Dueling in thirty days: day six

Lo and behold, several hours later I come back with day six of the Bolognese experiment. The two of us were fencing sword and buckler (I.33) in Christie Pitts today down at Bloor and Christie, but we always begin with 10-20 minutes of going over the sidesword plays. I am now entirely convinced that the way we are currently doing it is correct, as we are completely covered - by distance and by blade placement - the entire time. Left to the side, right foot towards the opponent.

To change things up a little bit today, Dall'Agocchie mentions earlier in his book the various defenses (of which there are really only five; more on this later) from all of the guards against all likely attacks. I noticed while reading through the defenses yesterday that the same blows - mandritto, riverso, imbroccata and stoccata - can all be parried with a falso manco (a deflection) followed immediately by either a mandritto sgualimbro, or a riverso sgualimbro (i.e. a left ribbon). I've done the former numerous times in the normal AEMMA class during drills and free-fencing time, but only against attacks from the right side. So we tried it out, and a number of interesting things came out of it.

1) The footwork is very clearly the following: parry with the falso manco while stepping to his right side with your right foot, and then throw either a riverso or mandritto sgualimbro while stepping with the left foot. This is the only way to strike the targets (head or face) that Dall'Agocchie explicitly states on a number of occasions.

2) In some instances, he gives the option of either mandritto or sgualimbro, but in others, only one or the other is available. I initially believed this to be a simple omission on his part; of course you can do both, because I mentioned it ten pages ago! But when we tried doing both indiscriminately, we found that the mandritto sgualimbro is not always a reliable follow-on; this depends entirely on the nature of the attack the opponent is giving.

3) Curiously, this action does not correspond with the left ribbon described in the solo form in terms of feet; the solo form has the fencer either stepping to his right, forward or backward, but not to his left. The more I think about it, the more I question if there really is a higher purpose for the solo form, or if it is meant purely for teaching footwork.

Once we get really good at performing both kinds of defenses with the respective foot motions, we should be able to do the drill in a circle, alternating between parrying with the true edge and the false edge.

Tomorrow's post will be a synthesis of what I've talked about in the first six days; we've gone a few different places while interpreting the text, some more useful than others. Every seventh post, therefore, will present the most updated understanding of the defenses and counter-attacks that come from Porta di Ferro Stretta, as well as progress made in creating a drill that incorporates all the attacks at random.