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New article by Matt Galas, "On the value of tournaments"

Highly recomended read that discusses pros and cons of competitive HEMA

"Greetings, All!

It's no secret that a number of us in the WMA/HEMA community are actively working on rule-sets for tournaments. In recent threads on this subject (both on US and European sites), I've noticed that there is a certain subset of our community that has a visceral reaction to the idea of tournaments.

Andreas faced Neil Shallcross of ACT UK in the final, which ended with the score 7-5 in Neil's favour

Andreas also won a backsword/sabre martial challenge against Martin Austwick of the English Martial Arts Academy, UK.

Anders Korsberg, Mikael Widegren and Magnus Hagelberg also competed for GHFS, Mikael winning his first fight against the famed Fabrice Cognot of De Taille et d'Estoc, France.

Axel Pettersson of GHFS took home first place in the open longsword tournament with 40 participants, defeating Anders Linnard, also of GHFS, in the finals by sudden death. Scott Hellroth reached the first round of the knockout finals, before being defeated by Dennis Ljungqvist, KuHFS, who went on to take 3rd place.

Nina Trollvige was only one point from reaching the Womens longsword finals.

The Destreza translation project

An ambitious work on the Spanish fencing tradition by Puck and Mary Curtis

The website with several translations and transcriptions can be found here: www.destreza.us/index.html

A video series where Puck and Mary teach some Destreza can be seen here: www.youtube.com/watch

From the Destreza website:

"During the 1500s a new system of swordplay began to develop in Europe unlike any the world had ever seen. The Spanish created a new, universal method of fighting based on Reason and Mathematics that could be taught to any student. They called the system La Verdadera Destreza, the True Art.

New English Sutor translation

translated by Keith P. Myers

Jacob Sutor (also spelled "Jakob Sutor") was a German fencing master who published a fighting manual in 1612, called the Neues Künstliches Fechtbuch. The book was mostly an updated version (or outright plagiarism) of Joachim Meyer's work.

Sutor's Fechtbuch includes techniques for the long sword, dussack, rapier (which appears to be an early form of the weapon more similar to a cut and thrust sword), rapier and main gauche, rapier and cloak, case of rapiers, staff, pole axe, and the flail

HEMA News Agency

Cod.HS 3227a - Hanko Döbringer

Download the PDF-file here.

Presented here is a transcription and modern English translation of the earliest extant manuscript dealing with the longsword yet discovered; Cod.HS.3227a, so named, "Hanko Döbringer's Fechtbuch," from 1389. Written in Germany it is the earliest known exposition of the "Lichtenauer tradition," and a very important document for the field of historical fencing studies.

The translation has been done using B.Henning's, /Kleines Mittenhochdeutsches Wörterbuch/, working from a microfiche of the original document that I obtained from the /Germanisches Nationalmuseum/ in Nurnberg, and relying on several dictionaries from the close of the 19th century. The transcription I believe is satisfactory, but I have elected to leave out the crossed out scribes mistakes in the manuscript since they do not have any importance for the technical information in the text. Thus the transcription is not strictly complete; I may add these items in the next update. A bibliographical analysis is sadly beyond my competence without accessing the original document at the owning library, so this must be left outside of this work for now.

This translation and transcription is not intended to be the final word on the work, but to be more of a usable draft for use of students who may have greater or lesser difficulty in working with the original text. As such this is not a literal translation, but a modernized text interpreted by myself. I have tried to make sure that the instructions and meaning of the original have not been changed, only made more readable. I have also chosen to use “You” in the text as much as possible in order to make it clear who is doing what. At a later date I will add illustrations of some techniques and concepts as well as a list of technical terminology with some references.

This work is intended for public use, so feel free to print it, reference it, or quote it, but please do not use it for any commercial purposes. As always I am grateful for suggestions on how to improve the translation and transcription in the future.

I would like to thank Anders Linnard, Jeffrey Hull, Stewart Feil and John Clements for their help in commenting and correcting this translation and transcription. Aside from these gentlemen I have had the help and suggestions from many others over the web. None mentioned and none forgotten. Thanks to Peter Svärd for creating a PDF and producing the layout. All faults, mistakes and erroneous ideas are my own.

David Lindholm
ARMA Senior Researcher
Malmo, Sweden
April 2005