Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Jamie MacIver, who is a historical martial arts instructor who co-founded the London Historical Fencing Club in 2016, which has grown to over 120 members and now has his own permanent training space. He is, like me, something of a Vadi fan, and his latest project is the Historical Research Company Limited, which produces research on historical fencing safety. Currently, they are investigating the safety or otherwise of various fencing tips. So without further, ado, Jamie, welcome to the show.
Jamie MacIver
Thanks Guy, thanks for having me.
Guy Windsor
It’s nice to meet you. Whereabouts in the world are you?
Jamie MacIver
So London Historical Fencing Club is, funnily enough, in London. So, London, UK, not London, Ontario, sometimes gets confused. Our club is central London. We’re near Vauxhall, if that means anything to anybody, which is pretty much heart of London, just not the posh bit in the heart of London. Me, I live east London, so I live the other side of London from it, so it’s not the most convenient location for me, but for most people, it’s great to get to.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Are you actually in the club at the moment or are you at home?
Jamie MacIver
No, I’m at home. At present, I’m at home. Yeah, I will be at the club later today, but not right now.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Mentioning that the London historical fencing club is actually in London is helpful, because the Espoo historical fencing society is not in Espoo anymore. It’s in Helsinki. So, yes, sometimes the club moves, but keeps its name.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, the Waterloo sparring group, which is not LHFC, but they now run out of our venue, was originally in Waterloo, and then it was in Southwark for a while, which is not too far from Waterloo, and now it’s come all the way to Vauxhall, and they’ve not changed the name from Waterloo sparring group.
Guy Windsor
So if I rock up to Waterloo to spar people, I’ll be in the wrong place.
Jamie MacIver
There’ll be no one to spar, but maybe there’ll be someone there. There’s a lot of people in London, so.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough. So, Jamie, how did you get into historical martial arts?
Jamie MacIver
That is the fault of my wife. Entirely the fault of my wife. She’s not a historical martial artist at all. But I’d been talking about kind of doing something for a while. I kind of knew vaguely what HEMA was, but I never really got off my ass, to put it kindly, and got around to doing it. So she, one birthday, very nearly exactly 10 years ago, bought me a sword and bought me four weeks of classes at the London Sword and Dagger Club, which was in Waterloo, actually. Doesn’t exist anymore. And that kind of just hit it off from there. And I don’t think either of us realized quite how good a birthday present it was at the time.
Guy Windsor
She’s not going to top it.
Jamie MacIver
She’s not going to top it ever.
Guy Windsor
So what kind of sword was it?
Jamie MacIver
It is, unfortunately, the other side of this bookshelf.
Guy Windsor
The listeners can’t see it anyway.
Jamie MacIver
It’s a historical museum reproduction, kind of quality, longsword, though. I should know this. Edward the Second or Third, reproduction sword, something like that.
Guy Windsor
Very cool. So you were training with did you say the London Sword and Dagger?
Jamie MacIver
London Sword and Dagger Club, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I’m not familiar with them.
Jamie MacIver
Well, they don’t exist anymore, and they haven’t for about nine, eight and a half years.
Guy Windsor
So you showed up and they folded. Okay.
Jamie MacIver
Not quite. So essentially it didn’t end on the best of terms. But essentially the instructor more or less disappeared, which is what led to London Historical Fencing Club being created. Essentially it was a bunch of us who had gone to that. We all used to go to LSDC to train regularly, and then when it just kind of pretty suddenly, just sort of collapsed, we were like, well, that sucks. We kind of like hitting each other. Let’s keep doing it. And we formed the London Historical Fencing Club, which is now eight years ago.
Guy Windsor
2016 it says in my notes, excellent. And you now have a permanent space. So we’ll get onto that in a minute. But we do have to discuss Vadi. Because I have been reliably informed, by you, in fact, that you are something of a fan of Filippo Vadi. So how did you discover Vadi?
Jamie MacIver
Well, this hopefully won’t get too awkward.
Guy Windsor
That’s okay. You can say whatever you like.
