FEATURED AUTHOR
PAUL WAGNER

Swords occupy a special place in many cultures around the world. Like many people, I grew up fascinated by swords and their use by heroic and romantic figures from Western history, such as the Viking warrior, medieval knight, and Highland clansman. However, not until reaching university did I discover an avenue existed that enabled me to explore European swordsmanship in a practical manner. Now, 10 years later, I am an instructor at the Stoccata School of Defence, one of the world’s foremost historical fencing clubs, and a leading researcher in the ever-expanding discipline of what is loosely called historical fencing (HF), historical European martial arts (HEMA), or simply Western martial arts (WMA).

When they hear the term Western martial arts for the first time, most people respond with curiosity and astonishment that there is or was such a thing. The general public tends to associate the term martial arts exclusively with disciplines from Asia with exotic sounding names such as karate, kung fu, taekwon do, and ninjutsu. Yet the fact is Europe developed a huge variety of armed and unarmed martial arts just as intricate and effective as anything originating in Asia.

Many factors, including the rise of firearms on the battlefield, the triumph of law and order on the streets, and the seemingly obsessive tendency of Westerners to turn everything into a competitive sport, contributed to the decline of the native martial traditions and their resultant disappearance from modern Western consciousness. However, in recent years many Western practitioners of Asian fighting arts have found the reality of their chosen arts less effective and satisfying than the hype and have thus begun to explore their own cultural martial heritage. Likewise, theatrical fight directors and stage combatants have made efforts to increase the realism, believability, and historical accuracy of the combat they are portraying. Sport fencers, particularly those of a “classical” leaning, have delved into the roots of their sport in search of a more martial, combative form, while medieval historians and living-history enthusiasts worldwide have increased their efforts to portray the warfare of their chosen eras as accurately as possible. All these interests and more have converged into a fast-growing, dynamic international Western martial arts movement.

The first Western art I learned was the short sword according to George Silver, which to this day remains the single most impressive martial art I have ever come across. It is a remarkable system, both simple enough that a few months of training was enough to blitz anything else the Stoccata School of Defence came across and yet subtle enough that 10 years later we are still learning and improving our interpretation. One of the main strengths of Silver is that he lays out his art in terms of principles and concepts, rather than simply a series of techniques. Because of this, Silver seems to have an answer for everything; every time I have come across a problem in getting a historical technique to work, a careful reading of Silver inevitably tells me what’s wrong and how to fix it.

In the ensuing years I have expanded my repertoire to include sword-and-buckler according to both Silver and the Royal Armouries Fechtbuch I.33, the rapier of Joseph Swetnam, English quarterstaff and bastard sword, medieval sword and shield, English backsword and military broadsword, Spanish navaja, and bare-knuckle boxing. What has impressed me most about these systems is their conceptual basis; although it might seem as if they represent a large number of separate disciplines, in fact they can all be considered manifestations of a common set of principles. Understand those principles, and you can apply them to any weapon in any circumstances.

Q & A

Paladin: You are a noted expert in Western swordsmanship. How did that come about?
PW: By accident really. When I arrived at Macquarie University in Sydney to start a Ph.D. I found the Macquarie University Dark Ages Society, a historical re-enactment society. The more experienced people who ran the club, in particular Stephen Hand, had recently discovered that historical texts existed on European swordsmanship and had begun the long, arduous work of reconstructing the lost martial art. I was thus fortunate enough to get in on the “ground floor” of this research and even more fortunate that the first texts we happened to pick up were the works of George Silver. Silver’s system was so impressive that we soon started the Stoccata School of Defence to concentrate purely on researching and teaching swordsmanship, and with the advent of the Internet we found a worldwide community interested in the same thing.

Paladin: What does stoccata mean?
PW: It’s an Italian term for a straight thrust. We chose it because both Silver and his archrival Saviolo used the term.

Paladin: Have you done any formal martial arts training?
PW: That depends on what you mean. To most people the term martial arts is associated exclusively with disciplines from Asia, yet the very term is of Western origin and means literally “the arts of Mars,” the god of war. The first usage of the term is in the 17th-century English rapier manual Pallas Armata, which refers to the “noble martial art of fencing,” and for many centuries prior the combative arts of Western Europe were known as “the arts of Mars,” “the noble art,” or the “science of defence,” from which we derive the term “fencing.”

But to answer your question, as a kid, my only exposure to Asian martial arts was a term of judo and jujutsu at high school, which I took as a less violent alternative to rugby, and of which I can remember nothing. When Stoccata started I joined as a student, and I am currently the only instructor to have worked his way up through the ranks, rather than just being appointed an instructor when the club started. In addition, for the last year or two I’ve been exchanging lessons with Raymond Floro, one of the world’s leading exponents of the Filipino martial art Kalis Ilustrisimo. So all of my training has been in Western historical systems, but there’s no reason to consider it any less “formal” than any other type of training.

Paladin: Why are “historical” systems important?
PW: Lots of reasons. First, it’s culturally important to realise that the various regions of Europe developed a huge variety of armed and unarmed martial arts just as intricate and effective as anything to be found in Asia. We have been raised to think of medieval knights, for example, not as skilled swordsmen but as heavily armoured thugs crudely thumping away at each other with heavy, bludgeoning weapons, which couldn’t be further from the truth. We in the West have a rich martial heritage that we should be proud of.

Second, our ancestors recorded their knowledge in untold hundreds of manuals and thus “froze” their systems at the moment of maximum utility. Although interpreting these works is not always easy, they do present us with a concrete link to people who actually used their martial skills to survive. Asian martial arts are living traditions that have been passed from master to student for centuries. In this way, techniques often get subtly distorted through the centuries, and the reasoning behind the use of each technique can be lost in the mists of time. You see this all the time in various Asian arts; just look at the difference between modern karate and what is shown in Patrick McCarthy’s translation of the Bubishi, which probably dates back to at least the 17th century. The original historical material can tell you why the techniques are the way they are, which is far more important than simply learning a series of katas or cooperative drills with no context.

