Longsword - Footwork I - The Foundation, the Frame, and the Floppy Bits

Various combat traditions have radically different approaches to footwork.  Most European longsword traditions, for instance, are pretty close to agnostic to which foot works best with which strike, as long as a foot is moving.  In comparison, the Yagyû approach is generally that the side the blows come from should be the foot that steps.  Thus, a blow from the right to left is a step with the right leg.  Meanwhile, sport fencing, descended from French smallsword, almost entirely relies upon advances instead of passing steps, with the body presenting as small a target as possible.  And none of them are as abstruse as Destreza, or as weird as the stutter-step di Grassi teaches.

Nevertheless, because there are only so many ways that a human body can move, and only so many ways that a length of steel can move, certain commonalities start to emerge.  The first and most important, to my mind, is that weight distribution must remain between the feet in order to maintain a stable platform from which to fight.  Whether that's the long stance of I.33, or the "Ansteorran high" boxer's stance, committing weight past the feet is a cardinal sin.  Even in movements that look like leans, the feet need to provide a stable enough platform to redistribute weight quickly, or the feet need to be moving as part of the weight commitment.

The reason that "weight between the feet" is where it all starts is because fighting is never static, and the ability to reposition in any direction is critical to taking advantage to that.  One of the ways that experienced fighters stand out from inexperienced fighters is their management of these weight commitments, and the range of positions they can take where they can manage that weight distribution.  Some, generally exceptional, fighters can even sustain having their weight distributed between no feet very briefly, but even jumping starts from the ground.

The second common point in all schools of my experience is that there are really only three ways of moving the feet - turning, one foot passing the other, and the feet staying in the same order.  For simplicity's sake, these are, in order, turns, passes, and advances.  Fiore is unique in early sword manuals, and my specific area of interests, to my knowledge for actually discussing how feet move, and how this impacts fights, and as a result, he gets to pick those terms for my use, but you see the exact same sorts of things discussed in sources as diverse as modern (as in post-1875) kendo manuals, Thibaut's version of Destreza, or Ridolfo Capoferro's Gran Simulacro.

Now, if we were to try to standardize all of these bits, and try to establish some sort of Grand Unified Theory of Swords - GUTS, if you will - then we'd need some sort of theoretical basis for this.  I suffer from either the advantage, or disadvantage, of lacking a classical sport-fencing background, a kendo background, or a modern martial arts background, so I am going to invent some terminology to explain a lot of what's coming.

Leonardo's lesser-known work, Vitruvian Fighter.

Now, in the edited Vitruvian Man above, there are four boxes in three colors.  Green is what I call the Foundation - the part of the body actually in contact with the ground, and the part that you can only modify so much.  It consists of the body from the soles of the feet to the top of the patella, and the ways you can modify it include flexure and spacing - that is, you can bend the knees more, and you can put the feet closer and farther apart.  One of the most common threads in medieval fighting manuals of all traditions is that they take very wide stances and still control them.  A look at leaf 20r of the Getty Manuscript will show exactly what I mean: the Master, who is not currently engaged, has his feet spaced almost as widely apart as he is tall, but he is very clearly collected and about to spring.  The ability to do more things with the Foundation is one of the key components of the swordsman's toolbox.

The second color is the red block around everything between the patella and the top of the head, and between the two elbows.  I considered blocking it at the shoulders, but decided based on Capoferro's three blow types to include the elbow.  This is what I call the Frame - the place where the overwhelming majority of mass is concentrated, where striking power is generated, and where the human body is most vulnerable to lethal injury.  It is also where the vast majority of mistakes are made - a mistake in this case meaning "a thing that prolongs the fight."  For instance, most people regardless of experience level are quite capable of managing one very deep lunge to reach very far with a sword.  However, in doing so, they tend to make two very basic mistakes.  They put the frame forward of the foundation, thereby putting themselves off-balance, and they make the center of mass of the body visibly rise and fall, because they haven't bent knees and hips enough, thereby giving their opponent a very clear visual indicator of what they are doing.  The second mistake people typically make with the frame is that they don't hit people with it, which brings me to the last set of boxes.

The last set of boxes, the blue boxes, are the Floppy Bits.  To be brutally honest, they are the least important portion of swordsmanship.  Yes, they hold the sword.  But they could just as easily hold a fan, a length of rope, et cetera.  Yes, wrist strength is important and allows you more options (see the toolbox above).  Yes, you can hit someone with Popeye Forearms.  But at the same time, the act of just getting your hands into position generally involves moving the foundation and the frame, and... well, it's possible to waste a great deal of energy with very little effect by waving one's hands about with a sword in them, and possible to achieve a great deal with relatively little work by using the foundation and the frame, and letting the floppy bits follow.

All of this provides us a basis for discussing footwork, what each of the components is doing during movement, and how the proper mobilization of the body follows.  All of this will be part of the discussion of footwork, of which this is merely a very rough introduction of terminology.