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 ...