cash to finish the artwork, and for printing and shipping. Save your pennies, and watch this space!

Way back in the dawn of time when I came to Finland to open my school, my research into historical swordsmanship was at a very early stage. But we all have to start somewhere. As I wasn’t sure whether to focus on Vadi or Fiore I included elements of both systems in the material I taught my students. After a couple of years we dropped Vadi to focus on Fiore. It took about nine years to get that system solid enough to build on. So then I returned to Vadi (as most of you will probably know), and instead of a messy hodgepodge of material we have a solid base, and an expansion pack. Mixing the systems is a mistake, but not the one this post is about. To be sure, these days that approach is completely unnecessary and counter-productive, but I don’t think anybody really understood that then.

No, the mistake I made was to take an outlier, an apparent exception to the norm, and simply on the word of a native-speaker, make it part of the core training. Yes, I am referring to the infamous rising fendente blow. A quick look at the segno of blows in Vadi:

VadiBlows

might lead one to believe that the rota blows descend, and the fendente blows rise. But you only have to actually read the book to know that the image is misleading, and a quick cross-reference to Fiore, and indeed to every other Italian sword fighting system in the history of the world, will simply put that mistake right. But no, I took the word of a charismatic self-proclaimed “master”, who happened to be a native speaker of Italian, and cheerily taught my trusting students that in Vadi’s system the fendente is a rising blow.

When my first book, the Swordsman’s Companion, was in the editing phase, I had kept this bizarre misreading, and one of the editors picked it up. (Thanks Greg!) Unlike the “masters” of my acquaintance at the time, this editor did not simply say “No Guy, that’s wrong, it’s like this”: he sent me a page of explanation supported by quotations from the actual source to establish why Vadi’s fendente is a descending blow. The truth, the evidence, was incontrovertible.

So then I was faced with the first proper character test of my new career. Half of me thought that if I admitted such a basic mistake to my students, they would quit. The other half thought that this would be an excellent teaching opportunity, to set the example of changing research leading to changing interpretations, and the truth being infinitely more important than ego or embarrassment. But oh, God, it was scary. That same night in class, I candidly admitted my mistake to my students. I don’t think a single person quit in disgust at my making the error. And I know because they have told me that some were actually reassured or impressed that I could admit it so openly. Some of them are still training with me 11 years later; and some even, with enough beer in them, still rib me about it. (This is fraught with peril, so beware!)

So, the lessons learned:

1) Students worth teaching understand that their teacher is human and will make mistakes. What makes a good teacher is not infallibility, but transparency and integrity. How you deal with mistakes is crucial. That you will make them is a given.

2) If a point of interpretation is an outlier, and appears to contradict the normal usage of the term, check it, check it, check it, before relying on it.

3) It is perilous to mix treatises and systems. Study one system deeply and broadly before attempting to blend two potentially incompatible systems. Create a base of one master’s work before adding to it.

4) Always check the whole book. The usage of a given term will tend to be consistent. If it appears to mean something weird in one place, check that it means the same weird thing everywhere else. This is basically point 2 again, but it’s worth repeating!

5) Being a native speaker does not automatically make you an expert. When I was studying at at Edinburgh University, the professor of English Language was German. His speciality was phonology. Although his own pronunciation was decidedly Germanic, he knew more about how English words are created in the mouth than anybody else I have ever met. But finding out that the professor of English Language was German was something of a shock. Yes, there are nuances of understanding a language that only native speakers can attain, but most do not. And I have certainly met non-native speakers of English who use and understand English better than certain native speakers.

6) “Don’t pull that Maestro shit on me”: be very, very wary of anybody expressing an opinion on the research or practice of this Art (or indeed any art) whose authority rests on a title, or who seems to believe that the fact that it is their opinion should be sufficient to convince you. Expect supporting evidence: true experts will always a) have it and b) be happy to supply it. Listen to those who will provide it, and avoid like the plague those who will not.

And in case it isn’t clear: as the great Quiller-Couch once wrote: “Murder your darlings”. He meant that, when writing, be prepared to cut even your favourite sentences, words or phrases. For us involved in the researching our Art, be ready to sacrifice any opinion, way of doing things, or interpretation, if the evidence demands it.

