Back to the Source -- A documentary on Historical European Martial Arts

Whatever you think of the subject matter -- the re-creation of late medieval and early modern martial arts starting with the surviving treatises from the period -- Back to the Source is quite an amazingly good documentary.

I have enough experience of the earliest SCA and its later evolution to recognize the attractive glow around people who are inventing something from early exemplars and creating a dream -- and creating a community in which the pioneering impulse is very strong.  Some of the interviewees worry that as HEMA progresses and becomes more standardized -- in other words as the pioneers teach a more sophisticated art to a large number of people -- something will be lost.

Sorry, folks, this is guaranteed to happen. You will attract people who want to practice "sport for sport's sake."  Some of them will care a lot more about winning than recreating a historical art.  Where pioneering HEMA members of today may respect scholarship as much or more than winning, a large, developed HEMA community will include plenty of people who value winning and winners more than the historical purists.

Enjoy it while you have got it.  Whatever your particular "it" is.

Folk of the Air

I promised a couple of weeks ago to discuss The Folk of the Air, a novel by Peter S Beagle, which contrary to the opinion of some readers I think is a very successful piece of literature.

It might be considered a novel of hippy-dom in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1970s. It is also a book about the intrusion of supernatural elements into a modern community. And most of all, it is a contemplation of the ideas and attitudes that in real life created the Society for Creative Anachronism in that same Bay Area in that same era.

Peter Beagle, who enjoys a very high reputation among a certain group of fantasy readers, is in this novel perhaps not as careful to construct a unified work of art as in some others. There are a few weak spots in the book that support that analysis. However, one can also argue that Beagle has got countervailing strengths which allow him to deal with a number of themes in interesting ways. The novel is complicated and diverse, just like life.

My own interest in the book is unsurprisingly in the way he portrays the early SCA (as the League of Archaic Pleasures), not as it was but as it might have been. Beagle says a lot about the SCA, especially the SCA in its earliest days, and he is very fair in his portrayal. He shows the good the bad the mundane and the bizarre that can accompany a serious effort to revive historic activities and culture. Like the early SCA, Beagle's League of Archaic Pleasures exists for good reasons and bad. People have a variety of motivations, not all of them good, and not all of them contemptible either. If you are a long-time member of the SCA like I am, you recognize people thinking and talking about the activities they have taken up and the Society they have created, taking pleasure in them, and wondering whether what they're doing makes any sense. Beagle does not answer their question.

One can argue that this kind of social fantasy is dangerous, and Beagle is quite aware of that. He deals with the dangers by portraying them as age-old supernatural forces that reemerge from elsewhere to intervene in and exploit the favourable environment created by the existence of the League. Beagle is able to make the reader shiver almost as much as the characters in the book do when confronting unexpected and uncanny manifestations.

I was talking about this book to a friend who had had it unread on the shelf for years and realized that my younger friend might find this to be a historical novel about a certain time in California's history. It is after all nearly a half-century old.

Somehow we slipped into the mainstream

Phil Paine writes:

One thing that has struck me repeatedly in recent years is that almost everything that I grew up with and experienced as an intimate world of "outsider" stuff is now the stuff of mainstream experience. ... Here's an example I ran across this week:

In Clive Gamble's Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History, there is a discussion about intentionality in theories of mind. Gamble discusses how the neurobiologist J.N. Cole distinguishes four levels of intentionality. Gamble illustrates the levels with these examples:

level 1: Dave, the re-enactor, believes he is a Crusader.

level 2: Dave believes that Ben, a fellow re-enactor, thinks he is a crusader.

level 3: Dave desires that Ben believe that Dave thinks he is a Crusader.

level 4: Dave knows that the re-enactment group is aware that Ben believes that Dave thinks he is a Crusader.

Apparently, medieval re-enactors are now so broadly familiar a feature of life that a scientist assumes that they are what you would call upon to illustrate a point in theory of mind, expecting the reader to visualize it instantly.

I remember, many years ago, when I first realized that you could tell whether a historian was of the generation that read science fiction or not, not just from specific references, but from their attitudes toward history.

Authenticity

I don't consider the Society for Creative Anachronism to be neo-primitivism, exactly, but what Mr. Potter says about authenticity hits close to home.  I've been thinking of authenticity as a near-religious term for quite a while now:

The moral imperative driving  this is what we can call the quest for authenticity. This is the search for meaning in a world that is alienating, spiritually disenchanted, socially flattened, technologically obsessed, and thoroughly commercialized. To that end, “authenticity” has become the go-to buzzword in our moral slang, underwriting everything from our condo purchases and vacation stops to our friendships and political allegiances.

There are two major problems with this.

The first is that authenticity turns out to be just another form of hyper-competitive status seeking, exacerbating many of the very problems it was designed to solve. Second, and even more worrisome, is that the legitimate fear of the negative effects of technological evolution has given way to a paranoid rejection of science and even reason itself.

Modernity, as a civilization, sits at the confluence of secularism, liberalism, and capitalism, and it is not everyone’s cup of coffee. The promise of the authentic is that it will help us carve out a space where true community can flourish outside of the cash nexus and in a way that treads lightly upon the Earth. More often than not, this manifests itself through nostalgia, for a misremembered time when the air was cleaner, the water purer, and communities more nurturing.

