SCA Fencing Notes 1
By
Don Pierre de Tours, OGR


Introduction


You can’t learn to fence by reading books or these notes. There is no substitute for an instructor and experience. What these notes are intended to do is to take some seminal concepts and pin them down on paper so that your brain can work on them after or before practice. It’s really hard to assimilate all the data, information, and opinions that will get thrown at you. Confusion enough will happen often enough as you try to make sense out of an initially alien experience. My hope is that these notes will give you something to refer back to once the confusion sets in (and it most certainly will).

I am also not putting diagrams or illustrations in these notes. Enough fencers, better fencers than I, have written many many books on this subject and their books are full of diagrams and pictures. If you find you need them, I suggest you attend practices more regularly (or buy the books). These notes are to aid your practices, not replace them.

Listen to what people suggest. Try what people suggest. Some of it you will find to be immensely valuable. Some of it will leave you scratching your head in wonder that someone would actually try to do that! Regardless, listen to what you’re told. Try what you’re told. The stuff that you can use, use. The stuff that you can’t use, don’t use. But the only way I’ve managed to figure out what is useful and what isn’t is by trying it all. Sometimes you will be shown something that you can’t use yet. This doesn’t mean it won’t work; you just have to figure out how to make it work. (To my way of thinking, this is why this is fun.) Sometimes you will find yourself changing what you were shown to make it work. (This is fun, too.)

There is no substitute for practice, making errors, then fixing errors, and more practice. Practice is the time and place to try the things you aren’t sure of.

Hope this helps.

 
Effective fencing rests on a tripod of three factors.


Distance

Although the phrase "on guard" is used to denote the ready position, beware of thinking of it as a "guard" position. You can’t win a bout by guarding yourself. You can only win the bout by rendering your opponent incapable of fighting (kill or disarm). You don’t want to be guarded; you want to be ready for whatever circumstances arise. Sometimes you will defend, sometimes you will attack. But if you get accustomed to thinking of being "on guard," many opportunities will slip past you because there is no threat to you that you must guard against.

Therefore, think instead of placing yourself a proper distance from your opponent to be ‘disengaged’ until or unless you are actually ready to strike and/or defend. Once engaged, distance will be used by you or against you until ‘immediate danger’ is invoked – by you or against you.

Disengaged: Without moving or parrying, your opponent cannot touch you with their sword if they take a full step towards you.

Engaged: Your opponent can touch you if they take a step forward.

Immediate Danger: Your opponent can touch you without having to step forward, or they’ve stolen ground from you.

Take a ready position that places you where, even if your opponent takes a full step towards you, they will be just out of reach with their sword arm fully extended. This distance should be your "disengaged" distance. Anytime you want to end a pass, or an engagement, remove yourself to a minimum of this distance.

At some point, you will have to move towards your opponent to touch them with your sword. Obviously, this will allow your opponent close enough to touch you with their sword. If you can be touched with a sword, that sword can kill or disable you. Knowing that this is dangerous helps to lessen the danger (it can never remove it). If either of you can approach the other without the difference in distance being noticed, this is stolen ground (a very handy thing to be able to do…and some can do it extremely well, so pay attention to your distance).

Footwork

Footwork is what gains or removes distance and moves you around. Proper footwork cannot be over emphasized. Beware of standing too wide, as this limits mobility and complicates changing position.

Any basic textbook on fencing will show you the proper footwork. For SCA fencing, we add a couple of different ready positions and stepping patterns. This is because a major difference between SCA fencing and "Olympic" or "strip" fencing is that we use both hands to fence and this requires a different position of the upper body (torso). Another difference is that we fence "in the round," which is not as strictly linear (forward and back) as strip fencing (hence the name…they fight on a narrow strip with virtually no lateral movement).

Positioning

With a single sword, it is required that the off hand be used in a defensive manner. With the other four forms (which will be discussed in another section), the offhand will either be holding a weapon or a parry object. This requires that our upper body in the ready position be a bit more "direct" than the classic strip fencing position, which carries the off hand to the rear and out of the way, usually suspended over the shoulder. Our upper body will be turned more directly towards our opponent to bring the shoulder of our off hand into a more forward position, enabling our off hand to be used effectively.

