[Paracelsus]

(09-28-2015 03:59 AM)Dalaran1991 Wrote:  

Why didn't we manage to preserve medieval sword combat? As the defining art of the ruling caste you would think they would be well documented. Certainly Western fencing evolved a lot more than kenjutsu, but that shouldn't mean documents just disappear.

This is probably going to turn into an extended advertisement for John Clement and his self-published book Medieval Swordsmanship. Let's start with the caveat that Clement is not an academic historian by any means -- but the specific field of medieval combat techniques is not one that limp-wristed academics have a lot to do with, and the whole area has a poor image thanks to overweight "warriors" in the Society for Creative Anachronism who try and interest people in the medieval period with all the fidelity to detail of your average live-action roleplaying group.

As said, Clement is an amatuer historian, but he's an amateur who takes the field seriously and who has done the hard yards both reading pretty well all the surviving manuals out there and working hard on replicating them in actual combat. This isn't easy since they were unashamedly killing arts, none of this "no hits below the thigh" or "no head shots" that most "medieval swordsmanship" seems to take up. As you'd know from kenjutsu -- there's precious little space for flashy moves and doing stupid spins in combat and whatnot. For what it's worth, Clement's observations about medieval combat technique do seem to match up well with observations made by more "orthodox" scholars who've had an interest in the weaponry and strategies employed.

Clement's take on why the arts weren't preserved:

Quote:

Those who did most of the scribe work during the time were typically monks, whose interests did not typically include the details of how to fight. They were concerned far more with laws, official documents, and theological matters. Furthermore, those who would be the most interested in such a subject (knights and men-at-arms) were themselves generally illiterate and not that concerned with "bookish" learning. Why spend time reading about a subject that you had real-life experience in almost daily and had been exposed to since childhood? It might perhaps be the equivalent today of someone spending the effort to create a detailed Internet Web site dedicated to how to dial your telephone or how to park your car. For such pragmatic skills, there was so much everyday opportunity for experience both in battle and tournaments, as well as many veteran teachers around, that spending time in scholarly learning for such a self-evident subject would have surely been an aberration.

Much of what warriors learned was passed down from person to person between households or clans or from father to son. Being mostly illiterate, medieval people were much more interested in illustrations rather than text. This is reflected in the range of scenes that can be found showing battles, tournaments, and single in combat in all forms of medieval art. ... Additionally, medieval artwork is thematic and not very representative, with elements often presented according to social or theological importance. When it came to depicting combat, those who paid the artisans to produce such works were hardly interested in accurately illustrating fighting "technique" for posterity.

Clement goes on to indicate about the best source we have around the early use of sword and shield remains the Bayeaux Tapestry.

The other point Clement makes is that there simply aren't many texts left. He goes through some -- Anonymous Tower Manuscript I-33, a German work in Latin from the late 1200s on the use of sword and buckler is the oldest surviving historical text devoted to actual weapon use, and there's another from 1295 -- after that the surviving works are from the 1400s onward, although some Renaissance manuals still retained instruction on use of two-handed, single-blade fighting. There are about two dozen remaining texts from the medieval period -- but these texts are really more discussions of certain fundamentals and insights rather than all-inclusive works.