It was never going to work out that way. From its very origins, the quest for the authentic was motivated by that most ancient and base of human urges, the desire for status. The authenticity craze of the past decade is simply the latest version of what the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, called “conspicuous display.” Veblen was mostly concerned with the pretensions of the failing aristocracy and their obsession with obsolete endeavours such as hunting, swordfighting, and learning useless languages. Yet his basic insight – that consumption is first and foremost about social distinction – remains the key to decoding our consumer driven cultural shivers.

As recently as a decade and a half ago, organic food was the almost exclusive bastion of earnest former hippies and young nature lovers — the sort of people who like to make their own granola, don’t like to shave, and use rock crystals as a natural deodorant. But by the turn of the millennium, organic was making inroads into more mainstream precincts, driven by an increasing concern over globalization, the health effects of pesticide use, and the environmental impact of industrial farming. The shift to organic seemed the perfect alignment of private and public benefit.

In the past few juice cleansing has become a 5 billion dollar industry in the U.S., appealing to those who want to lose weight and “detox” their bodies.

It also became an essential element of any “authentic” lifestyle. Yet as it became more popular, the rumblings of discontent within the organic movement became harder to ignore. What was once a niche market had become mainstream, and with massification came the need for large-scale forms of production that, in many ways, are indistinguishable from the industrial farming techniques that organic was supposed to replace. Once Walmart started selling organic food, the terms of what counts as authentic shifted from a choice between organic and conventional food to a dispute between supporters of the organic movement and those who advocate a far more restrictive standard for authenticity, namely, locally grown food.

But when it comes to shopping locally, how local is local enough? If we want to live a low-impact, environmentally conscious lifestyle, how far do we need to go?

The short answer is, you need to go as far as necessary to maintain your position in the status hierarchy.


The problem is you can only be authentic as long as most of the people around you are not, which has its own built-in radicalizing dynamic. You start out getting an organic-vegetable delivery service once a month, then you try growing chickens in your urban backyard. Then the next thing you know, your friends have gone all-in on paleo, eschewing grains, starches, and processed sugar and learning how to bow-hunt wild boar on weekends.


The Whole Food chain plans to start rolling out a system that ranks fruits and vegetables as “good,” ”better” or “best” based on the supplier’s farming practices.

There’s a deeper issue here though, which is that the problem with radicalization is that it breeds extremism. It is one thing to play at being anti-modern by eating only wild game, becoming an expert in axe-throwing, or building a whisky still in your backyard. It is something else entirely to push that ethos into a thoroughgoing rejection of science, technology, and reason itself.

Yet this is where we have ended up. The neoprimitivist logic of authenticity has pushed its way into every corner of how we think, act and consume. 

Longsword on the New York Times site

This video link will probably disappear sooner rather than later but in the meantime it's an interesting look at one variety of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts).  These people are inspired by the techniques of the late medieval German masters, but though they strive for historical authenticity in their moves they are not interested in other kinds historical re-enactment or re-creation.  No "thees and thous," as one of them puts it.  (But note that there is one guy on the sidelines who seems to be wearing some kind of medieval clothing and maybe a coronet.)

There is a wide variety of martial arts out there these days, different organizations pursuing different goals.  This may lead to the Balkanization of a field of activity once completely dominated by the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Research and re-creation

Steven Muhlberger

Delivered at Nipissing University

October 30, 2014

as part of the History Department Seminar Series

I am very pleased to be here before my beloved colleagues and other friends of the History Department, and to have the opportunity to discuss my work and my interests. I hope this will not come across as merely an exercise in self-aggrandizement or nostalgia. It’s meant as a reflection on one person’s meandering path through the vast country that is history, and on the variety of ways that history can be approached. My path is probably more eccentric than most but I think that all of you working historians out there have a tale to tell of how your engagement in the past is not restricted within the boundaries of the notional career path of the so-called “average academic historian.” At least, I hope so.

Reflecting back on my career at Nipissing University and before that at University of Toronto, I consider that I have been very lucky having the freedom to pursue my extraordinarily diverse intellectual interests. I began as a graduate student with a very intense project in which I took long-known late ancient chronicles, key sources for the understanding of the fall of the Roman Empire, and reconstructed the mental universe of the men who wrote them. The standard view of these works was that they were defective fragments of lost official records. My task was to turn the chroniclers from being incompetent historians to being valuable witnesses, who were more closed mouth than we might like, but still people who had something to say for themselves, and whose silences said as much about late Roman times as their explicit statements. Thanks to my supervisor Walter Goffart it was an absolutely first class introduction to an extraordinarily difficult historiographical problem, where analyzing the scholarly tradition surrounding the questions was just as important as reconstructing contemporary accounts of the era.

I was and am very proud of my first book The Fifth-Century Chroniclers because I did not avoid the hardest questions of source interpretations. I believe it is one of those books that is good to argue with and will prove useful to researchers for decades to come. Nevertheless, when I finished the Fifth- Century Chroniclers, I had no desire to take on another highly technical puzzle of that sort. About the time I was hired at Nipissing University, I found another historiographical problem worth exploring. It was 1989; the Iron Curtain was falling, and millions were occupying Tien An Men Square and erecting a statue of the Goddess of Democracy. What did it all mean?

As usual, a pessimistic view of human society emerged very quickly. Specifically an old notion was trotted out are not, in an effort explain away the clear demands of people on every continent for democracy to replace autocracy.

