With our tourney coming up—an invitational sabre match—I’m always conscious of how difficult these things are to do. I’ve either fenced in or judged a lot of tournaments, both Olympic and HEMA, and with each new historical tourney I’m struck by a disturbing fact—pound for pound, a tournament in HEMA and one in Olympic circles are not so very different. In both, too many fighters are playing the system, and worse, too many have zero regard for being hit. In both tournament worlds there is also a tendency to take medaling as the litmus test for excellence. Placing well can correlate with skill, but it’s not a sure thing. There are a number of reasons why this is so.
Everyone likes to
win. Emerging the victor in a bout, or better still a tournament, is a nice
feeling. It’s validating. It is important, however, to put any such victory in
context and remember that however well one does, victory on its own does not
mean mastery. There are several reasons for this and if you’re serious about
your development as a fencer you need to know this. You ignore it at your
peril, at the risk of further improvement, and it can easily lead to a false
sense of ability with all the ego problems that creates.
There is always someone out there better than
you are. This is just true.
Theoretically, out there somewhere, there is one fencer who truly is better than
everyone else, but see point two 😉 A
prime example of this is a close friend of mine—we’ll call him
“Dennis.” He’s a beautiful fencer, tactically brilliant, graceful,
powerful, the kind of fighter who makes you look even better than you are when
you fight him and he’s destroying you. Yes, that good. In the early 00’s, he
entered an epee event open only to fencers ranked B or higher; most everyone
there was an A-rated fencer. As this was epee, that ranking actually meant
something too–epee is the only weapon of the three to have retained much of
its martial ethos. No one there knew Dennis, and they expected to clean the
floor with him. He beat every single one of them, badly, and they were really
ticked when they realized that this was just something he did for fun, that he
wasn’t a “normal” tournament guy; he fenced enough to keep his
rating, but otherwise he’d just as soon be working on other hobbies. Dennis is
a good example of the unknown ego-check, of the truly gifted fencer out there
who is, quite literally, better than you or me.
Great fencers have bad days; poor fencers
good days. No matter how
good someone might be, even the best fencers have an off day. If this day
happens to be on a tournament day, chances are good they may not clear the
pools. In like guise, the poorest noob may end up taking the day. It just
depends. Maybe they just had more fire and the better fencers either
underestimated them or misapplied their skill. Maybe the directing was crap.
Maybe it was a combination. One can’t take anything for granted.
Tournament victory is only as good as the
quality of the pools. Not
all gold medals are the same. Medaling in a minor tournament with twenty
fencers of basic skill is not the same as medaling in a tournament where half
or more of the fifty competitors are truly skilled. Herein is one major problem
for WMA—what defines skill? Many people equate tournament victory with it, but that’s
a false equivalency, one only embraced by people who don’t know better or who
benefit from the fallacy. This is hard to combat because the same egos that
benefit from this, who derive their value from it, are quick to say any naysayer
is suffering sour grapes. Sort of makes discussing and fixing that,
demonstrating the problem, difficult.
Skill vs. Attribute Fencing One of the elephants in the ring is the issue of attribute fencing versus a more comprehensive skill-set well-applied. To be fair, most attribute-fencers have skill, but often this is a specific set of skills that exploit their reach, speed, etc. to the exclusion of a more comprehensive game. The thing is it works. If you’re fast, if you have reach, if you hit harder and intimidate people, it will take you pretty far. People medal and win tournaments all the time armed only with a few tricks that they have optimized. The confidence that comes with that cannot be underestimated. The test though, for those fencers, is what happens when they run into someone whose skill-set is broader, whose experience is deeper, and who knows how to nullify the advantages their opponent’s attributes offer. If attribute fencers are lucky, they’ll meet that opponent; if they’re smart, they’ll learn something from it.
Gaming the Tourney is another major issue. This isn’t new and
it’s not confined to WMA, but a major problem for Olympic fencing as well other
sports. There are advantages to winning, and so, some people are willing to do
whatever it takes to make it happen. For just a few examples, be wary of anyone
hosting a tournament that only enlists directors and/or judges from their
school or who stack staffing in their favor.[i]
Related tactics include attempting to intimidate officials and other
competitors, arguing for rule changes that favor one’s approach and fencers,
and hard-hitting. These kids don’t play with others, and worse, can give a
tournament, even a region, a bad rep. You don’t want that.
