Roz, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and I drove up to Tir-Y-Don this past weekend for the June session of the Atlantian University. Usually not a big fighting event, but when I read the course descriptions two weeks back, I knew I needed to go.
Cut and Thrust Marshalling 101 and Practicum
The C&T MiT program is finally moving forward, which means I can actually get my C&T warrant (though, with Roz as Southern Regional Deputy, there may be no need and I can go back to just fighting).
After a brief run through of marshalling concerns, we moved outside to fight. I really need to rig up some back-of-the-head pro, and I’m thinking of putting in place a short-term solution and scraping together money for a real helm, rather than a long-term solution, and scraping together money for a real helm. Perhaps I’ll work on that this week.
After watching some of the fights, I borrowed Llwyd’s helm and hood and fought Grettir. Grettir’s up in Black Diamond, and focuses solely on fighting C&T, no rapier. It’s an interesting attitude to take, which may or may not pay off in the long-run, but in the short term leaves him vulnerable to lots of measure-based attacks. I think he may have been functioning on a habit of fighting in B-range, whereas I was staying at C-range. Most of the shots I landed on him were strikes with the last 6″ of the blade, thrown through a slot in his guard.
My cuts were, I thought, vastly improved over the last time I fought C&T. The action was quicker, they were more precise, and I was not over-extending myself as much as I had previously. I blame it all on David Packer.
Bolognese Swordplay
One of the more looked-forward-to classes of the day was Don Aeron Harper’s class on Bolognese Swordplay. I loves me some Marozzo, right up there with Giganti and I.33, and have been looking at the collected output of Jherek Swanger as it sits on my bookshelf and thinking “Damn, I need to do me something with that”. I was planning to hit up Manciolino next, and Viggiani, but given some of what Don Aeron discussed, I may be starting with d’allAgocchie. Few others in Atlantia pay much attention to the Bolognese, and I’d love to be able to teach classes and share information with others.
All of which is not to say that I agreed with Don Aeron on all points. I was avoiding snickering when he was claiming to have “invented the step of withdrawing the front foot back to the left” while wearing a shirt that illustrated the action from a period manual (Capo Ferro, I believe). But perhaps I misunderstood; there was a lot of that going on that day.
Rapier Pas
I totally want to do one, not an Armored Pas with rapiers, but an historically accurate conduct of a tournament, or at least of the fights. On the one hand, there are the examples of the fights held for the entertainment of the populace. On the other, there are the duels.
Roz taught a class on the structure of the duel, as laid down by Saviolo and somebody who borrowed heavily from Saviolo. I know there have been “challenge tourneys” in the past that have been kind of stupid, or at least silly, but fights after the period form would be nice. Tell somebody your baroness is better than theirs, be called a liar, have seconds, pick weapons, and go fight. Maybe at a small event. It wouldn’t add much in the way of real satisfaction with the fighting, but it would at least remind us that there’s some historical context lying around somewhere. The knowledge of the structure of the duel will at least be useful if the rat-faced guy ever shows up again and questions my shot calling.
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