My friend Phil Paine and I found such arguments sour and self-serving. Together we wrote the article “Democracy’s Place in World History” for the Journal of World History, in which we demonstrated that proto-democratic institutions, especially at the local level, are documentable in many parts of the world; the potential for democracy can be found in many parts of the world. Particularly interesting was the comparison between the experience of ancient urban democracy in India and in Greece. The Greek democratic experience is often rated as a crucial moment in world history; ancient Indian democracy is not very well known even in India. Phil and I argued that they were of similar significance – both demonstrating potential for democracy without however guaranteeing it.

This was a daring project and depended on faith that big, difficult historiographical questions could be tackled by historians of normal intelligence and training if they used a careful comparative methodology and paid critical attention to the historiographical tradition. Phil Paine and I had ambitions to do more with the history of democracy but circumstances prevented us working together closely. Our output of the last 20 years on the subject is rather restricted as a result. In the 1990s I was once again looking for direction. I found it in the best place, at home.

Some of you know and others do not that I have been a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism as long as I have been a student of the Middle Ages, that is, for over 40 years. The SCA can be seen as one of the many historical reenactment organizations that have grown up in the last half-century. Except it isn’t much like most of the rest. The normal reenactment organization seeks to re-create a specific time and place. Participants appropriately and accurately dressed and equipped re-create a battle or a scene from daily life. The participants are usually in the position of actors putting on a show for paying customers who, as in most theatre, are a passive audience.

The SCA, however, is not a show for an audience. Rather the audience is identical with the participants. It can be seen as a roving theme party that has been going on in various locales since May 1, 1966. On that day a number of Californians put on in a backyard party which they called an “international tournament.” Guests were encouraged to dress in the style of “any age when swords were used.” The party featured mock ceremony, music and combat with a variety of swords. The winner of the tournament crowned a simple peasant girl queen, and a promising young squire was knighted. And when it was all over they all said “let’s do it again!” And they did.

The SCA evolved into a society focused not on reenacting such historic events as the Battle of Bosworth Field, but the world of the 12 century romances where an ideal king and queen preside over a court of knights and ladies and those who aspire to be such. In the evolving SCA as in the early romances, the tournament remained the focus of activity. Thus the SCA can be seen as a recreation of medieval literature rather than of actual history. Yet there was an early commitment by the individual members and the organization they founded to do things “right,” meaning that an SCA event would aspire to get the visual and physical aspects right – armour, food, costuming, tents and pavilions, beer, mead and cider. The desire to get the props right and the respect given to artists and artisans -- all of whom must necessarily be seen as amateur researchers-- are among the chief things that keeps the SCA from being just a fantasy role playing activity, of the sort now called a LARP (live action role-playing game).

The SCA is a role playing game, an embodied reimagining –in Paul Monahan’s elegant phrase –of some aspects of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But it is not an attempt to re-create a full and accurate and consistent historical environment. It is important to remember that the first SCA event gave invitees free choice of what historical or even fictional era they wished to portray –one person came as Queen Lucy of Narnia, and there were hobbits as well. That principle of the individual choice of “persona” or in-game identity has continued ever since, although purely fantasy identities have been phased out long ago. Indeed, the most serious efforts at accurate reenactment are located in the individual person. There is next to no effort to maintain a consistent time that embraces everybody at a given event or in the society as a whole. I may come to an event as a 10th century Viking, while you come to the same event in a costume modeled on one worn by Anne Boleyn. The success of the re-creation, in the judgment of those present, doesn’t have anything to do with consistent portrayals of either the 10th century or the 16th. While participants may carefully put together a consistent and accurate persona for themselves as individuals, the social environment they create is a fictional kingdom -- say Ealdormere – and a fictional time -- AS 49, the year of the Society 49. To do an excellent job of embodied reimagining, there is no particular reason that the individual participant needs to know a lot about the actual history of the Middle Ages or even the history of a given country, such as 10th-century Norway. Better one should know how to make or acquire authentically styled shoes or boots.

I realized long ago that my scholarly knowledge of the Middle Ages was going to be of only limited application to my SCA participation. The only advantage of knowing medieval history in any detail is that you can occasionally contribute a decorative element, as for instance in showing people how a medieval heraldic display would differ from a modern logo. Or you can use your knowledge to say, as so many fans of historical fiction and movies do, “that’s not right!” A strategy with a very limited lifespan. The social structures and practices of SCA members are formed by the needs of the 21st century society they are creating and re-creating. For instance, monarchs in the SCA are chosen by combat in tournament. This was never done in the actual Middle Ages, and nobody thinks it was. Why the divergence between re-creation and actual history? To have an hereditary monarch for life would be boring; competition for the crown on the other hand binds society members with an ongoing drama.

But scholarship and hobby, research and re-enactment came together for me in the late 1990s anyway.

I owned an old hardback edition of the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, a famous historian who lived during and wrote about the first half of the Hundred Years War (in the late 14th century). I had bought the book for $20 back when $20 was a lot of money. One day, years later, I picked it up and started reading it cover to cover and was fascinated by the fact that the so-called “chronicle” read more like a novel than the chronicles I was used to from late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. (All the smart people already knew this, but I didn’t.) Since Froissart’s main historical interest was in recording what he called “deeds of arms” (we might also say “chivalric combats”) there were many little anecdotes and a fair number of very substantial stories which illustrated the attitudes and actions of “men at arms” during the Hundred Years War. In other words, Froissart’s historical characters were largely the kind of people that SCA warriors were trying to imitate. This too was common knowledge. Yet very few SCA members, with the honorable exception of an amateur scholar named Will McLean had actively been working with late medieval chronicles with the intention of shedding light on the central activity of the SCA, our tournament combat. SCA members do not read primary materials, at least not very carefully. My reaction on reading Froissart again was that if the proper interpreter took this material and spread it around the SCA, there would be widespread interest among the warrior community. Will McLean already done some of this, as had others such as Brian Price and Daryl Pompeo. So I took it upon myself to excerpt Froissart as I read along and put the best pieces on the website here at Nipissing University, which I called “Tales from Froissart.” It was and is a list of very interesting stories, not all of them the best examples of what we would like chivalry to be, but at least examples of contemporary praise and criticism of noble warriors in action.

