FLAT of my STRONG

Should sword blocks be done with the blade or the flat of the blade?
Can you block with the weak or must it be with the strong?

Parts of a sword

Some people make it very clear which way is correct:

He's doing unarmoured longsword, which means that you can use both hands' strength as part of the block.
When doing SCA florentine however we only have the strength of a single hand to block with. We have always been told to block with the blade and I think it is for this exact reason.

We will have to try out blocking with the flat of our strong, to determine if it is even possible with single handed swords.

In SCA heavy, we're assumed to be wearing chainmail; which means that light cuts are completely ignored. This means that to block a shot, you only have to take the force out of a blow. You don't have to prevent the blade touching you, only foul the shot. This means that a kind of weak block can be effective with the weak part of the blade.

So it may be possible that we'll end up make a video like the above one, but with us chanting "blade of my weak".
I somehow doubt it though.

Assumed Armour

As far as I can see, there are several distinct classes of armour worn throughout history that are designed to protect the wearer from sword attacks:

• unarmoured / soft leather
• chainmail
• plate mail

There are a few different kinds of attacks with a sword

• cutting - running the edge along the target
• bashing - hitting the target with the edge
• thrusting - penetrating the target with the point

Now it may seem obvious, but the different armour types protect against the different attacks to varying degrees.

Unarmoured or soft leather gives virtually no protection, and arguably thrusting is the most effective attack.

Chainmail mostly provides protection from cutting, some from bashing; but little from thrusting.

Plate mail provides total protection from cutting, good from bashing, and good from thrusting (except in the gaps, obviously). These are clearly over simplifications, but they can help to think of the optimal attack strategy.

Different sword fighting schools assume differently armoured targets. In competition, people generally wear more armour than the "assumed armour" for safety and (in sca heavy) looking better. Here's some examples of the assumed armour of different schools.

• modern fencing - unarmoured
• sca fencing - unarmoured
• eskrima - unarmoured
• kendo - unarmoured

• sca heavy - chainmail and helm 

• half-swording - plate mail

I couldn't find any groups that compete with full plate assumed armour, but I'm sure they exist. The difficulty would be making it safe. The full plate techniques of aiming for thrusts in the unarmoured parts (groin, eyes, palm, underarm) would pretty much always be dangerous at full speed.

The point is, striking techniques used by different groups must be understood in terms of the armour they are designed to be used against, not necessarily the armour people compete in. It's pointless comparing the slashes of eskrima to the snaps in sca, or the half-sword thrusting technique to thrusting in modern fencing; they were designed to work around different levels of passive defense.

With this in mind, the SCA heavy techniques of "hitting" the target make a lot of sense. Thrusts however, have always been a source of confusion for me. With a two handed weapon, it's easy enough to get a "good" thrust; but with a single handed sword it seems quite difficult. I was always told that it can't be a "push" but must be a strike. After seeing some videos on youtube which showed how easily a broadsword can thrust through chainmail, I've come to think that thrusts should be more effective in sca heavy combat. Maybe all that should be required is a strong "push" with the thrust. I'm pretty certain that the foam/rubber thrusting tips we use, make it difficult to judge a good thrust to begin with. Also I've found it impossible to find a legal thrusting tip that doesn't completely change the weighting of the sword, making it tip heavy; when really it should be lighter at the point. It seems the thrusting tip requirements have been reduced in the last year or so, which is a good thing. I hope at some point we can use a simple leather cap, or just thrust with the rattan; for single handed swords at least.

Brion of Bellatrix

Information from over the seas is oft hard come by, however word of the deeds of Brion of Bellatrix has reached our shore. I was interested to discover this youtube video of Brion demonstrating pell work.

In particular there is some interesting advice here regarding training with two swords using a 'parallel' method. In this drill, one does the same movements of their preferred drills (on a pell or partner) however instead of striking with one sword, the practitioner uses both swords tracking adjacent at the same area of the pell (or partner). naedyr and myself have recently discovered this technique independently and it has highlighted both our common mistakes and some new and interesting shot possibilities. We aim to upload a video of some of these drills.

