Guild Ranks! Money! Politics! All that kind of drama! Part One of a Dramatic Series!

In my latest entry for my Let's Yell About the London Masters of Defense posts, we're going to look at the various ranks in the guild, what they would be allowed or forbidden, the money that was involved, and all that stuff that's both pretty practical and also could contribute to a ridiculous amount of drama.

There will, naturally, be some yelling about George Silver. Because if we're yelling about money and drama involving the London Masters, I can absolutely work in some complaining about Silver at the same time. It's basically mandatory.

To recap, there were four normally achievable ranks in the guild: Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were the Four Ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole thing, but we don't have any records of how the people in those positions changed or were replaced.)

Becoming a Scholar was something that basically anyone could do. When you decided to go to a master (or a provost who had been permitted to teach), the presumptive scholar would be given the oath by their new master (or possibly an usher or Provost so delegated) and pay the master 12 pence for the oath and 4 pence for entrance to the guild. Additionally, whatever fee the scholar and master agree on would be paid half up front, and the remainder as they agree to it; the examples of these fees are 30 and 40 shillings, which I imagine is a ballpark number for what the costs would have been. Despite there being no specific fee, masters are forbidden from undercutting one another. The scholar also had to bring their own weapons and supplies, or else "agree with his master or his master's deputy" for them.

(As an aside, I went to this currency converter and checked how much 40 shillings (or two pounds, per this site) would be in 2021 dollars, and it says about $710. I haven't done any real digging into how accurate that truly is, but it's amusing nonetheless!)

What's missing is how often a scholar is typically going to pay this fee to their master. The 16 pence in up-front fees are pretty clearly one-time costs, but the payment for lessons seems like something that would be recurring. There's nothing in the Sloane manuscript hinting at whether these are yearly or something else.

Incidentally, we don't have anything like an exact wording for the oath a scholar had to take. We know that it was on the cross of a sword, and that he wasn't allowed to use the teachings against his master or to teach them until he was permitted, but that's about it. No specific wording is recorded for that oath.

So! Moving upward, like I described in my previous post, the scholar could say that he wanted to fight for free scholar, get tested, get permitted to do so, and get the prize fight scheduled. There was one hitch which didn't come up in my last post because it was a background point to the prize fight itself, but it's germane to what I'm writing about here:

The London Mayor and Aldermen. 

As previously described, a prize fight was kind of a big deal - nearly a local holiday in terms of impact on the city around it. The fighter would process through the city with drummers and a retinue all the way to the location of the fight. People would want to skip out on work to go watch, and it seems about as disruptive to an area as a big game day is to the area around Fenway Park. In the "Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia,"(a catalog of London legal correspondence and records) we can see mention of letters from Ambrose, Earl of Warwick to the Aldermen asking for a license for his servant to play his prizes. The aldermen would routinely pull out "but the plague" as a ready excuse, and it really seemed as though getting permission from them could be a real pain. While they could prohibit the procession through the City of London pretty readily, there were a couple workarounds for holding the prize fights themselves: either go outside the city, or take advantage of one of the liberties therein - specifically Blackfriar's.

Going outside the city was straightforward enough, and there are records of a number of prize fights taking place almost literally in the shadow of the city walls. What seemed to happen more regularly however, was making use of the liberties of London - areas which were outside the control of the civic authorities. These liberties contained theaters such as the Curtain and the Theater, and inn-yards at the Bell Savage and the Bull. Blackfriars as well was located within a liberty, and has evidence of potentially being a headquarters of sorts of the London Masters, including rooms owned by William Joyner, one of the four Ancient Masters of the guild.

Back to the prize fight itself! These were events which were potentially extremely lucrative for the individuals fighting their prize, as well as the guild itself. There's no particular proof that theaters or inns would charge for admission; there seemed to be a strong ideal that prizes should be public. That said, it's very likely that they would have done a brisk trade in drinks. However, the real  money made for the guild would be from the audience throwing it at the stage if they were particularly pleased with the fights that they saw - certainly a real motivation for the fencers involved! The take from the stage seems as though it would have been divided up among the prize fighter(s), the guild, and based on a remark from the diary of Philip Henslowe, who owned a number of theaters, the venue itself. Henslowe notes that he was owed 40 shillings, which as noted above could be a really decent chunk of money for just supplying the space. If that's the cut that the guild was willing to hand over to the venue, I'm very sure that what they wanted to keep for themselves and for the prize fighters would be comparable at the least.

So! Assuming the scholar was judged sufficiently skilled, he would have to pay "all orders and duetyes" as appropriate to a free scholar. The Sloane manuscript doesn't indicate what those would be, though. There aren't any indications of further privileges that a free scholar gets, only that they need to wait for seven years before they're allowed to test for Provost.

This is getting a little long, so I'm going to cut it off here, and wrangle the remaining draft into a part two within a day or so, rather than sitting on this for even longer. (Pandemic brain is a thing. Who knew? Focusing on things is hard now.)

