Title

Any one with an interest in the middle ages should read this book. It’s definitely not a masterpiece of literature but it clearly outline the development of the concept of knighthood from its origins in the eighth and ninth centuries until its slow, sad decline around the sixteenth century. The unstated aim of the work appears to be to counter the dreadful notions of knighthood we’ve inherited from the the Victorian era.

Professor Gies covers history of knighthood predominantly in England, France and German with the occasional reference to Spain and Eastern Europe. The focus of the book is on the social development of the knightly class and looks closes at what the knights themselves thought of their class as much as the historical actions of the class. She uses the careers of three knights in particular to prove her points: William Marshal (1144-1219), Bertrand du Guesclin (1320-80), and John Falstof, the model for Shakespeare’s character (1378-1459). The lack of primary documents precludes previding such in-depth sketches of the careers of knights of earlier centuries although she attempts to trace the lives of the du Hongres brothers in the First Crusade with some success.

Contrary to popular belief, the book posits, knights were not a survival of the _equites_ class from the Roman Empire. The class first appeared after Charlemagne in the ninth century as little more than rich thugs terrorising the countryside on horseback. This lead to the tenth century church intervening and forcing the nobility of Europe to agree to the “Truce of God” and the “Peace of God” which basically said that such brigandry and killing each other are not the acts of good Christians. Only with the development of the crusading ideal in the eleventh century did the concept of piety become tied to the idea of knighthood. The addition of the culture of the troubadours of southern France and their later equivalents in norther France, Germany and Italy completed the picture and gave us something like the concept of knighthood we have today.

After this high point in the thirteenth century, Professor Gies says, economics took its toll and the class began a slow decline into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only to be revived by Victorian writers (such as Walter Scott) as the hopeless joke of romantic idealism that we know today. The Hundred Years War is cited as an example of the turning point for the class. Professor Gies suggests that the English victories early in the war were not the result of the longbow as such but of the English king hiring bodies of professional soldiers rather than relying, as did the French, on the old system of feudal levy. This, she says, is the result of the lack of knights in England – some counties unable to produce a knight whereas there were a couple of dozen in the previous century – and their unwillingness to provide their nominated forty days annual service in an overseas campaign.

This trend continued into the fourteenth and later centuries when the knight lost even his status as a local administrator, the job having become the province of merchants and non-knightly nobility.

The book is a good, non-technical read which will open many eyes to the reality of the knight in history.

Related posts:

1. Review: Inquisition
2. History Alive 2010
3. Review: The Aegean Bronze Age

Battlefield

This is the most obvious use of the sword as a weapon. It is also the one that is least understood by fencers. Contrary to popular belief in some quarters, rapiers were never used on the battlefield at any period in history¹. This does not mean that the rapier is an inferior weapon or that the soldiers of the day were unskilled sword fighters (because otherwise, they’d all use rapiers). It simply means that the rapier is the wrong tool for this context. Heavier weapons and weapons which could deal more effective with armour were always preferred.

Judicial Duel

Generally, battlefield weapons were preferred, especially in the Germanic countries, long after they disappeared from warfare because this was serious business. A judicial duel was rarely to first blood or any other nicety. It was almost always combat to the death.

Duel of Honour

Duelling for points of honour were also to the death until the concept of first blood was introduced around the 19th century. Even here, as late as 1547, duels were being fought with sword and buckler rather than the new-fangled (and Italian) thrust-centric rapiers. Rapiers were used when the fight was immediate rather than in formal, prepared duels. Also, contrary to even the words of the masters, the thrust is much less deadly – and certainly less immediately deadly – that the cut. It was only after the introduction of the small sword in the eighteenth century that this nature of the duel began to change.

Gang Violence and Thuggery

Those crazy Italians were not the only people to carry swords in the streets for personal protection but they became known for it. It is for fighting in the courts, taverns and streets that the rapier was truly developed. The weapon’s main feature is its length, which grew steadily over time to ridiculous proportions. This length gave the wielder the ability to hold opponents at a safe distance. It’s also good for attacking someone without putting yourself in danger of any form of retaliatory response.

