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As a martial arts instructor, as someone who teaches regular classes (incidentally, I am now doing this stuff full time, writing, researching, teaching, practicing, no more 9-5 day job!), I feel I have certain insights here on this issue. I frequently, even regularly encounter new students from sport fencing and from fantasy-historical societies who simply do not grasp the “martial spirit” we rely on in our approach. They are surprised even shocked by the intensity, the energy, the lethality of the techniques we study, the manner we study them, and our constant referral to historical source materials. They are equally surprised at how the weapons we study can actually be handled and employed, the range of actions we use and the speed and versatile of them. (I encountered some of this at my recent seminars in Krakow and Munich last month, and at the SSi event back in May). I think what happens is that when some students for the first time see earnest practice of Medieval & Renn weapons that requires bumps and bruises and pain to comprehend real and effective technique, when they see the complete lack of pretense and “play” we possess, they are overwhelmed, even intimidated. There’s no “Thee’s” and “Thou’s”, no “M’lady’s”, no feasting party, no formality or etiquette and no sporting competitions (not that those are “bad things”, just that we forego them in favor of exclusively focusing on “combat”). We don’t practice to win tournaments or put on performances entertainment and we have no “dueling” rules to exploit or hide behind. Sometimes, perhaps as many as 2/3rds of new students find it uncomfortable, unpalatable, it doesn’t allow them to escape, to play, to fantasize, instead it demands commitment and discipline and a sincere grasp of the naked violence underpinning the subject, in other words, a “martial spirit”. Sometimes we have to stop and laugh because we so freely discuss wounds and killing and death that new students start giving strange looks and we have to tell them we’re not psychotics, that it’s all theoretical and historical. Many new students to HACA classes have had no real exposure to any form of martial study except sport fencing, tae kwon do, boffer or rattan bashing, or what they’ve seen in the movies, and that’s a pretty hefty amount of baggage to unravel. Our method and message is sometimes too strong too fast for some students looking for something softer, more “accessible”, and less “martial”, it can be unnerving. But, that’s how we have chosen to go about it. Until some people see it, let alone really get out on the floor and seriously experience it first hand, it’s easy for those not truly physically involved in this craft and not earnestly pursuing it to say that everyone is “just playing”. Such an opinion is of little worth. For some students, casually teaching them interpretations of historical skills that are derived from and intended for unequivocal dismemberment and killing, makes them uneasy. Most of us spend our comfortable, safe modern lives working behind a desk and lose all sense of the harshness, brutality, and insecurity that spawned the arts we now study (except among a few) mostly as incidental curiosities. They much prefer the safety of speculation of what different sword forms are capable of without the necessity of sweating or of failing. This is the heart of the matter, there is the all-out fighting of the martial arts in Medieval & Renaissance manuals, and then there is the rules and regulations and codes of other later forms of fencing. While individual techniques may be just as deadly, and end results just as lethal, the range of the techniques, the conditions they were employable under, and the attitudes they were used with were quite different. In this sense, under this criteria of judgment, it is possible (even easy) for us as *serious modern practitioners* to quantity one as more “martial” than another. JC
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