I also became aware of a text from the 14th century that had been fearfully neglected, both by amateurs and professional scholars, Geoffrey de Charny’s Questions on the Joust Tournaments and War. The Questions are a collection, compiled by a famous French knight in the 1350s, of questions about legal matters that might arise in both sport fighting (jousts and tournaments) and actual warfare. In some ways this should be a high profile source of information on 14th century chivalry, because Charny was a close associate of the reigning King of France and an active warrior. His opinions as to what chivalry and the laws of arms (as he called them) should be very important to modern scholars. But the Questions are not very helpful if one simply reads them through. Charny provided no answers to the 134 questions he raised. That fact and the fact that there are no obvious parallels to the collection of questions during his time, have seemingly discouraged work on that material. Maybe scholars hate to be wrong? Or perhaps they hate to take chances?

Charny’s questions and my close reading of Froissart’s Chronicles had a common focus. In both cases I was mostly interested in what chivalric combat was like from the contemporary’s point of view. What was a “deed of arms?” What exactly did the participants in such deeds do? And finally, why did they do it? I had a dual interest in answering these questions. Having taken part in what might be called “deeds of arms” in the SCA context for many years, I was interested in how close we had come to the spirit and the actuality of the medieval practice. It was quite clear that we had not come very close to medieval practice. People had known this for a long time. But to what degree was there similarity, both in spirit and in practice? Second, I was interested in the analysis of the historical practice. Back in the 19th century there had been some interest among scholars, mostly amateur ones, in the nuts and bolts and sweat and blood aspects of individual combats and duels. Indeed, duels were not entirely extinct in that century. But since about the First World War, there had been little serious scholarly interest. People tended to follow the lead of the eminent Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga when he said that chivalric combats – jousts and tournaments and individual challenges – were a preoccupation of the nobility and not taken seriously by anybody else. I was pretty sure he was wrong about that, but at least his dismissal had left a gap in the literature that I felt could and should be filled by somebody like me.

Here is some of the material I have produced since I made the decision. First was a short book called Jousts and Tournaments, which is a translation and interpretation of those of Charny’s Questions which concerned chivalric sports in the 14th century, in an effort to reconstruct the rules used by contemporaries. It is not so easy to see what those rules really were, because as I said, Charny's Questions are unanswered. However, the Questions do show how extraordinarily important horses were to 14th century knights. There are 41 questions about jousts and tournaments, and all but one of them can be boiled down to "in such and such a situation, who gets the horse?" If nothing else, the book reminds us of how central to the identity of the noble warrior his horse was.

The next project was the book Deeds of Arms, in which I investigated the era in which Froissart wrote; thanks to his literary talent he has tremendously influenced our cultural memory of the Middle Ages. In this book I tried to put contemporary descriptions of chivalric sport and chivalric challenges in the context of the politics of England and France during the Hundred Years War. The book was in part an argument that there is no thing in real life that corresponds to "mere sport." One might like to think that sports or re-creations are something of a timeout from real life. But there is no such thing. 14th century jousts, 21st-century SCA tournaments, and the World Series are all parts of so-called real life. What happens in them counts for something. It may not count quite the same way that events in so-called real life count, but they do count. The book was a monograph-length demonstration of how chivalric sport counted, its psychology and symbolism and even its political importance.

Deeds of Arms the monograph inspired a series called “Deeds of Arms,” of which I am the editor and Freelance Academy Press is the publisher. The idea behind this series was that it would present translations of medieval accounts of chivalric combats in a very attractive illustrated format. There was hope that they would appeal to a wide audience, including people who just like attractive books and were not necessarily tremendously interested in the details of medieval combat. The series Deeds of Arms currently includes three books, two of which are basically my work, Royal Jousts and the Combat of the Thirty. I have another one: Will A Frenchman Fight? ready to go whenever the publisher is.

Two more books have come out in the last year or so. One of them is frankly an experiment, a collection of three conference papers on deeds of arms, repackaged as an e-book entitled Formal Combats in the Fourteenth Century. I wanted to see if there was in fact a market for cheap electronic publication of material that otherwise be too slight for publication. This was a no-risk project for me – I had a publisher anxious to do all the work.

This past summer finally saw the appearance of a book that I had essentially finished in my last sabbatical, Charny’s Men-at-Arms. It can be considered the expanded version of Jousts and Tournaments. Jousts and Tournaments used Charny’s Questions to reconstruct the rules for chivalric sport; the new book reviewed that material and added an investigation of the Questions on War, 93 cases about the laws of arms and issues of honor. The result is a group portrait of Charny’s military class and what they thought was important about “the life in arms.”

