Stages of Pell Work

Pell work is significant throughout medieval sword fighting with frequent reference:

Of fight the disciplyne and exercise,
Was this. To have a pale or pile upright
Of mannys light, thus writeth old and wise,
Therewith a bacheler, or a yong knyght,
Shal first be taught to stonde and lerne to fight
And fanne of double wight tak him his shelde'
Of double wight a mace of tre to welde.

This fanne and mace whiche either double wight
Of shelde, and swayed in conflicte, or bataile,
Shal exercise as well swordmen, as knyghtes,
And noe man, as they sayn, is seyn prevaile,
In field, or in castell, though he assayle,
That with the pile, nethe first grete exercise,
thus writeth werrouris olde and wyse.

Have eche his pile or pale upfixed fast
And as it were uppon his mortal foe:
With mightyness and weapon most be cast
To fight stronge, that he ne skape him fro.
On hym with shelde, and sword avised so,
That thou be cloos, and Preste thy foe to smyte,
Lest of thyne own dethe thou be wite.

Empeche his head, his face, have at his gorge,
Beare at the brest, or sperne him on the side,
With myghte knyghtly poost ene as Seynt George,
lepe o thy foe, look if he dare abide;
Will he not flee? Wounde him, make his wounds wide,
Hew of his honde, his legge, his theys, his armys,
Is this the Turk, though he be sleyn, noon harm is.

Cotton library: Titus A, xxiii fol 6 and 7 (early 15th century.)

To this end I have begun using my own pell (simply made from treated pine post, i'll blog it shortly). While reference to why a pell is useful less content is available for exactly what work should be conducted on the pell.

How to Train Technique

These short videos are the inspiration for our ideas on how to train a given technique:

Duke Gaston, Duke University:

After watching those videos many, many times we found some older, more in depth videos of the (possibly) complete set of drills:

These Gaston/Baldar drills have inspired us to work all of our initial training for a specific technique into 2 person drills.

The fact that Baldar is right handed and Gaston is a lefty seems to be the reason that they do the sword drills in both hands, but it has an added benefit for us florentine guys; it helps train both hands equally.

So the way we've been training is generating drills for every technique that we want to use, by following these steps:

• Think of a technique, eg moulinet to the head, that you want to improve
• Establish what stance and position you would throw this shot from
• With a partner, at 1/4 speed, do the technique once and complete the technique
• Do the technique again, at 1/4 speed, and have the partner do the corresponding move; eg tent block for the moulinet to the head.
• Make sure you both go back to your starting stance and position
• Then the partner does the technique, and you do the block.
• That is one loop of the drill
• Continue in this loop at 1/4 speed, subtly playing with variations of the strike and block, so that you find the optimal way to perform the technique
• If it's a single sword drill, once that arm gets dead tired, do the drill in the other hand.
• Both partners should be thinking and commenting on their own strike and block, but also each others' as well. One really good way to do this is to film yourselves, and watch the footage afterwards; making sure to decide on what you need to work on next time.

Once you have a set of established drills, you can mix them up, move around while doing the drill, play around with the range, and try them at full speed in armour.

Not only does this sort of drilling help improve techniques you already know, it helps you to always be thinking of new techniques; and new ways to use existing moves.

We've found that drilling techniques this way allows us to deliberately learn techniques a lot quicker than before.

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.