I’m not saying don’t fence in tourneys—you should if you want, they’re
fun, but, you should go into them with your eyes open and for the right
reasons. Not to wax too Miyagi, but primarily a tourney is a place to test, in
real-time, your skills and tactics; it’s a lesson, a chance to learn, an
opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t. It should also be fun. The
illusion of mastery, and especially of tourney gold as evidence of it, is a
problem for any fencer who truly wishes to improve. Mastery is less a
destination than it is a goal which pushes our training, which keeps us honest,
which keeps us striving.[ii]
This doesn’t mean don’t do your best, that you’re not trying to win—you
can’t test what you know if you’re going through the motions. The pressure, the
chance to think on your feet, to adapt, and all within seconds is a fantastic
way to see how well we apply what we’ve learned. If it all works, and you grab
that trophy, great! It is healthy, maybe after celebratory beers, to reflect on
the nature of the competition, to weight that against the heft of the medal
around your neck. That awareness shouldn’t detract from victory, but merely
inform it, and, better prepare you for the next one.
[i] This isn’t universally true of course. In small tournaments, especially where there is no one else to staff, one has little choice but to use who is on hand. Whenever possible, SdTS tries to enlist friends from other salas to help direct–our judges are pulled from the competitors.
[ii]
A black belt in TKD, for example, has
demonstrated that they are now ready to begin to study in earnest; a fencing master,
in a slightly different way, isn’t necessary the best fighter, but a teacher,
someone who has command of a particular pedagogical approach and is capable of
teaching other teachers.
[NB: My friend Jay Maas, a student of and instructor in Insular Broadsword, suggested I make a few things more clear than I did. His advice is sound and so I have made a few changes. It was never my intention to denigrate the British/Insular school; I merely chose texts from it as an example because like the Italians they have a rich source collection, the texts vary considerably, and because I know it best after Italian. I thought it was clear from my discussion below of the House of Angelo and its fame, as well as my comments about Roworth, that I know and acknowledge that there was a fully developed system in place and taught in 18th/19th cen. Britain, but it doesn’t hurt to make that more explicit. May 16, 2019]
There’s considerable misunderstanding and a lot of misleading information out there about “dueling” and “military” sabre and how they relate. Some students ask me if what we’ll be doing is military sabre as opposed to “dueling” sabre, but this is a false dichotomy—they’re making a distinction based more on perception than fact, on specific application vs. body of technique. In large part both camps (not to mention sport fencing ultimately) draw upon the same material, the same sources, so how are they different? To what degree the same? It comes down, in part, to how we define each term. The quick answer is that there is no difference in technique, only in amount and purpose. Moreover, the duelist normally follows rules, a soldier normally operates in a theater without them.
When someone says “dueling” sabre what they mean, by and large, is “classical” sabre, that is, sabre as defined and intended for the dueling ground, and which in time led to the modern sport. Defining classical sabre, however, is as easy a task as defining classical fencing. A few examples. Columbia Classical Fencing, LLC‘s website, for example, defines classical fencing as “fencing as it was practiced in the West during roughly the late 1700s and into the 1800s.” [i]
Salle Green LLC in Virginia has a lot more to say, and suggests that classical fencing is:
fencing for sport or the duel, conducted in the manner of fencing in the years between 1880 and 1939, as reflected in the rich variety of fencing manuals in English, Spanish, Italian, and French that survive from this period. It is defined by the transition from a common set of weapons for civil and military use to a distinct set of weapons for primarily sporting and civil use, and ends with the development of the sports factory approach to training and the conversion to electrical scoring after World War II. The classical period is important in the history of fencing as it makes the transition to the set of weapons we still use in modern fencing and establishes the form of footwork and blade technique that is the foundation for modern fencing skills.[ii]
These both situate classical fencing within a largely late 18th and 19th century context, though Green would push this, rightly in my opinion, into the first half of the 20th century. What’s missing in Maestro Green’s definition is what comprises “fencing manuals” in this period. Significantly, at least up until the 20th century (and indeed after 1900), many of these sources for sabre were military sources or written by military men.[iii] Often they were writing for a military audience, and in some cases, producing official government manuals on fencing. There are, of course, many exceptions, but if one looks at some of the more popular works per tradition the connection between military manuals and what tends to comprise classical fencing stands out starkly.
