Guy Windsor - The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts

I think it all began at the fencing club at Edinburgh University in 1992, when Charlie Napier ran down the fencing strip at me. His foil was held across his body, with the point way back behind him. I extended my arm, and he ran his body onto my point as his foil flicked around, the blade bending in a graceful arc and tapping me harmlessly on the shoulder. Both lights went off, and the president called the hit. For Charlie. Because he started moving forwards first: he had priority, and his suicidal approach took precedence over my safe, careful and lethal response. Id been fencing for five years at school, but there we had always followed a much stricter interpretation of the International Fencing Federations (FIE) rules, leading to a much more classical and cautious style of play.

But when Charlie got given point after point, I realised that the modern sport of fencing was completely unrealistic and had practically nothing in common with its martial roots any more. A little while later I was at a local competition and got talking to a beginner fencer, Paul, who had taken up the sport a few weeks earlier and was already becoming disillusioned with it. We got together in Holyrood Park under Salisbury Crags, and with pes and fencing masks set about trying to kill each other in a realistic manner. Proper hits. No suicidal running about. Treat the swords like they are sharp, and bugger the modern rules.

My grandpa had been a fencer, but he died when I was only thirteen. Id had a couple of lessons off him, but nothing serious. The next time I went down to London to see my granny, I dug through Grandpas books and found Alfred Huttons The Sword and the Centuries. In it, Hutton refers to dozens of old books written in the days when swords were used for real. This set me off on a quest to find some of these books, and I set to work figuring out how swordfighting should be done. It has always been obvious to me that people who fought for real are more likely to know how to fight than us modern folk trying to figure it out from scratch. And one day, in the National Library of Scotland, I found Donald McBanes The Expert Sword-Mans Companion. This glorious little book begins with 70 pages or so of autobiography (and what a life he led! Duelling, gambling, whoring and soldiering his way across Europe under Marlborough at the turn of the eighteenth century), which was followed by a very practical treatise on sword fighting and a set of instructions for gunnery. Before long my friends and I had also tracked down George Silvers Paradoxes of Defence from 1599, and some really poor photocopies of some medieval sources, such as I.33 and the Novati facsimile of Il Fior di Battaglia. By the beginning of 1994, we realised we had to create a formal society for studying these arts (we didnt even have a name for what we were doing I think we came up with the term historical swordsmanshiparound then). This was mostly so we could get other people to come along, because we were getting bored fencing just with each other.

We came across battle re-enactment and were extremely excited to meet other sword enthusiasts until we realised that they were not interested in the historical swordfighting methods that we were obsessed by. Their interest was broader, and encompassed the clothing, uniforms, battle formations and all that; the actual combat styles were completely unhistorical, invented solely as a way to allow steel-on-steel action in the safest possible way. I regret to say that, being young and foolish, we occasionally behaved rather badly and put our historical techniques to work on unsuspecting re-enactors.

Unbeknownst to us, other groups with interests closer to our own were springing up across the world: the Chicago Swordplay Guild, for one; and the Historical Armed Combat Association in Texas, for another. The internet was only just becoming a thing, so we had no way to find these people until it was actually possible to search the World Wide Web in the mid nineties. The Swordplay Symposium International, held at Livermore, California in 2000, was the first convention dedicated to Historical Martial Arts, and Paul went to it. Then all of a sudden, word got around, and we were no longer just a little group of oddballs in Edinburgh; we were at the forefront of a growing international movement. The rest, as they say, is history.

You might be asking who am I to be teaching you this material, and you should ask this question of every expert and the author of every book, treatise, source or reference you come across. Lets face it: not every author really ought to be writing books, and not everyone who claims to know things about swords actually does and this is just as true today as it was hundreds of years ago. I would say its especially important when youre considering modern experts (like me).

Ive been researching historical source material since about 1993. I have a degree in English literature from Edinburgh University, so I know how to read books and write about them. I graduated in 1996. I founded The Dawn Duellists Society in Edinburgh in 1994. It is still going strong today. I founded The School of European Swordsmanship in 2001. Its still going and it has branches all over the world. My first book, The Swordsmans Companion, came out in 2004. Ive written and published eight books since then and my training syllabus is online for all to see. Ive also created Audatia: the Medieval Combat Card Game, which accurately represents medieval Italian longsword fencing.

All that this means is that it is easy for you to judge one way or the other whether my opinion and my approach, my way of doing things, is worth anything. So have a look at my videos and read some of my books (like this one), and decide for yourself whether or not you think I know what Im talking about. Its perfectly all right if you think I dont.

Its really important that you can clearly identify the authority behind whatever it is youre practising. You might practise your art because this is what your teacher tells you to do. Thats fine. You might practise it because this is how it was written down in this particular book hundreds of years ago. Thats also fine. Or you might practise it this way because you can win tournaments with it. Thats fine too. So long as you are absolutely clear what your authority is, you can practise authentically. I hope that after studying this book youll be able to use a historical source as your authority, and then have other people who have read the same source look at what youve come up with and say do you know what? Youre probably right.