On Attack and Defense

Before I start reviewing the Chidester reproduction of the Morgan manuscript, I'd like to talk about parrying and defense in longsword, based on a passage I read in Meyer.  To do so first requires me to express some frustrations.

The frustration is this: Meyer knows what he's talking about, generally, and has some excellent advice, but Meyer is also writing for gentleman duelists, not for killers, and Meyer has a very bad case of OCD in trying to document every potential combat situation he can think of.  This weakens his overall approach, especially considering that Meyer, writing in a different era from, say, Fiore, relied much more heavily on text than on images.  The number of woodcuts in Meyer, compared to the overall length of his book, is frustratingly small, and the Meyer woodcuts varied even more substantially than the Fiore drawings vary from edition to edition.  This means that to understand Meyer, you really need either a guide, or a lot of time.  Now, the same is true of Yagyû Munenori, but he was writing with the idea that you'd be a member of the Yagyûkai when you read his work, while Meyer was very much writing a library book at the dawn of the printing age.

So what does this have to do with parrying and defense in longsword?

Short form is that Meyer warns against parrying for parrying's sake.  That isn't to say he discourages defense, but that defense and attack need to be integrated.  The difference between this and Fiore is that Fiore reverses the order of priority, because Fiore is writing for killers, not duelists; making an effective cover and closing the line is much more important when even duels are fought with sharp weapons, frequently to the death, and often without armor, than it is when fighting to first blood with dedicated dueling weapons.  Still, the defense and the attack are integrated in Fiore, as they are in Vadi and Yagyû.  Looking at the unarmored plays of sword in two hand for Fiore, generally the flow of action is as follows:

1. Close into range and come to crossing.
2. Feel blade contact and pressure.
3. Deny the opponent a means of attack.
4. End the combat.

Where this differs substantially from Meyer is that Fiore and Vadi - although not Yagyû, which I'll discuss in a moment - do not emphasize attacking the opponent's attack on the way in.  They allow for it, certainly; the "close and come to crossing" is generally by a probing attack, but the emphasis is not on breaking the defense on that probe.  Instead, the probe is meant to establish what the opponent's defense will be, and then take advantage of that defense.  The outlier here is Yagyû, partly driven by philosophy and partly by the metallurgy of Japanese swords, where the best way of preserving your sword straight and in one piece is controlled, planned edge-edge contact.  The Yagyû method is to meet the attack and turn it.  There's a whole family of technical vocabulary around this, but it all boils down to attacking into the attack, much as Meyer says, and then using the rebound to simultaneously cover yourself while moving and target the next strike, like the Italians.  The two are united, without substantial division into two separate steps as you see in either Meyer or Fiore.  This is important - my nagashi improved considerably the moment I went from thinking of it as parry to thinking of it as interception.

We see this behavior as well on the rapier field - the fundamental rule in destreza, for instance, is always to have the sword as the chord of a circle, meaning that the sword is on the shortest possible line from your center of mass to your opponent's, and your opponent's sword must follow a longer line, whatever that requires.  This preserves the greatest possible advantage on attack and defense.  Even prior to Carranza and Pacheco, though, we see this in Spain and Portugal: Godinho (1599), our best source on pre-destreza Iberian fencing, advises, rather than parrying as a parry, thrusting back along the opponent's line of attack with the guard raised, so that the attack is the parry.  Godinho's remarkably elegant approach differs from a riposte in that the emphasis is specifically on simultaneous attack, not on counterattack.

The point of all of this discussion - see what I did there? - is tempo.  Meyer's concern about parry as a waste of energy is fundamentally that every parry is a wasted opportunity for attack, so that the tempo becomes parry - rebound - next play, and the opponent has just as much opportunity in those last two beats to recover and develop their own attack.  Meyer's ideal formula, then, is receive/attack - attack; by disrupting the opponent's attack, one takes the vor, or controlling initiative.  Fiore, Yagyû, and indeed Carranza respond by saying that the tempo is contact - cover - counter, where the cover denies the opponent a reasonable line to attack.  Carranza and Yagyû specifically emphasize always being in the shadow of your sword (it's one reading of the kage of shinkage!); it is merely an implication of Fiore's plays.  It is worth noting that it looks like that is in three beats, but contact, cover, and attack are all elided, so when executed properly, it is at most two beats.  Godinho says it's receive/attack... in a single beat.  In all cases, the defense and the attack are an integrated whole, and all of them agree on disrupting the opponent's timing.

How does one train this?

Well, can't speak for everyone, but the way the Yagyû school trains this is by practicing the specific interception techniques separately to get the flow and movement down, so that contact, cover, and counter become a single continuously flowing (nagashi means "flowing," after all) movement.  This is before even involving a partner.  Once a partner is involved, it's the same drill over and over, starting at low speed and moving up to full speed and full (for a fukuroshinai) power.  Depending on the day one shows up for class, this can be the day-one drill, not anything like an advanced technique.  The only reason this is at all remarkable is that the received wisdom (see, for instance, the Bellatrix book) is that drilling defense is harder than drilling offense.  It becomes easier when you drill defense and offense as a single continuum, and drill the mindset that attack is defense, defense is attack, and the two need to be a single integrated whole.