Tomas de Courcy

Swetnam Preface to the Reader

This is part of an ongoing project to sumarize and provide SCA focused commentary on The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence by Joseph Swetnam, published in 1617.

For links to the other sections of the Swetnam Project please go here.

I am using this facsimile: http://tysonwright.com/sword/SwetnamSchooleOfDefence.pdf for the project.

 

As I said in my previous post I’ll be breaking Joseph Swetnam’s manual down by sections.  This is for the first three sections (kinda).  It includes title page, dedication, and first preface.

 

Prince Henry

Prince Henry 1594 – 1612

I’ll throw a few pictures in to break up the 1700 word post.

First off we have our standard title page with a bit of aggrandizing.  We have our dedication to the Prince Charles, the brother of his dead Patron.  I wonder if he was hoping to snag himself a new patron with this.  Nothing surprising here.

Then we have our introduction for those who aren’t his patron.  It’s entitled: “An Epistle unto the common Reader”.  The intro to the reader is fourteen pages long.  It includes such comments as that he isn’t a scholar and has never attended university.  But he seems to consider himself good enough anyway.  The next five pages seem to be his trying to prove that you don’t need a university education to quote random things.  The only problem is that he’s not very good at it.  He is more than heavy handed with his metaphors – which go on forever – and he approaches his point in a slow spiral so you know about where he’s going, but he never seems to get there.  He mixes quotes from scripture with morality plays and popular ballads.  It very much seems like a first year university student trying to pretend he’s learned by spewing as much information onto the page as possible.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Thoughts on Reading Swetnam

Well I’m kinda back.  I’m only allowed to pick up my sword for 15 minutes at a time, but I have my strength coming back to most of my body and I’m on a lot fewer drugs, so my head is much clearer.  This means that I can get back into some of my studying.  After my work with Saviolo I very much wanted to move on to Joseph Swetnam.  So it’s time for that now.  With Saviolo I found that I didn’t like his writing style as much as I did Di Grassi (though I liked the content more), so it’s interesting to me to see Joseph Swetnam’s style which seems very different from the earlier masters.  I’ll be writing this as I go through his Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence which was published in 1617.Cover

Similar to Di Grassi and Saviolo I’m reading Swetnam in the original.  This is the big reason why I’m starting with the English masters and not the Italianate ones.  I would like to get a grounding in the thought of the time rather than read it through the eyes of a translator.

First Di Grassi published his work in 1570 (translated into English in 1594) and Saviolo published in 1595.  I still think that Saviolo’s work is derivative of Di Grassi’s, and subscribe to the thought that Di Grassi’s manual was taught in Saviolo’s school before his own manual came out.  I did find a number of parallels between Saviolo’s work and dall’Agocchie’s work which came out a few years prior.

Joseph Swetnam published in 1617 – 22 years later.  Saviolo should thus be a completely new generation of fencing.  His work is more likely to be derivative of Fabris, Giganti, and Capoferro but from an English perspective.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Saviolo Test

Well I tested out some of  Saviolo’s style last night.  I worked on the following aspects:

  • Wards
    • High: Prima& Unicorn
    • Low: Right and Left
  • Voiding
  • Hand parries
  • Compass steps
  • Thrusts
    • Imbroccata
    • Stoccata
    • Punta Riversa
  • Cuts
    • Mandritta
    • Riverso
    • Fendente Stramazone

I am not a Saviolo scholar, I just worked on it a bit and am attempting to put what I read into practice.  Some of this may be wrong or I may have been preforming them wrong, but that’s just part of learning.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Fencing Styles

Nearly everyone in the Lower Mainland fencing community fights similarly.  In fact most of Tir Righ fights similarly.  It’s often refered to as Tir Righ Standard.  It’s effective, it’s safe, it’s defended, and it’s worked well for a lot of fighters.  This is how we teach new fighters.  It’s how we retrain fighters who are doing poorly.  This style is ingrained in us.  At Investiture the other week Master Guido was commenting to another fighter, one of the very few who fight differently, that as most of the people fight the same here you can use the same techniques to defeat almost all of them.  And he’s right.  Everyone is used to fighting same style vs. same style.  We’re becoming a little stagnate in our style.  We found one that generally works for most people, and are sticking to it.  And it is a good general style.  It melds clasical and period fencing, and allows for variation and experimentation within a construct.  But if you face 1/2 of the fencers in Tir Righ you have a general concept of what they are going to do and how they are going to fight.

