SCA Combat: Fighting Philosophy, Part II - What Works, Works

 In case it hasn't been obvious enough, I picked up a lot to think about out of Dave Lowry's Persimmon Wind.  A lot of that is I find value in what he has to say, but an equal amount, I believe, is in what he misses entirely.

Let us discuss the formation environment of any martial art, whether it is Liechtenauer, Olympic fencing, Lowry's Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu, or modern infantry combat doctrine.  The martial art forms in response to the combat conditions at the time of its inception; at formation, it is generally influenced by what came before it but what came before it proves incapable of solving the problems of the moment.  In the case of modern infantry doctrine, for instance, the foundational squad and fire-team tactics were largely an outgrowth of Vietnam, where the company-scale operations of WW2 proved to be a poor match for the terrain and enemy of Vietnam in most cases, and the entire host of WW2 infantry tactics evolved in response to the technical challenges of WW1, and so on back to the dawn of time.  As a result of this, it is often possible to pinpoint the moment when a specific martial art came into being - for instance, modern MMA owes its existence to the Gracie-rules match between Helio Gracie and Kimura Masahiko, and Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu to the fight between Yagyuu Munetoshi and Kamiizumi Hidetsuna.  In both cases, the combatants found their skillsets unequal to the tactical problem, and had to develop new solutions on the spot.

The new solution then undergoes a period of refinement - Olympic fencing evolved from French smallsword fighting between about 1650 and about 1850 - during which its basic techniques are codified and turned into a coherent combat doctrine.  During this period, if it still interacts with the world as anything other than an anachronism, the martial art is still growing, and its practitioners can be expected to make new discoveries on a semi-regular basis.  Those discoveries may be training techniques, exercises, slight variations in the movements, and so forth, but they are still growing.  Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this in modern martial arts is judo, whose early growth was extremely well-documented because Kanou Jigorou was determined that it should be a teaching implement from the start.

Once it has solved all of the tactical problems which it is capable of solving, a martial art can be said to have reached a stable form, and the problem becomes one of dissemination and teaching.  Typically the period of development and the period of dissemination overlap, because there will be tactical problems that the original developers did not foresee - for instance, the primacy of the riposte in Olympic fencing.  The dissemination period is usually marked by a claim for supremacy, or at least primacy, in the martial world - this is the point where, for instance, Silver publishes his Paradoxes.  During this period, also, multiple schools of the same art begin to diverge, with slight variations in their form to distinguish themselves.

At this point, the martial art largely becomes recursive, filling in and attempting to completely cover the space which it has defined.  The forms of the martial art start to dominate conversation rather than the outcomes, although lip service is always paid to the outcomes.  This is the period of the "school solution," where not following the school solution to a tactical problem is penalized, either directly or socially.  Lowry gives an example of this early on in Persimmon Wind, where he has learned the basics of iaido - Japanese fast-draw sport swordplay - as applied to a specifically lethal art form.  Because his art focuses on lethality, rather than elegance, the iaidoka for whom he is demonstrating immediately critiques him by saying "this isn't a battlefield, stop being so violent."  Similarly, it is entirely possible to solve the tactical problem presented in modern military training but be penalized for not illustrating the military decision-making process or, God forbid, using the wrong font on a presentation.  The form has come to dominate; the outcome is less relevant.

In a perfect world - say, Edo-period Japan, or an enforced-fantasy setting, the two have much in common - there is no progress and the best way that martial artists have to demonstrate the superiority of their school is by challenging other martial artists, either for training purposes or for exhibition purposes.  The difference between the two is really who they are trying to impress.  This was the situation in the Japanese martial world between about 1550 and about 1900, and is indeed basically how the Gracie-Kimura fight came to pass.  This phase is, funnily enough, the ground of most martial-arts entertainment, with dueling schools and "my kung-fu is superior to yours!" sorts of boasts.  The entire kung-fu genre thrives on this, and it's the basis for Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and its film iterations.  It's also why tournaments, in the Western world, evolved from free-ranging brawls with blunted weapons, where anyone who could mount a horse could claim to be a knight and try to find a lord willing to take them into a household, to highly mannered, ritualized events where wealth was a prerequisite to entry not merely because of direct costs, but because training and equipping a knight was expensive (which, incidentally, is the first time to my knowledge that anyone described A Knight's Tale as a kung-fu movie).

The problem is that we do not live in an enforced-fantasy setting.  Inevitably, the school encounters a tactical problem which it is utterly incapable of solving.  The trivial example is guns.  Guns are a quick and easy solution to the primacy of the knight, the samurai, and the kung-fu master.  The other example that comes to mind is the challenge posed to Yagyuu Munetoshi by Kamiizuma Hidetsuna - how do you face an armed man when you are unarmed? The eventual fate of the school winds up being dictated by how it responds to this.  In the Yagyuu case, a year later, he presented his thoughts and experimental research on how to defeat an armed man when unarmed, and the school evolved.  In the case of Fiore's longsword technique, with changes in sword fashion, the school mostly faded from existence.  There's precious little need for half-swording your way out of a bind when the sword in your hand is a rapier, and there was no way that a body of technique evolved for longsword could make that leap.

Sometimes, the way the school evolves is by changing its focus entirely.  The best example of this is probably the Shaolin Temple, where kung fu started as a form of moving meditation that would allow the monks to defend themselves in a (then) remote location, then became a fully developed combat system, then became a form of entertainment, a form of moving meditation, and a fully developed combat system, depending on what the needs of the generation were.  In the case of iaido, mentioned earlier, the goal went from killing opponents faster than they could respond, to moving meditation focused on no-mind, while kendo and Olympic fencing both evolved from martial art to combat sport.  By removing the focus on lethality and instead focusing on personal development, what we think of as martial arts, as a whole, allowed themselves to continue and in many cases thrive.