This position is called presented with the sword hand and corresponding foot in the lead position, facing your opponent. If you are holding the sword in your right hand, your right foot will be forward and vice versa. The key here is the sword hand and forward foot are on the same side of the body.

Our other major ready position is called the refused position. In this position, if you are holding your sword in your right hand, your left foot will be forward and vice versa.

(NOTE: It is the common assumption that the refused position is a defensive position. Whereas this position does offer a better defense, be aware that this is an assumption and do not expect a fencer in a refused position to be defensive. There is nothing to stop someone from attacking from a refused position and many can do so quite effectively.)

Regardless of which hand is holding the sword, the feet are in an upside-down "T" position. The rear foot forms the crossbar of the "T", the lead or front foot forms the upright of the "T".

Movement From Proper Position

Regardless of the upper body position (presented or refused), moving forward, backward, to either side, or through a refused position (moving forward or back) is accomplished in much the same way.

Once the feet are properly placed, the knees are bent slightly to facilitate ease of motion in any direction. (If your knees are straight, which they will become when you tire, you must bend your knees before you can move, complicating your time-of-movement, or tempo, making you easier to defeat.)


See the pattern? Unless you are making a cross-step, pick up the foot that is in the direction you wish to move towards first. Use your other leg to push you in that direction.

Cross-steps are what the name implies. They are steps we take in which our legs cross, or, one foot passes the other. Yes, they can be unstable steps and can possibly get us into trouble if not done quickly, but done properly and quickly, a cross-step is a very useful way of either closing or opening distance between our opponent and ourselves.

A cross-step is used to move forward from a refused position into a presented position, and it used to move from a presented position into a refused position. Moving "through" your stance can be done either moving forwards to maintain distance with a retreating opponent or to attack, or moving backwards into a refused position to maintain distance with an attacking opponent.

All your steps should be fluid and purposeful. Avoid "jittery" steps or taking two smaller steps where one large one will do.

You don’t have to be naturally graceful to achieve fluid movement. Football players do not all take ballet. You practice these movements, just as you practice your distance. The more often you take proper position, learn to bend your knees as part of it, and move in all directions with linear and cross steps, the more fluid those movements will be when you call upon them in action.

Use of a mirror when first learning position is a good way to learn if you don’t have an instructor to correct your position and movement. Don’t reinforce wrong behavior. When in doubt, stop and wait to ask before you pattern yourself incorrectly.

What you see in the mirror is what your opponent will see when you bout. Check the position of your sword arm, feet, and shoulders. If you were going to attack what you see in the mirror, where would the opening for your attack be? Once you find that opening, how would you change your position to close that opening?

Timing

Speed is not the key to effective fighting. Timing is. Simply stated, timing is knowing where your opponent is going to move and when they have to move.

A good example is driving your car. With your car, the objective of timing is to not run into another car. With practice and experience, you learn to tell if the oncoming car is moving too fast for you to pull out in front of them safely. You learn to gauge not just the distance but also the many factors that can affect your timing safety for that decision to move.

If the objective were to collide with the oncoming car, your expression of timing would change, but not the underlying concept…knowing when and where something is going to be in front of you

When you have a target moving in front of you, you must time your attack so that the tip of your sword and the target intersect at the same place at the same.

If your timing is good, it doesn’t matter how fast your opponent is. Timing doesn’t tire you out excessively the way trying to just move fast all the time does. Tired people can’t move quickly, so whereas initially their speed may keep your timing from getting them, if you keep your attacks timed and keep your distance as a threat to them, it keeps them from being able to relax and recoup their energies. Once they tire out they are even easier to hit.

The way to know you are being timed (i.e. your opponent has found your pattern so they can intersect your movement with their sword) is if you feel as if you’re just a little bit late with all your parries and/or defensive movements. The insidious part of being timed is the illusion of, "If I could only be a little faster, I could stop them."

If you ever feel that way, disengage! Your time has been read, you are being timed, and the more you try to speed up to "catch" your opponent’s attacks, the easier you will be to hit. The only effective countermove to being timed is to disengage and start again.