Fechtbücher

Here's some fight-books I've been reading recently:

• Sigmund-Ringecks-Knightly-Arts-Combat - medieval wrestling, fighting in full plate mail, wrestling in full plate mail, and more wrestling. The double knee ball drop is a nasty technique.
• Fighting-German-Longsword - Step by step lessons on Johannes Liechtenauer two-handed sword techniques.
• Lessons-Broad-Single-Fighting - An interesting 19th century (?) book which describes a form of stick fighting which sounds very similar to SCA heavy fighting, along with sabre fencing and stick based self defense.
• Samurai-Rings-Hagakure-Bushido-Japan - A very interesting read on Miyamoto Musashi's approach to fighting, along with what I found to be complete uninteresting essays on bushido.

I'm still waiting on these two to be delivered :

• Medieval-Art-Sword-Shield-Armouries - I'm hoping these sword/buckler techniques can be applied to florentine fighting.
• Medieval-Swordsmanship-Illustrated-Methods-Techniques - a collection of medieval fighting techniques.

Introduction

Greetings all,

This is the first time I have been involved in a blog so excuse my poor blogging skills. This is a joint blog currently run by myself (Gib) and Naedyr from the SCA who have developed an interesting in honing our skills at competing in the SCA ruleset for heavy fighting. In particular the SCA household (Reverie) that we participate in has predominantly florentine (two-sword wielding) fighters. We are unashamedly unapologetically speaking from an SCA bent. With that said, some excellent online resources for SCA heavy fighting or Fechtbücher are (and have been for some time) available, most notably:

House Bellatrix

Duke Gaston 's Res Ducis

and more historically any of the Fechtbücher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechtbuch#German_Fechtb.C3.BCcher

While these resources focus on diverse areas of fighting for sword and shield or two handed weapon combinations, very little has been said regarding florentine fighting. There are a few reasons why this may be so.

Florentine itself is a somewhat contentious issue with little historical evidence indicating that two swords were infact used at all in the context of battle or sport between 600 and 1600AD. To date we have not seen anything which challenges this statement and concede that Florentine in the SCA is more of a 'what about if' than a 'but that's what they did'. We, however, feel that Florentine adds a unique and fresh perspective to combat in the SCA under the assumed armor (mostly chainmail + helm) rules. We can postulate on a few reasons why that might be.

Florentine is not a weapons combination which is readily accessible to newbies. Very few people will state that fighting with two weapons is easier than one. The joy of a shield is that it allows the emphasis of your attacks to come from your preferred hand. With this in mind viable shot selection comes down to a range of movement options described in detail by Duke Gaston 's Res Ducis and a range of target locations from the legs, body, shoulders, arms and head. Adding another sword effectively doubles the possibilities for selecting an attack. This means that in training one needs to do all the training of a single sword user and then do it all over again for the other hand. So far we have found little reason why someone would be incapable of learning to use both hands to attack early on, however our experience has been that the requirements of a great deal of training time (including the adaptation or generation of a number of drills) to simply feel comfortable fighting from either hand equally is prohibitive. It is certainly a valid argument that if this time had been spent on sword and board fighting, we may have progressed further.. I guess we will never know for sure :).

There are a number of reasons why florentine has not historically been an option. We can only base our knowledge of medieval armor exploits from fechtbuch, museum exhibits, internet images and the host of experimental displays on youtube such as this or this, it seems apparent that the arms (and hands) may be the biggest vulnerability under assumed SCA armor. Therefore we think that while the additional vector of attack has its merits the underlying requirement to expose both arms (and hands) to attack could greatly dimish any practitioners enthusiasm :). It could also be that florentine fighting training systems aren't present in SCA period documentation because, like Miyamoto Musashi's niten'ichi, while demonstrably effective now no one ever thought to try it. Or that if they had the art was lost because they didn't live long enough to show anyone or bother writing it down. Again I doubt we will ever know for sure.

I'm sure there are many other reasons why one simply can't look up Sir Blah's book of florentine fighting but in any case we haven't managed to do so yet. Therefore we hope you stay tuned to our version instead and provide feedback on what you think.