Two close friends, Alex and Sean, of High Desert Armizare (Bend, OR), have been working through Zachary Wylde’s The English Master of Defence OR, The Gentleman’s Al-a-mode Accomplish (1711). [1] This treatise is, like others from about the same time (e.g. Hope and McBane), typically unpopular with people trained in traditional fencing. The suggested guard, the variety of terms in non-standard spelling, and the tacit if not explicit issue that these works take with then traditional fencing is off-putting. [2] However, as someone who was skeptical at first, time spent with this book and blade in hand will reveal that it’s no joke. Wylde provides a viable system, one not just for smallsword, but broadsword and quarterstaff as well.
Alex and Sean took a look at his section on the flannconade and variations, and, shot video:
http://www.highdesertarmizare.com/2021/08/22/wyldes-flancanade/
NOTES:
[1] Cf. http://www.the-exiles.org/Manual%20Zach%20Wylde.htm
[2] Wylde’s vocabulary underscores the fact that English did not have a standard, authoritative dictionary as yet. Even before Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604), itself derived from other word lists, England had had lexica of different sorts, mostly for other languages, e.g. the Latin-English The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1538) and an Italian-English dictionary I still use once in a while, John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598). There were a number of dictionaries produced in England in the 17th century, even specialized ones for slang, but it wasn’t until after Wylde’s time that any dictionary came to command spelling conventions and definitions for the language. Students of Wylde may find James Orchard Halliwell-Philipps’ A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, 2 Vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1881) useful.
Sala delle Tre Spade 