Back to the source - Historical European Martial Arts documentary

the sword is a symbol that has been very important in Europe for a long time it's at the core of pretty much all our mythology and all the literature and stories that we have the first time anyone ever holds an actual steel sword the look in their eyes from you know very small children to old ladies and everyone in between there is a certain magic about that moment there are so many reasons that people who join humor and so many reasons that they stay in humor the the people who join are usually interested because firstly those swords I think that doesn't need explanation swords oh my gosh swords we love swords everybody loves swords the people who come in are interested in learning something and the people that stay find what they're looking for I could really describe or say why I love it so much I can do it whatever it's mentally challenging as well as physically challenging it sort of has an all-around workout of the body and the brain I love the community more over than anything just the how humble the fighters are and wanting and willing to help each other and it's more like we're brothers and arms to the past that's just a martial aspect we the techniques what you can do with weapons that are this length or longer or even shorter people get drawn to Hima usually because there's something about the source material that is exciting or romantic to them if you just want to learn how to fight there's a million places and disciplines that you can learn that you can do that so people see the sword and I think wow I want to be like that guy in that movie that I loved when I was 12 and secretly still love now I remember one time I ran into someone from high school and I was just I was pulling into my parents house and he was across the street and we just got to talking about where we are in life and what we're doing and of course Hema came up and he said oh yeah I've gone to a couple of those groups you know that do the reenactment and I've gotten to LARPing and we fight with swords to us like oh that's cool you know do you want to see my stuff of course I always have my gear in my trunk of my car and I pulled a longsword out and pulled a rapier out and I was showing him and just his eyes got big and he was like oh this is not what I thought you were doing when you said you do Hema you know one of the beautiful things about Hema is that there are various aspects that appeals to different people now some people in a love the physical objects the swords the history I like languages are like the books or the fun athletic parts of the competitions but very much you know the scholarship isn't it isn't divorced from from the practice the scholarship very much drives FEMA by doing this it connects us to the Past it creates a context that is a bit anachronistic in the modern world but that's also the appeal of it we want to do this because it's part of a heritage and a tradition that people are missing in a modern world where everything changes all the time the struggle European martial arts are those fighting systems those martial art forms to use a word to define itself which which originated or were widely practiced in Europe but at some point that historical period for us usually means Victorian era backwards Montini fifty thirty one makes a distinction between south and a remarkable european literature on how to fight from about 1300 onward right into the 20th century we have people writing books on how to fight dozens and dozens of books over the course of several centuries throughout europe some of these arts have died out some of them have evolved into other things so you know the modern sport of fencing the modern sport of boxing are the direct descendants of these martial arts but they're not practiced as they were back in the day in sports fencing when your coach gives you a technique to practice you practice that technique and he got it from his coach and this goes all the way back to to when they are create was created or or over time it evolves and changes but you know you've got it right because your coach tells you to do it and he says yes you've got it right and that doesn't happen in Hema or at least in first generation Hema that hasn't happened because we've got a source material and we've got nobody that's able to say this is how the technique is done at its core is the reconstruction of European martial arts through source material the research and the study of the old manuscripts and the application through really technique training sparring and competition it's a very very large term that often gets caught up with swordplay because that's the most prominent and common aspect of it but it's an enormous enormous umbrella hema covers so many different weapons I don't even know that we can really reasonably put all of Hema into a box there are unarmed forms we have grappling and wrestling forms we have grappling and wrestling forms that intersect with weapons forms we have weapons forms that existed just a few hundred years ago and may have been just as late as our great-grandparents and we have forms that go back hundreds of years gender speaking well we have Hema starting with the antiquity we have French to do littoral combat for instance you're looking at weapon sets such as sword and buckler and then longsword in the earliest periods wrestling use of the dagger against the dagger or unarmed against dagger use of pole weapons such as Spears halbert's pole axes and then as the swords developed through side sword into rapier and then from rapier into small sword in that same period you start to see Sabre and back sword come in as well Alec Koster's mounted combat all through that period as well variety that everyone finds something that appeals to them the level of variety that you see in the martial arts that people know about today that's the same level of a variety that really is available for weapons as well this kind of sword is called a montanta it comes from Spain and Portugal and Iberia in general you also find swords like it in Italy and elsewhere throughout Europe the style that's used with quote silver is that's used very much but like a short staff it's tradition is a little different from a lot of the Germanic traditions and that it deals quite often with a lot of simple strikes and fighting against multiple opponents an emphasis on solo girls rather than attack defend attack defend attack defend because of the unsafe leanness of even if one version of this weapon the montanta was used by frontline combatants Marines people protecting other people and generally any situation where someone found they'd be at a disadvantage and fighting against multiple opponents just part of why it developed actually was that in Spain during the Reconquista one of the biggest problems they had was that the armies of the Moors outnumbered Spanish and Portuguese so much so having developing systems of combat that were useful against multiple opponents was a very big problem today right now maybe there are a few of them that are actually practicing it and that as the different explanations there's more source material about somewhat understand about others but it's also just about hyping popularity within hema it seems like more people practice longsword than any other art the longsword is the main weapon of that period in a sign of Honor and courage and chivalry if you want this is the reason that people are interested in hema to begin with I think that we live in modern times and in modern times we change everything all the time like there's always the latest thing that you need the new iPhone than you whatever it is and we do that by discarding everything that is old you know you know in a way so when we've discarded that we tend to feel a bit you know ruthless and I think that is part of the reason why so many people are interested in hema because there's a link that ties us together with our ancestors through these sources you can read these manuscripts in old texts and hear the voices of old fencing monsters and it also is a manifestation of a different type of society with other values where you know honour and courage and so on are very important aspects of of everyone's lives as we progress that we find new material and we interpret that and put it up to be available for the public and people pick up this material and run with it and start practicing and become more efficient at it you want to see other weapon systems gaining in popularity which is you know one of the really real exciting things the idea that maybe one day I will actually learn how a good sickle fighter that'd be pretty awesome what-who having the sources is the difference between fighting animal fighting without arm not speaking of very specific techniques all very specific sources but we have mentioned in several manuscripts of this technique might not work if your opponent has armor all this technique works better against armor so the difference is between armored non armored combat some of it is weapon armor worked that's what it was built for it was built to keep people from stabbing you or chopping you into pieces and when you're studying an art that focuses on stabbing people and chopping them into pieces you have to find some way to win that arms race so in some cases it was done with things like pole axes so we see within within the German sources the pole axe or for that matter the Italian sources as a weapon used to kill a guy who is wearing armor and there's folks out there spent a lot of time focusing on that and those materials on that technique learning to do that effectively if you're just looking at a longsword and how does a guy with a longsword fight a guy in armor we have a series of techniques generally called harness Christian harness fighting right armored fighting which includes stuff like half sorting or the armored hand which is to grab your swords blade somewhere you know halfway along the blade you know hand on top of sharp blade glove or no glove whatever and then to use it essentially is a very small spear and we begin to see overlap and pull axe techniques and hooking and otherwise using that the weapon is an object to not just stab or chop your opponent but to manhandle your opponent so that you can create an opening in a place where the armor is weak maybe in the armpit or in the elbow or or deep inside the the gauntlet and then work that point in there and then drive it drive it in to cause some kind of damage to your opponent Grandia tempting you get up in Nevada in the bicep again sure it's not giving any like jujitsu it's a little bit like grappling it's about position you know position before submission working yourself into a place where you can get that point right where it needs to be driving it in and then really sinking into that advantage incidentally in the armored section of the medieval wrestling corpus is where we have all of the groundwork so medieval ground wrestling is armored wrestling the reason being often armored encounters would be encounters to the death you basically had to follow it through unless somebody gave up but generally not so we have quite a few number of pins a number of locks a number of ways to hold the man down so that you can draw your or his dagger and try to get at him in this armor once he's on the ground underneath you it's something that that operates while philosophically perhaps similar to bludgeon or an armored fighting mechanically it works very differently it looks nothing like the armored combat that we see in shows or on television or any other kind of place it looks to the untrained eye I think probably a little bit more like a brawl and to the trained eye it looks like something infinitely less like a brawl than what we might see on our favorite television