Consolidated Book Review: "The Bellatrix System: Techniques and Tactics for SCA Armored Combat," Paul Porter (Thanet House, 2019)

  

The Bellatrix System is a hard book for me to review - not because I have no thoughts on it, but because it requires two separate reviews, first as a system of combat and second as a book.  It also requires that I acknowledge the potential counters to any review I make - that I am not being fair to its author, that it's all so much clearer in class or in person, and that he's forgotten more about fighting than I'll ever learn.  Those are all valid criticisms, but I am not reviewing Paul Porter as a fighter (the only reason he's not an exceptional fighter now is because he's more interested in teaching than fighting), I'm not attending a class, and he is a giant in the field, both literal and metaphorical.

So let's start with the easier of the two reviews - as a system of combat, specifically tuned to the SCA's rules and conventions.  The Bellatrix System is an effective system of SCA armored combat, well-proven and established over fifty years of fighting at this point.  Not only is Paul of Bellatrix a duke - meaning, for my non-SCA readers, that he has won the highest tournament in a kingdom, Crown Tourney, at least twice - but his squires have won Crown, their squires have won Crown, his sons have won Crown, and at least one of his grandsons of my acquaintance has a very good chance of being a third-generation winner.  It works because Paul of Bellatrix - Paul Porter - took a systematic approach to developing it.  When he noticed something worked, he figured out why it worked and how to improve it.  When it didn't work, he either analyzed it for finding out what failed, or discarded it as unusable from the start.

The result of that systematic approach is that the Bellatrix System was where we formed the underlying assumptions of stance, movement, and body mechanics that we use in the SCA today.  He was not the only one developing his style, but in 1970, when he started, it was a pretty small Society, so it is an acceptable simplification to say that he made the game we play today.  This owes to two facts: First, Paul of Bellatrix is a very accomplished fighter; second, and bearing in mind the first, he is a better teacher than he is a fighter.

Having said all of that, the book review is simple: It suffers from too much, and not enough.

Strictly as a technical writer, writing a manual, he's a very good technical writer, who can describe a process, describe how to train that process, and describe common errors in the process.  As someone with a strong technical background who's read more than my share of bad documentation, I appreciate that.  The team that helped him assemble it took a ton of pictures, and the pictures are used to good, but not perfect, effect throughout the book to highlight whatever procedure is at hand.  They would be better in color, because there are frequently contrast issues in the grayscale used, but that would have driven print prices through the roof.  I note it only for the completeness of the review, not as a gripe, that the reader will occasionally need to squint to get the most effect from many of the pictures.

However, where the book breaks down is in its presentation of material.  I believe that it would have been a better book if all of the supplementary chapters on variations had been either discarded, or reduced in hierarchy of information to sections in the chapters.  By keeping the variations as chapters, he distracts from the teaching value of the fundamentals by making the variations just as important.  The variations, because they are a priori dependent on the fundamentals, are not as important as the fundamentals, which do not depend on the variations.  As a book, without a duke to talk to about it or to break it up into manageable blocks of instruction, it fails to recognize that including the variations at the same chapter level as the basic material diffuses its emphasis.

Thus, it has too much of the variations, and the obsessive, often cut-paste text describing each of them frequently reads like it has devolved into a checklist.  The problem is that learning to hit someone with a stick is very hard to do from a checklist; what it needs is more of, for instance, the passage at the end of the Snap chapter, where he describes his teaching method.  That teaching method isn't in itself ground-breaking, but it demonstrates a number of things, not least of which is that he's thought about why it works as a teaching tool.  The same could be said of the chapters on conditioning, training regimes, and slow work.  Those chapters are simultaneously the most information-dense, most deserving of close reading, and also, for me, the parts of the book I could not put down.

I suspect that much of the reason that the how-to and variations chapters are written the way they are is to avoid what I think of as "pulling a Musashi."  Miyamoto Musashi didn't really want to write Five Rings, but did so as a favor to a friend, preferring direct instruction instead, and it was meant to be paired with technique scrolls that have, by one means or another, been destroyed.  As a result of this, much of Five Rings is vague and left as discussion, rather than being something that a simple reading will allow someone to do.  As a teaching text, Musashi erred too far on the side of "do it and you'll figure it out;" Porter errs too far on the prescriptive side.

All of this sounds like I'm disparaging the book; I'm not.  It is a tremendous achievement, and it could not be done without a strong understanding of the art.  There are chapters of it that changed the way I thought about training for fighting while I was reading them, because he stated things so clearly and plainly that I barely noticed the lightbulb turning on.  What I am doing is warning against the too-easy solution that occasionally appears in online forums, that if a student is having problems, they need to read Paul of Bellatrix.  It may benefit the student to read Paul of Bellatrix, but the person who needs to read, and comprehend, the book is the teacher, not the student.  To that end, the book would benefit from knowing its audience.

I believe that the greatest use of this book is not for new fighters, but for those who are at a stage of their training that they are either refining their art, or teaching new fighters.  New fighters do not have the kinesthetic vocabulary or the ability to determine what matters from the organization of this book; fighters who are refining their skills and teaching others, meanwhile, have the ability to evaluate and target their lessons.

To come back to my thesis, then, The Bellatrix System would benefit from more discussion of training methods and drills - things that do not get run enough at fighter practice, and also do not require a duke present to explain - and from less elaboration of variations of movements that the user can learn pretty quickly on their own with the methods and drills.