I’ve been rushed off my feet with a plethora of interesting projects, including a card game version of Fiore’s art of arms, an upcoming trip to Oulu, and finding out the hard way that my youngest child is lactose intolerant, so time for blogging has been severely curtailed. I hope that the next few weeks have more free time!

First up, last week’s beginners course. This was week 5 out of 8. We are proceeding apace, and got them through to step three of first drill, as well as introducing the dagger disarm flowdrill. The class ran like so:

In the warm-up I introduced them to the plank, and as a couple showed up late, we reinforced the 20-pushups rule. I ran them all through the 4 guards drill, then the 4 steps and 3 turns, then added the stick. It was a slaughterfest, so I retaught them the aim of the game, and we did it again.

We then rechecked the correct placement of weight on the feet, using pressure, and had them pay attention to it in free footwork practice. Then I introduced them to their tailbones, using the same pressure test to establish the correct orientation of the tailbone relative to the pelvis to most easily transfer incoming horizontal force into the ground. Then I had them pay attention to either that or the weight distribution on their feet while moving around. I like giving students a sense of following their interests, and being engaged with the process of their training.

From there we reviewed the 3 disarms that they know, from 1st, 3rd and 9th masters. Then we put them together into the flow drill. THis went pretty well, and most students could see straight away which was the weakest link, so I then had them train that in isolation. Either the weakest individual technique, or the overall choreography, as they saw fit.

This lead us to 7pm, and swords, straight into the cutting drill, part one. Note that we have now dropped many of the preceding exercises, as a rocket discards empty fuel tanks. After letting them practise for a bit, I stopped them and demonstrated the negative effects of tension when striking, using the tyre. It tends to open their eyes to the Art when they see me strike hard with the sword, without closing my hand on the hilt. The mantra then: “long and low and smooth and clean”…

After some more cutting practice, we went over first drill steps one to three, and then to the book to show them how we justify step three academically. They finished off by going over steps one to three again. I promised them step four next week….

And delivered. Week 6 was a chance to review progress, and make sure last week’s lessons were still in place. After the warmup we did the four guards drill, then reviewed how to find the correct tailbone placement, and then back into the drill, paying attention to the tailbone. I then introduced them formally to our drill (for which I must invent a proper name- if you have any ideas let me know) in which you stand opposite a partner, and with minimum force make him move a foot, while he is trying to do the same to you. The point is to control his force and direct your own. After they had been doing it for a while I demonstrated with a young beginner, who was much smaller than me— and asked the question, how do I get useful training in that set-up? The answer being by using the barest minimum of effort, and letting her push me to the very edge of balance— and running it so close that I would sometimes be forced to step. Then had them seek out smaller, weaker opponents to practise this idea on.

From here I shamelessly plugged my new dagger book, a shipment of which arrived last week, by reading out the instructions for the flowdrill from it, which they then practiced. After which we reviewed the 2nd and 3rd plays of 1st master, then had them break the flowdrill with them.

I then showed them the 4th play, countering the 3rd, in the Book, emphasising the turn of the dagger to counter the lock.

This all took us only to ten to seven, but I figured their arms are getting strong enough for 40 minutes with the sword. Straight into part one of the cutting drill, then we stopped and went over the guards tutta porta di ferro and dente di zenghiaro in some detail, then returned to the cutting drill to practise them in situ. Sure enough the guards were much better.

Then 1st drill, steps 1-3, emphasising that it is “always my turn”: just because it is the partner’s turn to strike does not mean that we stop practising. In step one, if he is attacking with mandritto fendente, I am working on a perfect tutta porta di ferro.

Then the promised step 4, which I demonstrated with a champagne flute. Yes, really. It gave them a familiar mechanic to apply to the unfamiliar technique. Working on steps 3 and 4 took us to time. Only two weeks left, but I expect to have them through the first 7 plays of the first master of dagger, and all four steps of 2nd drill by the end. Watch this space!

 

Finding myself at odds with a colleague regarding what it is fair to call “Fiore’s Art” (or indeed any other historical master’s), I have decided to get down on virtual paper my views on the subject.