show a lot of prejudices about historical combat a lot of misconceptions come from film and at the same time film is the reason I think why a lot of people started with email because they were inspired by by seeing the sword on the screen the age-old conflict between fighting for effectiveness and fighting for story it's so hard to get both right at the same time the filmmakers lack the the knowledge and the form language to make their actor look like convincing fighters so they will often use camera tricks and editing tricks to make the fight scene look violent but it doesn't necessarily make a very compelling action scene this is what a lot of Hema people's he is bad that you don't really CD the fighter and actor is he an actor with a sword if you look at the lightsaber fights in Star Wars the sequence is purely aesthetic it's a collection of well choreographed moves it's more of a dance than that is a fight we can actually see that there is no real sense of danger the problem in a fight is it's a lot of it is about feel and when you're showing somebody a fight you have to exaggerate but if you're exaggerating in a fight you're showing your enemy what you're gonna do so the two don't go well together nor divin'd is a historical European martial arts club which focuses on combining Hema and authentic historical fighting systems with entertainment such as live show and film so what you see in in other kind of movies like like Asian martial art films there is great aesthetic quality to the way they fight because there is a fighting system there and the the performers are very well trained in that system Seema has this form language has this this innate beauty and this is what at nordwind we try to achieve even though people are not looking for EEMA coordinator or Hema choreographers per se once you are at the position in which you can call the shots as a Hema person then you can sneak email taking something from a source into real life into a training environment is really going to be about experimentation I think it's really important to think about this as you know an evolving iterative process first you have to choose are you going to have that manual translated into your language or are going to learn that language yourself unless you're already a native speaker but even if your native speaker it's not easy for you to read your own language when it's 500 years old step number two is trying to understand what the author means understanding key phrases because a lot of times there's a specific offensive vocabulary that this author is using you're gonna get together with a training partner and work together to try to make what you just read happen and I think that it's very important to really work with it do something and then talk about it okay well that isn't what the master described so how did we mess this up so you have to go back to the beginning start again and just keep going until you think that you've found something that works you're never given all the information some things you're assisted with pictures or illustrations sometimes not usually we have text but sometimes not so you have to try to take what you're given I'm turn it into something useful for example a certain kind of cuts maybe this grades is coming from a certain place perhaps on the right shoulder it comes from above the text might see which edge to use and it may describe the end results that you're trying to hit the person in the head but what it does not tell you is how to get from here to there there is places that we have to be speculative those places where we have to try out different theories and different ideas and see how well they fit the sources it's very difficult once you've built a model that works 90% of the way and then you find out what the rest of the 10% of this way you thought this technique was gonna work doesn't really work at all being able to go back repeatedly and continue to evolve your ideas on how some of these techniques work I think another thing that is important to me is a willingness to go back and say guess what we were wrong you know we have a better way one example of changes in how we see things is the reversed grip for example we had all these images where people are holding the the swords with these types of positions right we didn't know what they meant and we're just really crappy at drawing hands but that's probably not the case and the funny thing about that is that once you understand that and you can reverse the hands you can use different hand positions it changes a lot of interpretations and I have one interpretation where it says you put your hands in front of your face and I just felt like it was like you're having a you're holding it like this but when I changed the technique I realized there was actually you know holding it like this in this position in which opened up entirely new way of using the sword when parrying and so on so you have the data you build a model and you really need to test that model and this is why things like tournaments and sparring are really important from my perspective it's this balance between the practice of it trying to understand what seems to work what doesn't work and then going back to the data and saying okay well here's what my practical experience is this is my theoretical understanding you know where is the mismatch either you're doing the technique wrong or your partner's giving you a pressure which is incorrect for that move so is that pressure then able to be corrected by another technique that fell ability in you and your partner eventually leads to you understanding the system more fully but then you need to be able to apply it as well and not all manuals have instructions of how to train it he already has this habit sometimes I'm not really telling you what to do but just tell awesome it'll be if you pull it up their historical European martial arts sources I would say roughly divided into treatises and manuals a treatise being essentially an advanced written study on a topic which the reader is already expected to know something about here's your textbook here's your lesson here's how you remember to do all the stuff that you paid me to teach you how to do whereas if we take it the other end of the spectrum World War one bayonet manual that is really written for teaching soldiers who know nothing about bayonet fighting these books came from as many different kinds of people as there were books they weren't just written by Knights they weren't just written by commoners they weren't just written by masters some of these were written by men like Agrippa who were not masters at all but perhaps just talented fencers that had a method of fencing they wanted to share we have yoki Meyer who writes his thorough descriptions of the Knightly art of combat he writes this for a general audience but it helped get him a job as a fencing master for a Duke medieval treatises were made for a wide range of different reasons sometimes just to document a system as a record for an archive almost for personal use we know sometimes it was written as a form of advertising sometimes as a status symbol that was very common the very rich and the highest in society had their own swords master and they created a work almost as an expression of wealth in the same way that today you'd have a yacht even through the 15th and 16th centuries we see a wide range of reasons why treatises and early manuals were created and also a gradual evolution of the reason for them being created you have to understand that the people who could afford that source material were already at a certain level of society they're not the people who were going to be chopping up fish to sell they're not the people that are going to be trying to fight their way in the slums in order to live and ironically those people are probably engaged in more fighting and more violence than the people at the books are aimed at so understanding the surrounding culture to the source material is just as important as understanding material itself so you know a master this you know more focused on school play will give different advice than a master that's focused on self-defense you got the to butcher Gigi auntie so his first book is a very nice fencing in the line his second book is defending yourself against multiple opponents dagger against spear grapples pommel strikes and so very much like the modern human context where it's very libertarian in nature everybody hasn't a voice everybody has an opinion everybody gets to throw out what it is that they think is right a lot of these fight books came from the same place they came from historical masters or would be masters throwing out their ideas about fencing in written format hopefully for people that were paying for them or that were going to be able to use them and even that isn't the kind of thing I can really tell you is is what happened right we don't know what we do know is that they were kind enough to write all this down for us and to let us argue about it on the internet incessantly for the next you know hundred years that's very hard to simulate a sharp sword in a fight because shop swords were designed to hurt people and kill them and cut them open in all kinds of awful and horrible ways we don't want to do that on the whole we like a training partners we want to go home and live to fight another day with them so to simulate the thing that we are training for in a safe way is a huge challenge the most common weapon used is steel fader or the steel blunt fader is a modern name for it but a steel blunt practice sword has a safe rounded edges and flex to it so you can thrust that is what most people use across all weapon disciplines but if you have big club but a lot of beginners they might not be able to afford a steel weapon immediately or they are unsure if they are willing to dedicate themselves for some reason alone or weapons then nylon or plastic weapons are available too and that's excellent we didn't have a way as a community of introducing new people quickly and cheaply into the art which is how ultimately is going to grow was by saying look you don't need to go out and buy specialist steel sword you can have something which will allow you to practice the Rowling's range came about through me phoning up lots and lots and lots of different manufacturers anybody who had an interest in reenactment anyone who could supply weaponry and it serves its purpose most of us move directly from those onto steel or on to things like fencerow things like this in my opinion you want to forget to steal weapons as quickly as you can I think there is a lot of value means that apart because they handle better but also partly because you're doing fencing and I should be done with the weapon that is approximately the real deal so there's an identity thing to work much to what was as well I've been blessed with many occasion to go through handling session with originals I try to not exactly copy the shapes of the regionals but I want to copy the feel of the originals for creating a safe play defense with we need to adjust a few things we need thicker edges we need flexibility we need a button on the tip all of these will answer a little bit geometry of the blade so if I copy the exact measures of an original and add those features for safe sparring it will probably not give you the same feeling of the regional areas manikin rates coming at me in case if I mean as the laser is resolute at gateway on mood circuitry is the example on a chaotic evil your core look what was their main coach aquatic when you were born in your max analysis because any LMS mastani Monica an American - oh yeah - gives a case if that 3G I accomplished in case equation of quaternion is my gotu to the Rihanna core wanna see Ganesha we walk third which I had to like your