The problem, then, is what of martial arts like Lowry's Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu, or for that matter HEMA or reconstructed sword work, where the focus remains explicitly on killing in ways that are no longer relevant tactical solutions? The most likely outcome, that taken by the HEMA and steel fighting communities, is that they become combat sports, with a high level of violence but without deliberate killing.  The Yagyuu approach is the exact opposite, since the school relies heavily on kata to train, rather than sparring, with the lethality preserved, but the contact level deliberately minimal even in paired kata.  The combat-sport solution has the advantage in that it allows the sport to continue evolving, generally in terms of better equipment or better understanding of its foundational texts.  Doubling down on traditional training methods and objectives, however, has its own value, in that it becomes a form of historical preservation all its own.  Given that the western approach is based entirely on reconstruction, because the historical practitioners are long-gone, this has obvious value to me.  Where I question it is in its combative value.  Don't get me wrong; I fully accept that I would get my head handed to me by a high-level practitioner of any of the traditionally trained martial arts if we were to test ourselves against each other.  What I have a hard time accepting is whether or not they've ever tested the efficacy of their tactical solutions in an uncontrolled setting.  Lowry himself gives at least one elaborate justification for this describing the Yagyuu training approach as requiring a fight to end quickly, because there might be further attackers to deal with, and I find myself asking... well, as described, would that actually END a fight quickly?

Having gone through all of that, how does it relate to my own study of SCA heavy combat? First is the recognition that the SCA is still very much in the "tactical solutions" period.  There is no one set answer to most problems, though there is now general agreement on good body mechanics and we've gotten to the point that the SCA's actually produced a fechtbuch - Duke Paul of Bellatrix (Paul Porter)'s The Bellatrix System: Techniques and Tactics for SCA Heavy Combat.  I reserve judgment on that book even though I recognize its importance and its value, because the thing that had originally led me to Persimmon Wind was something Lowry had written on the utility of reading versus doing in martial arts (basically, there's nothing wrong with reading, if you have the body-mechanics context, but without that, it's gibberish).  Individual kingdoms in the SCA have their own standards of calibration, armor, shield type, even terminology, and individual households within each kingdom have their own bodies of Received Wisdom that in some cases have only the most basic overlap.  This is complicated still further by knowing from the outset that everything you learn in SCA heavy fighting is both historically wrong, and currently irrelevant.  The first step is unlearning that lesson, in fact, and learning that fighting is fighting.

The answer, as far as I have been able to determine, is:

Zeroth, maintain and repair your gear regularly.  There is only mental space for one opponent at a time, and your own gear should not be that opponent.  Alternately, "feed your horse before you feed yourself," or "take care of your gear, and your gear will take care of you."  This seems trivial, but as someone whose pants have literally fallen off as the reigning queen came over to let me borrow her gauntlets, trust me when I say this is important.

First, to practice fighting against an actual opponent.  This will allow you to identify the particular sub-skills of fighting that you need to develop, and can be done by literally any fighter at any skill level.  Note that any time I use the word "practice" here, I mean "to do with at least one knowledgeable observer present," not just "to do."  The rawest fighter in loaner armor is practicing fighting.

Second, once those sub-skills have been identified, such as targeting, footwork, situational awareness, and power generation, to learn, develop, and practice (and note, my definition above still holds!) those sub-skills.  This is generally the stage of pell work and slow work.  At this stage, the focus is not on an opponent, but on one's own body.  The reason this has to follow stage one is not merely sadomasochism, but so that the fighter develops a shared vocabulary.

Third, train and condition the body to emphasize those skills where you are strongest, and to offset those you are weakest.  Generally, this is where speed, strength, and endurance training, so far as possible, comes into play.  Some people are just faster than others, and there are upper limits on both strength and endurance for most people, but everyone can improve their performance in ways that allow them to stay on the field longer.

Fourth, watch as many fights as possible, and think about fighting.  The focus initially should be fairly narrow - think about heavy fighting, think about how the entire body moves through a flat snap, think about how a shield moves.  Watch other fighters, both higher and lower quality, to learn how bodies move and what techniques you can take, and what you can discard, from every fighter.  Broaden this and watch every fight that you can.  I strongly recommend any of the Ali vs. Fraser fights, for instance, for range manipulation and footwork, and I had a light-bulb moment regarding my own fighting watching sumo, of all things.  It should be obvious that this is how I got to Lowry, and I have made an effort to keep up a fight journal with what worked and what didn't over the past year or so to work this point.

Fifth, fight an actual opponent at full speed and power, to develop a feel for what the lessons imparted in points one through four have gained you. Now go back to #1, and repeat this loop.  At some point, the need for qualified supervision decreases, but it never goes away, as it is there for quality control because at some point every fighter will develop bad habits, get lazy, or try something supremely stupid.

Now, all of that applies to martial arts as a whole, not just SCA heavy, and it is a guide for how to improve an individual fighter, but it is also a guide to how to improve a school of fighting.  Remember that my primary critique of Lowry's described training methodology for Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu was that it didn't seem to account for enemy action.  They did steps 2-4 religiously.  They had absolutely mastered step 4 as a school.  They were experts at 2-4, and even did step 1 pretty regularly if you accept paired kata as a practice fight against an actual opponent, but without step five, there is no process of "what happened, what worked, what didn't work, and in both cases why?" for the body of knowledge to continue growing - and, since knowing is half the battle, at least half the battle is never over.