Sports

Swords have always been used for sport with sets of rules to codify and control behaviour. The most complete set of rules we have is the Belgian Guild rules which were known to have been used from at least the 1540s in northern France and Belgium. There are plenty of medieval notes about bouts in the market place. Sport is as valid a context for swordplay as war.

Nobility

The final context is related to sport. The sword has always been the symbol of the nobility. Long after the weapon disappeared from the battlefield, the nobility and those who wanted to emulate them trained regularly and frequently with swords. They bouted between each other in the same way that CEOs (arguably the nobles of today) play golf. The further away from the medieval battlefield we stand, the more likely we are to find non-lethal sport combat between members of the aristocracy using increasingly light and thrust-centric weapons.

¹ They were used at the start of the English Civil War (1642-1651) but were quickly dropped in favour of more useful weapons.

Related posts:

1. Swordplay 11 Is On!
2. Rapier Play Versus Modern Fencing
3. Swordplay 10 Review

My latest addition is Darkwood Armory‘s magnificent “Arms and Side-ring” side sword which they list under the code ARMSIDE. It’s a great example of a sixteenth century rapier which, for me, matches the swords you find in the diagrams in many manuals of the period, in particular, Joachim Meyer’s Art of War, Henri de Sainct Didier and the rest of the gang who published around 1570 or so.

It lacks the complex hilt of later rapiers in favour of a simpler cross hilt with a knuckle bow and finger rings. It’ll be interesting to see how much protection these give in practice. I suspect it will be fine. The blade, while def enough for point-work, maintains a reasonable blade profile for cutting attacks. The weapon is a little blade heavy but I’ve an armourer friend develop the fullers in the standard Darkwood blade a little more fully which has lightened the blade considerably and brought the balance point back very close to the finger rings.

I’ve had a few test bouts with friends in the few weeks I’ve had the sword. I’m really looking forward to giving it a proper work out when training at the Australian College of Arms (ACA) starts again this month. That will be the real test of the weapon’s value.

Related posts:

1. Meyer’s Rapier in One Post
2. Papa Got A New Longsword!
3. Fencing Fest VII

Ambrose book is a great read for anyone with even a passing interest in the event but it is not without its faults. It’s purpose should be thought of as an introduction to this amazing event in military history rather than a definitive or in-depth history of the action.

Growing up on war movies and historical miniatures gaming, I’ve pretty much always been aware of the efforts of Johnny Howard‘s lads to take and hold the bridges over the Orne River at Benouville the night before the Normandy beach landings in 1944. However, it was only after visiting the site in 2005 that I understood the magnitude of the task and the difficulty of the feat these young men achieved. It’s always puzzled me – even more since visiting the site – how the bridges’ defenders were not alerted by the huge gliders crashing to earth.

As with all this author’s work, he concentrates on collecting first-hand accounts of the action from soldiers on both sides of the engagement and from the civilians so often caught in the middle of the conflict. He spend as much time on the preparations made before the action as he does on the events of the assault itself. In this book he adds a third section of equal size which traces what happened to the members of the assault force after D-Day and the history of the bridge from 1944 to the present.

For those who don’t know, just after midnight on D-Day, 6 June 1944, two lots of three gliders each carrying a platoon of British airborne troppers crash-landed into farmland no more than 50 yards from two of the most strategically important bridges in Occupied Europe. These bridges, if not taken by these men, would have allowed the elite German 21 Panzer Division to attack the eastern flank of the Normandy landings and, because they were held, allowed the Allied forces to breakout of the landing zone and push towards the heart of Hitler’s war machine. Because of the difficulties of parachuting into enemy territory at night, the force which was expected to relieve them within two to three hours of taking the bridges didn’t arrive in any strength until more than twelve hours later. While they were waiting for these much needed reinforcements, these few men held off a determined German counterattack.

The problem with the book is that it’s light-weight. The reader has to work fairly hard to figure out who was where and when and the diagrams meant to explain the action are not terribly helpful. On the flip-side, however, the book is best thought of as an oral history collection rather than an analysis of the taking of the bridges or the progress of the battle.

In all, the book is a well-written page-turner which provides a good overview of the event for someone who knows little about it. It’s target audience is the average reader with an interest in World War II rather than the amateur military historian.

