Welcome to the fascinating world of historical European martial arts
While the practical study of sword fighting has gone away thanks to the development of repeating firearms, a small number of people in Chattanooga are seeking to experience what martial arts was really like during the Middle Ages.
Over the last few years, the study of the fighting systems which evolved in Europe has grown in popularity globally. Thanks to the internet, you can study manuscripts written 500 to 600 years ago, watch the moves played out on YouTube videos. With a few clicks of the button, you can buy a practice sword that will not run your practice partner through but will still have the same weight as an bona fide blade.
And to find some of the people who study the martial arts practiced by Vikings, knights and 16th century nobles in Chattanooga, you only have to visit the Amnicola River Section of the Tennessee River Park on a typical Thursday evening.
During one of the first practices the Society for Creative Anachronism held in 2018, a group of about 15 gathered in medieval garb as people on bikes zip by. Weapons and armor sat piled on a picnic table: a bollocks dagger, mail, rapiers shared the space with plastic water bottles.
Two men in full medieval garb walk back to the table carrying battered shields and practice blades after duking it out nearby. Randal Smith, who wore a helmet that draped mail across his face, was breathing hard.
The retired iron worker said, “This is the best workout there is,” because a fighter is trying to bring up explosive speed in historical protective gear. He was wearing 40 pounds of armor that included thick leather shoulder guards, and plates of steel across his chest.
On the other side of the path and separated by about 200 years, the blades of the rapier fighters clacked together in quick staccato. The fighters mimicking the martial arts employed during the Elizabethan era fought with their heads covered by fencing helmets. Some fought with only a rapier. The left hands of others held a small shield called a buckler, or a long, thin dagger.
School Of Hard Knocks
According to Tim Kelly, seneschal or president for the local SCA chapter also known as the Shire of Vulpine Reach, SCA began in the ‘60s as a place where people jumped in and started swinging rattan swords as a way to experience what medieval combat was like.
While he was in his teens, Kelly joined the SCA group in Knoxville. When he learned the art of sword fighting back then, it was “the hard way,” he said. Literally the school of hard knocks.
“When I joined in 1980, there wasn’t much in the way of training going on,” Kelly said. “At this point, we were still working very hard to figure out what we were doing. And I was put into some armor and given a small shield and a small sword and was told ‘go hit that man mountain out there.’”
In the following decades, Kelly said the combat arts have gotten refined. He helped start the Chattanooga chapter of SCA, and spent a season jousting at Renaissance fairs. These days, however, he’s hung up the sparring tools to focus on blacksmithing. Besides combat arts, the SCA also focuses the study of the medieval period, generally. “We know a lot more about what we’re doing now than we ever did in those days and one of the things we do a lot better is training,” Kelly said about the combat arts.
Here in the Chattanooga area, a few people continue to practice historical European martial arts, though membership in the Shire of Vulpine Reach was higher ten years ago, Kelly said.
Studying The Art
Rapier fighting is different than fencing for a variety of reasons, Martin Waller said, because the way the sport is played has changed the tactics. In fencing, a strike anywhere on the body results in a point, said the member of the Shire of Vulpine Reach who studies rapier fighting. So athletes tuck their free hand well away from their opponent’s point. In the historical martial art, the hand hovers in front of the body because it might be used for grabbing, grappling, or it might hold a secondary weapon.
While SCA seeks to recreate medieval combat, a few rules are needed to make sparring sessions safe. In a melee, someone can’t attack their opponent from behind. Grappling could endanger the wellbeing of someone’s fingers wrapped around a rapier guard, for example.
So what must one do in order to become skilled in the historical European martial arts? At the SCA, it begins slow. Waller began HEMA after several years studying eastern martial arts. To research old European martial arts, he turned to a half dozen or so texts written hundreds of years ago in Italian and German. A German by the name of Hans Talhoffer, an author and fencing master from the 1400s, is a valuable source, for example.
“Usually, when we have a new person show up, for instance, the impulse is to get a sword in their hand as quickly as possible because that’s what they’re excited about, that’s what they came for,” said Waller. “I find that it is helpful if we can slow down just a little bit and explain that if you really want to go quickly, you have to go slow. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. So slow is fast and create a solid foundation.”
No swords are necessary to learn the first lessons about measure (how far to stand away from each other), the idea of tempo and the first steps of footwork. Then comes the drills.
Here’s how you thrust. Here’s how you counterattack. Like in chess, control the center. In this case, it’s between your shoulders.
During a practice one Sunday afternoon in Fort Oglethorpe, I struggled to put this all together as I made my first steps trying out a sword fighter’s shoes. Feet, sword tip, shoulders wandered every which way. We were running drills at a fraction of the speed and all my experience watching the twirling swordfights and the dialogue across locked blades on the silver screen was part of the problem.
No, you don’t improve if you imagine yourself in a London bar fight. However, the choreography portrayed in shows and movies is often the only knowledge a lay person gets about the historical European martial arts. “I’d hate to call what they get from these movies knowledge,” Waller said.
Mastering a single discipline requires months of piecing together the elements of sword play, like piecing together a sentence in a new language, remembering grammar, vocabulary and what you want to say.
But that also raises the question: Is learning to parry with a rapier like learning a dead language, the physical equivalent of conjugating Latin verbs?
A Practical Application
According to Waller, while no new moves are being developed, there are plenty of elements in the historical European martial arts that translate into other self-defense moves. The measure, tempo, all are factors when it comes to self-defense. “I hope never to have to use a rapier in earnest,” Waller said. “That being said, where some people might keep a firearm near their bedside, I have a French small sword.”
Unlike SCA, which focuses on everything medieval, Terry Pollard at the School for the Fighting Arts teaches historical European martial arts in addition to Filipino fighting systems and gun training—a diverse approach to self-defense.
Pollard says the interest in these martial arts such as longsword and Irish collar-and-elbow wrestling is larger in Canada and Europe itself. In Chattanooga and the southeast as a whole, he said, it is difficult for someone to open a martial art school that doesn’t focus on sport-focused martial arts like Tae Kwon Do.
For Pollard, the study of European martial arts helps him cross train—and it’s a way to explore the systems his ancestors used in Europe years ago. People interested in activities like live action role playing take an interest in European systems, he said, at least to learn a few moves. Pollard’s handful of students will train outside with him at his home in Ringgold, Georgia while a flock of chickens lounge nearby (It’s a real Mr. Miyagi experience, he said).
Pollard started learning historical European martial arts in the early 2000s with a group in Atlanta after he studied Filipino martial arts for years, allowing him to quickly learn the techniques.
In a sense, it’s a full circle. Hundreds of years ago, Spanish invaders with their sword craft influenced agrarian communities in the Philippines in their development of how they used sticks, bolos and kerambits.
While the European writers might advocate more formal stances than a Filipino practitioner, the moves look the same when steel meets steel, he said. He will study the work of Talhoffer, for example, and see techniques that are taught in judo or jujitsu—only the names are different.
Working as a guard at the Hamilton County Jail, Pollard has had to resort to martial arts to subdue belligerent inmates. This has informed his approach. While some may think a fight is a drawn-out affair—minutes of parrying back and forth – Pollard knows they are over in less than five seconds.
In that real-world experience, has he ever used anything he learned with European martial arts? It’s hard to say where he might have learned a specific technique, he said.
One damp Saturday morning on his deck, Pollard demonstrates moves with round shield and Viking sword. They are the extension of his hand, the same self-defense moves if he had a stick, a blade or nothing at all. It’s all the same body mechanics he explains.
While the movies may depict flash and spin when it comes to knights of old, the way Pollard demonstrates shows historical European martial arts conveys streamlined utilitarianism.
The way he shows it, there is more grappling in swordplay that the average person might expect. And while the visual flare added to fights depicted at the movies might be verboten, old texts show fighters grabbing longswords by the blade and whacking their opponent with the pommel.
The advantage to studying with weapons is that they make you faster in a self-defense situation, Pollard said. You operate at a different tempo because the speed of a swinging sword point is faster than the speed generated by a hand alone.
“There is self-defense within the European systems. It’s already there,” Pollard said. “The way I do it, I want to train the way it would be done back then. If it’s not feasible for the battlefield, I don’t like to fool with it.”