Riding with George by Smucker Philip

Author:Smucker, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

By the fifth week in my historical fencing class, we moved on to a weapon that was efficient for killing, easier to handle, and served well, as one expert noted succinctly, for “cutting important parts off of one’s opponent.” Hmmm. As Evangelista writes in his tome on modern swordplay, “Suddenly, men were poking neat, lethal holes in one another.” The stubborn Brits held out with their longswords for some time, as they considered men who played with the shorter and lighter rapier to be the equivalent of sissies. Nevertheless, by the seventeenth century, the rapier was all the rage, and between 1600 and 1780 nearly forty thousand noblemen were killed in sword fights, making the sword a rather useful tool for culling a nation’s top one percent.

Coach Grandy explained that the choice of the right weapon could be the difference between victory or death. And it was important to be practiced in the art of everything from a rapier to an épée—a smaller, lighter, and slimmer sword—because when you were in a dispute, someone always got to choose the weapons, and it wasn’t always you, he told us. “If you were not proficient at using a certain sword, and others knew this, your opponent could wisely choose that weapon for the duel.” That could spell doom.

I learned that the classic rapier was longer than the shorter épée sword that Washington would have trained on in Winchester or when sparring with one of his older brothers in his teens. There is an entire and eloquent vocabulary of swordsmanship, but suffice it to say that the two main parts of the rapier worth remembering are the blade and the hilt. The hilt is comprised of the grip and the hand guard, and the blade is, well, the blade, much stronger and heavier at the base than it is at the tip. The footwork and thrusting motions for a rapier are very much the same for a sixteenth-century rapier as they are for an eighteenth-century épée. To take up one’s guard, explained Coach Grandy, “the foot on the same side of the sword hand should be in front, pointed forward, and the other foot should be at a right angle, with the heel in a straight line as the front foot. About three-quarters of your weight should rest on the back leg, removing your torso from being easily struck.”

Indeed, a lot, but not all, of swordplay is what you feel most comfortable with. The whole point of en garde posture, with knees bent slightly, is to allow you to advance forward and retreat back without bobbing up and down or moving wildly, which would be a recipe to get sliced open. I experimented a bit, trying to move up and down from this position in a quick but deliberate shuffle step, and I found it much easier than moving about with a burdensome longsword clasped in both hands like Attila the Hun. Keeping the rapier at the ready was also a key, as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.