The adventures in rural HEMA continue. Preparations for the second leg of the 2024 IHFL are underway at the Wrathful Peasants, and I got my first little lesson in rapier. Hold tight the action is about to get…. fairly low key and mellow, actually.
Tournaments, and what to get from them
On Saturday 20th of April, the Blademasters’ Academy, my choice of apostrophe placement there, are holding the second leg of the Irish Historical Longsword League down in Cork and the Peasants are sending a few members to take part (and bring back a prize if they want to show their faces around these parts, no pressure lads). I have waxed vague and lyrical on the benefits of competition; I still stand by the points I made there. Competition is a critical way to improve your fencing by exposing your skills to an opponent that has no interest in you succeeding, and in fact is invested in the exact opposite. This change in intent recharacterises the fencing from a fun weekly activity you share with people you know into a form more closely resembling the authentic martial situation it is derived from. Not exactly of course, just further along the authenticity continuum.
Beyond that, competitions and events in general give us a social aspect to the hobby that contributes in some part to us becoming less isolated and weird than we would otherwise be. I might exaggerate but I do love the social part of HEMA. The conversations around the technicality, the historicity (I am assured this is a real word) and the performance all contribute to my enjoyment of the activity, but mostly I enjoy the banter, the humor and general comradery of the scene.
I won’t be going to Cork on Saturday though…. sniff, sniff… I will be following the HEMA Scorecard though and I wish the Peasants the best of luck!
Strike Hard, Strike First, No Mercy!
However, three other Peasants will be. Two are long-time fencers with a host of events under their belts and one is a newer member and I think this might be the first ‘away’ event he has attended. I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong on this. We have run some good events ourselves since he joined the club and now it is time for him to spread his wings, fly the nest and hopefully do well at the league event.
We have been incorporating the league rules into our sparring practice, using the weighted scoring and ‘one step’ after-blow/double rules. We know that Cork have been practicing with the ruleset for years and it is now natural for them to fence in a way that will maximise their success under that ruleset. We want to get in on a bit of that action and the only way is for us to swim in that sea until we can no longer feel the water around us. Along with sparring to the rules we also do quite a bit of critique or ‘coaching’ following the bouts. We comment on whatever we saw as lacking and what worked. Getting feedback is essential. Yes, the win/loss feedback is good, but that is coarse and very high level. Getting gritty high resolution comments is vital to improving. I find it hard to stay aware of even a few aspects of my fencing whilst I am doing it. I fight from muscle memory, and it takes a specific “your feet point the wrong way” or “you need to threaten with the point as you come into distance” or whatever, to give me the insight I need. In the next bout I will focus my attention on that problem and as time and repetitions go by, I assume that I will get better.
‘Doing well’ at events isn’t limited to competitive success. It helps, but it’s not the end of the story. When I go to events, I have many wants that, if fulfilled, will make me feel I did well. Of course, some degree of victory is nice, I want to achieve some technical performance (carry out some move or other properly), if I can keep my emotional state on the positive side (not get salty with refs, other fencers or myself) and if I get good social interactions, I am pretty happy. If I tied the whole experience to medals or cumulative wins, I can honestly say that I would NEVER have had a good event. A quick look at my HEMA Ratings profile shows that I am literally a ‘middling’ fencer. I have lost ever so slightly more than half my competitive bouts. And you know what? I don’t care.
I care more about the times I got pissed off because I was losing (I let myself down there), I care more about the times I managed to meet my technical goals and I care more about the few times I have made a conversational pun on some historical term that caused my friends to roll their eyes and groan. That’s what matters.
Little bit of Rapier (the trumpet, the trumpet)
We are lucky enough to have a Rapierist in the village. Technically he does SCA, which may be HEMA adjacent, but comes close enough that we can all still be friends. They pop down to the odd session and have been closely watching us as we finally got round to buying the long pointy bois. Last night I got my first hands-on instruction from a person who seems to know what they’re doing with Italian rapier. For me this makes the world of difference. I have watched videos and tried to pick up what I can, but having a live human tell me what I need to do, why I need to do it and how I am not quite doing it right is the best!
I make no claims (and nor would my instructor I am sure) that I have learnt all I need to know but the few pointers (lol) on how to stand, the guards and the basic mechanics of the thrust make me feel much better equipped to approach the subject. We have been offered instruction by others and I will be taking them up on the offer but logistics of that need to be worked through so having a local willing and able to show me stuff was a real boon.
There are elements of rapier that my body seems to think are shared with saber and smallsword. When I want to make a quick cutting action my body just goes “oh, you mean like a sabre cut, like this…” and my point goes into a moulinet-like journey, which due to the extra length of the rapier seems to take longer than the orbit of Pluto (planet or not we have to accept it takes a hell of a time to get anywhere). When I want to disengage and quickly move around my opponents blade, my muscle memory takes over and I do this little circuit of the wrist, not entirely wrong but just the tip moves, which means I am trying to displace with my foible, and it is super ineffective!
I need to learn the new moves and disconnect from the ground in motions of other styles. The familiarity with other single handed styles might be a hinderance at first, but slowly I will build a new mental category of movements, a new understanding of the changed reach, weight and properties of the new tool. It’s a process I actively enjoy as it makes me engage consciously with the bits of my brain that are moving me through space and manipulating tools that will eventually become part of my physical self-image. Brains are clever like that.
I want to share my learning process with you, but it is early days so far and things move slow out here where the cows graze, the dew drops cry and the cats meow. Don’t expect me to be entering any competitions any time soon, that’s for sure!
Thanks for reading my wafflings. I hope they entertained you for a while. If you want to chat about them or let me know what you think on the subject, you can comment below or contact me through the Wrathful Peasants page.
== Banner Image and Black and white photo credit to Sylwia Patrycja Poskrobko. ==
== Colour image uploaded by Colin Miraglio but as he’s in a lot of them from that event I can only assume he did not take it and I don’t know who did, but I really appreciate your pics! ==
== EDIT: The picture was taken by Alice Saint-Jean, she really captured the Blademasters’ Open 2022 beautifully!==
The Wrathful Peasant 