A hacker caught at Hampton Court

This weekend just past, I was at Hampton Court Palace, teaching a dussack workshop to a mix of long term sports fencers, Eastern martial artists and total novices.

I went in with a very set class structure, cuts followed by drills and summery, this all changed very quickly.

It became evident early on that these people needed a more rounded view of EBBMA (European blade based martial arts), than just waving the swords at each other.
So to begin with we went through the idea of memes, of choosing names for a position or technique,allow the mind to easily retain and fathom it's purpose (much like the naming systems used in kung fu styles).

This allowed us to cover the guard positions from Leichtenauer's longsword (both prior and post 1389), Lechkuchner's falchion and Meyer's dussack in short order.
The cuts were dealt with in the same way, working through Meyers, parting wrath and thwart lines, these identifying names really seemed to aid their understanding of the cuts and flows simply and quickly.

For the paired technique part of the class, I focused on Meyer's Bogen, dealing not only with the method of breaking that guard, but a

Yes I am using Fabris with a dussack, no I don't recommend it.

lso manners of entering past the point, of encouraging certain responses from an opponent, and if unable to dictate that; limiting his options to more predictable forms.

This led to some healthy debate, with the class taking breaks every 15 minutes or so , to assess the logic of entering in a certain way, offering at the viewpoints of several masters to colour and guide the students reasoning.
We spent a little time on Silver's times and definition of "the place"*; his, Thibault's and Fabris's use of distance to asses and deal with a threat as it develops (or lack thereof). From there we worked out how to use that information, advancing and retreating from the opponent in the Bogen.

The last part of the lesson was back to Talhoffer, looking again at the use of distance and visual tricks to encourage a response, tied this briefly into Fiore's sword in one hand, and childhood toy snatching (you have to take a class with me to understand this, it helps... honest).

It seems that this approach, my decision to argue from the perspective of several different masters, really helped give a varied, cross referenced overview of historical fencing styles and EBBMA. The feedback was glowing and I hope very much we get the opportunity to do something like this again soon.


*and of course the argument about thrust being faster than the cut...
Pictures courtesy of Nili S.