Let's Yell About Prize Fights

So wow, you get one injury and a lot of your focus for even writing about fencing and fencing-related topics is just completely shot. Whoops. But hey, we're back now and as promised I'm going to have another couple of fun times posts and yell about the London Masters of Defense prize fights, how they worked, fun things around them, and all of that. I've talked a little bit about them before (in this four-part series: one, two, three, and four) but I really wanted to focus in on the guild in general and the prize fights in particular here, rather than as an adjunct topic to the sizes of raised stages. Also, honestly, they're a fun thing to read about and also for me to write about here, and I wanted to spend some time just going on about a fun topic today. I'm going to focus solely on the prize fights in this entry; I think in a subsequent post I'll yell about the guild as a guild, talk about how it worked, poke more at their structure, and talk about the money.

Sources for people to hunt down and read! I'm pulling from a few books and articles here. The first is "The Noble Science" by Herbert Berry. This is a transcription and study of the Sloane Ms. 2530, which are some papers pertaining to the Masters of Defense, covering about 1540 to 1590. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend this. It's a fantastic resource. Next is "The English Master of Arms" by J.D. Aylward. The sections which cover the time period of interest are just wonderful. Finally, "Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay" by Craig Turner and Tony Soper. This is less about the time period in general and focuses more on presenting the manuals of di Grassi, Saviolo, and Silver for stage combat purposes, but it still has some good stuff in here.

For easily found online articles and resources we have "Public Fencing Contests on the Elizabethan Stage" and "The Schools of Defense in Elizabethan London" both of which are available on JSTOR. (Herbert Berry also has a handful of articles there, focusing primarily on playhouses. Not directly relevant here, but really good reads!)

Getting to it, then!

In this context, prize fights were fought because they were a requirement of advancement in the London Masters of Defense. There were four ranks in the guild - Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were four Ancient Masters who were the heads of the guild, but we don't have any record about if or how they were replaced over time.) When someone decided that they wanted to go learn the noble science and became a student, they were administered an oath and admitted to the guild as a Scholar. (There was some entertaining financial rigmarole around this, which I'll get into in another post.) At this point, they'd study under that master for an indeterminate period of time; there's no specific time laid out that a scholar was required to study before they could challenge to become free scholars. 

When a scholar felt as though they were ready to become a free scholar, they would first go to their master and ask permission to hold a prize fight. Their master was supposed to contact the four ancient masters of the guild and let them know of the scholar's intent. At that point, the ancient masters would set up a private test within a school where the scholar would be required to defeat six other scholars, specifically with the back sword and longsword. This private test is not a requirement we see for the later prize fights but let's be honest, we can all think of newer fencers who would absolutely have tried to rush ahead with a public display before they were ready. Assuming the scholar passed that test to the satisfaction of the ancient masters the scholar would be told what days he would play his prize. The first day would involve the longsword against whatever scholars wished to fight, and the second day would have whichever other weapons the ancient masters decided upon. Sword and buckler were the most common, but staff and backsword also showed up in the records we have. Afterwards the ancient masters would confer and decide whether or not to promote the scholar.

Assuming the scholar was promoted to free scholar, they would pay whatever dues were owed to the guild and not be permitted to fight their prize for provost within seven years. Despite this restriction, the Sloane manuscript notes a number of folks who fought their provost's prize well before the seven years were up, though I don't know of any source explaining how those came to pass. I'm assuming that money talks, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Things would get more interesting when the free scholar sought to play for provost. Just like the last go-round, the free scholar would ask his master's permission to fight the prize and the four ancient masters would set the day and location. At that point, it was up to the free scholar to notify all provosts who lived within 60 miles of the prize fight's location, and they would owe a fine to the guild for each provost not notified. While provosts who lived within 20 miles of the prize fight traveled on their own dime, any provost farther away would have half their travel costs paid by the free scholar. In the section describing how the Provost's prize was to be played, the Sloane manuscript states that the free scholar would play at the two handed sword, back sword, and staff but the summaries of a number of prize fights list a number of different weapons used. Sometimes fewer than those three were used and sometimes more; I presume it was up to the ancient master who was overseeing that particular prize being fought. As before, the ancient masters discussed the prize fights and decided whether or not to promote the free scholar.

Again, assuming the free scholar was promoted to provost, they were not to be allowed to fight their master's prize for seven more years. Also, again, there are a number of people who fought their provost's prize well before the required seven years between free scholar and provost. Maybe the idea of seven years between ranks was more a guideline than a hard and fast rule?

Moving up to master was much the same as moving to provost. He would approach the four ancient masters, and they would set the day. The provost would then give warning at least eight weeks in advance to all masters who lived within 40 miles of the prize fight's location. The page listing the order for the master's prize says that the weapons would be the two handed sword, bastard sword, back sword, and the rapier and dagger. As with the provost's prize, in actuality there were some variations in the weapons used. While there was no further rank to challenge for, the restriction at this point was that the new master could not open up a school of their own for a year and a day after they were promoted.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, at each of the ranks of free scholar, provost, and master, there are recorded instances of the prize fight not being fought at all, but the rank being awarded by an agreement of the four ancient masters. There aren't any details about the reasons for these, so it is up to us to speculate as to why this was the case.

Finally, the Sloane manuscript lists a number of challenges which were fought before the Crown. These weren't prize fights, but presumably displays of skill which the Crown had to attend as part of the job; I don't think this was a specific indication of royal favor beyond "this is one of the guilds in London and the Crown is attending this function" or something similar, mostly because the London Masters weren't nobility or the like, but were middle-class tradesmen.

