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It's not unusual - my archery club was about the same. Then again, having five sessions a week they could justify it...

Bull****.jpg

Oh, and the original academic article was just 'Turns out, weight evenly distributed across the body takes more energy to walk and run in than an equal weight that is being carried in specially designed equipment for those tasks'. Nothing about moving more dexterously, or in combat. It's interesting, but a sideshow that doesn't even affect interpretations of historical battles, as the dodgy press releases suggest.

The only interesting bit was how they affect breathing, limiting the amount that the chest can expand and so needing 'deep breathing' techniques. But that's not really ground breaking either.

Haters...
...Continue Thing Hatred.

Drawing a compound is fairly different to drawing a longbow, or a warbow. With a compound, the draw is stacked at the beginning of the draw, and becomes easier as the draw goes on. With a self-bow, the draw is stacked towards the end, so it begins easier to pull, and at the end it's far harder, especially if you're not using your shoulder muscles correctly.
They also have different draw lengths - for insance, with a compound you draw up to your chim, and with a longbow you draw up to your lip. With a warbow you draw at least as far as your ear.

So a heavy compound bow is far easier to draw than a heavy longbow. I've never tried warbow archery, but I can pull a fourty-five pound compound bow without problem, but a thirty-five pound longbow is a ***** to hold at the draw for more than a few seconds.

You probably already know this, but there's also the matter of not locking in your elbow. If you grip the bow normally, then the bottom of the inside of your elbow will stick in, where the string wants to fly. It'll get hit, but because of totally different reasons to the string hitting the inside of your fore-arm near the wrist. Because of this, in target archery you need to at least relax and rotate out your elbow. If you're using a heavy bow then you also might damage your elbow, especially if you have it 'locked', but then again you might get Little Leaguer's Elbow anyway if you're practising a lot when you go through your teens.

Don't do this:
Do this:

I'm left eye dominant as well, but strongly right handed. It means that shooting barebow, I either need to shoot left handed, or close my right eye and have no depth perception. For warbow archery, which is largely about judging distances, it's better to shoot on your eye-dominant side if you have the musculature to support it. For victorian longbow archery, or Olympic barebow, I don't find that it makes a difference.

I have to say though that 50lbs is a pretty damn heavy draw-weight for you to be learning archery on. Hopefully there's a local archery club who can give you better advice than the internet though?

Erm, in terms of Svedish HEMA groups, your best bet might be the HEMA Alliance group finder for the vikinglands, at http://www.communitywalk.com/map/index/964605 and also the shfs at http://www.shfs.se/. I know that the Gothenburg HFS are the real ****ing deal, and the website for the Enhörna group looks promising. Their facebook says that:

We are active in the parish of Enhörna, a peninsula at lake Mälaren, some 45 minutes South of Stockholm, Sweden. We also have training sessions at Södertörn University, in Flemingsberg, 15 minutes south of Stockholm.

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Otherwise, I have no idea. Go ask someone the other side of the North Sea

As for written action scenes - I don't know. I'm not all that into straight up fantasy, and Cornwell always seems to just write Sharpe over and over again. Except now with longbows. One thing that I think is important to violence as part of a narrative, which often gets overlooked, is the mental state of the people involved. Are they aware of what they're doing? And they consciously considering their opponent and the available actions? Or are they in lizard-brain-mode, and working on a simple stimuli -> learnt response framework. How comfortable are they risking life and limb, and how comfortable are they with committing violence?

Yeah sure, lots of writers probably have very a-historical or whiffy combat in their books. But on the other hand, lots of authors have combat which, well, doesn't really do anything for the story or character development.

Your mum is silly.

Never change, dual wielding thread, never change...

FrisianDude said:

I don't really understand the quote, what does he mean with 'thrust' in that sentence?

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Stick your knife through the skin of his neck, as depicted.

Yeah. I'm just going to put two links up, which I feel make the point that I'm aiming for much better than I can:
http://www.forteza.org/forteza/For_Philosophy.html - An American HEMA group.
http://media.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/file/82787/618069313109.png Folio 74v of the Fechtbuch Cod.I.6.4°.2, Paulus Hector Mair compiled that book, one of HEMA's favourite historical figures, and the page probably dates from the 1470s.  The caption says:
‎'So if you want to rob a peasant, pinch the skin on his throat and thrust through it, as shown, so that he thinks that you have cut his throat, and this does him no harm.'

Clearly someone here is wrong about medieval violence, fechtbuchs, and the people engaged in it. And I don't think that it's the contemporary source.

And if they focus on the 'H', they often decry modern historians as attempting to de-construct chivalry, and wander off in to the mystical lands of knightliness, chivalry and associated bullshido.
Tangential troll - the medieval world-view has sweet **** all to do with systematic approaches to the mechanics of inter-personal violence, and is only tangentially related to trying to interpret sources which depict it.

ares007 said:

Daggers were particularly useful when you were grappling with an enemy and gained the upper hand. In this case you could quickly draw your dagger and deliver an accurate thrust to end the struggle.

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Because a single stab will end a struggle the majority of the time...