battlenet yoshiyama kazuko you card Eau Claire has a red Photoshop this is the second book of Nicoletta Gigante Nicoletta de Conti is one of the most celebrated Italian fencing masters Italian rapier masters of the early 17th century his first book of 1606 was very well known and very widely distributed and celebrated for centuries afterwards is one of those clearest you know most concise representations of the Italian method in his first book had promised to write a second but for centuries it it was unclear this had ever taken place in fact as early as 1673 a sicilian master Pallavicini in bringing out his own second book essentially derives to guarantee by saying I didn't promise to bring out a second book but here it is unlike people like Giganta who promised a second book but never deliver so you know no not even seventy years after the publication eg antes first book his second book was already regarded as you know mythical new sources are still being found and they're being found from a variety of places in the early days of this reconstruction in the early modern days I should say they were largely found in museum collections and that is still an ongoing process many museums have a lot of information still not even cataloged much less you know available to the public I had when I started out when I was a teenager this idea about famous men a famous researcher of today like McGowan Steve Hagen the many before them as well hospitals are so on walking around walking with the torch down a catacomb and finally this dusty of manuals and I was shorts that also happens fortunately a lot of museums for reasons of preservation and and various other things are putting more of their information online a lot of times you find these manuals just by typing in different different spelling variations of key key phrases in Google Books which makes it accessible to more researchers rather than just the two or three that can get to the museum and have language skills and so on the Internet has really changed you know research in a dramatic way and largely for the positive there are genuine researchers who find new material who make new discoveries about existing material got guys like Matt Dallas pure marketer Monello these guys are our actual researchers doing original research which is very valuable then you have guys like Michael Chidester and the crew overworked an hour who are not necessarily doing research but they're making the material available to us which is infinitely valuable like the most valuable thing that could happen to us after the initial research itself well we can ours purpose these days is to try to bring together all of the source materials that we study especially for the martial arts from the 15th and 16th centuries and before when I was starting Hema 13 years ago it was very difficult to access all the source materials there was a few resources scattered online they were hard to find there were a few books that were rather expensive by and large if you wanted to study something you had to begin from scratch and work it out yourself so which an hour exists to try and alleviate that entire problem and create one source where you can go and find out everything that you that you need to know about a particular treat as a particular master to begin your study and you can branch out from there but as far as locating the source materials getting their transcribed and translated and making them available we're trying to take care of that problem forever and have it done so that the next generation of sword fighters won't have to go through those problems the study of Hema has evolved over the years I think people have become much smarter and much more creative in looking at other sort of supporting sources and data to try to get more information about the relevant context for how these techniques work like statues for example how they portray fighting if that's the case or or just depictions of fighting in other sources than martial arts sources to complete the picture I had a researcher who is here a year and a half ago who is looking at a painting and was looking at st. George on a horse and just how his body was absolutely you know unified with the horse and he said based on his equatorial researches that's you know exactly the pose he should have been in order to pamorah power above poloncic ET me apart menisci Dimetrodon duncan sorry she districts archaeological director inject the mosaic defense the lamp I will division the juju kochujang ooh porygon yet out the castle eczema try to develop complete by example so it's out there no matter whom out of ways and often you don't know it's there until you stumble across it fast forward to the to the Howard oven collection wish yourself as an interesting history because how the warden of beginning in the 20th century was a great collector of fencing books when he died he passed it on to his heirs and essentially got you know this great collection offensive books got stuck in a barn in in one of the Home Counties and you know there's only rediscovered again a few decades ago it's now a poem if they're alone in the Wallace a couple of years ago the Wallace Collection had an exhibition the noble art of the sword a chap called Joshua Pendragon was the assistant curator that she gave a list of works that were in the Wallace Collection and I saw the demon in him because there's some interesting stuff in there and then we thought of saying a hang up on this list of the holdings there's a reference to Giganta 1608 now now there's a couple of fencing bibliographies over the centuries that list a gigantic 1608 there's a reprint of the 1606 which in itself isn't that interesting because fencing books get reprinted all the time however we were aware that Marconi in 1847 it makes me quite specific claims about what's in check out his second book one day I happened to be here there was a day with guest lectures about various subjects relating to the sword and you know can we have a look at the the Howard Walton collection and and the staff are like yes sure it's just they're you know pointing to a filing cabinet and we opened it up and you know immediately they stopped taking through the place you see that it's it's different start to his first book and you see the cutting and you see the buckler that dagger dagger a big spear you know we knew immediately it was the second book that only been rumored to exist within fencing circles no one had ascertained that it existed until that point nobody it was a facsimile 1902 francesco 'nobody unfortunately it's hard to say how accurate this facsimile is because some art critics have looked at it and said that it looks like a 19th 20th century redrawing of a medieval manuscript more than it looks like a medieval manuscript so until we get those scans of the original we won't know how reliable these pictures are one of the questions that comes up a lot is how do we know that these masters had any idea what they were doing the most honest answer is we don't there's a myth among some of the Hema practitioners that because the source is older it is somehow more authentic or more authoritative and that's not necessarily true kind of goes hand in hand with that is this idea that just because it was written down in the past means that it's an unquestionable source which again is not always true there were bad fencers in the past just as there are bad fencers today when we're attempting to interpret a manuscript you kind of have to start from an assumption that the person that wrote it knew what they were talking about and obviously we've got no way of knowing that until we've got it to work or not as the case may be to stand any chance of coming away with a workable system you have to make the assumption that they're right but you need to be aware that you've made that assumption so that you can at least be objective about it we don't know that they know what they were doing but we have some evidence that they did I mentioned Furai earlier if you already of the Burien italian swords master claims to have fought I believe five duels wearing nothing but loves and his sword and came away unshaved I don't know if that means he killed five men I don't know if that means he managed not to get hit I don't we don't know exactly what that means at least I don't but we we have indications that this guy was real but his students were real people and we have some records of some of his more famous students prior the books being printed well those were expensive projects so getting the funding from those usually came from a picture and of some type or so on as a general rule we tend to think that the patrons are getting the better quality guys but there's no way to prove that definitively politics and you know rubbing shoulders was always going on masters disagree with each other all the time and to take the most obvious example you know the English polemicist Jorge Silva you know right here sir his Rand saying how Italian fencing was useless and they got each other killed a lot of his specific claims that you know Italians never car I just simply untrue if you look at the treatises by looking at the specific areas where people disagree you actually get a lot of insight into you know whether this masters misunderstood one point of it or it makes you think about the fine tactical points like cut versus thrust I can find examples like kamila Paladini whose managed to get rests in the water collection here he agrees that Jorge Silva he says you know some people say the cut is slow but on many occasions in front of great Lords I've asked fences to thrust at my face and each time I've been being able to cut them before they thrust me his explanation is that he can move his wrists quicker than when someone could move his foot which you know something that you're still the might have said so you know actually by looking deep into the scholarship a lot of these apparent contradictions wash away we know that at least an hour is quoted for about two hundred years after he's dead that that fencing students and teachers continued to believe that what was taught violation hour and violation our students was valuable and what I see and what I have seen over the last fifteen years as I have progressed through this is that the historical techniques work they work in a competitive context they work in a casual foot fence with your buddies in the training school kind of context and I have no reason to believe that they would not work in a life-or-death mortal context assuming that the technique is performed correctly with the right amount of intensity the right amount of intent by someone who knows what they're doing and uses that technique within its correct context and that becomes the whole martial art what is the technique how do I do it when do I use it and if you can bring those pieces together these techniques work and I think that's how we know the Masters knew what they were talking about because we do it now I do a lot of modern wrestling as well and what for me is very sad about modern wrestling systems is that they've been very sportif eyed and a lot of the techniques techniques are based on rules that don't make any actual sense and when you go back to the historical sources you get a whole nother perspective a much more true perspective if you know of what wrestling is actually about swords are sexy and most people are attracted to Hima to do the long sword it's big it's cool it's fast it's hard but medieval sources tell us that all fighting comes from wrestling it is a good question if you have a sword why Russell and the answer is because when you come close enough to each other you are now in wrestling distance despite the fact that you have a sword there are optimal distances to apply various sets of knowledge in particular