The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

Just one section from this week’s study, but it’s a section rich in awesomeness.  Yet again, half a page (page 7) packed with good stuff.  I think by this point, Agrippa was already in to full on “nifty tricks you can do from this guard” mode.  Giganti’s still laying down the groundwork of combat theory.  He’s swell.

Guards, or Postures

In single sword, there are many guards and many counter-guards… I only want to teach two types, which you may be able to use for every lesson

As mentioned, he skips naming specific guards in favor of the qualities of a good guard.  The two types he’s teaching are illustrated in the two accompanying plates, and are more or less Seconda and Quarta, but more on that later.

Before you perform an action, you must gain your opponent’s sword out of measure…

I love this sentence so much I had Gawin repeat it four times.  If I had a blackboard, he’d have written it 50 times.  So many Atlantians love to start fighting from in measure, playing the quick-draw game, that it wouldn’t hurt to have just about all of us write this 50 times, erase, bang the erasers out, and write it 50 more times.  Though, Master Geoffrey expressed the counter opinion well: “It’s like dating, being all coy and subtle working your way into range.  I’d rather just fight.”

…assuring yourself of his weapon by placing your blade over his so that he can only strike you by employing two tempi

Here he repeats his whole approach to the fight.  Close the line, attack in the tempo.  This first sentence of this second paragraph of this one page has two fundamental dicta of combat.  It’s beautiful.

Your goal is to take away the opponent’s ability and opportunity to strike you in a single tempo

You can practically define a strong guard as “Any that lets you attack your opponent or defend yourself in a single tempo”.  I took the opportunity of reading this sentence to remind Gawin that he should not take away that ability and opportunity himself, and should instead always keep his point on his opponent’s opening (he doesn’t always manage it).

If your opponent was in a high or low guard and you failed to set yourself in this guard and to assure yourself of his sword, you would be in danger even against someone less knowledgeable and experienced than you

I had Gawin re-state this sentence when he read it.  The phrase “set yourself in this guard” has no clear antecedent for “this”, a problem that occurs a few times in the book.  He reduced it to “If you don’t set yourself in a counterguard, you may get killed”.  Spot on.

He then illustrated this quite effectively when we were fighting: He had a high-ish line, I failed to close it, and he punked me in the mask with the uber-stiff 40″ blade I’d gotten rid of.  Today I got to show off the scrape on my nose to my manager.

The action could easily end in a double-hit, or he could force you to parry or put you into obedience…

We took this opportunity to discuss the meaning of “obedience”, since it’s not a term that gets bandied about at practice all that much.  So, G.I. Joe style, now we know, and knowing is half the battle.  And remember, showing up is half of success, so if you show and you know, you win.  Maybe.  Red lasers and blue lasers are also involved somewhere.

If you assure yourself of his sword… he will be unable to move or to perform any sort of action without you seeing it and being able to defend yourself

Another great sentence.  I especially appreciate Leoni’s translational skills here, using the phrase “assure yourself of his sword”, which does not dictate a specific technique as other interpretations might, but instead implies a state of being, as seems to be the overall style of Giganti (You are a human being, not a human doing, and fuck you motivational speakers).

The illustrations you see here show two guards… and two counter-guards…

So now that we’ve gotten into Sword Porn, we’re also taking time at practice to discuss the illustrations (Here plate 2 and plate 3).

This is done through a fairly straightforward question “What do you notice?”

Letia noted two important features, the back-weighted stance and the rearward-turned foot.  We set about discussing these and their potential purpose.  Nobody (who hadn’t read Dante’s article on Capo Ferro-istic body mechanics) knew the reason for the rear-turned foot.  So we worked forward from what we did know — The rear-weighted stance preferred forward motion/lunging, which was also preferred by Giganti’s strategy — and worked to the effect the rear-turned foot had on the lunge.  However, Letia’s lunge-form is not so much Giganti’s, which made the change in foot  angle actually detrimental to her lunge.  She opined it might be due to female anatomy; does anybody out there in Blog-o-land have any expertise on that subject?  For the boys, it extended the lunge by three inches (we were rotating the foot with the heel stationary, so all of this distance was gained from the hips).

Also noted: The hands are not actually in Seconda and Quarta.  The inside guard illustrated s really more of an inside seconda, though that would place the false edge against the opponent’s blade which is contrary to Giganti’s teaching.  Whether it was an engraver’s error or whether it’s intentional (and, inside seconda is not too terribly worse than quarta) I have no idea.

Also also noted: The orientation of the torso is highly variable (leaning back, leaning forward, leaning to one side, squared up, lined up) though the hips and legs are the same in every guard/counter-guard.

Also also also noted: Distance between the feet in the guards illustrated: 2.5 foot lengths.  Distance between the feet in the lunge illustrated on plate 1: 2.5 foot lengths.  So no step has actually been taken from the guards to the lunge, though again Giganti’s actual instructions are to take a narrower stance to allow for it to be extended with the step forward.