Grumpy Swordsperson

Hi, I'm Ville, foilist and historical martial arts nerd from Helsinki, Finland.

[historicalfightingguide]

How to clean your HEMA swords

School of historical swordsmanship "Motus" gathers together to tell you the secrets maintaining and cleaning your weapon. We are at our 10th summer training ...

Found here.

[longswordsinlondon]

Jake Norwood earlier described his approach to Liechtenauer as like the way an artist will choose a master, study his works, and try to reproduce them with exactness. There are tons of ways to paint in the world, but only one way to paint like Rembrandt, and you don’t learn more about Rembrandt or get better at his style by doing whatever seems easiest in the moment or seems to come naturally. You do it by trying to make every brush stroke like his, identifying when and how you fail, and trying to do better the next time. (I probably mangled this analogy, but its Sunday afternoon at a Hema event and I’m tired.)

Mike Chidester (via longswordsinlondon)

[elsegno]

Using a rondel dagger to slice through about a half a mat of tatami. This was with a fairly exaggerated cut, but a descending slash was averaging 1/3 to ½. The dagger is a Tod Cutler made to historical specs. Don’t let people tell you rondel daggers can’t cut.

[lame-games]

Someone should try this with a triangle-edged rondel. Everyone knows rondels can cut, Meyer wouldn’t have made it a key part of his dagger otherwise.

[elsegno]

I was told the rationale for disallowing cuts in an east coast (US) dagger tourney was because rondels can’t cut, so not everyone knows this, haha. I don’t think I’ve seen a video of rondel dagger cut tests anywhere (though Boston Armizare should have one up on their channel soon from last night). I think a triangular spike type rondel should still be good for 3 layers of mat. We did one cut (unfilmed) with the dull false edge on the back of my rondel and it made it 2 layers in.

[pteappic]

Try wrapping a piece of linen around your mat and see how your results are then. 

Sure, a rondel has an edge. One of the big reasons to have an edge is to thrust - otherwise it’s very hard to drive it though several layers of fabric (it has to push the fibres aside like an awl and rondels tend to be pretty thick blades). But for hewing they really aren’t very good, especially the quick happy cuts that people tend to throw with them in ‘dagger sparring’.

You might find this bowie cutting an interesting comparison for what a very cutty knife can do: https://youtu.be/Pj-0BqdE2js?t=6m10s

[randomitemdrop]

Item: sword that works just like a standard Rapier, but delivers Poison damage instead of Piercing

[nymphei]

Lexicity: “The first and only comprehensive index for ancient language resources on the internet.”

With dictionaries, grammar resources, texts, and more, the website Lexicity can help you study ancient languages - ancient Greek, Egyptian, Mayan, Arabic, and 24 others.

[historicalfightingguide]

Seeing that in historical martial arts a big part of the whole endeavor is transcribing and translating old langugages into modern ones this website should be a useful tool for many.

It’s got old high german as well as old chinese, old persian, old norse, old english, old french, old turkic, old irish, church slavonic and others.

[historischvrijvechtennederland]

Perfect thrust….

[viktor-sbor]

ROY, MARIUS (1833-1921)- The fencing school (“La salle d’armes”)

[we-are-knight]

Hmm, interesting. Im pretty interested in the armor and weapons used in the modern-Germany geographic locations, swords specifically

Swords in Germany were incredibly diverse: let’s focus on pre-renaissance swords or else things are going to get out of hand.

Early examples of post-migration swords in Germany are based upon Norman design, in which we get early Arming Swords, a good example being the Albion “Ritter”.

Another example from Maciej of Artofswordmaking, this one being a 13th century example.

The Arming Sword is both THE quintessential ‘knightly’ sword, as well as THE most commonly used sword up until the rise of the rapier. But it’s not the ONLY sword out there, because…

MESSER

There’s no single form of a Messer, just as there is no exactly similar Arming Sword (save for a few examples out there that are mass-issued or otherwise commissioned), but the Messer is a distinctly German weapon. Single edged, it is for all purposes a knife made at sword length. Usually, these are single-handed, though some two-handed versions exist too.Contrary to common belief, they are not made and categorised as knives due to an exposed tang, but due to them usually being made by the cutler’s guilds as opposed to typical sword smiths. Medieval trade wars are serious business.