Related posts:

1. Review: Australian Zombie Myths
2. Review: The Knight in History
3. Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz

For strarters, think about what’s important to you. It may be family, career or your hobbies. These topics will form paths you’ll be following in 2012.

Stop right there. You’re picking the topics other people say should be important to you. Put all that aside and start again. What’s actually important to you?

Next, picture yourself at New Years Eve 2012 about to roll into 2013. What do you want to have achieved by the end of the year? What would you be disppointed by not achieving?

In the realm of historical fencing, for example, I would like to have developed a better understanding of some of the key treatises published around 1570 such as those of Joachim Meyer, Giovanni Dall’Agocchie and Henri de Sainct Didier. I’m keen on the transitional period between cutting-based technique and later thrusing-based fencing styles and these guys straddle the change from one to the other.

Now turn these into something a little more concrete by working out how much time you need or have to devote to these activities. This task may alter your list as you juggle things to fit the time you have available.

Using the example above, by the end of the year, I want to have studied to a sufficient degree those three fencing masters and practiced their key techniques in sparring. That gives me roughly four months per author. Actually, let’s say three months per author so I’ve got some time for whatever side projects crop up along the way. I’m already fairly familiar with Meyer so in his case I’ll concentrate on his dusack technique – which he claims is the basis of all single sword practice so should be worth studying. Alternatively, I could drop him altogether but I don’t want to do that.

Do this for each other topic you highlighted and you’ve got a whole list of things to look forward to and the do in the coming year.

Here’s a couple of things from my lists. By the end of 2012, I will:

• have climbed Mt Warning again (to prove the knee is finally fixed or wreck it entirely),
• have studied deep into the Club 1570 masters’ treatises and developed some skill in each of their techniques,
• run a successful RPG campaign (most likely either Conspiracy X or Traveller),
• developed a better understanding of the reign of Philip IV “le bel” of France (with associated Templar goodness),
• found a simple way of maintaining my French that doesn’t require me to hang out with people I don’t like or spend excessive amounts of cash,
• reached my goal weight of 100kg (admittedly this is a side effect rather than a goal as such but I’d be disappointed if I didn’t make it).

Of course, there’s a bunch of other items on the list … but you don’t need to know about them.

Related posts:

1. Ten Years of Roleplaying Campaigns
2. Anaesthetic and Time Travel

Historical Fencing: This remains a point of focus as it’s such a dominant activity in my life. I’ll be concentrating on the cut-and-thrust single sword techniques in the transitionary period between true battlefield swordfighting and later Renaissance rapier fencing styles. There’s a bunch of fencing masters publishing texts five years either side of 1570 which interest me no end, including Joachim Meyer, Giovanni Dall’Agocchie, Henri de Sainct Didier and Jeronimo de Caranza.

Gaming: I’m an old, old gamer. I’m too old, in fact, to ever give it up. And last year, I discovered that many of you are interested in the roleplaying campaigns that I run. There’s more to come. I know I’ll be running a few short camapigns during the year, possibly even a return to running Call of Cthulhu or Traveller. There’ll be a bunch more photos of historical miniatures gaming as well.

Languages: I’ll be journalling my continuing efforts to retain (regain?) my French. This will take the form of reviews of websites with useful French content and other methods of becoming and staying current with the language, I’ll be concentrating on stuff which will help you prepare for the DELF B1 exam as achieving this credential seems to be the gateway signalling both a minimum level of competence and the key to further study. I intend (again) to start learning Italian but I’ve not yet signed up for any courses.

There will also be plenty of book reviews (mainly history texts, I imagine) and rants (on every topic under the sun without doubt).

On the technical side, I’ll keep posting only once a week but the day will change from 10:00am (AEST) Friday to the same hour on Monday. It’s just a little more convenient for me. Thus you can expect the first post under the new regime in three days time.

I don’t foresee any major change to the blog although there will be a number of useability tweaks occuring over the next few weeks.

Related posts:

1. My Blog’s Year-in-Review

Let’s start with the fundamentals – section 116 of the Constitution:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

That’s it. Separation of church and state …. Done.

Whining about MP’s bringing their religious beliefs into parliament is just plain stupid. Ours is a representative democracy and as much as I think the beliefs of, say, Fred Nile in NSW and Tony Abbott at the federal level are antithetical to an open, civil and caring society, the people in their electorates keep voting for them. These are the people they want to represent them. To bar these people from office because they hold particular beliefs is contrary to section 116.