what I study is is the German system that's based off of Johannes legionnaires writings and we are admonished over and over to attack whatever openings our opponent gives us and so the wrestling curriculum gives us another opportunity another way to attack those openings to take the moments that are given to us it's in the wrestling that you learn how to exploit fuel and feeling between opponents it's in wrestling that you learn how if he pushes to pull if he pulls to push and all of these things translate immediately up to when swords cross and that way all of the lessons from all of our weapons apply to wrestling and vice-versa it really is the universal translator between weaponry for instance when two longsword fighters come close one may remove his left hand and try to use the pommel to hit his opponent a medieval person would see that as wrestling and in fact a lot of the plays that get used for the hilt in the pommel of the sword or dagger place it's basically about in the I'm taking control of your opponent and being able to manipulate your own and your opponent's balance and the way that it gains you an advantage medieval wrestling is primarily a stand-up jacket wrestling system so it involves gripping onto the clothing that your opponent is wearing and likewise your opponent is gripping onto your clothing and you can use these to leverage your opponent to throw them to trip them maybe to break limbs if necessary depending on the on the particular contest or or even life-and-death situation the wrestling might be used in in a medieval idea really encompassed not only the sport of wrestling but also self-defense on the street so you might find yourself wrestling with no weapons or wrestling with weapons but the same techniques apply you know if you had to look for a modern analog that would be the closest thing you might look to maybe even Japanese judo surprisingly for many people but again it's a stand-up jacketed system the sporting contest that we know about in medieval wrestling how they competed friendly with each other in wrestling was to the throw they didn't roll on the ground very much there wasn't pins not submissions not jokes they saved that for serious encounters in play it was to the throw and they counted a throw very simply just anything but the foot knees or hands touching the ground if you deposited someone on the rear end that's a throw if you don't practice with a sharp sword if you don't ever test cut you're going to miss facets off of what it means and you're going to miss out on conclusions that you could have made if you trained with sharp sword sharp weapons are good for doing solo drills to test cut and you can work with partners with shops as well with someone that you really trust but you really need to trust that person and the New York historical fencing Association we actually train for although it's kind of unrealistic we're training with the idea that if we're in a position where we need these swords to protect our lives or to take the life of someone else we want to make sure that we're using it in such a way that we're you you know if every motion is effective whether it's cutting or thrusting if you fence with sharp stories you're going to realize that sharp edges cut into each other so they stick like this you know a blunt edge like this well slide a sharp edge doesn't it cuts into the the other edge when you're training it's so important to have all these different tools because if you're doing a bind where two swords come together and are gripping each other and the tension and feedback from that play is vital to understanding the next move if you're using something that's a slippery edged training weapon like a nylon waster or a wooden waster it's it's not gonna give you the same experience and it'll distort your understanding don't have to train every day with a sharp sword but you need to train with a sharp sword from time to time to get a grasp of these things it'll change the way you grip the sword it'll change the strength that you put into your strikes because you're not trying to beat somebody with the sword you're trying to cut and slide across the exposed areas you look at bad examples of fighting like for example in a lot of computer games and you see these big heroic warriors pulling this enormous sword out of their back and slamming it down upon the metal of their opponent it's completely ineffective so why are you gonna smash your beautiful expensive weapon against somebody's armor when you could take it and cut it across something that's exposed even just something that's simple you wouldn't understand that if you didn't know how a cutting-edge weapon worked probably the best way to sum it up is to say that there is no perfect Hema training tool for for any weapon there is always the trade-off between safety versus you know what is the most realistic training tool the better way to think about it is you know what what are the the best training approaches to get everybody all these different skill sets they they ultimately would like to have and then you know how does the equipment fit in in terms of the modern Hema Revival I mean the first point to make is that people have been looking at earlier styles of fencing for a long time for example another master costantino karo and he quotes murasa a guy from 1711 who's completely different a book published in 1536 you know it's conscious of of the names of these historical masters into the beginning of the 19th century had belgian guilds still practicing with long swords so long after long swords are obsolete in civilian life and in the battlefield people were still using them for vegetable sport essentially fast forward into the early 20th century we had the first kind of attempt at to heem a revival we have guys like Hutton guys like jelly in Italy it didn't continue but I wouldn't say it was unsuccessful I guess the first world war disrupted a lot of Europe and that generation of early humorous let's say seem to have fizzled out around the 20s in 1981 I went to my local library and I kid you not I did a interlibrary loan request for medieval fencing manuals and out of the blue I got a copy of the 1965 transcription of Sigmund ring ik by a guy named Martin Bishop he was a German who transcribed that fencing manual and I self-taught so that I could read sigma-ring --ax fencing man and that was how it started for me so by about 1982 I was able to understand at about the 90% point what I was reading in that manual not to say that I was doing the techniques but I could read it I could understand it and I started working on it then the interesting thing at that point that was way pre-internet and so I was working on that completely in isolation in the early days of the struggle European martial arts community of in the Hema community we were all self-taught we were all looking for something and so that that who was that earliest teacher that earliest teacher was a book and the back yard and a wooden stick and getting hit upside the head by by a friend we began to seek out people who knew a little bit more some of the the early teachers but even then in that time what was really going on is that you had someone who knew more or who claimed to know more who was able to to guide you when it really came down to interpretation we were on our own so initially who taught me defense was a little bit of John Clements a little bit of the Internet a little bit of Christian Tobler a lot of self-study and getting head upside the head with a with a stick that you didn't want to get hit with because we were too dumb to wear masks back then we see so many people who have trained under teachers who have never needed to go through that same process of discovery that there's a fear maybe a legitimate fear in the community that that that attachment to the source is is getting lost or could get lost I think Hema can be done without reading the sources translated copy but I don't think it can be done to the best I don't think every human practitioner needs to do research I do think every human practitioner needs to be educated about the sources we need to make sure that our students know that the master isn't the guy up in front of the classroom the masters the guy who wrote the stuff down even if you know your interpretations differ from somebody else's interpretation you are still at least informed by somebody who really used these arts and there's no more people like that alive so we have to learn it from the sources how do we do our Hema right we do our humor the way the Masters said to do the Hema the big question is how did the Masters say to do the Hema sticking to the souls is important it has to be kept in mind I'm not saying it's a sin being tempted to stray from the source if you stray too far you're losing the H in Hema maybe the e even you're just doing something new something else something different if we're all just learning from somebody else what we're learning is a modern sword art based on historical sources what we want to be doing is constantly getting closer to the way that it was done and discovering the way that it was done as part of that path and if you haven't read the material if you aren't intimately familiar with material you can't be on that path the images I think it's a pretty safe bet they're probably doing the same thing I mean I can't be in higher percent sure what viewer I says is you will go to the ground because of your lack of knowledge and the armor and armor this is a particularly safe throw and then basically texts about how this is an awesome throw and it will throw you on the ground a whole lot and you'll be totally dead basically this one paragraph says nothing at all but how the techniques done then we go over the German step analysis to give us a whole huge paragraph and he explains how many steps are taken where to take them and gives you a whole huge explanation it is an old debate should we study one manuscript and and stick to it as a Canon or should we try to have more of a holistic approach and work with several ministries and it all comes down to your own goal some people like to work with only one manuscript because they want to try to recreate that specific style or art let's say for example you want to work only with akela Murat from the Bologna school well I just want to become efficient fighters with a specific weapon and then they draw from a number of various sources everything that they think can enhance their own skill or a knowledge when I fight I like winning so I draw on whatever I think you know is appropriate to that time I really prefer to get my techniques art of many as many as different three times as possible and then choose to once they adapt better to my body types into my skill set into my new strains so even if you're perhaps doing a different style of black sword or saber or long sword or anything else you can still apply those different lessons back to work fighting some systems are more compatible than others for example if you study 19th century Sabre if you look across Britain France Spain Italy Germany all of the sabre sources from the 19th century share a lot of similarities many of them are very modern in how they are written and you can it's maybe possible to understand hope only one really hope I would assume however there are some there are some systems which are really quite a bit more different for example if you look at a 33 sword and buckler and you look at Marat so sword and buckler Bolognese solemn a sword and buckler they're quite different they stand differently they hold the buckler differently they cut in different ways they deal with the tacks in quite fundamentally different ways so you could mix Marat so from the 16th century and I 33 from the late 13th century but I don't think that they would