That's the quick and dirty discussion of the prize fights themselves. In the next couple posts, I want to look at some other issues in and around the guild - the duties and restrictions on the various ranks, as well as some of the problems they had in getting the prize fights set up. I also want to touch on what I've been able to figure out of some of the economics that were in play.

More Parrying Dagger Data Thoughts

So in the aftermath of my last post, trying to kick around some thoughts, and at the prodding of Bella di Sicilia and Katerina Falconer de Lanark, I accepted that I should really figure out some kind of overall typography for sorting the various types of hilts on parrying daggers.

I looked through A.V.B. Norman's "The Rapier and Smallsword 1460-1820" for ideas. For this, Norman broke down as many variations on hilts that he was able to find (which was a fairly hefty number - he had worked at the Wallace Collection and as the Master of the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London) and broke them down with a number for each individual type or style of hilt. There's a lot there. He didn't do daggers, but he did reference Harold Peterson's "Daggers & Fighting Knives of the Western World" in his work. I immediately hunted down a copy of Peterson's book, and while it's interesting and fairly extensive - he covers "the stone age to 1900" -  he doesn't go into typing the hilts of daggers in the way that Norman does for rapiers. That's the price of casting such a wide net, though. With the limitations that Norman placed on his survey, it was much more reasonable to expect him to start to categorize and apply some kind of system to the hilts he looked at.

The thing is, I don't really want to use his system. He basically breaks down each variation of hilt into its own specific type, with some variations on them when needed. Which is fine, but I just don't think that there are so many different styles of parrying dagger hilts that I'll need to give each variation an individual type. There are just way too many similar trends among them.

So I did a first attempt of something else, which I amended into my spreadsheet of data for each of the daggers there so far. Here's a clip of the notes explaining it:

Click on this for a full size (legible) image!

I realize that this isn't perfect, and that there are already daggers which don't fit exactly into this. I was wrestling around with how to visualize this and also how to expand it in a logical way and while I was complaining about this to Lilias de Cheryngton, she said, "Like a tree or a flowchart?" and my mind went "YES DO THAT!"

Includes product placement! Check out Remy's website for fencing coaching and personal training services!

So that's probably what I'll use to really flesh this system out. Ideally, it will make expanding it easier (just add on a new branch and flow down from there) and there'll be a couple different ways to visualize the summary.

I thought about shifting every step of the way to numbers (it works for IP addresses, right?) but the existence of daggers with multiple sets of quillons makes that hard. Using letters for the subcategories allows me to describe some of these daggers, but not all. For instance, this example should be easy enough, because the quillons are the same style - just change it from quillon type e to 2e and that's a  straightforward. On the other hand, we have examples like this which would necessitate going down two separate branches of the tree, and I'm not sure how to get that to parse correctly. I'm sure that I can but I'm just not sure how yet. I'm going to keep trying to get this to work, and I can at least keep surveying more dagger sizes while I do. I'm going to end up going back over the list again and again anyhow, right?

Let's Do Dagger Data!

 (or: in which a random question makes me wonder a few things, so I made a spreadsheet about it!)

I know, I keep saying that I'm going to post about certain things (more on prize fights, more on Fabris' second book) and believe me I have some incomplete posts sitting in the drafts folder, but I got hit with a thing so here we are.

Over on the Facebooks, Lissa posted a question about daggers and dagger length, and it set off a short side conversation in the comments about what were actually used historically. So I decided to take my recollections and go get some data and throw them all together.

It's kind of an aphorism that fencers in the SCA trend towards "longer is better" in terms of weapons. As a general rule, there's something to it: being able to get your point on someone before they can reach you is always good. On the other hand, there are some important points which can throw a wrench into this. For instance, a smaller person using a sufficiently long sword can run into leverage and movement issues with the blade. If a sword is too long, a canny opponent can potentially get past your point more easily. A longer sword can be harder to keep free from being found by your opponent. 

...and a longer dagger can be much, much harder to maneuver around your sword into sound guard positions. Folks with shorter arms are particularly prone to this.

Those are all functional combat concerns, though. On a more practical level, a sufficiently long dagger becomes increasingly useless as a generally useful knife as well as becoming more and more annoying to wear as a daily carry item. If the dagger was purpose-built to be used as a dueling weapon, a companion to a sword, that might be one thing. As a day-to-day item though, that's something else.

So where does that lead us? 

Well, it lead me to hitting up the Wallace Collection, and going through their collection of daggers. I skipped past weapons which weren't plausibly parrying daggers from the period I'm studying - call it the mid 1500's onward - and then I weeded out more modern composites as well. (There were a surprising amount of 1550s dagger blades mounted on 1800s small sword hilts!) The bulk of them are from Italy, Northern Europe, Germany, or Spain. When an item had a date range listed, I used a year in the middle of the range for mapping purposes, but made a note of the range on the spreadsheet.

Of the 61 examples, all but two had the full weapon length listed. There were 23 entries which didn't have the blade length specified. Despite that, there was some neat data that I grabbed! As a note, one foot is 30.48 centimeters. I've been doing a lot of eyeball conversions during this!

Here we've got a breakdown of the overall length of the daggers in question. There's a really clear clump in the middle, ranging from just short of 37cm up to a bit more than 43cm - that's about 14.6 inches to about 17.1 inches of overall weapon length. Many fencers I know use daggers whose blades alone are in the neighborhood of those sizes, yet here we have a number of parrying daggers whose full length sits nicely inside the blade length of SCA daggers.