But my exploration of more authentic, more medieval styles of sport combat was not restricted to the page. At about the same time it began to write Jousts and Tournaments, I started to promote what I hoped would be more authentic styles of sport combat within the SCA. This was to some degree a joint effort with my wife Ruta, because together we hosted an SCA event on our rural property and Bonfield, Ontario, something we did for twenty Labor Day weekends in a row. Much of what we did on those weekends were standard SCA activities, but because we had so much space and the whole long weekend, we were able to experiment, to hold challenges and tournaments and for a while at least equestrian games both modern and medieval. We had some jousting on one occasion. The spirit of the event and some of the activities we put on resulted in a certain amount of influence in the SCA community. People came from as far away as St. Louis Missouri to take part. (Repeatedly!) Some of them brought their own elaborate, non-martial re-enactments. One group forged iron and set up a glass-bead furnace. Another group erected a medieval-style barn.

As these last activities indicate, it was not just a matter of me and of my wife dispensing wisdom to our friends and visitors. In our encouragement of higher quality reenactment leading (perhaps) to a better understanding of the Middle Ages, I began to discover that there were plenty of other individuals and small groups doing similar things. One example will suffice. Early on, when I was particularly interested in witnessing some actual jousting, I discovered a non-SCA group in Ontario which was putting on jousting shows. It was led by a man named Shane Adams who was a veteran of Medieval Times, the medieval dinner theater show. Shane from childhood wanted to joust and when Medieval Times came to Ontario from Florida, he signed up. He was disappointed to find that Medieval Times jousting was not the real thing and he became dissatisfied enough with just acting in their show to form his own troupe. In 2002 I witnessed them joust in Elgin, Ontario; the next year I was part of the show in the exalted role of Squire – since I actually had some experience in handling horses they were glad to have me. One thing I learned from the experience of working with Shane's troupe was how dangerous and exciting and thrilling jousting was even in a modern context. When the experienced, fully armored knights came riding out on their huge horses for the climactic contests at the end of the show, the audience went completely wild, filling the arena with sound. Clearly, even in the 21st-century, jousting was not a trivial pursuit. It is or can be a true embodiment of one aspect of medieval culture.

This was just the beginning of my contacts with jousters and other non-SCA re-enactors.

These re-enactors (and I want to be clear that I mean in general military and chivalric re-enactors) come in a variety of flavors. One way to distinguish them would be to divide those who began with a fascination with armor from those who were fascinated by the sword. The first group wants first-class, authentic armor, and when they get it (through vast trouble and expense), they want to use it as it was meant to be used. The sword-lovers learn how to use their weapons in the manner of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance; sooner or later they want to use techniques that are appropriate to armored combat, and they begin acquiring armor. You can see how the groups can come close to merging; but thing that distinguishes them is the fact that in the half-century since the founders of the SCA re-invented medieval tournament on the basis of a few mostly-inaccurate assumptions, actual treatises written in the fourteenth century have been discovered, republished, translated, and interpreted. These sword manuals are the key to the sword-lovers’ practice. There are a variety of schools of HEMA or WMA – Historic European Martial Arts or Western Martial Arts -- based on the Holy Scriptures of the Italian master Fiore or the German master Lichtenaur or some other historic master-at-arms.

The armor-lovers are not necessarily less learned than the sword lovers, but tend to be interested in a rougher, all-out form of combat; there's much less interest in theory and systematic training, and more on bringing an opponent down to the ground. This kind of conduct does not look like fencing, medieval or modern, but much more like wrestling. The most prominent example of this kind of fighting reenactment is the Battle of Nations competition invented in Ukraine and for most of its history a competition chiefly between Eastern European "national teams." When I first heard of Battle of Nations my immediate reaction was "I would hate to be the official who tries to referee Russian reenactors fighting Polish reenactors.” And sure enough the reality did not disappoint. The Russians in particular had no hesitation in using tactics designed to seriously injure their opponents. Stories circulated that the Russians were in fact sponsored by gambling interests, illegal ones that that. When Americans with an SCA background first attended Battle of Nations, there was an immediate culture conflict between the brutal young Russians and the Americans who had come up in a tradition in which fighters “didn’t break their toys” (opposing fighters) so that there would be no shortage of opponents. There was a schism in which many of the national organizations left the old umbrella organization and formed a new one which purported to be more honest and transparent in regard to business affairs and more – chivalrous?—on the tournament field. One result of this conflict is that American veterans of Battle of Nations formed a new US-based league which featured a rougher style of competition than SCA tournament combat, taking on as it did certain features of Battle of Nations.

I have mixed feelings about the Battle of Nations and other “real combat” activities. Perhaps I should heartily disapprove, but I can't escape the connection. This summer I ran into a prominent SCA fighter who was instrumental in setting up the new American organization for “real combat.” He thanked me for making available the phrase "deed of arms" which he found very useful for describing the activities that he and his friends were engaged in. He felt that the interaction between my scholarship and his style of re-creating medieval combat was teaching him and his friends a great deal about the actual past.

Who am I to say he is wrong? There should be some intellectual gain, however limited, however biased towards the modern, in all the creation of imaginary medieval kingdoms I have indulged in over the last four decades. As Dr. Janice Liedl of Laurentian University points out in a forthcoming article, both science fiction and historical fiction have their place in coming to grips with the scattered pieces of historical evidence which is all any of us have to anchor our understanding of the actual past. The facts are always too few and we always have to conjure up connective tissue make a coherent picture of what used to be. In the era of Game of Thrones and Assassin’s Creed historians and their scholarly methods are only a segment of creative historical inquiry. The conclusions we reach using them are no longer quite so privileged. We can moan about this or we can adjust. The adjustment is not so radical. It is merely a recognition that if the past is important it will not attract the attention of sober historians sober historians only. All kinds of imaginative energy will be generated by the widespread interest of all sorts of people. If our expertise is not going to become ignored and irrelevant, we will have to learn to live with popular, one might even say poetic interpretations of the facts. It won't be so hard; after all historians have been doing this for thousand years.

