Concluding Notes, Windsor's "Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts"

 

Before commenting on the final third of Windsor's Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, I should discuss my particular purpose in reading this book.  The reason I read this after the Bellatrix book is that I found the Bellatrix book a useful but frustrating text - there were areas where Paul Porter spent a lot of time elaborating on a theme, rather than moving on to the next useful piece of information and allowing the student to work it out for themselves.  One of the things Theory and Practice does well in its first two thirds is discuss how to take a text, pull the main points, and develop a training program on those points.  I suspect that there's very little in there that Duke Paul would particularly object to, and I found it very useful for taking bits of Bellatrix and turning them into functional drills - also for identifying things I, or my kids, who are my primary guinea pigs, could do better in any given drill.

The problem is that, at about the two-third mark, the book quits being useful for that purpose.  I finished it, mind, but things like "how to set up a HMA club" don't really apply in the SCA setting, and "how to train for a tournament," while accurate and useful for someone aiming to compete in Crown, proved to be exercises in frustration because a lot of the answer is to train until it's just one more day, which Windsor only sort-of addresses, because tournaments aren't really his thing.  Much of his "attribute" section winds up being "now I'm not an expert in these fields, so consult an expert," then discussing his own experience.  Within limits, this has a bearing on the theory and practice of historical martial arts because it is impossible to separate the "be" of be-know-do from the ability to know and do, and because the discussion of, for instance, Fiore would be incomplete without a discussion of Fiore's four virtues.  Where it breaks down is that the suggestions that Windsor offers are either in great depth and very comprehensive - his breathing section is very good - or so broad and sweeping as to be trivial.  "Identify your weak points and improve them" is the general thrust of the advice, but, because that's a very particular problem to solve person-to-person, it is impossible to offer consistent or quality solutions without targeting an individual or limited group.

What I will say is that Windsor, in other places, does a good job of teaching joint maintenance, breathing, push-ups, et cetera; having taken his knee and breathing online lessons on my own, I will say that he has the skillset to teach those.  What he does not have is the skillset to make broad prescriptions of behavior, though he feels the need to address those.  This is not his fault: this is too broad a topic for anyone to handle effectively, especially in the same book where recommendations like "think through the implied tasks of starting an HMA club" or "think through the implied tasks of starting a drill program" are given the attention to detail they deserve.  Such a book as would adequately address the attributes section of his subject would have taken volumes and volumes, and would probably still be inadequate.

Speaking of attributes, one of the things that I have not addressed particularly here is the author's own attributes.  I found his honesty regarding his own personal experiences, and why he thought they worked, refreshing in comparison to the often anodyne descriptions he gave in the attributes section.  His discussion of why cross-training worked for him, or of why breathing control proved so vital and why it appears in every martial tradition, is worth it if only to get an insight into the author himself.  I learned as much about Windsor's vices (beer, sugar, scotch, and fries) and weaknesses (dentists, spiders, and hanging inverted) as I did about his training methodology, and his ability to discuss how he addressed his own problems using that methodology helped provide the methods some basis - again, back to his mantra of "process is more important than outcome."

All in all, I think this book is a useful training aid, especially if, as I have come to believe, teaching the next generation of fighters is the critical test of a fighter, rather than the ability to land a shot on a duke.  Is it perfect? No.  Is it the only book that should be on the shelf? No.  Should it be on the shelf? Absolutely.