Now let's take a look at the weapon lengths compared to when they're from. The bulk of them are clumped from 1600 through 1615 or thereabouts, which works pretty well for what we generally study and recreate with rapiers. The much later group - 1650 through 1675 - is interesting in that the bottom half of the weapon length drops right off, leaving us with generally longer weapons in that time. We have a good number of full sail guards from Spain in there (and it may be totally composed of them, but I'd need to dig around further), with blades which are solely made for combat, and not at all suitable for general knife use.

So I mean, in short? (Ha ha.) Shorter daggers, more minimal hilts seem to be the order of the day. 

Also, here's a link to the spreadsheet if you want to take a look at the items, the raw data, or anything else! Warning: it's a work in progress! For instance, I need to clean up the conventions for descriptions (which is to say, I need to create conventions for the descriptions). Going forward, I'm hoping to get data from other institutions for fun as well. I want to hit up the Royal Armouries site next, but their interface just isn't as convenient for grabbing this information so it may take longer.

Anyway, more ongoing projects that I can do when I'm bored and that aren't dependent on the weather are handy. I'll still get back to the London Masters prize fights real soon though, and of course more Fabris.

Wrapping the London Masters of Defense Rabbit Hole

 Okay, let's wrap up this random dive. (For now, anyway.)

While I started in on this by mulling over list sizes and hitting the boundary and deciding to poke at prize fights on the scaffold, the size of the scaffold, and so on, I definitely went a bit into the whole prize fight thing, inn-yards and playhouses, and more general bits about how the London Masters of Defense worked. My prior three entries covered a lot of that, but I want to take this last entry and go through some general interesting things about the London Masters of Defense, how they worked, and some side notes which I found really interesting.

So the beginning of the London Masters of Defense can be traced to Letters Patent from 1540 signed by Henry VIII, the text of which I dropped in an old post here. There are a couple really interesting things to note about this. First is that there's nothing about teaching or organizing or structure or anything else here. It's literally just "hey these twenty people (masters and provosts of the science of defense, according to the text) can go out and look for people who are supposedly teaching this stuff but are doing so really poorly and making actual masters look bad and are overcharging to boot and can drag them to a judge who will make them stop." That's really it. Secondly, and related to that first point is that although the patent implicitly gives the named individuals if not a monopoly on teaching fencing, at least massive control over it, but it doesn't actually incorporate them. They're not actually a guild in the way that, for instance, all the Livery Companies in London were. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to nail down any actual texts for a guild's Charter of Incorporation. I found one for the city of Wells, and while that's not quite the same, it does demonstrate the concept of the "rights and privileges" which the governing positions would be granted - which the Masters lack. (Though I did find a list of all the charters granted, which is kind of neat.) In "The English Master of Arms," Aylward says about it that, "If we compare it with, for instance, a Patent incorporating the Salters, issued by Elizabeth nineteen years later, we find that the Salters are given powers to elect Wardens, to make ordinances, and to enjoy all former liberties, none of which are given by the Patent of 1540 to Ric. Beste and his associates." That said, there was never any claim specifically made about them being a formal company, corporation, or guild - they only ever referred to themselves as the Masters of Defense.

What this all means is that there was one major impact of not being a formally chartered company - the Masters of Defense were not considered exempt from the various laws regarding vagrancy. Specifically, the Vagabond Act of 1572 (which I did a lot of digging for but the internet doesn't seem to have the full text of the act) mentions fencers specifically. In short, being a Master of Defense did not itself seem to be considered employment for purposes of fulfilling this act. Many such people had either an actual other job or a position just on paper to avoid the harsh penalties for vagrancy. Others may have sought connection a noble household, been a legitimate tradesman, or they could have found two judges to issue them a certificate of exemption from the act. While on a practical level if a Master had an established home and was settled and owned a school they would be more or less immune to being hassled over this law, it was still something to be concerned about.

Further complicating matters, Aylward points out that Patents of the kind that was issued by Henry VIII generally expired upon the death of the monarch, and there is no proof of renewal by Elizabeth. In fact, in 1545 the Alderman of London required them to produce a copy of such a Patent as part of a court case to settle an issue about setting up schools in the city of London, and no such copy was produced. On top of that, the Sloane Manuscript 2530 - the papers of the Masters of Defense that Herbert Berry transcribed in "The Noble Science" has example Master and Provost letters which include statements that Elizabeth did renew the privileges granted by Henry and also went so far as to grant them license to "play openly within the City of London." Yes, the Sloane Manuscript is the only place we have this written down - no other records we have back this up. Now, I'm not particularly conversant in what might have burned in the Great Fire. Maybe records relating to the London Masters of Defense were among them, I don't know. It's possible, but I'm inclined to doubt it. We have so many papers of Elizabeth's official patents and charters that I don't think that we'd somehow be missing something here.

And that wraps it up! I want to follow up further at some point with a more detailed look at what prize-fights entailed, and I'll likely do that in a few weeks. That's a separate rabbit hole in my mind though, because that's something that I really want to recreate at an event sometime. I still have dreams of a raised stage up at Bicolline for Les Beltaines some year - because doing that in that setting in front of the tavern would be a blast. It's for sure Not My Event but the setting would be wonderful.