necessarily go together very well as a system as for the historical integrity of it that's a personal choice obviously if you want to recreate the fencing style of a certain place and period then you stick to the sources of that place in period I've always found every club that I visited to be very welcoming and excited and interested because the sharing of knowledge is what is the lifeblood in humor the Hema community is very open source that means a lot of things one is that there are very few professionals what we do these are mostly an amateur community and the way to get credibility respect in that community is by sharing your information these days we can do YouTube videos and actually show what we're talking about as well which can make it a lot clearer because we're talking about physical topics so it helps to illustrate the points that we make online and to get discussed and debated in question or peer-reviewed basically by the rest of the community about Internet is a communication tool they can only take you so far there is nothing quite like actually being in person with someone and and having quickly walk you through something that you spent months over the internet trying to explain and being able to very quickly go back and forth and exchange ideas again that's that's a hugely valuable thing we have a huge number of events which is weekend long weekend's of workshops lectures and classes on how to do these things and tournaments one of the great things about martial arts events like fight camp especially for people who do things that are quite fringe like European martial arts is that you get to learn from different instructors who would actually have slightly different interpretations to each other some of my favorite discussions with people over Hima have been very very heated going no no no no no there's no way that this can work absolutely you're completely and utterly wrong you absolutely run this and you could not be more wrong if you had a hat with wrong written all over and you tattoo wrong in your face and then you go away and quietly when you're sitting on the train and going away from the event or you're going away from someone else's house you end up giving them a text or you end up giving you the knee Mela going you know what that principle you said that actually works if you put it in this context and they'll quite often they'll go you know what you're saying that works so even when we are at each other's throats were if we're biting or if very freely exchanging information the information does get transferred and I think even quite often if we don't want to admit it we still a way to learn from whatever someone else has said well then we also have these events as a way to bring me closer established bond between people face-to-face in order to bring in beginners so they can see this wonderful community that we have taken to beginner's class and they would try out some weapon styles that they're not practicing regularly at home in their home club for me my prospects always been that these major events has been the real engine behind the Hema community these different events will continue to grow and hopefully be a really good nexus for people to come and learn not only learn what it's about but for the people who've been doing it for quite some time also you know remind them what it is that they they're really loved about all this we live in a 21st century but the orders were written at a time where people were much more physically active as a general rule and if they had access to a proper diet they were in good shape so we can argue about if we should practice with 15th century shoes the 21st century shoes but we should also consider if we should actually try to train with a 15th century body it basically means that you have to workout it kind of goes back to goals if the the aim of the club is just to explore this martial arts and walk through it and they don't fence much or when they fence their fence very lightly Fitness is not so much an important factor but for those clubs who are more interested in say competitions Fitness will become an issue there are very few sports this activist hours that do not the corporate physical trainers it's a non-issue for me really Fitness is just a tool it's not matter of being fit or bigshot it's a matter of knowing what your body can do the more you know your body and the more your body can do well the better martial artists you can be one of the great thing with Hema especially the sword fighting is that you don't really have to be young and fit and sharp and it's all the music these technicality of sword fighting means that you can be all that's doing all the tricks and perform quite well so I think for somebody who perhaps doesn't feel very comfortable in their body learning to fight with weaponry is a great way to go because it takes the focus of you it extends the force that you can create and it gets you moving and anytime you move you become more in your body so it's it's a good feedback cycle remember what we do is martial arts and he eventually get hurt sometimes it's not the goal it's not the aim it's not the joy of doing Hema but it happens so you need in order to also make these physical no it's yours to think of your own safety and the safety of your your partner's we do have manufacturers now who are actually looking to produce gear for us which is a huge boost when I when I started up 12 years ago when I was 17 we had old fencing masks welding gloves and sticks it worked at a time but as community grows and we become more professional you also see manufacturers either from outside of the Hema community taking interesting what we're doing wanted to provide a gear for us or actually actual practitioners starting their own companies which i think is the best idea because they do they know what the fencer needs we need equipment that that can make keep people safe and this is growing the interest is there and the the people who need the equipment they're asking for it the market won't grow to its potential until the safety equipment is there mothers are not going to be eager to bring their children to you know get into this program if you know broken arms and legs are you know a monthly occurrence hence our most among the most common injuries like eighty percent of the injuries in Hema are hand related and everyone knows in daily life how frustrating or complex it is if you break a finger and my biggest concern is of course if a blade breaks and it penetrates the the body because that can be there the end you know for someone that's the scary one right you know our blades with the we have blunted tips and usually there's tape on the tips and a variety of things that you know keep it that it would be very difficult to to penetrate one of our jackets the concern always is you know in that broken blade situation the rare freak occurrence that that were to happen and then a thrust would follow through you can see the gear check is getting more and more sure done like first I'll wear something over here and then no you should wear something that prevents rust if the sword breaks at penetrates just over time shown us getting 22-metre knowledge yeah yeah douzo or chronically preventive is a cottage to drama school come to the hood it's a quad I got coconut some Hansa the thing we must remember Indian designing equipment is the style of fencing we are simulating and it is not armoured fencing it is blows victim or fencing without any protection on it's kind of a fine balance because every time he wear something as protection it does change it the way your body moves it's just a part of the way things are you're going to move differently in sports gear than you are if you're not wearing it so simulating an unarmored fight but still wearing protection because you don't want to blow out your knees or have your hands smashed up it's a massive challenge from the feedback we always hear oh yeah it's very nice but can I be more flexible can it be lighter this is the hardest part of the development phase right now you have two things going on the tournament scene is really increasing in popularity but you also have people training the real techniques and a lot of hybrids let's be honest but if you're training the real techniques you should be able to train without gear or with the least restraining gear because otherwise you cannot really interpret the real techniques if you're limited by gear but if you don't use any gear in training and density you want to do a tournament then you feel the restrictions so you won't be able to use the techniques you have been training and I think that is what a lot of people aspire to normally your sword should keep you safe and what we see is a lot of gear defends you to build your swords to be extreme position you want to go to and because of that you do get hit in the hand where normally you wouldn't get hit so the protection make sure you need the protection because you cannot use your sword to protect yourself Viet Nam's Google Nexus good claw rows volume Hima our history snake his turret neighbor leukemia - moshe dayan accession to the progressive Shantou grande go to the observer [ __ ] stylist Jang Suki was earnest rude awakening support or Enoshima to the club could each senators America support away and okay I go into a sporting goods store I just went in to get new knee pads and I said okay so look this is what I'm doing I'm gonna be getting hit with a longsword and the want the knee pads I have they gape open at the top and they can just cut down into him I need something that straps veterans the people are looking at me with these eyes like well I don't know what you need clean Chi was a lot neater so it has Cavalli dr. Bunji or poet me Danny Tigers to enjoy put on to the points as a productive on the working imagine we're still trying to get the best thing that will work when what we need is the best thing that's made for it Santos our mierqi supportive a nice Pena just given mobile to proven emotional sentiment history sniper tell mr. Jose Mendoza Varga browning from possibly Emma yes to Sonny's growing sport oh boy some products are basically identical like the fencing mask or chest protectors for example some products are similar needed to be modified and there of course equipment which are only used in in Hema schirmir histories they possibly could to push a diverse a most easily know it push it puts away in rudeness or Anya to their names Nick tovo the public eye on young Tottenham costing one very important gear is the neck protector which not only protects the the neck but also the collarbones the next one which is also very important is the back of the head protector which protects the back of the head back of the neck one very crucial part is that the hand which needs to be protected and we've been tackling this problem for a long time I still unsolved and struggling but we are not alone the hand is one of the most complex part of the human body you have so much movement going on and this is of course the place you interact with the sword you have lots of formable pieces as well to really come up with a design that gets the energy out of the strike and to disperse it over a sufficient surface area is really hard with the space you have to work with we always like to make the analogy between music and long short fencing and EEMA in general there's something the ancient masters used to do as well what for us is important here is that we see the same amount of technical finesse that is required to handle the sword and this is why we came with the idea that we would like to make a glove a protective glove with which you could play a musical instrument and that's the challenge we we set ourselves the conditions in Hema are so extreme that we believe in a scientific approach