#squire jess

[we-are-knight]

Training the Squire.

She took a certain swordtok channel talking about dual daggers as a bad weapon choice as a challenge.

This was a clip from her first time fencing using two daggers against me with my greatsword.

Somehow, after multiple attempts, she got the angle of the parry just right, and parried my sword, while stabbing me in the armpit.

Later, she managed this...

And a few other plays in which she hooked my sword with her off-hand dagger, before stabbing me.

She's got a lot more to work on, but she's determined to make "dual dagger combat" viable for the girlies.

[we-are-knight]

Some training highlights with Squire Jess.

I forced her to do some longsword to warmup. She thought she was clunky and shit. I disagree.

Then in her dual daggers against longsword, she got some funny doubles on me. 😅

[we-are-knight]

My squire has the cutest idle animations, seen shortly before she proceeded to stab our friends during sparring yesterday.

It's important to me that Squire Jess is able to be both incredibly cute and kid-sister-like, while also being able to knife fight like a demon. 😌

[we-are-knight]

I may have Knight-ed a little too close to the sun with Squire Jess tonight.

I decided to teach her armoured dagger. I like harness fencing as I want to fight like a knight, she likes wrestling whenever she can, it's a good combo.

So I decided to teach her a few plays from Czynner's fechtbuch.

Remember that Knight is 6'2, Squire Jess is 5'0. My knees are really close to her reach. No prizes for guessing which of the above figures was me by the end. 😅

If armoured sword is the knightiest art of fencing on foot, is armoured dagger the squire-liest...?

[we-are-knight]

Slowly conditioning Squire Jess to using some swords, by getting her a Swiss Degen.

For those curious, it's a "dagger" in the same way that a Messer is a "knife", and even appears in the same section of a fencing book from Switzerland that would ordinarily go to a Messer (though messer is also mentioned).

So she's still doing "dagger". Just ignore that it's as long as an arming sword. 🗡️

[we-are-knight]

"Yeah, swords and daggers are fun, but where's the serenity that comes from bludgeoning a child to death?" — Knight, 2026

I got the Squire to try sword and buckler Vs mace and targe. While I didn't always win, we got some cool shots, and I got to dabble with maces again after a long while.

[we-are-knight]

Incidentally, if anyone has fencing questions, I'm always happy to answer.

But if anyone has questions for Squire Jess, I'll feed them along to her. 😊

[we-are-knight]

One of the defined uses of a mace is not "breaking armour", but rather, breaking other weapons. Considering how top heavy the mace is, it's easy to see how it can at least disarm an opponent.

Practising with Squire Jess, one of the things that is important when training with the mace is to get used to the idea of hitting weapons hard, and people lightly. The trickiest part of fighting with the mace is being able to apply force until it is no longer needed. Part of the reason for the large rotations/moullinets you see me doing is to gather momentum that I can either increase or cut off at the point of impact.

In the above, I was trying to strike her Cinquedea to force her to present it, but due to striking it where I did, we had the result of her losing the sword altogether. You can even see my realisation (watch my feet!) after I finish the swing, as I advance at her (and in the audio, am laughing in surprise).

Unfortunately, Squire Jess got to remind me that a buckler is still a weapon, too...