We then transition from one handed swords to the more famous weapon of German fighting arts: Longsword.

The Longsword becomes most prominent from about 1350 to 1500, but did exist as early as about 1200, though early longswords were basically just ever-so-lightly-longer-bladed arming swords with enough space to be gripped in both hands. Another image and product by Maciej best shows an example of this: note if you will, the very small grip, comparatively?

I believe @pteappic has mentioned that, in fact, modern HEMA longswords are too large for practice in the manner of early German fencing, as Ringeck felt that longswords should easily be held in either one or both hands. Certainly, one will notice that later German longswords (at least from 1450) are occasionally found to be nearly reaching Greatsword length.

After this we get to true greatswords and their transitional period longswords, but that’s outside of medieval context.

For armour, from early to high medieval period, we look above all else at maille. An exemplary image would be that of the Knights Teutonic:

This is a stylised image, but rather a good early Medieval caricature. Maille hauberk, sleeves and mittens, and leggings, over which a tabard or surcoat may be worn. Up until about the late 1400s, this isn’t terribly uncommon, and by the 1400′s you move onto the style of Gothic plate:

Transitional between these two is a lot of plate-and-mail gear, along with brigandine gear. The shift from maille to plate has a lot of halfway points.

[pteappic]

There’s a reasonably consistent difference we see between swords that are worn and swords that are transported. 

In the context of earlier sources like ps-Danzig or Ringeck, the sword used probably a weapon that was worn, which tends to mean something reasonably convenient to have on the body. Surviving artefacts often have hilts of 20cm or less and blades that top out at 90cm or so - a very convenient size to wear on your belt all day. In the roßfechten glosses we see the same sword being used in all three ways: one-handed, two-handed (’long’) and half-sworded (’short’). 

Full size HEMA feders, by contrast, tend to be sized for transport, which makes perfect sense for something that’s only used in class or tournaments. But it does make a sword that’s too large for reasonable one-handed use and hopelessly awkward to wear around. I’ve joked before that we’d see an immediate shift towards shorter feders if competitors were required to complete an obstacle course wearing their feder before fencing.

As an aside on armour development, the addition of some plate components to primarily mail armour is pretty standard by the 1200s. The coat of plates shows up around the late 1200s/early 1300s. That process carries on through the ‘transitional’ armours of the late 1300s, which are basically a full mail shirt plus a load of plate - these are contemporary for Fiore, just about. The Churburg armoury has a lot of surviving examples of these. With the rise of the backplate, we start to see a reduction in mail in the 1400s (to save weight).

This is about where my knowledge of specifically ‘German’ armour styles begins. The full Gothic plate shown is very late - 1480s or so. Before then we have a series of fairly identifiable regional styles, starting with the square kastenbrust of around 1420. This is what Jess Finley wears for armoured combat. From 1440 or so they become rounded and start to acquire fluting, as in this 1440s example from the Kelvingrove in Glasgow shows.

This style is very commonly shown in early Liechtenauer glosses and related material - Talhoffer and Peter von Danzig both have it. Then the breastplate slims down and we get to early Gothic forms ca 1460, and finally we move to the super-fluted late/high Gothic shown already by around 1480.

The fully developed brigandine is mostly contemporary with these later Gothic armours, but is a bit more of a western style - there’s lots of accounts of them in Burgundy and so on. 

[we-are-knight]

Thanks Tea!

[victoriansword]

Why Reproduction Sabres SUCK

Most reproduction sabres and related military type sword reproductions suck. It’s not usually build quality or aesthetics that are their main problem. This is a look at why they are so bad.

[grumpyswordsperson]

Too long, didn’t watch: It’s because historically swords grow thinner towards the point, while many modern reproductions are just sharpened pieces of flat stock.