Jamie MacIver
I was still at LSDC, it was still running. I wasn’t teaching anything. It wasn’t LHFC yet. I was about just over a year in, so it would have been March time. So yeah, coming up to a year and a half in, not quite. And Esfinges, which doesn’t do a lot these days, for those of you who may or may not know who that is, they do stuff promoting women, particularly in HEMA. But they were doing this online event that they called 30 Days of HEMA. It wasn’t like particularly formal. Basically, the idea was, you pick a text, HEMA text, obviously, and you read that for the 30 days. And you had challenges you needed to do, like, post this on Facebook and do a video here, and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t do any of that part of it, because I kind of got a bit too obsessed with the book itself, and I saw that, and I thought, okay, I’ll do that. Sounds fun, but LSDC was a Fiore club. So at that point, I already studied Fiore, and I was like, well, I don’t really want to do Fiore because I’m learning that already. I want to do something else. And I’d heard from many people that people were like, Oh Vadi. He’s just a bit more. He’s just a bit of a step on from Fiore, he’s very, very close to Fiore. So I picked up this translation. You may have heard of it, Veni Vadi Vici.
Guy Windsor
Oh, fuck no. No, no, no, no, Jamie, tell me, tell me, tell me that you have the updated one. Before you say another word. That book was a problem, and I put it out there because I was obliged to. It wasn’t ready yet, but I couldn’t find the right editors for it. And so I put it out anyway, because people had paid me for it. And this is why I don’t crowdfund my research stuff anymore. And so, that book, if anyone’s listening, if you have Veni Vadi Vici, by all means, keep it on your bookshelf, because it looks quite nice. But for God’s sake, don’t open it. And the translation work, which has been massively updated and improved in The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest, that is free. The new translation is free, so anyone can download it and use that instead.
Jamie MacIver
For what it’s worth, I would agree that the new translation is better than the old translation.
Guy Windsor
I should bloody hope so.
Jamie MacIver
I have both. I have literally every translation that’s ever been made of Vadi somewhere in this house, including many that have never been published.
Guy Windsor
So basically, what you’re about to say was you found my Veni Vadi Vici, and you were so horrified by it, you decided to do it yourself.
Jamie MacIver
More or less. The thing that I was most horrified by actually, was the comparisons to Fiore. More accurately, yeah, there are things in Vadi that you can see in Fiore. And there are definitely links. And that is undeniable, but it was partly, some of this was in your commentary in the book, and some of this was just the general narrative. If you speak to anybody about Vadi at the time, they would say the same thing, which is that was basically Fiore. Fiore’s got more books, go for Fiore instead. And I kept reading Vadi and it was like, this is not that similar to Fiore. There were all these things occurred so uniquely Vadi and all these things that are quite different. And actually, I think there’s something else here that is sort of standalone and independent and is almost better to look at on its own, rather than make these comparisons to Fiore. So it was a Fiore club. But I did go to my instructor and say, actually, I’m kind of into Vadi is it okay if I just kind of do your exercises, but I’ll be putting my own little Vadi flavour on them, and I already just started kind of going through that. It was supposed to be a short-term project, and then the longer I did it, the more I felt that actually it stands well on its own, as its own kind of unique system. And just really just kind of kept running with it. And I actually prefer it to any of the Fiore stuff I’ve done.
Guy Windsor
I would absolutely agree that Vadi is his own system. It’s clearly influenced by Italian fencing of the period. It’s not an outlier in any respect. But you were doing Fiore exercises with a Vadi twist in class. And presumably that wasn’t massively disruptive. So there are sufficient similarities that you can get, you can sort of do that. But yeah, it’s not Fiore. I mean, the footwork is different for a start.
Jamie MacIver
Footwork is different. And in many ways, I think what you said there, and you have an article you wrote a while back on comparing Vadi’s guards to the Bolognese and the Fiore guards and that one. And, you know, I feel that the links to the Bolognese are actually kind of both more interesting and stronger in many ways than sometimes to Fiore.
Guy Windsor
Closer in time. I mean, 1480s. Fiore is writing in around 1400 to 1410. Vadi, 1482, to 1487 somewhere in there. Yeah, and the beginnings of the Bolognese are already around in the 1480s. The first publication, I think, is 1517.
Jamie MacIver
It’s about that, you’re right, yeah, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I would say Vadi is contemporary with early Bolognese, much more so than he’s contemporary with Fiore.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, yeah. And I was quite confused when I first heard about Dadi, actually, because you are 100% right on the timings there.
Guy Windsor
So I’m right about something. Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you.