And that wraps up this random little dive into inn-yards and raised stages and fencing on them and some fun background into the Masters of Defense and all that! Like I said, next time I'll probably write up a look at prize-fights and I'll also get back into Book Two of Fabris. (Remember that I was doing writeups of that? I do!)

Yet More Playhouses!

I'm just continuing down this here rabbit hole and I'm okay with this! I might come up for air but I'll probably just end up looping back to poke more at the London Masters of Defense and then prep for a class about them. So that's cool!

So, prize-fights and the venues.

Prior to 1570, there was a fair variety of places where prize-fights occurred. The most common was the open-air market of Leadenhall, but there were other outdoor settings as well. After 1570 however, prize-fights almost entirely shifted to inn-yard theaters and public playhouses. The two most commonly used inns were the Bull and the Bell Savage, with the Curtain and the Theater as the two most popular playhouses.

I mentioned in my last post that I pulled out some stage sizes for two playhouses in London - the Fortune and the Globe. Ironically, according to O.L. Brownstein in his article A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from c. 1565-1590, "there are contemporary references to fencing shows in all the public theaters except the Globe and the Fortune." Both of those were buildings that were built specifically as playhouses though, and never adapted from anything else. What about the other venue that we've seen discussed in reference to prize-fights: the inn-yard theatre?

An inn-yard theatre is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A raised stage would be temporarily built in the courtyard of an inn, and plays would be performed there. The audience would be charged for an entry, and a multi-story inn could also effectively have raised viewing galleries due to the rooms and balconies along the sides of the courtyard.

While the Sloane Ms. 2530 has a number of inns listed as prize-fight venues, in his study and transcription of the manuscript, "The Noble Science," Herbert Berry notes that the Ms. 2530 was neither the official register of the company nor a complete accounting of the company's activities. We know from other documents of the time, such as letters to the Aldermen of the City of London asking for permission to hold a prize-fight with all the attendant pomp, that other sites were used that were not noted in Ms. 2530. Although I have not yet found proof that any prizes were fought at the Boar's Head, it seems to me to be a good enough example of an inn-yard which was converted over time to a true play-house. That said, I did note that in "The Boar's Head Playhouse" (Folger Books, 1986) Berry speculates that the stage built in 1598 - 3'6" high, and it specifically had a railing to prevent the audience from trying to climb up - could have been placed in the middle of the yard with the hope of enticing prize-fights to happen there.

So let's talk about what the stage and the inn-yard looked like at various points in its development! (All of this data is from "The Boar's Head Playhouse," by the way.) In its original form, the full size of the open yard was 55'7" x 54'6", and the first free-standing stage in the middle of this was 25'x39'7". 

To this point, I recently grabbed a tape measure, some cones, and a Lupold, and we laid out a rectangle the size of that initial stage. Then we took up a pair of spears - being the most sizeable weapons we'd expect to use in any of rapier, C&T, or A&S projects - and proceeded to play around in the list we'd set up. I am here to tell you that it was luxurious. Even when we were testing it on all angles while moving around one another, we never really felt as though we were in imminent danger of stepping outside the boundaries of the stage being used. (Or what would have happened in period, falling off of the stage.) I imagine that if the fighters were fighting across the shortest dimension with larger weapons that they'd be very aware of the edge, but as long as your fight didn't consist solely of backpedaling, you'd probably be fine.

From there, when the stage was moved to be permanently up against one of the buildings bordering the inn-yard which had been converted to a tiring-house, they kept the same basic dimensions for it. Notably, despite expanding the galleries available for the audience, there is no evidence of the stage height increasing; presumably the owners wanted to be able to fill the floor of the yard to the brim and have it visible from anywhere. The only other meaningful change to the stage would have been that it was accessible directly from the tiring-house, without steps or ramps or clambering up a three and a half foot step.

There we are! A reasonable example of a free-standing temporarily erected stage in an inn-yard, which could well have been used in prize-fights!

I think there'll be one more post wrapping up the London Masters of Defense rabbit hole, and then I'll try to roll it all together into a single short class for the kicks of it.

More cool history stuff! Scaffolds and stages and prize fights!

So okay (for I begin in the traditional manner of my people) a couple days ago, I posted a bit about a small dive I took into how backing up was seen as bad, and how at one point Saviolo said that he thought Englishmen backed up too much in their fight and that this made Silver sad enough to post more than a hundred flyers around where Saviolo's school was to challenge him to a fight.

What came up in that was the idea that fighting on a raised scaffold, or stage, was a thing. Silver wanted to fight on one explicitly so that if someone backed up too much they'd fall off, but fighting on a raised stage without railings was pretty common in England. It was a standard thing for the prize fights fought for advancement among the Masters of Defense!

For context, there were four ranks in the guild. There was scholar, free scholar, provost, and master. (There were four Ancient Masters, but those were the folks in charge of the whole thing. You didn't just get promoted to that.) You joined as a scholar and had to stay there for seven years. Then you could play your prize for free scholar. Seven years after that, you could play your prize for provost. Another seven years and you could play your prize for Master. (That's how it was on paper. In reality there were a number of spectacular exceptions to those rules, sometimes to the point where people who had to adhere to the rules seemed to be the exception.)