[yenthough]

[ordinaryvisionary-blog]

News about the progress of ProGauntlet gloves after a prototype was tested at the DLC last week-end. Read about it on their blog:

http://progauntlet.nl/#news-section

[ordinaryvisionary-blog]

State of the art ProGauntlet prototype, tested by Dutch top fencer Arto Fama in tournament at Dutch Lions Cup 2018 in Utrecht, last the week-end. 

[hunlarpfag]

A bunch of new stuff from Landsknecht Emporium. Some of them are new upgraded versions, some are unique. All of them will be sold soon in a sale with discounts in the upcoming days as they are raising money for new equipment.

[victoriansword]

an article by Matt Easton

[upennmanuscripts]

We’re very sad because we only have a few students registered for our Fall course at the University of Pennsylvania. If you or a friend are an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, if you’ve ever thought it might be cool to learn about medieval manuscripts, particularly if you’re working towards a minor in digital humanities and/or global medieval studies, please consider enrolling in ARTH343: The Medieval Manuscript in the 21st Century.

Have you ever wondered how we know what we know about the Middle Ages?  It is very largely through books - handwritten documents, marks of lives well spent, historical documents and, often, consummate works of art. Very few people ever get the chance to handle illuminated manuscripts. This is your chance. Using the extraordinary resources of UPenn’s Kislak Center and the Free Library of Philadelphia, students of this course will handle, describe, and learn about Books of Hours, the private illuminated prayer books of noble men and women from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.  Students will also learn to use the most up to date digital tools and technologies to create their own histories and narratives about these books of hours, and to publish their work on the web should they so choose.

[grumpyswordsperson]

A translation of the 1470 Mamluk Treatise

A translation of the of the 1470 Mamluk Treatise Kitāb al-makhzūn jāmiʻ al-funūn (The treasure that combines all arts).

If you want to learn a bit more about the manuscript, click here.

[pteappic]

Can’t see the system for the trees

Edited out of a discussion on Facebook

Lots of people talk about a martial art as a decision tree: first they do this, so I do that, then they can respond in these ways, so I respond in these ways, and os on. I don’t like the decision tree model. I think it puts things into too rigid a structure to capture the infinite variations of actual fencing - you become unable to see the system for the trees.

Instead, I try to explain it in terms of a toolbox containing a bunch of tools*. Each of these tools can be used in certain situations to change the situation in certain ways. Once you’ve used one tool, the new situation may call for another application of the same tool, or for the use of a new tool. How we got to some given situation is irrelevant - the only thing which matters is what that situation is and what tools you have to deal with it. Sure, you could hypothetically map out all the possible state changes and make it into a single decision tree/flowchart anyway. However, that’s far too much to keep in your head. Thinking about it as a small number of discrete tools means you can react to new situations with much less delay. In practice, you don’t even need to worry about all the tools at once - the type of situation you’re in naturally restricts the tools you can use.

This is close to something known in mathematics as a context-free grammar. The important difference from the decision tree model is prior state:

In a decision tree, “how did I get here” is an important factor, which shapes the options we think of and the decisions we make from that point. If someone doesn’t enter my tree as I’m expecting, or it goes sideways halfway through, the mental model of what’s going on breaks and I can’t make a new action In a context-free grammar, “how we got here” is completely irrelevant. The only things which matter for choosing a tool are “where am I now?” and “what can I do from here?”. That gives it resilience to varied circumstances. You can write a decision tree out of a bunch of these tools/functions (and any individual drill often is some form of this). But that tree is only useful for learning a specific lesson for a short period of time. A nice way to use this is by showing 3-4 separate action chains which all overlap on some central tool - this has the fun property of simultaneously isolating that tool and showing it in several relevant contexts. For a practical example, I do the unterschnitt a lot when fencing. One of the reasons it’s such a major part of my toolbox is I’ve drilled it to the point I can slice in reaction to the correct situation - no matter how the bout got to that situation. So it comes out any time their arms go up. Most people have that tool associated with a specific decision tree that’s not commonly entered**, so they don’t see when they reach a suitable situation for it.

* 17 of them, to be precise

** Schaitel -> Kron & rush in -> Unterschnitt