some cool exchanges. 0:04 it looks like red man fails to hold the spear due to gauntlets, causing him to drop the spear and maybe gets stabbed in the face for it. Does the gauntlets make it much harder to grip things?
I like the long graceful swings that you depict. But I notice the axes are mostly held back, giving little defensive value. Often your bigger swings expose you both to "double-kills". Perhaps combine more thrusts and minor swings? The axe can also parry and deflect more, (used like a Halberd)? These axes were very sharp, so small swings will cut flesh, bone, and leather. I've seen effective light cuts achieved by a crank-like counter-rotation of the hands. Strikes to mail might require bigger swings for concussive damage, but also risk breaking the blade's edge on steel helms, bosses, or getting stuck in shields.
why are you showing stab injuries you are in full plate you cannot stab through plate you must find the gaps should rename it to just sparring with arming swords because you are clearly trying to replicate unarmored combat
The stab effects are a visual cue to show when a successful thrust into the gaps have been made, as its difficult to tell without them. For safety we are using our normal fencing masks to represent open faced bascinet helmets, so still count any hits that land between the brow line to the chin. In the opening exchange, Dan hits me clean in the face and follows up with a thrust under the aventail, hence the 'kill' indication. The following stab markers are ones that land on the exposed palm of the hand where there is no armour, and the final exchange ends with a thrust making it under my aventail, resulting in another 'kill' I hope this helps clarify things a bit, without the armour you'd be seeing way more hit markers 😆
Too could be interesting sword vs flail,because "language" and fencing of both weapons vary between one to another. Even could be done flail vs montante.
Switching to your second handgun is sometimes termed "New York Reload." Draw and fire one round accurately time is faster than sword draw and thrust time or spear reload.
Brilliant demonstration! While easy to see the benefits of shield and spear combo, watching someone use a Dane axe with speed makes of far easier to imagine how a strong and highly skilled user could strike a neck, arm or shoulder, or drag a shield out of place. And also how a strong user could potentially overwhelm an opponent with brutal thrusts and hacks. Well done, and thank you!
Thanks! We've been working through some injuries and training at other clubs, but this session was such a blast to film and edit! Its great to know you look forward to these videos whenever we put them out :D
What sword is the guy on the right using? Also love the video, and slow sparring in general. Really helps you see what your doing wrong in the moment rather than having to learn from hindsight and reconstruct the mistake from memory. Its alot simpler to start moving the sword to do something, see its not going to work in real time and realize why in the moment. Then as you learn what will work and what wont, as you go back to normal sparring those lessons translate to knowing when to do what.
www.living-history-market.com/store/Turco-Mongol-sabre-Ultra-light-weight-775-825g-approx-p295120238 You've hit the nail on the head on how we use slow sparring to learn, as it basically gives the time to think and try find a solution to whatever problem your opponent is presenting. There are of course limitations to this as sometimes you need speed to create power in a cut to move a blade out of the way, but in this case where we are only attempting to win from the bind we find it a very useful exercise
Do you also train with a metal headed Broadaxe? From training with mine (ca. 120cm haft 1350gr weight) i made the conclusion that the only way of defense with these against each other is evasion by going out of distance. They have so much inertia that i am very sure that such small beats and displacements as in the video wouldnt work against a full force blow and blocking downward vertical strikes with the haft would also require a lot of force or else the arms of the defender collapse and the axe head reaches the head.
I can see where you are coming from. But not every swing or stab is going to be Full force so the beats are an effective way to deal with "Some" attacks. The shafts are full weight. Plus the weight of the heads we are using are roughly correct maybe a little bit lighter. So they arnt too far from reality. Enough to get a decent idea.
Nice sparring! Looks more realistic to me than this no protection, hip hinge tap him with a sturzhau stuff…Did you use any secondary sources to learn centergripped roundshield and sword?