So. Prize fights were big deals. For the rank of provost and master, the candidate had to invite all those of the rank he was fighting his prize for as lived within 60 miles (for provost) or 40 miles (for master) of London. If the provost or master had to travel for more than 20 miles, the candidate had to pay for half the travel costs as well. (There were penalties owed for any eligible provost or master not notified, as well as penalties for provosts and masters who did not attend a prize fight, barring certain exemptions.) The candidate also had to pay a fee upon promotion, in exchange for what was supposed to be a fancy set of letters patent with signatures and seals and all. (I haven't been able to track down any surviving examples of the letters themselves, but the Sloane Ms. 2530 does contain the text for example letters, which is pretty great.

Anyway! So there was going to be a monetary cost to the candidate, but they were usually able to end up making a good profit after their expenses because prize fights were a big deal. There are still written records of how there would be a giant procession from the edge of town to wherever the fights would be taking place. Drums, noise, the whole nine yards. If you made money by selling food along the route - or better, near where the fights were - you might be pretty happy about this. Other businesses not so much, and they weren't shy about making that known. There's a lot of background drama about whether or not permits for the procession or the fight would be granted, if they held them anyway, the whole lot of it. But the upshot was that prize fights were almost an impromptu local holiday, and they would draw a huge crowd which would typically show appreciation for fights by tossing money onto the scaffolding, which the candidates claimed as their own. Everyone profits, everyone wins! The London Masters really were a functioning (though at times very dysfunctional) trade guild.

Right, so that's all the context for why fighting up on a stage for these sorts of things happened. I wanted to get an idea about how large a space the prize fights would have to take place in, which is its own thing. A number of them took place on stages built in inn-yards; the Bell Savage comes up regularly in this context. I haven't nailed down the size for what might be built as a temporary structure in an inn-yard, but I did find some articles by Herbert Berry (the same person who wrote the study and transcription of the Sloane Ms. 2530!) which might shed some light on this! There's one on the Bell Savage, another on the Red Lion. I'm hoping that there's a reference to a stage size, or at least a reasonable set of guesses based on building foundations and the like, since it was mentioned that the Bell Savage had theirs set up against the side of the inn. As an aside, while the plans are from the 1800s, the London Picture Archive has this and this if you want a general layout idea of the Bell Savage, which is really cool. I'm hoping to get a chance to skim through "Inns and Taverns of old London" which at least promises to be interesting!

Playhouses though, are another matter! They were also used for prize fights, and even without needing to cannonball into JSTOR there's some decent starter information out there. The wiki page for English renaissance theater has a sketch from 1596 as well as a shot from the modern reproduction of the Globe which show a bit of the layout. Also, playshakespeare.org has an article about the Globe which says, "A rectangular stage platform, also known as an 'apron stage', thrust out into the middle of the open-air yard. The stage measured approximately 43 feet (13.1m) in width, 27 feet (8.2m) in depth and was raised about 5 feet (1.52m) off the ground." Britannica.com has articles on the other three well-known playhouses of a similar style, the Rose, the Fortune, and the Swan. The Rose was smaller, and the article doesn't note a stage size. The Fortune's stage was about 43 feet by 27.5 feet according to the contract with the builder. The article on the Swan has no information about the size of the playhouse or stage.

Even if it's raised and has no rails, 43 by 27 sounds like a list which is positively luxurious in size compared to what many of us are used to! 

I'm going to get back to doing that Fabris Book Two Part One retrospective, and I also want to do more with the Marozzo vs Fiore knife defenses as a treat, but I may try and collect a list of the playhouses where we have records of prizes being fought, and see if I can nail down specific stage sizes for those. That should be a fun spreadsheet to look forward to!

List boundaries and historic prize fights, or what happens when you mean to write one thing and find a related research rabbithole instead.

Now that we've gone through all the rules for the single rapier in book two, I wanted to kick some thoughts around them in general. I had intended this entry to be something along the lines of "what principles do they illustrate and have in common and what can we learn from them all and how are they useful to us in what we do."

I meant to do that. I really, really did.

But see, I started by kicking around the thought of "look, how useful is it for me to just do the implacable walk of death towards someone if they can back up into infinite space because we don't have static rapier list boundaries." Because we don't, right? One of the discussions about major tournaments that comes up regularly enough that I can set my watch by it is what to do if someone backs into the ropes. Responses usually vary between "call a hold to make sure nobody goes outside of them and continue, repeating as needed" and "call a hold and recenter them before continuing." Neither of these offer a particularly realistic take on how personal combat happened in period, where that level of retreating could be seen as cowardly.

That's where this all started.

Anyone who has taken a class with Tom Leoni has heard about how renaissance Italian dueling custom held that if a duelist backed up out of the circle or other bounds, they forfeited the match. The closest I've found to a clear citation in writing on this is in Saviolo's "Of Honor and Honorable Quarrels." (Jared Kirby edited and presented an edition under the title "A Gentleman's Guide to Duelling" which I think is still readily available.) In the section entitled "In How Many Cases A Man May Overcome In The Lists" Saviolo writes, "Last of all is the running out of the lists. Of this sort of losing the field everyone is so much the more shameful by how much the more I have placed and set him down in his lowest place or room. To be slain in the field is less shameful, though it is far more dangerous and hurtful."

Additionally, Silver (I know, I know) wrote about an incident involving Saviolo, his friend (possibly employee or co-teacher?) Jeronimo, and Silver himself in "Paradoxes of Defense." As Silver described it: "Then came Vincentio and Jeronimo, they taught Rapier-fight at the Court, at London, and in the countrey, by the space of seaven or eight yeares or thereabouts. These two Italian Fencers, especially Vincentio, said that Englishment were strong men, but had no cunning, and they would go backe too much in their fight, which was great disgrace unto them. Upon these words of disgrace against Englishmen, my brother Toby Silver and my selfe, made challenge against them both, to play with them at the single Rapier, Rapier and Dagger, the single Dagger, the single Sword, the Sword and Target, the Sword and Buckler, & two hand Sword, the Staffe, battel Axe, and Morris Pike, to be played at the Bell Savage upon the Scaffold, where he that went in his fight faster backe than he ought, of Englishmen or Italian, should be in danger to breake his necke off the Scaffold."

It was fairly common for the London Masters of Defense to conduct prize fights on raised stages (what Silver terms a scaffold), usually set up in the yard of an inn or playhouse so that an audience could gather and watch. Covering the neighborhood in flyers, which George and Toby Silver did as well, was also a pretty common thing to do based on this story as well as how prize fights would be announced as well. 

Anyway! All of this fun rabbithole diving is what causes me to keep thinking, "we should come up with a compromise there somehow" and I keep wondering how I'd go about building a list with sturdy railings so that when a fencer hits the edge of the lists no hold is called and everything just goes on. I don't know how practical it is to do that for the many lists that a major tournament has - the usual solution of list poles and rope is just a whole lot more space efficient for storage, as well as being adjustable when setting up. But maybe doing something for a single list for cool prize fights done in a period style or a display or something like that?

I'd love to be able to do something like that on a raised platform, and definitely that should have railings. A more immersive event would be awesome for this, or at least a thematically cool site for it. I guess what I'm saying is that I need to see about setting up a raised stage or at least a fenced in list for the town square at Beltaines and then posting flyers some weeks beforehand about a prize fight or something. See? Super period!

Then I went down the related dive of remembering that the London Masters were a business. (One article about them refers to them accurately as a "corporation.") This means that when you played your prize for promotion from scholar to free scholar, free scholar to provost or provost to master, you had to do things like notify members of the appropriate rank within a certain radius that the contest was happening so they could come and fight. If you failed to inform someone, you had to pay a penalty. If someone traveled more than twenty miles to get there, you paid half their traveling expenses. When you got your signed and sealed letter of rank, you had to pay duties and such for that as well. It's pretty bonkers.

Point is though, raised stage with railings for cool period prize fights in a really cool town setting.

This is what happens when I start to look into something and then just keep going and going. Next time we'll talk about things like technique and underlying principles and such. This time it was cool history stuff and that's just fine.

Book Two, Rule Six, The Plates!

 Okay, let's dive right in. Last time we looked at the text describing rule six for the sword alone. This time we're going to look at the example plates. Like I mentioned previously, there are six plates total - two sequences of three plates each - so I'm stringing some together with the magic of MS Paint and here we go!

Here we can see how an approach would look if we entered on the inside. Looking from plate 151 to 152, we can see how our arm will pull back to our body and our torso rotate so the left side is presented as we step forward, causing our blade to remain stationary in space. Interestingly, in our first plate we already begin with our left shoulder about even with our right. Fabris states that it allows us to fortify our sword and keep ourselves safe to the inside and only a little open on the outside. (This has come up a couple times previously, and I really want to play around with this in the future. I don't think it's a universal concept but rather something which is true in specific circumstances, such as when you're constantly advancing towards your opponent. I don't think practicing on the fencing dummy will really let me figure this out, but that's also worth a shot.)

Stepping into plate 152, we've completed a pass with our left foot. Our arm is about as far back as it could reasonably get, and our left side is fully forward. From here, all that's really going to happen is that we'll pass forward ahead with our right foot and then wound our opponent, which we see in plate 153.

Fabris really doesn't add much from here; he notes that our opponent really won't be able to turn themselves into fourth to cover themselves to the inside because with the angle our arm is at as well as the measure we're in mean that we're going to be in a much more mechanically strong position. At that measure, they certainly won't be able to perform a cavazione successfully, either. Fabris notes that if they tried it back in plate 151, we could contracavazione as we proceeded forward and things would still work out the same. 

What's worth noting is that Fabris calls out the "union of body and sword and the motion of the feet" being what keeps us safe, and we can especially see that in the conclusion of this play. The step we take is longer than the smaller steps we've taken previously, but not unduly so. Our arm doesn't straighten, but it returns more or less to the angle we see in the beginning of the play. What does happen is our right shoulder turning forward with the right hip shifting forward on the passing step. This maintains the unity of forces through our body and is going to be much harder to resist than the extending of an arm would be, as well as covering a surprising amount of distance and keeping our body safe as we clear our opponent's blade.

The second play occurs with our opponent on the outside. Interestingly, we're in fourth against their third. We choose this guard for two reasons according to Fabris: it's stronger to the outside (because, remember, it points to the outside) and it keeps us safe in the opening that the angle of the guard creates. Notice that we're fairly squared off with respect to our opponent, preparing for the next step, seen in plate 155.

Frankly, Fabris doesn't have much to say about this middle step; the situation is much the same as earlier, as well as at the same point if we were on the inside. Our body positioning, measure, progress forward, and left hand all ensure our safety to the inside and our blade keeps us safe to the outside.  

