Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

[Galloglaich]

I think it's best to interprets Silver's rants as over-generalizations based on experience with bad rapier instructors. Lots of it comes from xenophobia and personal grudges, no doubt, but the idea some folks teaching dubious martial arts makes sense to me. You see that all the time in our contemporary moment. Rapiers fencers who only had experience defending against the thrust and never practiced rough sparring might well have had trouble against natural fighters.

I agree with all that.. no doubt there were some charlatans around and the more 'rough and ready' approach that some of the English fighters had could clearly trump more sophisticated but delicate specialists. I think there is a famous anecdote about a stranded English seaman fighting several rapierists in the Spanish court with a quarterstaff?

I just question the idea that semi-trained fencers - with any weapon - had little to fear from the inexperienced. I think self-defense is a harder problem than that.

I agree in theory it doesn't sound like it should make sense, but I'm just going by what I have observed. I should be clear, this is only reflective of my own experiences, I don't pretend that they are universal.

That said, by what I've seen, with certain weapons there just seems to be a few tricks and / or basic mistakes which can undo you, as soon as you learn to fix that you become dangerous. I think it's maybe because the weapon is more counter-intuitive to use or because there is too much to think about. A newby spear guy can make a fast thrust but usually doesn't recover effectively, and you can rush them after they thrust (they usually have no idea what to do when you get inside their range). A newby sword-and-shield guy often doesn't even use his shield at all, or if he does, leaves his lower legs exposed, and will react to a high feint, making it easy to get them. All new fighters tend to telegraph but this seems particularly exaggerated with the longsword; why, I'm not sure. A telegraphed oberhau (cut from above) can be easily dealt with by a single-time zwerch, or a double-time krumph-shiel, or even a simple hengen - counter... or by just a step back and a nachreisen. Often in fact it's against newbies that you can really execute these techniques most cleanly in sparring, I usually take the opportunity to try disarms and take-downs and so on.

From my own experience, the same guy I can just take out over and over and over again in their first couple of weeks of trying to spar, twenty times in a row, two or three months later I'm having much more trouble with and getting some double-kills if they are fast. But that is just anecdotal.

By the way, speaking of advanced techniques, here is a nice video from MEMAG in Maryland, demonstrating a wide range of technique progressions from various Liechtenauer manuscripts, done deliberate, slow and loose to be easy to see. I like :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLSn0...ature=youtu.be

One of the reasons I like it in particular is that you can see one or the other fighters telegraphing their intent in an obvious way and the other person reacting 'indes' and adjusting their counter or their attack. This looks a little goofy but it's illustrating the decision-points.

G