Jamie MacIver
And yeah, your new translation, up until relatively recently, was the one I tended to use. But Filippo Dadi, was confusing for me when I first encountered this. Is it just the misspelling of the name? I was really hoping it would be. Very clearly, is definitely not. 100% different people. But it did have a brief, like hour when I was like, this is kind of funny, you know.
Guy Windsor
So specifically, most of the people listening will have sweated through a two hour long with Dario Magnani. We have a two-hour long conversation about a single paragraph in Fiore’s text in the Getty manuscript, right? So if they can handle that, the listeners can handle some serious specifics about Vadi. What do you think, particularly is Vadi-esque? What makes him so different to Fiore, in your view?
Jamie MacIver
So the first thing, the reason why Vadi clicks with me more than Fiore, before I get into the specifics of the system, is the presentation. And Vadi’s just kind of general throwing out of principles. Yeah, he doesn’t describe them necessarily as principles sometimes, but he’s talking generalities much more than specifics than Fiore, which, for me, makes it much easier to actually apply it in any kind of fencing context, because you don’t have to go through this kind of play structure and then work out how they link together.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, you don’t have to extrapolate the principles from the plays. He just tells them to you straight out in the 16 chapters of his theory,
Jamie MacIver
Which makes it so much easier to then say you can apply the principles more easily if you’ve been told the principles in the first place. For me, the stuff in Vadi that I find most different to Fiore, most fascinating, the stuff I prefer is what all the stuff that Vadi refers to as the Mezza Spada, the middle sword, where you have this kind of complex back and forth of sword play. You have these half actions, these cuts to come from strange angles with strange edges. And this kind of close blade work is what I really like in Vadi that I think you don’t see so much in Fiore. Or at least if it’s there, it’s kind of hidden away in the turns.
Guy Windsor
It’s described in Vadi. I think it’s implied in Fiore.
Jamie MacIver
It’s certainly nothing so straightforward to put it out of the book, as you get in Vadi. And really, the elevation of tempo, which we first see in Vadi, we don’t really have in Fiore. One of the core finishing concepts, then leads to a lot of the other aspects where he’s talking about exploitation of opportunities. He’s talking about the tactical aspects about when to apply things, not just what to apply, and then kind of working it out. And for me as a system as a whole, putting the presentation aside, Vadi’s longsword over I would say any other longsword system that’s practiced is the most defensive, the most kind of balancing, what would now be referred to as a parry riposte style, but coming in from a defensive aspect right back to a counter attack again, and the flow from that back and forth.
Guy Windsor
Why would you say, particularly that Vadi is more defensive than, for instance, Fiore?
Jamie MacIver
The guards is the main reason for Vadi. So if you see the presentation of pretty much all the guards, he’s brought the sword forward, and the structure of all of them has essentially closing lines of attack. Whereas Fiore’s guards are much more open. They’re kind of open to strike from.
Guy Windsor
Some of them are.
Jamie MacIver
I would say all of them are.
Guy Windsor
Well, I wouldn’t call posta longa bicorno or breve, or even finestra, particularly open. Definitely not frontale either.
Jamie MacIver
Even longa, because it’s got in the centre, versus on the side for the Vadi guards. You’re not closing a specific line of attack right. Here, I’ve got to react to my opponent versus here, here with the arzio and Vadi’s close guard, we’re closing a line of attack. And again, that gives me this setting up for a counterattack from a parry riposte, rather than a reaction proposal to it. So this use of the guards…
Guy Windsor
Hang on, hang on. Hang on. If the guard is already closing a line, as some of them clearly are, I’m not disagreeing with that point at all. How does that make you more likely to parry?
Jamie MacIver
So it’s setting up specific parries by closing lines, or rather, it’s closing down certain attacks. So if I’m in a central guard or an open guard of any kind, to be honest, my defensive options need to be wider, right? I haven’t forced my opponent to strike in a certain location, sure, and as a result, my defence is now on the back foot. I’m reacting to my opponent coming in. Instead of guards that close lines and waiting for my opponent to strike me and having the advantage of them being proactive or proactively closed off certain lines of attack. So by reducing their attacking options I can use that to make certain choices about how I want to defend or where to be struck at. With this closing of one line, obviously you open others, but I don’t know if I’m opening my left hand, I’m not going to be directly attacked onto the sword on that side unless I’ve messed it up. Whereas if I’m in a central guard or in a completely wide-open guard I could be attacked on the left, I could be attacked on the right, or whatever it happens to be, so my defence becomes more complicated. As a result of that, my counterattack becomes more complicated.
