RSS

May 11 Practice

10 May

Good practice last night.  A fencer who hasn’t been fighting for a while was out.

I did a little bit of work on Swetnam, trying to figure out how his stance would work in SCA style rapier.  It could work but it’s both defensive while not giving ground.  You can only move in a mostly forward arc.  The sword placement allows a lot of interception parries, and is very good at retaliating quickly, but the lack of backwards movement means that there’s very little body voiding available to you.  I’ll be doing more work on it once I’ve gotten back into fencing at full speed, as I suspect the slightly less stable positioning will be a detriment to fencing where you’re not afraid to get stabbed in the face.

Primarily I worked on finding and exploiting openings in guards.  I did a lot of forearm shots and some belly shots.  The angulation work is starting to come back, and I’m remembering what position to put my hand and blade into to take advantage of various openings.  I need some more work on ensuring that I have full control before making an attack, but that will come.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on May 10, 2012 in Rapier

 

Tags: , , , ,

April 25 Practice

26 Apr

Practice last night went well.  Violante and I were working on a few things.  She’s trying to get practice with attacking on angles, and not moving straight in, while I”m working on defenses and spotting openings.  The two worked very well together.

I’m finding myself remembering how to see openings, and just starting to be able to take advantage of them. My movement gets more fluid by the day.  My base guard seems solid, and I”m working a lot on disengages.

We continued with only doing slow work, though there was enough light that we didn’t have to turn on the porch light to fight by.  My goal is that we will begin doing full speed work in the early summer, leading up to me returning to fencing at events mid summer.

After the slow work section (also known as when it started raining) we discussed various types of Dons and what to look for in a teacher or mentor.  I brought up something from “The Swordmaster’s Grimoire” on teachers and coaches.  I extended it saying that there are teachers, trainers, coaches, and advocates/cheerleaders.  When you look for a formal relationship with a more advanced fencer it’s important to know what you need.

I don’t feel that I am ready for a formal student/teacher relationship in fencing.  I want to continue to focus that energy on my A&S, especially as I will be stepping down as seneschal soon and will be able to devote more time to it.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Rapier

 

Tags: , , ,

Swetnam Chapter 12 seven principles

16 Apr

This is part of an ongoing project to summarize and provide SCA focused commentary on The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence by Joseph Swetnam, published in 1617.

For links to the other sections of the Swetnam Project please go here.

I am using this facsimile: http://tysonwright.com/sword/SwetnamSchooleOfDefence.pdf for the project.

We have now reached the combat portion of the manual.  There is a major change here in that the rest of the book is part of chapter 12.  The table of contents has broken it down into 18 sections.  I will be using the sections as they are listed, but as with the previous chapters still using each inline heading as the heading for the post.

I may need to go back through and add more sections if my posts prove too long, but I’ll cross that bridge when I burn it.

Chap. XII. Sheweth of seauen Principall rules whereon true defence is grounded.

The seven principles are:

  1. A good guard
  2. True observing of distance
  3. To know the place
  4. To take time
  5. To keep space
  6. Patience
  7. Often practice

Read the rest of this entry »

 
1 Comment

Posted by on April 16, 2012 in A&S, Rapier

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Viruses are gone… finally

02 Apr

Well, I’ve finally done it.  After almost a month I’ve gotten rid of the viruses/malware/redirect on the site.  It only took nuking the whole thing and recreating it.  With luck the virus isn’t good enough to have been in my backup.  If so then I’m not sure how I’ll get rid of it.

I had to nuke both this site and my drupal site, and my backup SCA site.  This is the first one back up and running.  With luck I’ll be able to recover the drupal site as well.  That one will eventually come back to wordpress, as I”m fairly certain that it was a drupal exploit that let the devil in.  I took the opportunity to try out anew theme.  We’ll see how it goes.

The down side to this is that I lost all of my uploads.  Luckily they were mostly pictures, and a few redundant files.  I don’t think it will be too much of an issue.  As time goes on I’ll try to go back through and add things back in.

I think it’s about time to go through and clean up the site anyway.  There’s a lot of redundant information on here.

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on April 2, 2012 in General

 

Tags: ,

Swetnam Chapter 11

24 Feb

This is part of an ongoing project to summarize and provide SCA focused commentary on The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence by Joseph Swetnam, published in 1617.

For links to the other sections of the Swetnam Project please go here.

I am using this facsimile: http://tysonwright.com/sword/SwetnamSchooleOfDefence.pdf for the project.

 

This chapter is set out as a discussion between a master and student and covers the weapons which will be taught in the rest of the manual and what to what to do with your life once you’ve mastered the weapons.

For this chapter I will use the same setup as Swetnam does, going between Master and Scholar.

Chap. XI. Questions and Answers.

Scholar
I like what you’ve said so far, now I would like to learn some skill.

Master
What weapon do you want to use?

Scholar
Whatever you think is best

Read the rest of this entry »

 
1 Comment

Posted by on February 24, 2012 in A&S, Rapier

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

February 22 Practice

23 Feb

Yesterday marked the first of the new round of Lionsdale Rapier Practices.  We’re having them at my house in conjunction with A&S nights.  Because our space in the back yard is limited, and there’s only the one set of flood lamps, we’ll be sticking to slow work until there is enough light to fight safely by.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 23, 2012 in Rapier

 

Tags: , ,

← Older posts