Third, the European fencing masters provide a language to explain certain martial concepts that, if properly understood, can be applied to any number of weapons and situations. Silver, for example, provides us with ideas like “narrow space” vs. “wide space,” “true times” vs. “false times,” and the “time of the foot” vs. the “time of the hand.” Such concepts are absolutely key components of almost any combat art, and good martial artists may understand and use them intuitively, but without an explicit language they don’t necessarily get explained and passed on to students.

Fourth, this stuff really works. Apart from swordsmanship, the unarmed combat in medieval and Renaissance sources is also a brilliantly effective striking and wrestling art, plus you’ve got later traditions such as savate and bare-knuckle boxing. I know it’s difficult to claim one particular art or tradition is “better” than any other, but Western manuals represent the collective wisdom of millennia of European fighting experience, and only a complete fool would think they wouldn’t work or have nothing to teach us.There is also the matter of tracing European influence on existing martial arts, which is a much-neglected line of research. For example, it is often claimed that there is a Spanish fencing influence on Filipino martial arts, which is more than likely, but until we have fully understood the historical Spanish and northern Italian manuals, such theories cannot be proved one way or the other.

Finally, of course, swinging broadswords around in earnest is lots of fun!

Paladin: Within the historical European arts, do you have a favorite tradition or system?
PW: The more styles I learn about, the more I like the English systems. The English seemed to have a very straightforward, practical approach to fighting that doesn’t require any great athleticism, extensive training, or fine motor skills and doesn’t fight the body’s natural instincts. There is an emphasis on a solid defence rather than risky offensive moves and on simple techniques that will still keep you alive even if you don’t perform them exactly right. Underneath it all is a remarkably subtle set of core principles. They are also the sort of systems in which you can, with suitable control and safety equipment, spar at realistic speeds, which is the only way to hone the sense of timing and distance that actual fighting requires.

Paladin: Tell us how your new book, Master of Defence: The Works of George Silver, developed.
PW: Well, Silver’s second book, Brief Instructions upon my Paradoxes of Defence, was never published and only survived as a handwritten manuscript. When Terry Brown, author of English Martial Arts, examined the original in the British Library, he reported that there were “crossed-out” bits that might include further instructions or alternative techniques. I thought this would be worth checking out and obtained a copy.

Now, when the manuscript was transcribed in the 19th century it was done exactly as it was written, complete with Silver’s shorthand contractions and all. This makes it rather difficult to read. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the “modernised” versions around on the Internet, which lose much of the poetry and sometimes even the meaning of the original. So I thought it would be a good idea to reprint the book, correct any errors, and prepare it as it might have appeared had it actually made it to print in 1605, alongside Silver’s first book, Paradoxes of Defence.

Paladin: You also included a number of articles on various aspects of Silver’s work.
PW: Yes, Stephen Hand of Stoccata in Sydney and Mark Hillyard of Academie Glorianna in England, who are both recognised experts on Silver, agreed to help me write some additional material. We tried to cover a wide range of topics, including the history around Silver’s works, a review of his weaponry, an outline of his principles, an examination of his arguments against the rapier, what relevance Silver has to understanding Shakespeare, and, finally, a comparison with Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.

Paladin: How did the comparison with Musashi come about?
PW: It evolved out of a conversation I had at a party with some academics specialising in Asian military philosophy. The topic of Musashi came up, and I began to realise that Silver had in fact covered many similar points in his writings. Since the two men were almost contemporaries, I thought a detailed comparison would be interesting and was amazed at how similar Musashi’s Book of Five Rings and Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence were in their general advice and attitude to swordsmanship and martial arts in general. Silver is, of course, a great deal more overt in his instructions and possibly more relevant to a modern Western mind-set.

Paladin: You mentioned cross-training with Raymond Floro. Can you tell us what that is like?
PW: Yes, I was introduced to Raymond a few years ago through a mutual student, who had been rightly praising his Kalis Ilustrisimo to us and apparently pricking Raymond’s interest in Western swordsmanship. Raymond took one look at what we were doing and recognised both the inherent effectiveness of the European systems and the fact that they filled in what he considered gaps in his own art, particularly with regard to “heavy” weapons. Since then he’s incorporated a great deal of Silver (particularly his principles of space, positioning and timing) into his own system, all the way down to his knife and unarmed techniques. For me, it was a revelation to see Silver applied in a practical, modern street-fighting context, since I’d only ever considered swordsmanship as a historical exercise. I don’t think there could be a higher recommendation for Silver’s wisdom than having someone of Raymond’s caliber adopt it like that.

Paladin: Is there that close a relationship between unarmed and weapons-based fighting then?
PW: Certainly. Medieval skill at arms was usually taught as an integrated system, encompassing a series of principles and techniques that could be applied to a variety of weapons, or unarmed combat. Fiore de Liberi, for example, was a medieval Italian master whose techniques are strikingly similar to Silver’s in many respects and who presented his martial system as a series of progressive steps built up on a foundation of wrestling, adding and incorporating different weapons as needed.

Paladin: Would you say Silver is relevant to today’s street?
PW: Absolutely. Apart from the unique understanding of principles and skills, especially footwork, that any form of fencing can contribute to any other martial art, historical swordsmanship is directly applicable to all sorts of improvised weapons. With an understanding of the techniques of single sword, longsword, and staff weapons, for example, you can pick up a baseball bat, iron pipe, tool handle, or any similar heavy object and defend yourself against any other handheld weapon in an efficient and systematic manner.

MASTER OF DEFENCE
The works of George Silver