That’s one view of the challenges facing historians in our changing intellectual world. It probably isn’t yours. Variety is the spice of life, or rather an essential aspect of reality and of our efforts to deal with it. Wish me well on my highway – I will continue to work; I wish you well on yours.

Books available from: Freelance Academy Press Witan Publishing

A human kaleidoscope

People who wish to introduce medieval dancing into the SCA have a real problem – almost all of our documentation for dances done in the medieval period actually come from late in the Renaissance. Some people who want to dance often use other styles as inspiration, in particular in English country dancing. Once you get past the anachronism here, there's a lot of fun to be had doing known country dances or choreographing new ones.

One member of the SCA, known in it as James Blackcloak has created several new country dance inspired choreographies. Some of them are on YouTube. For your enjoyment, I direct you to this one, entitled St. Paul's Cathedral:

Do late medieval fight books reflect actual practice?

For anyone interested in the actual practice of late medieval combat, interpreting the fight books that survive is a crucial activity. Thanks to a heads up from John Joseph Cash, here are two attempts to do so.

One of them is a master's thesis in archaeology submitted by Johann Keller Wheelock Matzke to the University of Exeter in 2011.

The other is a summary and interpretation of that thesis by Randy McCall at this website.

At this moment I have no opinion about the value of these works.

Unhelmed

As portrayed in Froissart's Chronicle; and thanks to Raymond Hindle.

Living your ideals

In light of a conversation I had earlier today,

something that other people have noticed

occured to me : a lot of the problems of the SCA derive from the fact that it is trying to re-create not reality but an ideal creation. Take it a step further. In a sense an SCA member is on the same level of reality not of Count Roland in Charlemagne's time – a real human being – but Roland of the song of Roland. Does this make sense? Roland of the Song of Roland was an attempt to portray an ideal knight. An SCA knight is an attempt to portray an ideal knight. Neither poets nor re-creationists can manage that trick though. Once you start trying to fill in the details the ideal figure becomes less and less believable.

My low level of blogging comes from the fact that I have moved again. I am now in Windsor Ontario.

Battle of Nations – a BBC documentary

Thanks to the person who alerted me to this documentary on four British newcomers taking part in the Battle of Nations competition of 2013.

Given that at the same age I was taking part pretty actively in something similar – SCA combat based on the use of safer weapons but with no limit on the force used – I have say this looked pretty loony to me nonetheless.

Two moments from my first viewing: the documentary says that the British combatants were "cultural ambassadors" representing their country in international competition. I have to say that I choked on my coffee when I heard that.

Second, back when I was helping to invent the SCA, attracting girls was definitely a major motivation for us young male fighters. It is sad to report that these young Brits seem to be total failures at this aspect. Drinking yes, girls no. What's with that?

Tam Lin

A friend sent me a link to this marvelous rendition by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer of the British folk song Tam Lin.



Hearing this version of the song was a shock. It forcefully read reminded me of this version of Tam Lin by the folk-rock group Fairport Convention,, which I first heard in the summer of 1972:



That summer I was in Norwich, England taking part in an archaeological dig. It was a wonderful way to celebrate my graduation from University. The people running the dig provided us with cheap housing and a little bit of spending money, and we scraped or dug dirt. It was a social and informal learning experience and I soaked it up.

The house we were staying in was a student house during term time, and the usual residents had left lots of their property, including a record player and the Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief. I played the album a lot, particularly the song Tam Lin, about "an earthly knight" rescued from the Queen of the Fairies by his lover. I was an SCA member, a historian hoping to be a professional medievalist some day, and someone who really appreciated the rock elements of this particular arrangement.

And Tam Lin was just the beginning. Somebody told me about a weekly get-together of folk music enthusiasts at a pub near our dig, and I went there more than once, although I never had the nerve to to sing an American folk song. And before I left England a friend of mine gave me one of the early Steeleye Span albums.

The result was that I had found in British and later Irish folk the soundtrack of my life for the next decade, The decade when I was a graduate student and when I was most intensely involved in the SCA.

It was really something to reflect on that..

Well Met: a book on Renaissance Faires

I have yet to read this book, but Jeff Sypeck's post on Quid Plura is intriguing:

What hath the Renaissance faire to do with psychedelic rock? The vogue for “world music”? The frilly shirts of Jimi Hendrix? The rise of craft breweries? The House Un-American Activities Committee? Before reading Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, I hadn’t thought to ask—but Rachel Lee Rubin’s book is a useful reminder that pseudo-medieval pursuits are sometimes more about the present than they are about the past.

Rubin starts with the basics: how the first faire grew out of a children’s commedia dell’arte troupe organized at a California youth center by teacher Phyllis Patterson. In May 1963, Patterson and others organized the first “Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market” as a fundraiser for left-wing Pacifica Radio, drawing more than 3,000 revelers to a North Hollywood ranch. Associated with hippies and drugs by local detractors, the event quickly outgrew Pacifica. It spawned its first imitators in Minnesota and Texas in the early 1970s; more than 200 Ren fests of varying sizes now thrive across the United States.

