Notes on Guy Windsor's "The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts," Part I - Front-End Material

 

Picking up Windsor after reading Paul of Bellatrix involves a radical change of gears.  First, Windsor is not writing a fechtbuch, but a book about how to read a fechtbuch, and how to interpret that information.  Second, despite Paul Porter having about two decades on Windsor in terms of combat experience, Windsor is one of the few professional swordsmen in the world at this point, which means that he has a distinctly different viewpoint from strictly dealing with SCA combat.  Windsor is also much more of an academic - he holds a PhD from Edinburgh University for his research into historical sword texts, and his approach to problems tends to be both more holistic and more cerebral than Paul of Bellatrix.

By holistic, I mean that Windsor attempts to find commonalities across multiple sword schools, things that all of them must address in some form or another.  Paul Porter is writing from a different perspective, attempting to teach one particular style of fighting in one particular form, while Windsor is attempting to allow readers to systematize everything from MS I.33 (an early European manuscript, for those who don't know fencing manuals) to the Yagyu Heihou Kadensho, and discussing weapon forms as diverse as Fiore's wrestling plays and Figueireydo's montante rules.  That's a pretty broad spectrum to attempt to encapsulate in one book.

By cerebral, I mean that the angle of approach is radically different.  Porter approached his SCA fighting with a strong athletic background and then applied his judo experience to fighting in the SCA; Windsor is up front in his front-end material about the fact that his background is in English literature and in reading material.  While he has spent decades in the field and devoted a ton of sweat to it, he did not start with "this move works, why?" but rather with "why does this move work?" The distinction is subtle, but it's why Porter's text has more photographs than it needs, and Windsor's has none.  Neither is bad; shifting from one to the other is merely an instructive mental exercise.

Windsor spends a good deal of time talking about what, for lack of a better description, I call the transformative power of the sword.  To get good at any skill - whether that's swordplay, a language, cooking, or cabinetry - requires a great deal more focus than simply picking up the rudiments.  A common trend in martial arts writers is that, because they are dealing with tools where a violent death is an implied component of the curriculum, they discuss that focus at length.  Windsor is no exception, and while his thoughts on the subject, and his examples of using targeted balance exercises to teach special-needs children to walk, are valuable, they are the same kinds of thoughts found in Lowry and many other writers - that the sword isn't the end-goal, it is merely the means of transformation.  Where Windsor's front-end material stands out is that, unlike many writers, he is very clear that his ideas are just his ideas about how to approach the problem, and they have worked for him, and because he's a thoughtful man who has put thought into the approach, he offers them for use.  Many writers of similar books - I have a modern iaido fechtbuch on my kitchen table right now that covers much this same material, and Paul Porter goes into it a little as well - tend to over-sell their contributions.  Windsor's humility and honesty on the subject lends him credibility beyond his already impressive qualifications.

He identifies seven of what he calls the "principles of mastery," which are divided into two categories, internal and external, and describes exercises for developing each of these principles.  Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a good deal of overlap between some of them - not in the sense of redundancy, but in the sense of a Venn diagram.  For instance, mindfulness, one of his internal principles, dovetails very well into both the "Pareto Principle," wherein most of your output is determined by a limited portion of your input, and determining which is the most effective input is a key driver, and the important of diagnostics and refinement.  It's very hard to determine if you're doing the best possible version of a thing if you are not paying attention to the thing you are doing, after all.  These principles of mastery are one of those places that he admits this is what works for him, rather than a universal system as some authors would have been tempted to claim.  However, I find them a generally workable set of principles.  I'd probably tune the definitions to myself, but there is nothing in there which I would outright discard, and some of his exercises - his recommendation of breathing control exercises - are so universal that I was already using variations of them for blood pressure control.

The longest single chapter of what I consider the "front-end material" is a discussion of the theory of fencing.  He uses "fencing" here to refer to all swordplay; I personally am leery of such a term instead of, say, swordcraft, but I recognize its utility.  This is the first place that Windsor's work can be directly applied back to Porter's.  There are a great number of words spilled on the subject, and many of them are very good - that each system has to deal with who to engage, how to engage, with what to engage, when to engage, et cetera, in combat, and that identifying the underlying assumptions of a system is critical to understanding the system.  For instance, as he says, showing up to box at a wrestling match will generally result in disqualification - or, in Muhammad Ali's case, a ton of frustration as your opponent crab-walks around and kicks you in the shin.  I am attempting, so much as possible, to explain without reference to his own words, partly to solidify my own thoughts on the subject, but, based on Windsor's writing, the following can safely be said about the Bellatrix book:

Success comes from power generation; the swing (specifically, the forehand snap) is superior to the thrust; all other things being equal, engage at the longest possible range; offense is superior to defense; with the exception of full wraps, false-edge strikes are to be avoided at all costs.

There is more that could be said about the Bellatrix book from (my understanding of) Windsor's perspective - the discussion of shot timing and the importance of developing trained combination is a key factor of both - but these are common points of most fighting systems.  Indeed, even in a system like iaido, with its focus on winning the fight in a single blow, there is a combination trained in to deliver a vertical strike after an opening attack, and an acute eye can spot a shift through a guard between one motion and the next, just in case the killing blow wasn't a killing blow.

Next up: Selecting, evaluating, and extracting information from a historical manuscript.  As I have here, I will use Porter's book as my "historical manuscript," as it being in English and well-illustrated means I'm able to devote effort to "how does this apply?" rather than trying to figure out what it means.