h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And so on Saturday Matt Easton of the Schola Gladiatoria (http://www.fioredeiliberi.org/) came to Swindon and took us through nearly five hours of Medieval Martial Arts.

Quite sensibly we started with a warm up... but part of the warm up involved jogging around the hall! Phew! And while we were jogging Matt would shout "jump!" after which we did a starjump. That was followed by some one-on-one tig/tag, which in various guises involved just tigging each other... then having to do three sit-ups or push-ups if you were tigged and then moved on to Matt simply calling out a body part and us trying to grab whichever part of the opponent's body was called. Then we had a full on free-form tig which I was lame at.

Then we did a bit of dagger. We ran through all the dagger masters, interspersed with excercises where we paired up, one of us had a dagger and while maintaining forearm contact trying to apply the various bits of all the dagger masters. It really showed the different advantages that are offered by strength and speed... my opponent couldn't maintain a lock on me at all because I had the strength advatage, but I couldn't even get a lock on her as she had the speed advantage! Then we went through a few different locks and bars and broke for lunch.

After lunch we picked up our swords, got into a loose circle and went through all the verious guards (which I will not mention here as they are numerous) and then did some solo cutting. But this wasn't just cutting at your own speed, this was cutting while one of the circle counted ten cuts, and we took turns at doing the ten count. We did Fendente Mandritto (downward diagonal from the right), Fendente Roverso (downward diagonal from the left), and both together as one movement... with all those three combined we probably did about 250 cuts. My arms were aching by the end of it... and then, just when my muscles couldn't scream any more we did solo Volta (turn) excercises. Volta, at it's most basic level in the context of longsword fighting, means having the sword at a slight angle to the right or left, keeping the right hand static to use as a pivot point and whipping your blade around to bring it to the opposite angle. Yes, I said 'whipping'... it is actually possible to do fast whippy moves with big weapons so that negates some of what LRP has taught me about combat... that being said though whippy combat isn't something that can be done exclusively as if you're pretending to use a real weapon, you'd also need to pretend how much it hurts after a few minutes! But anyway, I digress, we did this for another little while and then paired up to go through some of Fiore's manouvers which invloved the Volta or variants thereof (one of which included a kick to the groin! Wheeee!).

After these we did some closing-and-grappling moves, which I have gone through in earlier entries.

Overall I had a really good time, though I'm *still* tired and have fingertip bruises, slight friction burns and a nice blister on my thumb (I need gloves!). I'm also thinking that I need to take my knees to the doctor.