is the only right approach to do this you don't necessarily take something that is already there and try to improve it you study the conditions of the product you're designing for and you start from scratch with the parameters again what are the actions you actually required to take not only the sword fighting but also the grappling but also for example putting gear on and off also in case of an emergency we have a partial bird's-eye here but we had to cover it because of IP issues so it's slightly thicker now and it moves slightly less up small but here you can see so hidden behind this little sports love is our prototype and to show you that it works I'm going to grip the sword first and you see that I can move around unrestricted and shift from one group to the other and it's almost as if I'm not wearing anything and everything here stays covered no gaps whatsoever so a consequence of putting our glove in higher skill in the higher context and involving external investors is that we need to protect our intellectual property because we are looking at something that will have to be much bigger than Hema in order to be to be to be sustainable so this is why we haven't been able to show the Hema community and our backers a lot of details even though we really really want to so in order to be able to put in a mark we need money for that we need I pay protection and because that we cannot show anyone anything for now there is a fence record with my name on it which is was almost like an inside joke to show just Asuka Court key to rob and a spoon ago the sake of the Magana because of me I was in in Poland for a competition and I noticed that the Polish fencers had a gamba song with great arm movement trust me it was about rosin core technology but the sport friends has never raised her arm about their head as we do some of the time so they are more mobility is very restricted it was just because there was some padding to them because the aesthetics are rejected Maria being told Obama that the podium will be noisier over nitrous could keep some time Tasha all those off you do not his videos except apart you touch me alone because the polish fancy use more less a straight-up gambeson which meant it was proper protection and proper movement but also it will it was laced when I thought they would better if we had a sipper for example and a whole bunch of change like that throw to stop her to catch trust and just took it from there is dabra dabra dabra model except Rosa yet sir my history snow means collision especially produc coverage Tom could not swallow me egomaniac or public transport food for Savai'i boo a person person to start taking it was supposed to be just a jacket from me and I asked him to put my name on it or maybe they did as a joke more or less but it turned out to be a very popular product there's a lot of things to take into consideration when you're designing a modern Hema jacket the first being wash ability we all want to be able to throw stuff in the wash and get it clean we need a certain protection level that is generally above what you would see a medieval man wearing on the street certainly mindful tanya of stress native product she sent from Nevada reconstruct oral history constructor of hr-v items each July on history's nerves or a historic tourism therapist our dr. Corbeau Savannah was nest economies admit ignorance neck means to ensnare pass we on the tables were Muslim Buddhist - Oh Bosnia history plane the cut of the garments is vitally important to allow us to raise our arms clear above our heads in ways that aren't necessary and modern sensing we also have a different aesthetic what we think is attractive on a man's body is very different from what a medieval man was attractive on his body and that changes some things it very much depends on the focus of the individual Hema practitioner what are they looking to get out of there Hema experience en astonishment solutioning out of history through his strong emotions vapors voltage ultra Venus Xtravaganza pressed upon each other through her three stations pooja smash smash Gupta rudia lamentation aircon good thing I am it looks modern it looks fresh it doesn't particularly pull off anything medieval at all it's very much a modern take we were told by several team eyes that it's it's a modern sport actually so it should look modern but then there are Hema practitioners who very much want to work in garments that are made in the style of a medieval garment even if it's modern materials again it's up to the individual practitioner of what they're interested in and that works out well I think for the producers of equipment because there are a lot of little niches to be filled because everyone has a little bit different approach to their Hema experience the other thing that that really resonates with the Hema community as I know it is a matter of self presentation Mikami talking to the Valhalla if you guys here boo couch potatoes Chinese it's about me that was about bottom level trend to Tillie giggles I'll pick Ivana Corky through those at Umberto's physical image China strand telling its terminus principle of dual nature of semiotic sport of a Torah scholar the manga photos above water streaming be our core tech guru spot nimr's capper we service start to be a household name where people actually know what you mean when you say that you do Hema when that happens and it's just about to happen the reputation that we have at that point in time is the reputation that we will have for a very long time it's something that will have to work I work in with advertising in this just you know this is just one of those things where it's the way it is so it's very important for us in our community that as we study a form of combat for example armored combat that we're doing it right at least as best as we understand right and that means not taking twelfth-century kits against fifteenth-century kids so if we're gonna do one word combat we're gonna look good we're gonna look like people who are serious martial artists setting studying a serious martial art which happens to include armor we don't want to look like were playing some kind of a game let's present ourselves in a fashion as professional but as athletic that says serious martial artists and if you are a competitor that's a serious competitor in the modern world we don't want to give an impression that actually turns people away from what we're doing who would have done it if not for an issue of perception in 2011 we did the first live stream or the tournament violence and that turned out to be very very populist we've done that ever since I know that other events this is also done the same thing Long Point for example you know it was an experiment when they did this for the first time and we really didn't know how it was gonna turn out that also brought a lot of attention to the tournaments maybe that's not other recent way to him is appropriate where people are hoping to get on TV we realized though that it had a lot of potential for outreach I think at about the same time that we did that first one there was a little video that was done here by a guy named Matias reelin where he attached a GoPro camera to the end of a sword and so you were actually getting the view down the sword as a couple of us swung the sword around and he took that video he put it to some music he put it up on YouTube and it went viral and when that happened that really opened our eyes it was so unexpected and so I think you know the guys at GH FS started really taking a view that this was a real tool for outreach so started working on it a little more from that point of view it was part of a larger scheme to make everything a little more pretty professional so that we were taking a little more seriously the thing with an online community is that sometimes the person who posts the most is considered the best fencer and that's of course is not the case tormance actually start out as a way of asking people who claimed knowledge over the internet to put up or shut up if you're really trying to look at the question of you know will this work under stress there are very few ways to actually do that that are as good as a tournament at the moment competition is an environment where I can be absolutely certain that my opponent is not cooperating with me I can be absolutely certain that they're not helping me that they're not even subconsciously trying to make my technique work they're not trying to make it look good they're not trying to do anything at all for me except beat me up I think people confuse the idea that tournaments are like a real fight they're not all of this there's always going to be a level of approximation they're not a simulation or a proper duel and the view and you're thinking about life and death those are two different goals people don't approach it as a life and death situation because to know that lives are not a stake you need to create rules that enhance the behavior you want to see you taking efficiency technical variety what are the kinds of combative behaviors that you want to encourage and that's how you develop these rules and use them to actually get people to fence better historically competitions of different types were part and parcel of Hema the real historical traditions and the historical practices but you can take a look at Germany in the 1500s and you can see that they were having a fistula or a public fencing competition every weekend for a series of months so you know and this is in one town these old historical rule sets existed for a different function or we think they existed for a different function than our modern rule sets they struggle rule sets were games games of skill using fairly limited and restricted skill sets within the martial arts of the time but we need to remember that most of the modern tournaments is a modern invention and they're not representative about duel it's not a battlefield situation it's not a historical tournament it's something else because we're trying to achieve slightly different things if I'm learning 15th century German longsword you know Ernst fashions right how to fight to kill a guy I want to be able to stab a guy in the face I want to be able to grapple and bash him in the head with my pommel as we see in the source material none of that would be allowed under historical rule sets but we also borrow a lot of things from historical opposites like they have to go for exam when you hit someone they're allowed within one fencing tempo in other words immediately after you hit them they're allowed to try and hit you back if you touch your opponent he's not just gonna fall down and die most probably if you hit him in the shoulder and it's not his question shoulder it's gonna strike me back and there are so many times where we have historical accounts of that happening and that means that you need to strike the opponent I need to keep on striking him without getting hit or rushing into grad ball or step out and cover it's artful fencing but it's also just common sense but for us who are training a complete system without that tradition we also need to to experiment with what happens if all targets open you can do wrestling you can do thrusts you can do cuts you can do 100 cuts you can even do it the more clogged where you turn and you hit with a the hilts you know you can punch you can kick you can elbow what happens why would these arts that they invented win over someone who's just a big person a strong person the brawler's we want to create an environment that is as free as possible for people to do the things that they believe are the right interpretations of these texts and these sources that we have to do that well and for competition to be part of that you know we have to understand the context of the primary sources to