Complaining about religious schools receiving government funding demonstrates a similar lack of understanding of this section of the Constitution. Schools founded on religious principles as well as the smaller number of schools with other philosophical foundations (ie: Steiner, Montessori, etc) cannot be barred from receiving funding as long as they follow the recognized and approved curriculum. Several of these school are not eligible for funding for this very reason and cannot teach their own preferred curriculum.

However, those truly serious about the separation of church and state in this country do have something the can and should complain about – although on this point there is a notable silence from the swill trough. This is the reliance on the charitable and religious sectors to provide the social services it is the goverment’s duty to provide.

Related posts:

1. Wah?
2. Spank My Monkey
3. Meyer’s Rapier: In the Onset

The first surprise is the number of people who read my blog. On average, there’s 730 page views here per month with a daily average rising steadily from 20 per day in January to 35 per day in November. I must be doing something right even though it appears that the average visitor only read the page they land on and then browses somewhere else. In order to work out how to keep visitors browsing around the site for longer, I’d better figure out what draws them here in the first place.

The most popular posts and pages are not to do with historical fencing. In fact, only one post makes it into the year’s top five most popular posts/pages list – and that’s a post on Camillo Agrippa from February 2010. Unsurprisingly, the top five posts/pages are reflected in the top search keywords which direct people here.

Top Five Most Popular Posts/Pages

1. Across the Spinward Main – Traveller RPG Campaign Story Hour
2. My DELF B1 Exam Experience
3. Fallen is Babylon – Conspiracy X/UniSystem RPG Campaign Story Hour
4. 9mm Juliet – Feng Shui RPG Shakespearean Manga Campaign Story Hour
5. Camillo Agrippa – Renaissance fencing master

Three of the top five are roleplaying campaign notes. WTF? Some of these pages haven’t been touched since 2005. In fact, the Traveller story hour gets close to the same amount of traffic as the rest of the top five combined. Wow! I thought I was the only person in the universe still harbouring a secret wish of being de-mobbed from the IISS and backpacking from system to system. Obviously not.

That the DELF B1 exam post is in the list shouldn’t surprise me as much as it did given the amount of searching I did before taking it to find out how tough it was going to be. I expected more fencing posts and pages to make the list and I definitely expected the posts about trying to decode Joachim Meyer’s rapier technique rather than Camillo Agrippa to feature.

(At sixth most popular and just missing out on making the top five list is my experiences making my own Dusacks back when I studdies this weapon.)

Visitors to the site are likely to be either from Australia (which is kind of natural since that’s where I live) or from the US. My American visitors tend to be interested in historical fencing or Traveller. My Aussie visitors are all over the shop. These two locations make up around two-thirds of all visitors.

Most visitors are fairly technicalogically savvy using the latest browsers and operating systems and large screen resolutions to view the site. More than five percent of visitors read these pages using a mobile device. I wonder how this percentage will change in the coming year. What does puzzle me, though, is the 10% of visitors using Windows Vista and the 2.4% of visitors using the Opera browser. Seriously?

What does this mean for next year? I’m not sure. The question boils down to who am I writing this blog for: me or the wider world? If I’m writing solely for me, nothing changes and you can choose to come along for the ride or not as you see fit. If I’m writing it for the wider world, I need to concentrate more on what brings people here (roleplaying and learning french) and find ways to keeping you here once you arrive. Regardless, I’ve found my weighty matter to ponder over the holiday period. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

No related posts.

This is a fascinating read which ultimately tries to cram too much into too small a book. Depending on which of its many and sometimes conflicting aims you are considering, it either succeeds marvellously or fails dismally. At its heart, however, the book explores what happens to men on the battlefield, what it takes to make them kill and how they live with the knowledge that they’ve taken the life of some poor bastard just like them.

The core of the book looks at what is required to make soldiers kill in combat. It relies heavily on the now generally discredited work of Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall which showed that in World War II only around 25% of front-line infantry, even when directly engaged in combat, fired their weapons. Grossman extrapolates this data back in time to account for similar statements made about armies during the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. He then claims this as the basis of changes in training procedures which raised the fire rates from the World War II lows to highs of around 95% in Vietnam. I’m not equipped to comment directly on his argument other than to note that there is a significant body of research which disagrees with him.