Finally, we see the wound in fourth. At that distance, with those body mechanics, there's really no reason to take the time to shift to second. There's still a rolling along the spine to shift the right shoulder forward, along with the hip, and the body is lowered as well. Fabris reminds us to push in with our body and not to extend our arm, which would open us up to a girata or possibly a parry. We need to drive forward and not lean ourselves to one side or the other, which would create an opening and cost us our union of forces.

Fabris spends a little bit of ink describing that he didn't go into how to use this technique on first, second, or fourth guards, or generally go into approaching withdrawn guards, because he feels that if you master these techniques, you'll understand how to properly apply them to these other circumstances. Once again, he's trying to describe theory and demonstrate the application of it in some ways and leaves it to the reader's understanding to work out how to apply them in a more general sense.

As an aside, it occurred to me while I was standing in my hallway working through the steps from rule six that there's another reason to set up in fourth even if we're opposing on the outside. If we are in fourth, and if our opponent attempts to cavazione as we approach, we can move ourselves into third and more readily interrupt our opponent's cavazione while keeping them to the outside. From our perspective, our opponent's sword would be moving clockwise while we move our hand counterclockwise into them, and keep them safely to our outside, which is what our body is set up to deal with in that case. If we were in second we would need to contracavazione, which we lack the time to do, or turn our hand into fourth but be unable to cover ourselves with our hand before we would be struck. I'm going to have to play around with this in other situations and see how it bears itself out.

That's it! That's all of the sword alone for book two! We'll be going into the sword and dagger portion of book two soon enough, but maybe I'll do another Marozzo and Fiore dagger defense comparison first. Who knows! It'll be a surprise.

Book Two, Rule Six!

 We're doing it! We're going to wrap up the first part of book two. (Then maybe we'll look at something else before we dive into the second part - proceeding with resolution with the rapier and dagger.) Let's get to it.

Fabris opens by stating that all the techniques we've seen so far can work, but the more sophisticated the technique is, the more likely it is to succeed. Naturally, the technique that he's about to show us is the most sophisticated one of them all.

We start off just as usual, approaching with natural steps. As we reach misura larga, we should bring our sword with our sword point against their debole but in a way so that we're in a stronger position. So far, this is all pretty much what we've come to expect from the outset. 

As we proceed forward from misura larga we will be stepping forward while we retract our arm, leaving our sword essentially stationary in space. Fabris wants us to be taking very small steps while we do this, so as to ensure that we'll always be able to deal with whatever movement our opponent might make. To allow ourselves to move as far forward as you can without moving our sword, our hand will end up coming very close to our body. To allow ourselves to move even further forward, we also end up effectively creating a void with our right side and allow our left side to pass forward. Ideally we won't wound our opponent until we have passed the point of their sword, and we shouldn't wound them by moving our arm. Instead, we'll keep our arm in its withdrawn position and carry it through our opponent with our body. (When we get to the plates, we'll see that we can still use the turning of our body back to our right shoulder forward, as well as a slightly longer step at the end to really drive our sword forward instead of relying on our arm.)

Fabris gives us one specific instance in this portion of the text, noting that if we are on the inside line and our opponent brings their sword high we should do the same but only just enough to maintain our crossing. If they move to pass underneath our sword, we can find them in third and we should keep the left side of our body forward. (Again, we'll see a variation of this in the plates which will make it more clear.) He goes on to note that we do this to keep our body safe if they perform a cavazione from our finding them in third (because our body is already past their point) and because it increases our sword's strength and ability to create an angle if we desire.

Fabris summarizes this rule by saying, "In this rule, you should follow this motto: keep your sword where you had it when you first found the opponent’s blade - keep it there until you wound. And do not wound unless your body has passed the opponent’s point, or wound just in the instant you pass it." He goes on to emphasize that if our opponent makes some movement in the tempo while we move forward, if our body can't pass their point we're better off not trying to wound them but to pick them up on the other side and then continue forward more safely.

Interestingly, Fabris also goes into some details about how this will or won't function with the sword and dagger. (Why? I have no idea.) He says that if our opponent's sword is properly joined to their dagger, we really can't find their sword without putting ours right into their dagger. We should refer back to the technique which has us place our sword by our opponent's hilt while keeping it free, and do that. As we perform the rest of rule six, our dagger will necessarily move itself so far forward that it will keep us safe just by being there.

Finally, I wanted to leave you all with this quote, because it's just so perfect: 

"Some individuals, more out of arrogance than out of knowledge, state that there are certain unstoppable attacks to which there is no possible counter. To them, I reply out of experience that every blow has its counter, and that no blow exists that admits no counter. To put it another way, any attack is unstoppable if it is performed in its correct tempo and measure; just as it is true that an attack that is borne out of thewrong tempo and measure not only has a counter, but is also easily parried.

So, under these premises, it is both true that any attack has its defense and that all attacks are unstoppable. Whoever believes otherwise greatly deceives himself, as do those who think that the same technique can be invariably used against any kind of opponent. Personally, I think that a good fencer can indeed face any opponent, but that he should operate differently depending on the opportunity presented to him."

Good, yeah?

So this rule, despite being the most sophisticated, is pretty short. Our next entry will be about the plates, of which there are six, being two sequences of beginning, middle, and end on the inside and outside. And then we'll be done with the first part of Book Two!