begin with so if we want to see beautiful technical fencing that calls for one type of rule set if we are interested in who would win a fight in a back alley with a sword then we have to have a much more than will set however that is going to be more scrappy that's going to be people bearing down on you there's no point of lamenting that we don't see the beautiful techniques when we set up conditions that the Masters themselves would have recognized aren't going to bring out the beautiful techniques if martial arts is the application of good technique at the right time maybe I have a great technique but I haven't figured out when to use it not much of a martial artist along the same token I might have the most perfect instincts in the world as a fighter but if I don't have the right technique one of two things is going to happen I'm gonna get my butt kicked or I'm gonna offense in a way that everybody and their grandmother within the human community he's gonna look at me and say Jake what you're doing isn't hema I don't know what you're doing it seems to be working but it's not Hema if you win but you do it poorly with really ugly fencing or things that people don't think are proper techniques you're not actually going to get a lot of positive feedback from that you're not going to be the hero of EEMA but just because you want swordfish when we're looking at tournaments I think one of the things we have to think about is just revealing flaws when we try to do a technique we want our partners to you know take advantage of any mistakes that we make we want to do a better technique in tournaments are unparalleled and the ability because there's someone else who's trying that definitely hit you and getting the points themself I'm going to really learn how that technique works at full speed full intensity against somebody who absolutely doesn't want it to happen and what kind of mechanical tweaks need to happen there what do I need to do with my feet with my hips with my hands if it works why remember that if it didn't work why remember that did it not work because I'm out of shape and I'm too slow is that even a feature that we need for that technique it allows me to really test that technique it allows me to test myself how well do I know the material that I claim to know that I claim to teach I know for a fact that Anders Leonard entered this tournament this swordfish with a specific idea of practicing techniques and I watched him carry out some techniques if we get the context of the competitions right the things that work very often will be things that are advised in the books look at Alisa koskinen from Finland who one of the ladies longsword she was doing some seldom used techniques he used the technique called the corn paw and not only using the chrome pol that she used you know the right hand version is the common one there is a left hand version that's described but she actually used it in the tournament that's the first time I've seen anyone do it looks like interesting another doctor pound and after blow that was interesting a Crim powell from the left scored by osika skinnin nice to see that she's showing that she knows the sources she trains from the sources she can use it effectively she can score with that technique and she's not just using it in the pool fencing at fencing she's using it in the finals and she's winning for first place that's just great there are certainly concerns people have about tournaments turning kima too much into a sport and not enough of a practical martial art we need to be cautious that we don't push the competitive side so far that we move away from the elements of recovering historical systems into the realm of we just have a sport for sports sake but having gone through it with those concerns and actually participated in tournaments I think the benefits greatly greatly outweigh the negatives I think that the popularity of humor is a two-edged sword in that the more popular it becomes the more standardized it has to be the good thing about standardization is leading to the fact that it's going to be a safer competitive environment it's going to lead to the ability to mass-produce the items and equipment that we so dearly want that currently cost great deal the dangers of standardizing anything are that it's going to limit any kind of continued growth what if in 20 years time somebody went oh my goodness this makes so much more sense now I've just done this particular mystery move and it's going to completely change the way that we've previously understood this if you've got something that's standardized in place it's gonna limit the growth of something that at the moment we all love because it is so exciting Lee knew having said that I personally believe that it's not all about tournaments you know tournaments I think just seem to be at the moment and maybe for some time to come sort of the popular sexy component of Hema and the fact of the matter is a lot of the people who do this get into Hema because they want like you want to be sort fighters that's what you know that's what young men want to do in particular more and more young women as well people want to be sort fighters it you know they don't just want to pose if they're gonna practice the techniques they want to have a forum in which they can actually use them if you talk to the people who actually win these tournaments you ask them are tournaments the most important thing I think most of them would very quickly say no I've been driving and created the sporting scene of Hema but I really hate this birth occasion a speedo my club is one of the most successful clubs as far as tournament goes we never practiced with tournaments we don't practice by the rule sets or anything like that and and the boys and girls that I train in my club are not thinking about only winning the tournament you're thinking about self-development there's long seeking foster that culture and see a tournament as a vehicle to improve as fencers in general format has great value very useful motivator for people to you know just pretty now is week on weekend and then to train against a non-compliant person from a different school that haven't trained with before my greatest kick is when I'm able to perform a technique that the world hasn't seen for 500 years and if I can do it in sparring it's good if I can do it in tournaments even better because it's more stress and it's an uncooperative opponent - it's for me it's a way of measuring how much I have internalized of the Oracle where we go with humor from now on I think is probably going to continue in as in the similar vein it will get bigger it's going to get bigger because people's awareness is increasing hopefully I don't think you all die death because it's not a fad it's not something where everyone's going oh that's fascinating you do something that's so different we must all come and do this we haven't become a hipster movement yeah it's very very much a case of it's people who want to do it and are interested in doing it and I think those people are always going to be about so it's not too big to collapse in on itself it's still attracting people who have a genuine interest in as a martial art or as a historical item or whatever with you know all the publicity that we've been getting FEMA is starting to go mainstream you're starting to see an interest from the mainstream martial arts community you're starting to see more of an interest from the mainstream sport fencing community I'm starting to see people from you know you see the CrossFit crowd starting to look at this that's what I think the big trend is going to be in the future is the mainstreaming of Hema there really isn't one particular kind of person that does Hema because people come to it for all different reasons they might come because they're romantics they might come because they love the movies and they might come because they want to get in shape they they come for all different reasons there isn't a particular kind of walk of life that I haven't run across in Hema or that seems to be really dominant I know I know soldiers and cops management consultants IT guys computer specialists grade school teachers professional athletes soccer moms I mean I've run into all kinds of people who are practicing Hema I'm a lawyer math teacher freelance writer criminology degree student copywriter project manager it's not people who are gonna dress up in costumes necessarily although it is those people - it's not Dungeons & Dragons nerds although it is those people as well it's not your professors from the university although it is them it's not your athlete and your school jock although it is certainly that guy when you put a sword in his hand and and that cross-section runs all the way from the high level competitive guys all the way down to people who are just shown up to class because swords are neat and they want to take a class Hema is one of the most fantastic grassroots movements I've ever seen it's exciting you you can go and learn physical skills that you can put into a fun fighting situation or a stressful competition fighting situation you take your pick which can also be fun so getting involved if you're lucky you know there will be other groups in your area that I've already sort of started building the community so you just look for you know swordplay places there are also plenty of places I think certainly in the US and I imagine elsewhere that people just kind of have to start out on their own so the biggest thing is to just reach out reach out and find other people that might share your common interests and you never know what nearby neighbor you have or family member or person that you know may also be a closet hema person our oldest student is 17 and you know he's actually pretty decent pretty fast that has surprised me you know again because of the really broad demographic there are lots of people that are sort of interested in this but just have never realized it was a thing so I think part of getting involved if you're doing it on your own is to just kind of let people know hey look I like doing swords you know is this something that anybody else wants to do just ask really Hamer's very much based on that model it takes one two or three dedicated people to to start the club and even for the unfortunate people that are just kind of isolated as long as you get the internet you are never fully isolated when it comes to Hima so part of it is also knowing where to go online you know various forms online just googling things you should be very quickly able to to locate you know sort of the nearest club or find somebody else who has interests so much your own about studying this or that or whatever Hameroff was everything but you don't have to you know you don't have to tick all the boxes if you like you might not be a top fencer or wrestler but you are an academic and without the academics we will be nowhere this will just be made-up stuff that has no value whatsoever or you can be a Community Builder unorganized or a manager or judge anything really so there are so many ways to contribute akima it's really multifaceted and if you love languages history competition sport fitness it's got everything if only some of those aspects appeal to you that's quite a lot to get on with the point being the invitation is out there anyone can come and join in it's an athletic physical activity it is a mental activity it is a scholarly activity it's a social activity it's really for anyone who is interested in something that happened something that was something that was amazing and if they're passionate about joining in on that they're gonna be pretty damn welcome it's not easier today than it was 10 years ago so it's not you know they're they're really no excuses not to start it out if you're interested you

