In the Middle Ages, the biggest stars were none other than knights. Romantic heroes, warrior inspirations, some of them were well paid as well as permanently celebrated. But habit doesn’t make a monk: to be a knight, a true one, he needed a certain talent, above all in handling the sword.
Being good with a sword doesn’t mean swinging in all directions hoping to hit and kill your opponent, remember the BBC: This is a sophisticated martial art, full of rules and techniques. The period archives available to us are there to remind us of this, even if today they are still quite incomprehensible.
In the combat guides we learn to handle more or less long swords, to fight with two hands or with one (which makes it possible to protect ourselves with a shield), but also to use daggers, axes or even a lot of stones if you don’t have a ‘best weapon.
Store your gear
The idea is not only to get the better of your opponent, but also to keep your weapon as intact as possible. “Even making a small sword takes a lot of steel”explains Richard Scott Nokes, professor of medieval literature, who adds that hundreds of kilos of coal are needed to create or repair it.
Some great masters of combat, such as the Italian Knight Flower of the Free period fourteenthand century, they left no written record of their methods, not wanting them to fall into enemy hands. Others, on the other hand, recorded everything, detailing many techniques and embellishing their texts with drawings intended to illustrate concrete situations.
Problem: Viewed as of 2022, medieval combat guides are incomprehensible to say the least. Vague, cryptic, self-absorbed, they show that pedagogy is clearly not an innate skill for everyone. Analysts continue to split their teeth over many pages. “It’s incredibly difficult to take these static images and interpret them as dynamic combat action”confirms Richard Scott Nokes.
sword warfare
It must be said that the images often have something to laugh about: we see bodies twisting in a completely improbable way when they don’t have three legs or three arms.
Then, we see fights whose winner is probably the one who managed to send his opponent into a narrow hole dug in the ground, headlong. The lyrics, often written in verse, don’t help much to understand what’s going on.
The whole thing is so bizarre as to become fascinating, and it’s no wonder that clever people with a thirst for history (and atypical traditions) have tried to reconstruct some of the situations described in the famous guides.
In this excellent report from YouTube channel Retoldas instructive as it is hilarious, in reality we see how all this does not make much sense – unless it is only us who do not have the right interpretations.