The supposed dichotomy between “military” and “dueling” (or “classical”) sabre is an issue more within the historical community than the classical. Many fencers within WMA/HEMA have desired to differentiate what they do from anything remotely resembling sport fencing. For them, classical fencing is too close to sport, and thus automatically suspect. Many within the classical camp use the same weapons as sport fencers, only with modified rules, and rather than address technique and purpose, which would show how much historical and classical fencers have in common, these same historical fencers reject them out of hand for using foils or S2000 sabre blades. The fact that the modern game derives from Italian and French fencing, that classical technique developed in these two lands, tends also to produce a quick reaction against things classical, especially given the popularity of English infantry manuals in HEMA. This is all guilt by association and ignores the salient fact: the classical tradition, especially for sabre, derives more from military than from civilian sources.[iv]
This bias, however understandable, is misguided. Ultimately it can be limiting too. Some proponents, for example, of English broadsword/sabre, often seem at pains to distinguish what they do as somehow more “military” than sport or classical, but here as elsewhere it comes down to definitions and how one applies them. What they fence is certainly closer to what an infantry private learned with his regiment, but it’s a far cry from what the officer in charge of that regiment likely learned. The texts of C. Roworth and Henry Angelo, for example, are no more military than those by Giordano Rossi and Ferdinando Masiello.[v] These English texts give us a window into sabre intended for the infantry between say 1800 and 1850, but while Roworth includes a comprehensive examination for sabre/broadsword, Angelo does not. Unlike Roworth or his Italian counterparts, Angelo’s sword exercise is hardly representative of the entire system he taught at his own sala. Henry Angelo, author of the Infantry Manual of 1845, was the grandson of Domenico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo, author of the exquisite L’Ecole des Armes or The School of Fencing (1763). Very little of the sophistication the Angelo’s were famous for, and which is illustrated so wonderfully in Domenico’s book, made it into the 1845 Infantry Manual. It did not need to be there. It is almost as if some fans of Angelo and Co. find it more legitimate because the infantry manual is so bare-bones, so devoid of the sophisticated maneuvers they associate with artful, sport fencing. This is not to say it wasn’t there, that it didn’t exist, but to remind the reader that they won’t see much of it in that source.
The context for these various texts is on its own instructive. If, for example, one compares the works of Settimo Del Frate and Henry Angelo, the former contains a lot more instruction. Angelo’s goal was to provide a minimum of basic instruction, not a complete program. By and large the key Italian works present much of the state of the knowledge at the time, not just the fundamentals. One reason for this is that in the newly formed Republic of Italy, military fencing masters were vying for preference and position, so their works intended for the army were not just drill manuals, but books intended in part to reveal the author’s expertise over that of his fellows.[vi] Taken together, the corpus for Italian sabre is thus more exhaustive and sophisticated. This reflects a difference in context, in purpose for many of these treatises, and as students we need to keep that in mind.
The difference in context explains a lot, everything from why say Del Frate or Masiello’s works are longer and full of details, even lesson plans, and, why Angelo’s pamphlet on infantry sabre is so rudimentary. The rank and file did not need a complete course in swordsmanship. [vii] After the volley their next step was the bayonet. If the fighting came down to sabres, something had likely gone very, very wrong. They needed enough to be effective in the context of war, not thoroughly tutored in all the options required for combat mano a mano. The requirements of an infantry private are different from those of the duelist. That private, because of his rank, will not be fighting duels, and thus has little need for more than basic instruction, good as it might be. The duelist, on the other hand, only benefits from possessing a larger selection of options even if, and this is critical, they never use them. They must be able to recognize them, and, undermine them. In short, a duelist needs more than an infantry soldier.
The duel is a critical consideration in understanding why some sources are more detailed than others. While it had all but disappeared in England, dueling culture was still alive and well in Italy at the time these works were written. Though illegal, as it was in England, provisions were made within the military and several military men, most notably Achille Angelini and Giordano Rossi, wrote dueling codes.[viii] Many within historical circles thus equate “classical” and “dueling,” and this isn’t wrong, but they misspeak in saying that these are somehow separate from “military” sabre. They are one in the same, just presented in different ways for different audiences, for different purposes. Because the officer ranks were the only ones allowed to duel, in so much as anyone was, it is little wonder that the officers writing these manuals included more within their work, that is, included those maneuvers that any one of them might have occasion to call upon should he find himself called out. It should be noted that British officers, like their brothers most everywhere else in Europe, typically contracted a master for more complete, advanced training.