Channel: Cédric Hauteville

Views: 284,223

Keywords: Historical European Martial Arts, Martial Arts (Sport), Fencing (Sport), Sword (Fictional Object), Swordsmanship (Character Power), Documentary (TV Genre), History, Culture

Id: 7DBmNVHTmNs

Length: 89min 12sec (5352 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/mrvile]

This is a very well-presented documentary. Managed to be very interesting without resorting to the usual History Channel approach. It's cool how low key the presentation can be while still effectively reminding you how brutal human history was.

Good timing with posting this too, I've been playing a lot of For Honor since it released yesterday and have been thinking about this a bit.

[u/urkan3000]

Matt Easton (who is featured in the video) has a great youtube channel where he talks in length about swords and old sword fighting techniques.

[u/DrJonesPHD62]

Oh, nice to find this here. Saw it when it was first released. More people should give it a look.

[u/HaddonH]

I've seen this, for such an exciting topic it's mostly / predominately people sitting and talking. I'm not sure how the filmmakers managed to take what should should have been thrilling and made it so dull.

[u/[deleted]]

In the end.....there can be only ONE

[u/TheBatemanFlex]

pretty interesting to see how Vikings actually fought as well.

Edit: how some believe Vikings might have fought.

[u/PM_ME_DEMM_TITTIES]

7 minutes in and a sword is laying next to a banana for scale. These guys know how to measure.

[u/malbolt]

16:28 it looks like he was about to finish him rightly

[u/count_blueballs]

I found a school/group near by already, plus the wife gave me the shrug and eye roll permission lol. I'm all set for my mid life crisis!