LEARNING TO SWORD FIGHT FROM MEDIEVAL INSTRUCTION BOOKS.

LEARNING TO SWORD FIGHT FROM MEDIEVAL INSTRUCTION BOOKS. The article by Anderson and Smith has lots of photographs and illustrations of what medieval sword fighting must have been like. How do they know? It turns out that there are a lot of surviving medieval textbooks which were used in teaching sword techniques. I found the article by Anderson and Smith about sword fighting and armor while following a link from Instapundit to this article which argues that medieval sword fighting was very different from most modern conceptions of it. The author is John Clements, the director of ARMA, the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (www.theARMA.org). Clements bases his conclusions on the medieval instruction books. Some of the lessons for medieval swordsmen: keep moving; don’t be passive or defensive; grappling is part of any fight with weapons. The ARMA website has lots of other articles about medieval and Renaissance combat.