...which is always my main gripe with most HEMA interpretations of dagger vs. unarmed stuff. People trying to work out and then teach techniques, without having researched how knife attacks tend to function. Of course the context is slightly different when it's ritualised violence, but self-defence is quite obviously a motive behind, for example, Fiore's unarmed against dagger.

bobthehero said:

What era are you talking about for the visor up because: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCvOC2VwDc
Note their visor are down.

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Nice video. Worth noting that all the sources that they show are from after the 1520s, while the earlier Falkner one depicted them open. I wonder if there are artistic or military trends in play.

MadocComadrin said:

Well, it's kindof hard to defend yourself when your sword hand is pinned across your body (remember, you were pinned while drawing). That leaves you with one hand free to contend with his shield, saex, and legs.

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Step One: Let go of sword. Step Two: Let go of anything in your off hand. Step Three ???? Step Four: Profit.

Srsly. You only have to look at documentary evidence, let alone modern interpretations, to see people going '****eth this ****e, forget the longswords, I'm going to throw you on the ground and then **** you up by stamping on your face.'

Trufax.

Tsukana said:

If he's drawing something like, say, a dagger, you're only putting yourself in MORE danger by grappling him.

Especially if you're pinned to a wall.

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Because the best knife defence is doing nothing while a man stabs you. Especially if you're pinned to a wall and can't run away.

No wait, it's to grapple and try and control the weapon. Silly me.

Silver, an C16th Englishman, wrote down his opinions on various weapons, which may be what you're thinking. He pretty much had the 'Welch Hook', a kind of short-ish pole-arm, as the king of weapons.

Then again he was a massive xenophobic troll. Lots of the rapier stuff deals with a rapier using a buckler, cloak, dagger (like a main-gauche) or second rapier in the off hand. This makes sense when fighting against a weapon which almost exclusively makes thrusting attacks. However, of those only a buckler seems to make sense against a weapon which is more functionally effective at cutting, such as an arming sword or a messer.

Or, I've been drinking for about eleven hours steady, and rapier isn't my area of speciality. Sydney Anglo's 'Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe' gives a damn fine overview of it all.

When I think of holding a scabbard, I see that as a potential weapon.
When I think of holding a pencil, I see that as a potential weapon.
When I think of a weapon, I see that as a potential weapon.

I never sleep. I'm the goddam Batman.

...the ****? You just went full out retarded. From the D&D-ist language to the 'core values' projection onto the past. Hell, Talhoffer has striking, while the rest of the Lichtenauer tradition is full of jujitsu-esque body throws, even when wielding swords.

I mean, I'm a raging, trolling weeaboo hater, but from the way that you're speaking, you've never really done much research into weapons or HEMA have you? Hell, folded steel isn't brittle - that's the point of pattern welding. Kenjutsi has half-swording-esque movements for dealing with armoured combat too. Now, if you started talking about different ways of executing a cut, or about blade harmonics and things, then I might be able to take you srsly.

If you guys are headed west at all, I may be able to put you up in Exeter, Devon.
I'm away from the 6th of July for a week, and I think the lease on my current place runs out on the 20-somethinkth. Other than that though, it may be a fair bit too far west for you. Plenty of green lanes around here though.

It's after two in the morning, but respectfully, there are an awful lot of 'respected' martial arts institutions out there that don't pressure test, are more interested in ranks and belts, practice dead drilling etc. Historical European Martial Arts, by essentially being an explorative enterprise, has had to face up to the same issues as other martial arts without being able to hide behind arguments from authority.

Now, the flip side of the coin is that many eastern Martial Arts have had hundreds of years of not being tested, or firmly rooted in martial practice, within which to become sportified, filled with bullshido, become forms of meditation, or what have you - for example I have a reference somewhere to a Judo master in the 1910s saying 'We really need to crosstrain with striking arts to avoid becoming a sport', much in the same way that, for example, Olympic fencing did. By returning to the documentary evidence, and examining it critically, Historical European Martial Arts are forced to grapple with lots of questions that could otherwise be swept under the rug of 'That's how it's always been done.'

As someone running a research group into HEMA, I'm afraid that I hold the opposite position to you. 'Think critically, rather than passively accepting' would be how I would phrase it, but essentially I believe that so long as you're not being disruptive to other people's ability to train, then you should be asking as many questions as occur to you in order to develop as a martial artist.

tl;dr, screw the Confucian approach to learning systematic approaches to inter-personal violence.

Edit for an added troll: Shōrin-ryū is a mixed martial art from the 30s. Bartitsu pre-dates it, which in turn is only narrowly pre-dated by modern Jujitsu. Equally, I can turn around and point out that last year I participated in a Cornish Wrestling competition, a recognised living tradition which dates back to at least the C16th, when it emerged as a regional style in existing European wrestling styles. Hell, therefore it has a living tradition back to time immemorial.

EDIT for an added talking-past-eachother:

If you didn't this is your cue to shut up with respect to making any more comments to me on your perceptions. Since, I have spent a lot more time than you at studying weapons and armor

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I'll send you my thesis on historicizing the early documentary evidence of systematic approaches to violence from Western Europe, if it helps. Or the paper that I wrote on HEMA as a research endeavour and experimental archaeology -  comparing the Towton massacre records to Shackley's look at 14th Century Japanese Swordsmanship (illustrated by the archaeological records from Zaimokuza).
Don't insult an audience that you don't know.