The telling point for me is that, when describing the emotional resistence to killing another human being even in battle which needs to be overcome, he appears to echo the thoughts and feelings of veterans. This is the reason why no one who has not been in that situation can truly understand what it is to experience the battlefield. Grossman goes so far as to suggest that there is a genetically in-built prohibition to killing another of our own kind in all of us that needs to be overcome by soldiers on the battlefield who then need to be ritually healed before being welcomed back into society.

One of the benefits of of the book is in the valuable addition it makes to the clichéd schema of the supposed “fight or flight” instinct. Grossman proposes two other points on the line between these two poles which he calls “posturing” and “submission.” I’d like to see some research to back up his claims but these two poles make a great deal of intuitive sense to me. Fights almost never happen. In a conflict situation, one side puffs itself up to look bigger and more threatening than the other. In the end, one submits and slinks away rather than taking the comflict to the fight stage.

Grossman suggests, and I tend to agree, that these additions to the schema make sense of early gunpowder weapons, known for their unreliability and inaccuracy. They are a means of making a bigger and louder posturing gesture than can be made without them. In these terms, battles are not so much won by the victors as they are lost by the defeated collectively submitting to this display of agression.

However, I reckon he loses the plot completely when he steps away from the narrow focus of the battlefield and extrapolates to violence in modern life. In short, he claims that video games, especially, first-person shooters follow the same Pavlovian training techniques used by the military to overcome the soldier’s innate resistence to killing without applying the rigid discipline that prevents soldiers from becoming murders. Such simplification of a stupendously complicated topic makes me wonder whether the same principle is at work in other sections of the book.

In short, the book is a fascinating read which has opened discussion on a previously taboo topic. I hope the discussion continues and some real research is done to put Grossman’s coherent and intuitively appealing claims to the test.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz
2. Review: Pegasus Bridge
3. Review: The Knight in History

I can’t summarise Dall’Agochhie’s essential actions better than has already been done by Steve Reich (Nova Assalto).

Dall’Agocchie proposes to teach the prospective duellist only one of the multitude of guard position in the Bolognese tradition. What he calls the porta di ferro stretta Meyer calls the Iron Gate in a variant which is held to the left side of the right handed swordsman (2.54R).

From this position, Dall’Agocchie advocates only two actions to parry all attacks and counter strike. The first is beat away an incoming attack to the right by transitioning into guardia d’alicorno (Meyer’s Right Ox; 2.53V) and thrusting at the opponent’s face. Meyer describes this action in several places (2.89r3, etc). The second is raise the hilt and cut a riverso squalimbro (Meyer’s Defense Cut from the left; 2.55R) against an incoming attack to the left then thrust into the opponent’s flank. Meyer describes this action here (2.70r2).

These similarities are hardly a surprise. After all, there’s only so many ways to swing a lump of metal. What strikes me as interesting is Dall’Agocchie’s use of provocation. He advises the newbie duellist to draw his weapon, passing into guardia d’alicorno (Right Ox), and immediately thrust at the opponent – not to wound but to force the opponent to act. Then, he says, the duellist can use one of the two basic actions to score his or her point of honour. This is a perfect example of Meyer’s provoker – taker – hitter schema in another tradition.

Dall’Agocchie is adamant however that simply practising these techniques does not a fencer make. The newbie duellist cannot in thirty days be taught tempo, which he says only comes from fencing a variety of partners. Tempo is a subject on which Meyer is almost entirely silent. While he speaks of fighting in the vor and nach, this refers more to siezing and controlling the initiative of the fight than the timing of fight actions.

While the similarities between the two schools of fence are in many ways to be expected, the differences are most enlightening. For me, Dall’Agocchie’s admonitions and Meyer’s silence on the subject of tempo shows the advantages of training in more than one fencing tradition. Each illuminates the practice of the other.

Related posts:

1. Summary of Meyer’s Rapier System
2. Meyer’s Rapier: Provoker, Taker, Hitter
3. Meyer’s Rapier in One Post