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First look – Red Dragon Concepts Federschwert
The Knight Shop, under its in-house equipment brand Red Dragon, has finally produced the first batch of it’s long-promised customisable federschwert for public sale.
After several years development, Red Dragon’s component-based HEMA training weapon has emerged from its Eastern European partner’s forge and is on sale through The Knight/HEMA/Sword Shop for a bargain opening offer price of £150. …
Fiore Medieval Longsword Class
More on Priority or ‘right-of-way’
By Robin Catling.
Having written about Priority recently, what do the rules say about ‘right-of-way’?
Priority or ‘right-of-way’ is the set of rules used to determine who is awarded the point when there is a double hit in foil or sabre – that is, both fencers hit each other in the same fencing time. …
Fencing in the Ancient World
The word “Carma” coming from Sanskrit refers to fencing in ancient times. The modern word “Escrime” is used to signify the art of “touching without being touched,”
Mankind has a history of fighting and conflict. People have tried to compensate for their physical weakness by inventing weapons to defend against or conquer animals and other humans. Weapons developed from wood, stone and then metal, lead man to try to perfect methods of combat; to maximize their most effective strengths and skills for both offence and defence – the art of fencing. …
Romancing the Sword [re-post]
The final release poster for Alita: Battle Angel is out and she’s holding some weirdly unidentifiable, but cool-looking sword. A 26th-century cyborg still needs a sword.
Cue Hellboy reboot and in the poster, the guy who carries an unfeasibly large calibre revolver is holding… a sword. As is… Transformer‘s own Optimus Primus Stove, a thirty-foot alien robot from another planet last seen wielding a dirty great sword, which presumably transforms into, I dunno, a roofer’s scaffold tower? …
The HEMA Heresy
Almost all our our study of historical European martial arts is based on original period manuscripts by fencing masters of the time. But practical issues in reconstructing the techniques often raises suspicions about some of the content… …
Bartitsu and the ‘New Art of Self Defence’
Mr Edward William Barton-Wright was an English railway engineer who travelled widely and formulated what today we call a mixed martial art. Barton-Wright combined elements of boxing, jujitsu, cane fighting (la cane), and French kick boxing (savat) in order to create a self defence system that could be used by gentlemen on the mean streets of Edwardian London or elsewhere in or beyond the British Empire. For a short time it was so popular that even Sherlock Holmes employed a form of it in his detective adventures; a down-and-dirty form was picked up in the Robert Downey Jnr / Guy Ritchie Holmes movies of a few years ago. …
Unreal tournament – when HEMA turns to ‘tag’
When you ‘train to the treatise’ but spar and compete to tournament rules, there’s a danger that the swordplay looks less like the historical sources and more like a grown-up game of tag. …