As we age, we slow. This decrease in our ability to move fast isn’t sudden (debilitating accidents aside) and we tend to not notice we are slowing down with the passage of years. But the years pass and we do slow down. What can get better with the passage of time is our ability to reason. Timing is a function of our reasoning ability. The more you practice timing, the better at it you will become. The more you practice speed, the worse at it you will become.

I think the choice is obvious.

Accuracy

Good distance and timing come to nothing if you miss. Since all attacks leave us vulnerable in some way, missing is actually counter to what we’re trying to do, because missing leaves an opening for our opponent to use against us.

Fencers have a Holy Grail. It’s called "tip-control." This is the ability to put the tip of your sword exactly where you want it to be. The only way to acquire tip-control is through many hours of practice. It’s not difficult, it’s just time consuming.

Here’s the bad news. It takes between three and five thousand repetitions of an action for it to become "reflexive." Perfect examples of reflexive activities, or learned "reflexes," are talking, walking, and tying your shoes. None of those actions were you born with the ability to do. They all had to be learned. They (with possibly the exception of your shoes) are much more difficult to learn than fencing is. Yet when was the last time you actually thought about how to move your tongue, form your lips, how far to open your jaw, and how much air to expel in the course of saying, "Good morning?" It’s reflexive. Automatic. Unconscious.

This is the purpose and goal of practice. To take an activity from the conscious mind and make it "transparent"…unthought and yet functional. I call it "transparent" because although the activity is still performed, almost no thought is expended to perform it.

This transparency frees our mind for higher orders of function. How coherent, or even enjoyable, do you think a conversation would be if you had to consciously form each sound you made? Nothing we have to constantly think about and coerce our bodies to do can be called enjoyable much less transparent. You must invest sufficient practice time to allow the time of actual engagement to become fun.

The good news is that, if you practice, the time that flees anyway will serve a purpose and offer a return that far exceeds your investment over time.

I have, over time, found a way to make your practice serve more than one purpose.

To hit a target, such as a hand, arm, chest, etc., you must practice hitting a target. Since very few of your opponents will oblige you by leaving themselves as a stationary target for you to hit during a bout, you will have to become good at hitting a moving target. Rather than practice on a stationary target, practice on one that moves.

I use a tennis ball on a string. I hang it in an open space where a good smack on the ball (even though you don’t want to hit the ball hard) won’t break anything or cause the ball to hit anything. Make sure the ball is attached securely (I use duct tape).

Hang the ball so that it is the same height from the floor as the center of your chest. Step back into disengagement. Extend your arm out first and then step forward and try to lightly touch the ball with the tip of your sword.

Always extend your arm first before stepping forward to make the touch, whether you are trying to hit a hanging ball or your opponent. You will have MUCH more control over the force of your hits in this way. A guaranteed way to hit too hard is to step forward first, then fire your sword forward (this touches on the topic of calibration…something I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section). If you develop a reputation for hitting like a truck, you will find yourself without people to play with.

If you succeed in hitting the ball, the ball will move. Good! That’s what you want it to do! You want to learn where the sword tip is in relation to what you see, where you’re standing, and how you’re moving. You want to be able to track a target in motion and intercept it with the tip of your sword. Once the ball is in motion, keep it in motion. The objective is to get good at hitting a small, moving, target.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For each ten repetitions of this action with your strong hand, do fifteen repetitions with your off hand.

In SCA fencing you will be called upon to use your off hand with either a sword (if I take your sword arm, will you give up? No…switch hands and continue the fight), two swords, a sword and dagger, etc. Don’t assume that you cannot use your off hand effectively. It simply needs time and practice to become useful.

Practice does not make perfect…it makes permanent. Only attention to detail will approach "perfection" in anything.

The tennis ball target will hone your tip-control, accuracy, and timing. It will also strengthen your arms and legs. It will enable you to hit what you’re aiming at, regardless of where it is (assuming it’s within range, of course) or how it’s moving. The more time you spend "killing" your tennis ball, the more deadly you will be in a fencing bout.

Copyright 2002 ~ Wayne Spinaci ~ All rights reserved





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