And it’s so ingrained that when I was trying out something a little different I had someone adjust my entire style about a 1/2 hour before a tournament… I did very poorly in that tournament.  Immediately before a tournament is not the time to make sweeping changes.  But the bigger issue is that other styles of fencing are not seen as “different” but “wrong”.  What really got me thinking was this post: http://classicalfencing.blogspot.com/2011/03/gorilla-tactics.html at a clasical fencing blog I read.  It brought up the idea that maybe we need to examine why we do what we do.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Academic Rapier

I currently have a lack of both time and money, which makes it difficult for me to attend more than my local practice for fencing.  What I do have is a lot of time for reading while on the train.  So, similarly to what I did when I decided to learn more about bread making I picked up some books.

The first one had very little to do with rapier: Warrior to Soldier, 449-1660.  It’s a history of warfare in England from the Saxons right through to the New Model Army.  It’s a great overview for anyone in the SCA with an English persona.  It helped me to understand the rapiers position in England, as that of a day to day sidearm.  I knew that it wasn’t a military weapon, but to see the evolution of the military sword and armour was very enlightening.  Though the rapier came to prominence in England, the decrease in armour was actually because of the firearm.  I always figured that firearms in general brought about the change in armour, but it wasn’t actually until the advent of the musket (which at the time was so heavy it needed a prop) that armour became useless.  The first muskets allowed a half trained man to kill someone in the heaviest armour who had been trained from childhood.  Although new armour was designed that could withstand a musket shot, it was so heavy that it required a man to be on horseback, and slow.  It was useless on the ground, and couldn’t be used to protect the horse as it was too heavy.  So if the cavalry had the bulletproof breast plates on their horses were still vulnerable, and the musketeers just aimed for the horses instead.  The armour was so heavy that people refused to wear it.  They would rather wear little armour and be fast.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

February Update

Some thoughts today:

Stats

I was browsing my stats.  I never realized how popular my Roman Legion Cooking project I did for AT War was.  It seems that that is the most viewed page, and the biggest reason people come to this blog.  Followed closely by my bread experiments.

Norse Bread

I’ve been planning some more experiments with the bread.  I’m thinking that since the mead barm bread went so well I might try to expand on that.  A friend of mine did a project on Norse Bread, and it brought up some great ideas.  I could use the resarch into norse bread and the types of grains that were found in it, particularly in the Birka find, and make a mead barm bread with the proper grains.  I’m not sure if they would use mead barm or beer barm to leaven it, but since both would be readily available it would make sense.  My no research suspicion is that they would use mead barm, as it would impart a light sweetness to the bread.  Based on the types of norse bread I’ve read about I’d assume that they would go stale about a day after baking, so they would likely be eaten fresh and hot.  Perhaps a lightly leavened pan bread….  Much research is required here.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

A Reassesment of Medieval Bread

1588 cookery book, The Good Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchen:

Fine Manchet. “Take halfe a bushell of fine flower twise boulted, and a gallon of faire luke warm water, almost a handful of white salt, and almost a pinte of yest, then temper all these together, without any more liquor, as hard as ye can handle it: then let it lie halfe an hower, then take it up, and make your Manchetts, and let them stande almost an hower in the oven. Memorandum, that of every bushell of meale may be made five and twentie caste of bread, and every loafe to way a pounde besyde the chesill.

This is the origin of my medieval inspired bread.  With the Mead Barm bread I did last time I think I”m ready to return to my recipe and see if I can make it better based off the original.  Something to remember: unlike most things yeast cannot simply be added or reduced in scale.  It takes a certain amount of yeast to get a leaven and if it’s too small, regardless of what the percentage is then you’re SOL.

If you want to take a look at the previous versions check Medieval Style Bread part 1 2 3 4.  All of them are more inspired by medieval as they don’t use barm.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago