Warm ups consisted of me (Tassin) and Letia fighting a number of passes with sword and dagger in our normal SCA style of fighting. This continued until we were both warmed up.
Drills:
Today’s drills focused on finding the blade and attacking.
First drill, finding the blade:
Agente and patiente start out of measure.
The patiente takes a guard, in this case a typical SCA single sword guard.
The agente takes their choice of Fabris guard.
The agente finds the patiente’s blade and kills him.
Repeat until satisfied and then switch places.
This drill can be done with the patiente in any guard they chose. We chose a typical SCA guard today because it is common and according to Fabris should be easy to exploit. In the future the guard used in this drill should change.
Second drill, opponent in obedience:
Agente and patiente start out of measure.
The patiente takes a guard, in this case a typical SCA single sword guard.
The agente takes their choice of Fabris guard.
The agente finds the patiente’s blade and attacks.
The patiente parries the attack, putting him in obedience.
The agente performs an action to defeat the parry, continuing the attack to kill the patiente.
This drill can have many different outcomes we both performed a variety of attacks until we came to one that we felt should be repeated.
Letia as the agente:
Letia attacked my high line with a passing step requiring me to parry up.
When I made the parry she was able to drop her tip below my forte into my chest.
She can then continue her step past me.
Hangups: Fabris says that the process of finding the blade should start in the fourth part of the blade (the part closest to the tip). When this happened Letia was successful in her attacks. When she began in the second or third part of my blade she did not have the opportunity to drop her tip before it got caught on my guard.
Tassin as the agente:
I attacked on a low (waist/belly height) inside line with a passing step.
When Letia parried the attack I performed a cavazione and struck her in the body as I passed on the outside.
Hangups: Performing the cavazione before she started the parry didn’t work for obvious reasons. It was tempting to bring my hand onto her sword as I struck for extra protection, however, done properly my sword completely protected me and the hand movement slowed my attack.
In practicing attacks we used only passing steps. When using passing steps we found it was important to pass by the opponent instead of passing into them. The firm footed attack did not come up.
We then finished by fighting each other for the last 10 minutes or so in Fabris’ style with the sword alone.
Stuff to work on next time:
More varied attacks, including those that strike on the inside line.
Work against more varied guards since we don’t all fight the same.
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