So how did a countercultural crafts-and-music romp evolve into a nationwide subculture overseen, in some cases, by a large entertainment corporation? Well Met doesn’t chart the growth and commercialization of the Ren faire. Instead, Rubin has two goals: to explain “the ways in which various forms of cultural expression ‘tried out’ first at the faire became recognizable staples of American social and cultural life,” and to restore the Renaissance faire to a central place in the history of the counterculture. Once I got past my initial disappointment that the book wasn’t a history, I was won over by Rubin’s argument for the importance of the Renaissance faire to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s—and its long-overlooked ubiquity.

Her evidence is legion: how the Los Angeles Free Press began as the Ren faire newspaper; how Americans, who now consume beer from nearly 2,500 craft breweries, first sampled ale at the faire; how fashion choices and even the typefaces on psychedelic album art recall early faire fliers; how the faire anticipated renewed markets for handmade crafts and set precedents for large outdoor rock concerts; how occasional faire-goer Michael Jackson mimicked the moves and style of faire mime Robert Shields; how the Flying Karamazov Brothers, the Firesign Theater, and Penn and Teller all got their start at Ren faires; and how the faire coincided with a Middle Eastern cabaret boom in California that helped build an audience for international music. Rubin even suggests that the Ren faire helped revive interest in the klezmer. Who knew?

There's more...

How the combat worked at the Red Knight's Deed

Some of you will be interested in this.

Almost all the weapons, pole axes and spears apart, were steel weapons, rebated in some cases.

There were two types of combat: unarmored and armored.

In unarmored combat, the fighters wore armor on heads necks hands and lower arms and generally some type of gambeson or pourpoint on the body. The vast majority of the pieces were in medieval style, though there were some modern fencing masks.

In unarmored combat, a distinct touch to any part of the body was sufficient to end the pass. The first combatant to win three passes won the whole combat. As one might expect, thrusting predominated as a tactic, and hands were a favorite target.

In armored combat, there were three different kinds of fighting. There was what was called "outrance" where the first combatant to strike a good blow against a gap in the armor won the combat. Good blows had to be delivered to a lightly armored area or a gap between plates. Plate armor was proof against a thrust or a blow of the sword. Grappling and throwing one's opponent was allowed in this style and in no others.

Second, there was what was called "plaisance" where each fighter was allowed to throw 12 blows against his opponent with no breaks in the action. Victory was judged by the Herald/marshal, and the Duke, Duchess and ladies.

Third, there was an unnamed type of combat in which the first combatant to strike three good blows against his opponent won the match. There was a break after each could blow.

In most situations combatants judged the effect of blows on themselves, but final judgment rested with the presiding authorities. For instance, if two fighters grappled and fell to the ground, as presiding judge whether one of the two had had sufficient control to claim victory.

Deed of the red knight

As many readers know, I have been participating in the Society for Creative Anachronism for decades. One of the things I have done in that time is designed and run medieval – style tournaments. So my scholarly work on formal combats ( deeds of arms) has been paralleled with attempts to re-create, for fun and for interest, various kinds of formal combats. The distinction between running an SCA event that has some pretensions to a medieval atmosphere and running, either in SCA context or elsewhere, something closely modeled on an actual medieval event may be a little bit fuzzy, but let it suffice to say that I've tried to get closer to medieval exemplars as time goes along.   Christian Cameron, novelist and reenactor, has similar ambitions and this past weekend I was privileged to take part and indeed help design an effort at re-creating late 14th century formal combat. Christian wanted to experience a close reenactment to help him understand and write about such an event in one of his upcoming novels, part of a Red Knight series. He also wanted to invite some of the most interesting reenactors he knew to a special party. Did he ever succeed! Christian happens know some very creative people, and also has access to a lakefront property of great beauty in Prince Edward County, Ontario. So this past weekend, some serious but fun-loving folk showed up with pavilions, armor, and civilian costume of the highest level. He asked Cole Cioran and I, who ran a Roland-inspired deed at the Pennsic war about 10 years ago, to come up with a usable and satisfying set of rules and competitions that would appeal to Western martial arts aficionados, historic reenactors, and serious SCA people. We were also given the task and the authority to manage the fighting aspect. Cole was the chief Herald and the marshal of the lists, while I played "the Duke," a presiding noble who with his Duchess Judith, (in real life the owner of the site and a most gracious patron) acted as the final authority as to what took place in the lists. Duchess Judith and I also, with the jury of ladies, gave awards and honorable mentions to the fighters who were the most impressive. These were satisfying roles to play, especially considering the quality of the competitors and their general good attitude and desire to re-create a chivalric deed of arms. Duchess Judith, whom as far as I know has no experience with such events, turned out to be an enthusiastic and sensible contributor to the action. Besides the combat in the lists, there was also archery and a rather marvelous feast prepared on the spot in a rather wonderful outdoor kitchen which is a permanent part of the site. As we ate we were entertained by the Schola Magdalena, who performed 14th century choral music at the highest level of skill and beauty. But the greatest pleasure was simply being there overlooking Lake Ontario and chatting and drinking with like-minded happy people. And there were no disasters, thank heaven. Even though I was there as an experienced hand, in one sense I was a complete novice. I had never before seen that much combat with steel weapons, nor such a large group of people using actual armor for actual protection. SCA style combat has its virtues, but here it was steel (mostly) swords against (almost entirely) mail and plate. Impressive. I may have more to say about it in a bit


Image: Cole at work.