It is obvious that coming from a different time and culture we cannot ever perfectly recreate the Art as Fiore himself did it. Not even one of his students would ever have expressed the Art exactly as Fiore himself did it. But the Art is not just the specific choreography of the set plays; it is also a set of tactical principles, a set of movement mechanics, and a body of technique, intended to grant us victory in specific combat contexts. We have abundant exemplar techniques to work from, complete with clear instructions and before-and-after illustrations. With sufficient effort we can train ourselves to solve the swordsmanship problems that fall within this system’s scope, using Fiore’s techniques in accordance with his principles. Thus, express his Art.

As artists though we must apply the art according to our gifts and our natures- there is no sense in trying to be someone else, especially not if that someone else is long dead. Fiore claims Galeazzo da Mantoa as one of his students. It is possible that he was. And when he fought with Marshal Boucicaut, no doubt Fiore was proud of the way he did it, as he mentions it in his book. But equally, it is vanishingly unlikely that had Fiore taken Galeazzo’s place, he would have fought exactly the same way. But Galeazzo, according to Fiore, was applying Fiore’s Art.

A useful analogy here is the theatre. Shakespeare’ plays, for instance, have been put on in every conceivable way— from the attempts to get it all as close as possible to the way Shakespeare would have done it, at the Globe theatre, to modernist interpretations. The play is not the text, it is the production: the combination of text, performance direction, set, stage, costumes, lighting, and audience interaction. It is possible for the same production, the same play, to run for decades with the actors changing from time to time. Of course, bringing in a new actor changes the experience of the play, but it does not become a new production. A good example of this is the Savonlinna Opera Festival’s production of Aïda, which has been repeated almost every year since 1986. The cast has changed, but the physical interpretation of Verdi’s music and Ghislanzoni’s libretto are the same. The production is the same. It’s the same opera. Every single performance will have been unique in some way, but it’s still the same show.

As historical swordsmanship practitioners we are obliged, I think, to make a sincere effort to perform the art as closely as possible to the author’s original intentions. Getting back to Shakespeare:  The Globe theatre is a good example of this idea in practice. Especially in their “original pronunciation” productions. This is a movement to reproduce the accents that the actors would have had back in the day- and we though interpreting swordsmanship texts was difficult! This video explains it better than I could:

For examples that you can see for yourself if you wish, we can compare two movie versions of Hamlet (Shakespeare wrote for the movies, didn’t you know?), Franco Zeffirelli’s (1990) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1996):  two totally different films. Gibson (despite being an anti-semitic, misogynist, religious fundamentalist thug whose work should be boycotted on principle, but we didn’t know that when the film came out) was directed by Zeffirelli in an amazingly good, pretty much by-the-book, set-in-a-castle, classic interpretation. But the text is heavily cut: the running time is about 130min. It grossed about 20 million.

Branagh’s mighty opus weighs in at 246 minutes— almost twice as long as the Zeffirelli. It has the complete text of the play, and has been hailed by many critics as the greatest film adaptation of a Shakespeare play ever. But it was set in the nineteenth century! And it grossed only 5 million. So while Branagh was very faithful to the script, he made no attempt to make it look the way Shakespeare would have.

Nobody in their right mind would suggest that either of these movies “is not Hamlet”. Of course they are. Different takes on the same artistic vision, different bringings-to-life of the same core text, in a medium of which the original author could not have imagined. But Hamlet nonetheless.

The aim of play scripts and screenplays is of course quite different to that of swordsmanship manuals, and likewise their interpreters have very different goals. Putting on a play, or making a movie, is done for any number of reasons, not least among them to entertain an audience, express an artistic vision, and to make money. In the theatre it is perfectly normal for actors, directors, and the rest of the crew to be deliberately expressing their own interpretations, for their own reasons. Except in recreationist versions such as those at the Globe, there is no serious intent to reproduce the play exactly as the playwright saw it in his head. It is understood by all that any production is an interpretation. There is no practical limit on what constitutes a “correct” interpretation: there is really no concept of a “correct” interpretation.

The goals of Fiore’s Art are simpler: Kill your enemies. Survive the fight. Gain renown. This places a constraint on correctness. Whatever interpretation of a historical martial art we come up with must be:

A) Historical. It must be a sincere attempt to accurately reproduce the art as the author intended, taking into account all the data points at our disposal.

B) Martial. The interpretation must work under the conditions initially envisioned by the author.

C) Artistic. The interpretation must be expressed according to the precepts of the art in question: principles both tactical and moral; movement dynamics; tactics and technique.

We are not at liberty to simply excise the portions of the text that don’t suit our vision; nor can we export the art to a foreign context and still be “doing Fiore”. But within those constraints there are a pretty wide range of interpretations that still fit within the scope of “Fiore’s art”. A pretty wide range of tactical and technical choices, of routes to renown. Even a range of core movement dynamics, especially between versions of the text (I’m thinking of the Getty and the Pisani-Dossi here).

In conclusion then, I have no hesitation about claiming that what I teach is Fiore’s Art of Arms, in the same way that Branagh would claim his Hamlet is Shakespeare’s. We have no way to know exactly how Fiore would have fought, and anyway, it would have changed over time as he learned and trained and aged. But we have his book, and what I am teaching is, as far as I can manage it, at the cutting edge of Fiore research. It is a sincere attempt to follow the Master in thought, word and deed. I am not Fiore. And if he came back to life and saw what we do, the best I could hope for would be for him to shake his head sadly and say: “Guy, no. Not like that. It’s like this”. But I am a practitioner of his Art of Arms. And so are my students.

I have just come back from a very enjoyable and productive trip to Seattle, perhaps my favourite American city. The trip was organised around a weekend seminar for Lonin, and included some consulting work for the CLANG computer game.

I arrived at midday on Thursday, working on a 10 hour time difference. I was met at the airport by Eric and his two adorable little boys, age 2 and 4. Having duly inspected various lego contraptions and pronounced them without parallel, we went to lunch, where I got to not be in charge of the kids. So, all the fun of major kid chaos, and none of the responsibility. Lunch done, Eric dropped me at Neal’s, where my room was filled with cardboard boxes: a case of my new dagger book, a year’s supply of cigars from bestcigarprices.com, and a gigantic bit of Pilates kit for my wife.  I arrived in plenty of time for Neal’s book club meeting. The kitchen gradually filled with startlingly clever chaps, all bringing food and wine. This the kind of book club where, if you haven’t read the book, it really doesn’t matter- the book is just a starting point for conversation, liberally lubricated by the noble grape. My kind of book club, in other words. After a couple of hours of thoroughly civilized conversation and a glass or two, I crashed early, and was duly woken by the time difference at about 5am. This was all to the good as it meant I was up in time for Lonin’s early-bird Friday practice at their salle in SANCA. In this case, only Neal and Eric showed- I’m guessing the other students were saving themselves for the weekend. So Neal and Eric got some one-on-one, then we returned to Neal’s and I spent the morning catching up with emails and updating this blog, then lunch, a nap, and off into town to run some errands; notably finding a birthday present for my wife, posting off the dedicatee’s copy of my dagger book, and posting off the rondel daggers I made for Bob Charrette. I met Neal and his lovely wife Ellen for dinner at Sitka and Spruce, and thence off for a pint at the Pine Box, then reasonably early to bed.

Work began in earnest on Saturday morning. We loaded up the car with swords and were there at the community centre gym by 0930. Class started at 10 (while there were a few folk trickling in- I’ve never seen the slightest need to wait for late people- why should those who arrive on time be inconvenienced by those that don’t?), with a salute and a warm-up, then the four guards drill. The class was made up of mostly Lonin students, with four brave souls down from Canada; twenty in all. It was pretty obvious that though the Lonin students had seen the drill before, nobody knew it. This is normal, as until it is taught from first principles, most people who are using my syllabus but not under my direct instruction don’t understand the role of the solo drills. But 10 seconds of watching them work on it let me know pretty much exactly what we would be covering over the weekend. I spent much of the first morning on the first play of the first master of dagger, starting out in a set, formal, basic version, and building complexity into the drills gradually and systematically. We then moved on to the longsword cutting drill, and the longsword first drill. After lunch (an incredible feast organised by the redoubtable Eric) we went back to work on the cutting drill and the basic pair drills, first setting them up, then applying variations- especially looking at starting from way out of measure and moving smoothly forward without creating an exploitable tempo.

Class was followed by an informal dinner get-together at Eric’s (for which many thanks, especially to his delightful wife Michelle and the two rambunctious little pirates for giving there home over to a horde of smelly swordsmen), and quite early to bed (again!).

Sunday’s class began with the warm-up and a review of the dagger and longsword material from Saturday’s session, punctuated by a minute’s silence at 11am, to mark Veteran’s day (Remembrance Day in the UK). When a debt cannot possibly be repaid, all we can do is acknowledge it. I realised afterwards that two of the students present were veterans themselves, as they both expressed appreciation for the gesture. The rest of the morning was spent working on freeplay-type drills, as diagnostic tools and feedback mechanisms. By the end of it, everyone present could use freeplay to assess a weakness, find drills from the syllabus to address the problem, and return to freeplay to asses whether the fix had taken.

This lead us to lunch, after which it seemed that everyone (except me of course!) was knackered. Ideal circumstances for slipping in some serious mechanics training- finding and strengthening groundpaths, and finding more efficient ways to move. This included such stalwart favourites as the stability drill. What with questions, answers and revision, that took us nearly to the end of the allotted time- but I managed to squeeze in a few examples of reverse engineering any Fiore play from the syllabus- a student would pick a play at random, and I showed how to create it by discrete, syllabus-lead adjustments to first drill.

All in all, the seminar went extremely well, and I think everyone present got the training they were ready for.

That evening a few of the students, and the redoubtable Ellis Amdur (a terrifyingly good martial artist) and his super-glamorous wife Mageli Messac joined us for pre-dinner oysters, geoduck sashimi, and wine at Taylor Shellfish, before an absolutely first-class dinner at Terra Plata. I was pretty shattered by this stage, but had a marvellous evening nonetheless.

Monday morning had a blessedly slow start, before meeting the CLANG crew at 1030  to help them with their user interface for the game. Basically they wanted to spreadsheet the optimum guard relationships, and what could be done from each guard, and in which guard various blows ended up, and other Fiorean details. It was a very useful exercise for me, to have to think about Fiore in spreadsheet terms. We finished up for the day about 1530, giving me enough time to rest up before teaching the evening class at Lonin, where we covered part two of the cutting drill in some detail before sloping off to the pub.

Tuesday started with a two-hour private lesson for Eric, then back with CLANG for a few hours to finish off, not least going over the crossings of the sword. Class that evening was run by Neal (doing Victorian stick exercises and indian clubs, lots of fun) and Nathan Barnett (an old friend I had not seen for about 8 years, who now runs a fabulous little B+B) who ran a basic cutlass class. It was delightful to be just following orders, not having to think about what was coming next. Off to the pub again (of course!) then home at a reasonable hour.

Wednesday was basically free, so I met up with Ellis for a spot of duck in a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant that rivalled the ones I’ve eaten in in Singapore, and some martial arts chat, and then off to see Neal at Delve Kitchen, a simply incredible operation that is at the forefront of modernist cuisine. They were testing blenders- by blending golf balls. Yes, really. I don't think I've ever seen so many astonishingly intelligent young men in one place before, having so much fun wrecking stuff. It was a blast!

A little last-minute shopping, and home to pack. Not a small operation, given those blasted boxes. Some down-time and then my last class for Lonin, where we went over the dagger disarm flowdrill (see p125 of the book) and part two of the cutting drill again, this time as a circular drill. Lots of fun. Then, you guessed it, off to the pub, but a different one this time, more of a beer-gourmet-bar. Heavenly IPA to ensure a restful slumber.

Thursday morning we just had time for a one hour private lesson for Neal, and then off the the airport and home on Friday morning.

In every respect, personal, professional, culinary and cultural, an excellent trip. Thanks are due to all the students who made my classes such a pleasure to teach, to Eric for organising the whole thing, and to Neal for putting up with my turning his home into a post-office.

One of the mysteries surrounding German (i.e. Liechtenauer) and Italian (i.e. Fiore) unarmoured longsword combat (and I’m sure it keeps you awake at night too) is the different responses to a crossing at the middle of the sword (meza spada) in the two systems. At Fiore’s crossing of the swords in zogho stretto we see lots of entering with grips, pommel strikes and the like, whereas from the same starting point (swords crossed at the middles, some pressure in the contact, points threatening) Liechtenauer would have us wind, bind, or cut around (such as the twitch, zucken). My theory (and is it only a theory) is that the systems are optimised for slightly different weapons. Fiore’s longsword appears to be a little shorter than that used in the German manuscripts. (If you don't have examples to hand, you can find them at the  excellent Wiktenauer.)

