Sword & Buckler

Around the year 1300, somewhere in Franconia, a cleric wrote a book about fighting with a sword and a small round shield. He wrote in Latin and reached for German when Latin had no word for a thing. He had it illustrated with two figures, a tonsured priest and his student, standing in ward after ward. Thirty‑two leaves of vellum survive. It is the oldest fencing book in Europe, a century older than Fiore, and it lives today in the Royal Armouries at Leeds, where anyone can go and see it.

The teacher is the priest, sacerdos. The pupil is the scholar, scolaris. And on the last two leaves the scholar steps aside and a woman named Walpurgis takes his place, fencing the priest sword and buckler in hand, as his equal. Nobody knows who she was. She is one of the earliest women drawn fencing in any book, and she has given the manuscript one of its names.

For a long time the book sat in the Tower of London, which is why some still call it the Tower Fechtbuch. Most of us just say I.33. We have written its whole story, if you want it.

Against each custodia the book gives an obsessio, a position taken in front of it that closes the ward's natural blow and forces the man in it to do something else. The most famous is halpschilt, half‑shield: sword and buckler held together in front of you, point up, the buckler covering the sword hand.

From there the fight is short. He binds your sword, or you bind his; the buckler goes over his sword hand to trap it, the schiltslac, the shield‑strike; and the free sword cuts or thrusts home. The buckler is never held out on its own like a wall. It works with the sword, always covering the hand that holds it, because the hand is the nearest thing to hit.

Krucke, the crutch. Langort, the long point, which is a ward and a besieging both. Schutzen, the protecting position. The names are German, the sentences are Latin, and the plays run like a flowchart: this ward, that besieging, this answer, that counter. It is a system, seven hundred years old and perfectly clear.