For students interested in military sabre, some notion of this historical context must be taken into consideration. This should go without saying, but for all the discussion of the “H” in HEMA, too often it is ignored. Many new fencers learn about military sabre from Youtube videos or social media, and if they see that one school of sabre uses the term “military” more often than others then perhaps it’s more understandable that they fail to see how other national texts on sabre were also largely codifications of military systems. It is also one reason they think that dueling and military sabre are different animals—few people ever talk about the connection between them.
Students of sabre should pay some attention to the wider corpus. Regardless of the tradition they favor, even a basic acquaintance with other national military programs, not to mention different applications for the same body of technique, can only benefit them. This is true for those interesting in “dueling” and those interested in “military” sabre—these are just different applications of the same material. At the very least it may prevent them from grossly misunderstanding what it is they are studying.
[iii] A master I worked with
in Portland, Oregon, the late Maitre Delmar Calvert, was trained in the French
army (he was a Foreign Legionnaire) at a time when they were still using the
revised Règlementd’escrimeissued to the
French army in 1908. For more on Calvert’s early training and military
career, see Bernard Coliat, Vercors 1944
des GI dans le Maquis, Imprimerie Jalin à Bourg-Les-Valence, 2003. See also http://usfencinghalloffame.com/wp/calvert-delmar/
[iv] As a quick example, Italian works from ca. 1850 on were
largely produced by military men for a military audience, from Del Frate in
1868 to Pecoraro and Pessina in 1912. The French Reglement (1877), likewise, codified fencing for the French
military. This is not to say that works dedicated to sport were not beginning
to appear, but that even these, ultimately, looked back to these military
sources.
[v] In fairness, Roworth’s 1804 treatise is a thorough work, providing more than Angelo’s later infantry manual. He entitled it a “complete” system for broadsword for a reason, and one examination will demonstrate why. Not only did Roworth lay out his approach to the use of the weapon, but he also covered defense against smallsword, spadroon, and bayonet.
[vi] For a good
discussion of the competition between military masters in the newly unified
Italy, see William M. Gaugler, The
History of Fencing: Foundations of Modern European Swordplay, Bangor, ME:
Laureate Press, 1998, 166-167; 216-217. A more recent, complete examination,
and some of the key documents, can be found in several of the translations of
Chris Holzman. See especially his The Art
of the Dueling Sabre, xxv-xxxii; in The
Roman-Neapolitan School of Fencing, Holzman includes some discussion of the
Northern and Southern Italian rivalry (xxi-xxii) as well as the report of the
Hon. Paulo Fambri to the commission dedicated to choosing which manual, and
thus which region North or South, would define the official military program
(xxxiii, ff.); for some sense of the vehement opposition to Parise and the
Southern school by Radaellian devotees much can be gleaned from the
observations about Masiello’s strong feelings in Holzman’s translation of Sabre Fencing on Horseback (1891),
ix-xiv.
[vii] Masiello’s manual for cavalry, for example, is not a complete work on sabre, just sabre as applicable for fighting from the saddle.
[viii] See Lt. Gen. Achille Angelini, Italian Chivalric Code, Firezne: 1883, translated by Christopher A. Holzman, 2016; Giordano Rossi, “Concerning the Duel,” In Capt. Settimo Del Frate, Instruction in Fencing with the Sabre and the Sword, 1873, translated by Christopher A. Holzman (2011), 222-230 [this is a chapter from Rossi’s Scherma di Spada e Sciabola, Manuale Teorico-Pratico con Cenni Storici Sulle Armi e Sulla Scherma e Principale Norme pel Duello, Milano: Fratelli Dumolard Editori, 1885]. See also Masaniello Parise, “Fencing on the Ground (1904),” In The Roman-Neapolitan School of Fencing: The Collected Works of Masaniello Parise, Maestro di Scherma, translated by Christopher A. Holzman, 2015, 295-319 [revised in Carlo Pessina and Salvatore Pecoraro’s “Spada Fencing: Play on the Ground (1910),” In Sabre Fencing, 1912, translated by Christopher A. Holzman, 2016, 175-197.] It is important to note that McBane, who wrote works on smallsword and broadsword, was not only a fencing master and soldier, but a duelist.
Sala delle Tre Spade 