It is is difficult to establish the size of the weapons from the illustrations in the manuals, but fortunately one Italian master, Filippo Vadi, explicitly determines the proportions of the sword in Chapter 2 of his De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi (Folio 4)

La spada vole avere iusta misura
Vole arivare el pomo sotto el brazio
Come qui apare nella mia scriptura.

The sword should be of the correct size,
The pommel should come under the arm
As it appears here in my writing.

(Translation here and below mine, from my The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest)

Using Vadi's stated proportions, my sword should be 133cm (my floor-armpit measurement). If we measure the illustrations, we find that the longest sword (relative to the man holding it) is 1.31:1. I am 175cm tall: keeping this ratio, my sword should be 133.6cm long, and my floor-armpit measurement is 133cm. Pretty close: but this is the longest sword in the sample. In contrast, the swords in Fiore appear to be a bit shorter. (There is no hard evidence for this.)

In Vadi’s explanatory chapters on the art of the sword, he makes several references to techniques that re clearly Fiorean, but also many to techniques that appear to be very similar to Liechtenauer. For instance, he describes at length the way to play at the meza spada, and includes the following:

On folio 11V
Ragion de giocho de spada. Capitolo XI
Theory of Swordplay chapter XI

Qvando tu sei amezza spada gionto.
Facendo tu el diritto o voi el riverso.
Farai che piglie el verso.
Di quel chio dico poi che sei al ponto.

When you have arrived at the half sword,
Making a mandritto or roverso,
Be sure to grasp the sense
Of what I say, because it is to the point.

Si tuui steggie tien pur lochio pronto
Et fa la uista brive con coverta.
Et tien la spada erta.
Che sopra el capo tuo le braccie gioche.

When you feint keep a sharp eye out,
And make the feint short, with the cover,
And hold the sword up,
So your arms play above your head.

So when crossed at the meza spada, we leave the crossing to strike. Lifting your hands up at this point seems to indicate exactly the kind of winding action we see in the Liechtenauer material.
We can even feint on one side and strike on the other:

On folio 12V

Ragion de mezza spada.. C. XIII
Theory of the half-sword.

Essendo tu pur gionto ameza spada
Tu po bem piu et piu volte martelare
Da un sol lato trare
Da laltra parte le tue viste vada.

Having then arrived at the half sword,
You can well hammer more and more times,
Striking on only one side,
Your feints go on the other side.

The problem is of course that all this is being done in circumstances where as Fioreans, we would only enter because the leave the crossing would mean being immediately struck (the defining feature of zogho stretto). But here’s the thing: with the longer swords, the situation is different. The extra length, only a few inches at most, nonetheless changes the game completely. To illustrate this I shot a short video with my student Ilpo Luhtala. The swords we used for the Fiorean crossing were an Arms and Armor Fechterspiele, at 123cm (48 1/2”) and a 117cm (46”) Pavel Moc Embleton (old version, the new ones are longer). We then switched to longer swords, about the right length for Vadi: a Peter Regenyi fechterspiele at 135cm (53”) and an Angus Trim sharp at 130cm (51”). As you can see in the video, with the shorter swords, crossed at the meza spada in measure to strike without stepping, it is easy to enter in, and very dangerous to leave the crossing, even for an instant. The points are very close to our faces. With the slightly longer swords (about 10-12% longer), the game changes completely, and there is time to safely cut around, provided you make a small motion, a “turn of the wrist”:

El mzzo tempo est solo uno suoltare
De nodo: presto et subito alferrire
E raro po falire
Quando le fatto con bona mesura

The half tempo is just one turn
Of the wrist: quick and immediately striking,
It can rarely fail
When it is done in good measure.

And we must close the line and strike with a single motion, as Vadi demands:

De tucta larte questo sie el givello
Perche inun tracto el ferrissi et para
O quanto e coxa cara
A praticarlo con bona ragione
E facte portar de larte el gonfalone.

Of all the art this is the jewel,
Because in one go it strikes and parries.
Oh what a valuable thing,
To practice it according to the good principles,
It will let you carry the banner of the Art.

You can find the rest of the translation free here: https://guywindsor.gumroad.com/l/sXBJh

Or even buy the book! The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest

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