Freelance Academy Press and La Belle Companie demos at Kalamazoo, May 2013

Freelance Academy Press, which publishes the Deeds of Arms series that I edit, sponsored two sessions on Western medieval martial arts and historical combat at Kalamazoo's Congress of medieval studies earlier this month. One of them, a reenactment of a judicial duel in the Italian tradition was videoed and can be seen here. Likewise, La Belle Companie, which re-creates a late medieval retinue, presented a show and tell on how 14th and 15th century English men at arms armed themselves – or rather, were armed by other people. It too is here. I mentioned the prominent place that high-quality reenactment had at this year's conference, and now you can see what I meant.

Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, 2013

I really enjoyed myself.

What was most remarkable was the number of sessions based on re-enactment or experimental archaeology.

Activities  on site included:

Smelting

Drinking ale and mead brewed with historic methods

Dressing a person in armor starting with the underwear

A late medieval armor  fashion show

This doesn't include discussions of activities off site.

Peak moment: watching a re-enacted trial by combat while in the next room a pick-up choir learned plainchant -- and sang it very well indeed.

Online intellectual content – the real thing!

Two interesting posts from long time correspondents (what do you call a person whose blog you read on a regular basis?).

Over at Hammered Out Bits, Darrell Markewitz, the Norse reenactor and craftsman, brings his own perspective to the question of interpreting small objects. This artifact sparked a discussion about what it actually represents or how it can actually be used to establish details of Norse costuming.

Says Darrell:

...no matter how much you work with artifacts, you never really understand then until you see them in life, actually before you. Reading the measurements does not really impact you. Almost everything is either way SMALLER, or way LARGER in actual truth, than what you imagine it is.

That's the core of his post, but it's actually worth looking at it to see why Darrell thinks this. Well illustrated!

Then there is Professor Grumpy over at Historian on the Edge. He is writing a new book about how historians have not only lost control of history, but are in danger of being excluded from it. Sounds cranky? More like appalling, actually. In the sense that he is describing an appalling situation.

This reminds me of a time maybe twenty years ago when a well-known Canadian scholar, an historian actually, was arguing that we should reorganize Canadian academia on the model of "real countries." Reading this summary of how a real country (UK) does things, I am just glad that we have avoided reality so far.

Anyway, I highly recommend Prof. Grumpy's first chapter, and I congratulate him on maintaining his calm in the face of a situation that he must find intolerable.

Martial art

For the last 20 years (!), My wife and I have been hosting an SCA medieval re-creation event on our rural property. Because it takes place on Labor Day weekend, and because we have 95 acres of land, there is time and space for a lot of different things to happen, or for people just to relax.
One of the chief activities is SCA style combat, which uses rattan weapons to make possible a vigorous style of fighting. I don't think that the SCA style can honestly be called an historical one; it evolved from some logical but mistaken assumptions about the effects of weapons and armor. Thanks to intelligent and scholarly martial artists we know a lot more about late medieval combat at the very least.
But SCA combat has its virtues. You can stage a hard-hitting analog of medieval combat with a minimum of serious injuries. Many SCA fighters have never broken a bone, even after many years of competition. And it has a certain aesthetic appeal.
This aesthetic element was brought home to me on the weekend. I was discussing various combat systems that now exist with someone who fences in the "cut and thrust" style, in which real steel swords are used. He and I both agreed that we did not see the point of certain modern jousters and martial artists who have adopted medieval styles, who use something like medieval weaponry and medieval techniques, but scorn dressing up in medieval costume, since what they are doing is in their minds a purely modern thing. The two of us didn't see the point. It may or may not make any sense to fight in a medieval or pseudo–medieval style just for the fun of it, but to do the same thing in 21st century dress and high tech armor just has no meaning for me at all.
And that same day I was lucky enough to see the fruits of medieval aestheticism, SCA style. One of our standard fighting activities involves a small earth and wood fort that we built some years back. One of the challenges of using it is coming up with scenarios that make a certain tactical sense, even though the number of fighters involved is seldom over 20. On Saturday afternoon, some good scenarios were devised and played over and over until everyone was good and tired.
It may be the fact that I am now retired from fighting for good and all, but I found this fighting to be really quite amazing. To my educated eyes, everybody involved looked like they really knew what they were doing. That struck me because with few exceptions, the fighters were what passes for average in our corner of the SCA. There were no famous knights, except one, and he is not nearly as famous as he deserves to be as a master of the pole weapon. There were also a number of quite new fighters, and they picked up on the clues of their more experienced neighbors like there was nothing to it. For me, it was an impressive and moving moment.

Making iron at the event, 2006.

Medieval minstrelsy reconstructed

What should appear in my mailbox this morning but a newsletter from Boydell and Brewer entitled the Medieval Herald. This newsletter is much more substantial and interesting than many of the electronic commercial flyers I get. For one thing, it includes some very good interviews with authors, who all have the knack of making their work accessible – or have been edited very skillfully. Makes you think that maybe their books would be accessible too. One feature in this issue of the Medieval Herald will be of interest to a number of my readers I'm sure. There is an interview with Linda Marie Zaerr, who works on the performance of middle English romances. And what you know, she has a whole page of links to her performances. I will include one below, a short one, and if you are interested, you can follow up here. Her YouTube statistics are not very good, which makes me think that hardly anybody has discovered this resource yet. Here is Prof. Zaerr on the vielle (fiddle) performing an excerpt from Bevis of Hampton: