Academic – Martial – Education
Most fighters with some familiarity with German longsword know Meyer’s cutting diagram; even if their group turns their nose up at Meyer’s “sporting” style, they probably cut their teeth on the diagram. It’s a simple concept of interlocking rings, where…
Read more
I have an incurable disease. It’s not going to kill me, but it’s already made my life miserable and promises to complicate my life going forward. This is going to be a bit of a rambling post as I work…
Read more
Despite being blessed with absolutely talent when it comes to practical hands-on stuff like DIY, armouring and mechanics, I have always had a fascination with armour. My wife and I structure visits to Europe around armouries, my shelf is covered in…
Read more
In Joachim Meyer’s sequence of devices, the principles of hanging and winding are introduced in the second device using the guard of Zornhut (1.34v and 1.35r; Figure 1), immediately after a device dealing with the slice (referred to in my…
Read more
My article about the Kron, or Crown, guard a few months ago (read it here) caused quite a stir, with a lot of discussion about whether I was right about the Kron being a horizontal guard above the head, sometimes…
Read more
Despite some of the accusations levelled at me after the last two blog posts (here and here), I really enjoy tournaments. I’ve run and competed in HEMA tournaments since before they were popular, and I see them as an essential…
Read more
In previous installments of the Meyer Masterclass series, I’ve dealt with Meyer’s longsword devices in roughly the same sequence as he presents them. We dealt with the first three devices which lay the basis for parrying and counterattacking, the Fourth…
Read more
My previous article, “Some observations on women, tournaments and heavy-hitting” cause quite a stir a few months back. While lots of people liked my comments, some argued that what they did was not “heavy hitting”, and some argued that such…
Read more
It’s always nerve-wracking, spending 10 months organising a visit from an overseas visitor, and then waiting for something to go wrong at the last minute. It gets even worse when you can’t be the one to collect your visitor from…
Read more
I’d like to think I’ve done a decent cross-section through the HEMA tournament in Europe. At the same time, I’ve been organising tournaments bimonthly to yearly in South Africa. I’ve spent a lot of time fighting, judging and organising tournaments,…
Read more