Thank you! I'm in full agreement when it comes to protective gear. Some forms have been borrowed from the usual 1:33 manual, although looking pretty sloppy looking back on this video nearly a year later 😅 The rest is up to interpretation, the shield being much larger makes it slower and obstructs cutting from 2 and 6, but its much easier to cover a line and the weight makes it crazy strong in the bind. There wasn't much thrusting in this video due to us wearing mail, so we concluded that good powerful cuts to the limbs were answer to fighting an armoured opponent
Simulate what would happen if the axe man were properly armoured. Spear guy gets wrecked. If you're doing "unarmoured" its very apparent that the spear has a huge advantage. Its just boring to watch a damn spear doing the hokey pokey.
next on the to-do list I think. Working out where the axe excels is a process that needs to be tested in all circumstances before we can draw any conclusions. Even then, its impossible to simulate the moral shock of watching your mates hands being cleaved clean off which would play a vital role in any battle
@@SpearEnjoyer axe messes you up in armour, spears do not, unless you're striking with them like a staff, or a club.....it's kinda how that Welsh club came to be.
@@a_fuckin_spacemarine7514 Kind of... people tend to overestimate how difficult it is to get a solid, clean, sledgehammer-like hit on a person who is actively resisting and isn't planted in the ground like a tree. mail is incredibly good at what it does which is why it was used for so long
Lovely stuff as always. I really need to find some time to get to an event your at. Our group have musters that youd happily attend but we are midlands based so is a fair treck. I am currently working on stuff myself with dane work and appears we are coming to some of the same conclusions, ao would love a play sometime and compare notes as it were.
Interesting video. Thank you for sharing. Some tips, from a Chinese point of view, if you are interested: - When attacking, we thrust continuously and relentlessly at various targets until the opponent is dead, rather than launching single thrusts. - Thus, the gap between a feinting thrust and the real attack should be a fraction of a second, rather than two separate movements. - When thrusting, we slide the rear hand all the way to the lead hand to get maximum reach. - When the opponent's weapon is shorter, there is no need to lean in to get extra reach. - We keep the opponent at spear's length, rather than moving in to (in this case) axe length. By the way, my comments only apply to the first 65 seconds. I don't practise spear with a shield, so I cannot comment on that. Kind regards.
Modern European spear users forget foot, look at how they flow with swords sabers and rapiers but the second they touch a spear they become flat footed and lose all sense of rhythm and flow I love watching Chinese spear practitioners because they have preserved the living form of spear play
Amazing sparring lesson, im eager to try a synthetic dane axe myself, can i please have some stats of your Dane axe (like length and weight) for me to compare and adjust ? Thank you for reading and if you reply, again, thank you
@DF12612 thankfully we have good hand protection but yea in reality as they didn't really use hand protection that was an instant out of action blow, probably a lethal hit due to infection down the line 😂
It is nice to see the full potential of spear fight because at reeactment you are not allowed to thrust upwards. So very nice video. Keep up the uploads.
Sorry for the late response! The swords we use are normal re-enactment grade and usually tipped with a rubber blunt with a steel washer inside for safety. My personal sword is by Viktor Berbekucz and weighs 1100g. HMB swords are ok but tend to be on the heavier side with the minimum required weight for duelling being 1300g for competition
@@SpearEnjoyer no problem, that's very interesting. I'm currently setting up a training group in Vienna that focuses on simulating early medieval unarmored combat so we'll be relying more heavily on rubber.
This is a pretty old video and we have improved since then. When you say more aggressive, do you mean attempting to seek an overbind more often? or just hitting the opponent with it buhurt style? We have no specific rules other than we stop and reset once someone is hit in a way that would have disabled them if it was a sharp weapon
@@SpearEnjoyer same. I believe they are referring to shield bashes, pushing, and striking with the edge of the shield. I also do a lot of this combined with leg sweeps and grapple throws. a certain amount of safety is very important when using metal weapons and the caution and care shown to your opponents is good to see.
Hey man, just wanna let you know I really enjoyed these spear sparring videos, these are some of the better spear sparring videos I have seen online! Cheers to fellow spear enjoyer!
