La canne de combat (combat cane) is a French combat sport based on the use of a cane, a medium-length walking stick. It is visually quite original, very quick and athletic. It is also somewhat difficult to really understand from the outside, as the rules shape much of the action. This post provides a brief history and describes the main rules of the sport.
George Silver is the famous author of an early printed work on fencing and martial arts in English, Paradoxes of Defence (1599). He is often quoted for having layed out universal principles in the form of his hierarchy of true and false times. Sadly, the most common interpretation of these does not fit the whole text. This post provides the necessary quotes to understand the causes and key properties of true and false times, which are in my opinion more interesting and less open to interpretation than the hierarchy itself.
Martial training generally comes together with initial fears and occasional pain. Some training methods point out fear as a pedagogical helper. They will use the fear of pain as a motivator to not get hit. They will use unsafe gear and say that the fear of accident increases the realism of the practice and help make the student focus. I personally disagree with these methods and would not fancy studying in such environments, for the reasons outlined in this post.
This post explores the notion of speed in our sources, starting with the explicit admonitions to be quick, the reasons one needs to be quick, and then details the distortions to martial moves that are brought by low-speed work. I believe this information is important to keep in mind when discussing training methodology.
Ceci est une version française de cet article, suite à des demandes de lecteurs intéressés ! Il traite d’une nouvelle façon de représenter la distribution de masse des épées, à la fois intuitive, visuelle et objective.
The mass distribution of swords is a well-known component of their performance and handling feel. Although sword makers have to control it through a variety of means, from a user perspective, only three parameters are needed to completely describe it: total mass, centre of gravity, and radius of gyration. They are well known of physicists. However, their values are not in direct relation with what we perceive when using a sword. Because of this, their usefulness has been questioned and their measurement in the sword community is still scarce. In this article, I will demonstrate how to build a more visual representation of the mass distribution of swords, with an application on five swords of my collection.
This article explores the history of the notion of centre of percussion, how it has been conceived by physicists and how it was then transmitted to sword people and modified to better suit their practical experience.
In the 16th century, cuts begin to be sorted according to the portion of the arm that moves while delivering the cut. This post explores the classification of cuts and the various tactical considerations that can be extracted from the source material.
How to move when cutting with a sword? While the question may seem simple, the answers are actually quite complex and diverse. In this post, I want to expose some things that can be found in sources to inform our cutting mechanics. This provides a starting point for experimentation, interpretation and training that is firmly grounded in history.
As I’ve exposed in a previous post the term HEMA does not come with a good description of the goals or an exact prescription of the approach. The study of historical European martial arts can use a variety of methods, and depending on the goals of the student the activity can take different forms. There does not have to be a universal agreement on that, at some point it’s just different strokes for different people. The rest of this post is just a clarification of my personal views on these topics.