Bastard sword construction

Here are some pictures of my SCA heavy bastard sword being constructed.
The grip is based on a black synthetic waster.

Pear shaped Pommel pewter 1.7 pounds
Square Cross aluminium 1 pounds


Bastard 134cm total cob 4.3cm from cross 101cm blade with tip 2.08kg finished

Square shield construction

Here are some pictures of my latest centre grip square shield construction.

Weight without tubing 3.0kg
It's a reasonably heavy shield, but it is nicely weighted, due to the handle being attached on the front face.

Evidence for what we do?

The SCA is unique in that it encourages exploration into sword play at realistic speeds for percussive force fighting. To my knowledge there are few other ways to experience this type of fighting safely. The second focus is on the martial aspects of pre plate armor sword play (and other weapons) and how it might actually work when applied. One area that gets a lot of apparent malice is that lack of backing up evidence for the style of fighting that is employed as there are no texts related to sword play much before 1400 but the sca is interested in fighting from 600 - 1600. I recently noticed a very interesting image that is freely available on this wiki article which relates to Arp Aslan from around the 11th century:


Of particular interest is the fine warrior located center and back wearing red. What strikes me is the stance he is employing in this image which appears to be in SCA terminology 'tent' or 'house' block. This has become the dominant stance for many of the top tier fighters in the SCA.



While there are no books instructing on this guard it is very effective in blocking sword blows with ones own sword and is very fast becoming the main stance I use when fighting sword and center boss (as the warrior appears to be doing in this image). What struck me is that I wouldn't have noticed this stance without being able to practice sword play at full percussive strengths due to the lack of perspective that 2 dimension drawings have. Further more this stance wouldn't
exist if single hand swords weren't regularly used as blocking devices on their edge. This appears to go against some of the information I have recently heard from other sword practitioners, clearly more investigation is required.

ps. I note a lot of plate metal armor around the legs and what appear to be plate gauntlets, I was under the impression such armor was very rare until several hundred years later, am I wrong?

Duke Davin teaches Great Weapons Part 1

armour effectiveness

An interesting post on the effectiveness of armour:
http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/muscle-vs-armor-blunt-impact.html

armour testing

A fairly in depth article on English Longbow Testing against various armor circa 1400

On Images and their value.

This one is short but sweet. I have been looking for an online database of actual medieval images with verified dates to do my own research. I have stumbled upon the University of Heidelberg's digital library here: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/helios/digi/handschriften.html

My first interesting image was this: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0047
I have heard a few people talk of helms as being very difficult to attack and demonstrations of helms that for all intents are purposes can not be broken by a sword. This image clearly shows a knight's helm being cloven by a sturdy strike.