Yooowwwwch


Love the straw for padding haha!!

Yeah thats pretty awesome.

I guess we have all the fencing and weapons stuff - hell - archery - hand to hand fighting - small arms such as daggers - swordsmanship - but sadly we dont have those members yet who could shed light on this one.

If you look at the interview with Angela Claire on our site, she works at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. She is an expert at Medieval swordmanship and often does displays there.

I would provide you with a link to the interview but my stupid internet at work has blocked me!

Yes the Colonials had there own Folk Style Wrestling in the day. Most have been distilled into Freestly or Greco-Roman variants

The signiture move for people round my area is throwing,
this is not a fact but its just that ive seen people being thrown at windows (they didn't smash, movies are wrong!), by being thrown, i mean pushed so hard they fall over. Or a hench bloke picks him up and drops him.
=]
David

PeteMills wrote:
Yeah thats pretty awesome.

I guess we have all the fencing and weapons stuff - hell - archery - hand to hand fighting - small arms such as daggers - swordsmanship - but sadly we dont have those members yet who could shed light on this one.


Ahem

Well, think about it...

Mediaval Japan:
# Feudal society
# warrior class
# peasant armies
# honour code
# 1000 years (or so) of constant warfare
= figured out how to fight

Medieval Europe
# Feudal society
# warrior class
# peasant armies
# honour code
# 1000 years (or so) of constant warfare

Have a search for HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) or Western Martial Arts.

For anyone who visits the Royal armouries, you may like to know that the best person with a european sword is the electrician. He will hate me for saying that though

[b]Wu ming347 wrote:
Does anybody have any idea what's going on in this vid at 0:46???

Also, I think its very amusing that at first glance it appears there are just lots of regional types of wrestling; somewhere along the line all our other martial heritage must've been outlawed?[/quote]

Some was. Fencing schools were outlawed in England until 1500AD as it was thought to detract from the practice of archery. The plain fact is that most of our martial heritage simply fell out of use. We did not preserve the arts once they ceased to be of use on the battlfield in the face of gunpowder and on the streets in the face of changing fasions.

Luckily, a lot of the material was written down in period manuscripts.

And I have met the current world champion of Shin-Kicking, an Australian and a very nice chap

Lesley Jackson wrote:
I do believe it was called 'ecky thump' and was featured in that well known martial arts programme in the seventies called 'The Goodies'

Seriously though, we tend to concentrate on the Eastern martial arts and we have a great European heritage of martial arts ourselves.

I'm quite interested in finding out more about the Medieval methods used, especially by knights - after all they were our equivalent of the Samurai.

Knights would learn 3 principal forms of combat: Armouerd, un armoured and mounted (in and out of armour). The actual variety of arms and weapon combinations was staggering, as war fighting threw everything into the mix, and judicial combat was often staged with novel weapons to even the field.

Methods of medieval combat do not survive in an unbroken lineage to the present day, but several traditions are documented in historical manuscripts, written as training aids, promotinal materials and, in the case of Mair, as an effort to preserve the arts.

Over the last 30 years, researchers and martial artists have been working to resurect these martial traditions. There are so many myths about western arms, armour and fighting traditions (or the lack thereof) that we are fighting up hill all the way.

I will happily point anyone who wold like to learn in the right direction

Paul is quite right, there is a huge wealth of information out there.

I'm not sure how much region effects the art as opposed to the Master of the individual schools but there is certainly a whole variety of techniques out there from a variety of Masters and schools..

There are completely seperate styles, systems and lineages that can be traced.

I myself am currently trying to interpret/study/practice Longsword techniques written down by an English author at about 1500AD

The Wikipedia article is a good starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_Martial_Arts

Matt Easton
Stevie T
Paul Bennett.

Thanks ever so much for your replies and information.

I seriously don't want to spark the whole male/female MA debate thing - I know that women train nowadays in Western MA's. Are there any kind of of WMA areas women used to practice, or was that a complete no-no in the past?

The only specificaly female example that I can think of is recorded in Tallhofers manuscript showing a woman fighting a man in a judicial combat. The conditions were there to equalise the combat.
The man is in a pit up to his waist, and armed with a club, the woman is free to roam and armed with a flail (a large rock in her veil)
Techniques are shown for both participants. It might sound a little comic, but this was to the death. If the man left the pit, he was executed, so the woman had to either get him out or kill him outright.

A woman is shown in the earliest manuscript we have: I:33 a sword and buckler manual.

I recall a recent lecture where a fellow researcher had found a reference to a woman attending a fechtschule (kind of like an ad-hoc tournament) in the early 16th century. Her performance and previous training were not indicated.

Im sure there are others out there with more knowledge than me on this subject though