Guy Windsor
Interesting. Vadi does have open guards as you’ve described like porta di ferro piana terrena, basically tutta porta di ferro. Weapons held off to the side. Falcon is pretty much in the centre and it’s not closing any lines of attack. He has his posta di cinghiare. So, it’s not like he doesn’t have these open guards, but he has more examples of guards which close a specific line. That’s fair.
Jamie MacIver
The low guards, even those have been adapted slightly. They are more open than the others, there’s no denying it, but he’s even bringing the sword further forward on those ones. That lends them to be more counter thruster guards than the slightly wider versions of it which you see in Fiore.
Guy Windsor
OK, I don’t think you can get that from the images. If you’re comparing, for example, porta di ferro piana terrena with tutta porta di ferro, I don’t think there’s any meaningful difference in the position of the sword. Likewise I would say the same for his denti di cinghiare, which is closer to mezzana di ferro in Fiore. If the point is significantly out of line, which it is in both cases, I don’t see how that can be different.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, it’s funny, I don’t think it is significantly out of line in the Vadi version. Actually for any of them. I did a thing a while back, a very long time ago now, where I had one image from a tournament video I had that looked just exactly like one of the guard plates from Vadi. I thought that’s just a weird coincidence, that’s hilarious. I wonder how many more I can find. They’re not pictures. But actually some of these coincidences of where the sword positions are, you do end up with pictures that look almost exactly like the guards. So I think they are better than I gave them credit for when I started and there is also advice in the text section to keep your sword in front of you. You have these guards where the wider you go the less you are keeping to that. So the images also match the parts of the text where he’s got this charge forward. Falcon by the way, I’ve always said that Falcon is the exception to many of Vadi’s guard rules and I think that it’s true. Although I do hold it over the right, not in the centre, because you can see the pull in behind the head in the image and it’s over the right shoulder I think still, which gives you a more charge position. It does kind of close lines. It is definitely less true than of the others.
Guy Windsor
I don’t think it meaningfully closes the line. OK. I would have to see you doing porta di ferro to see how you could possibly think you are closing the line there.
Jamie MacIver
To be clear, the low guards I agree, don’t explicitly close lines, except for to the legs but I don’t think it really counts.
Guy Windsor
That’s true for Fiore’s low guards too. Not coda longa, obviously. But the rest.
Jamie MacIver
But bringing the sword more forward has different reasons. It encourages certain defences and counter thrusts, but you’re right that I don’t think that the low guards are closing the lines in the same way as the middle or the high guards are.
Guy Windsor
What are your feelings about the feet close together that you see in for instance Falcon and in Vadi’s fenestre?
Jamie MacIver
Interesting. Saggitario, archer, is the most interesting version of this.
Guy Windsor
Because the weapon is low?
Jamie MacIver
No, because he has images that look exactly like Saggitario where they are not together in later parts of the book. So in the guard section, yes, his feet are very close together for archer. And then in the mixed weapon section he’s standing with something that looks like a retracted archer but with feet wide. And you’ve got of course the first play where he’s basically in archer position with feet wide again. Obviously, they are in different contexts. But for me the feet together feet far away, I think it is somewhat transient rather than essential to the guard, in that it’s an option. Sometimes you have your feet together, sometimes you don’t depending on what you’re doing. Especially if guards are end points of actions, which is a fundamental principle in Vadi, as in other senses.
Guy Windsor
Okay, now I agree, but I’m curious, because I’ve never found any real evidence for Vadi thinking that the guards are the beginning, middle and ends of blows. And I agree, and I’ll say the same of Fiore. The earliest, explicit textual reference I have for that is Angelo Viggiani’s Lo Schermo, published in 1575.
Jamie MacIver
I mean, Vadi does have the guard-to-guard line. So if you wish to appear great, go from guard to guard with the slow and serene hand, so that that is obviously one line, right?
Guy Windsor
A very good line.
Jamie MacIver
A wonderful line. Yeah, very quotable, very memorable, that’s for sure. Yeah, he doesn’t often say, come to this guard, come to this guard as an end point explicitly, that’s for sure. There is one of the sections, I forget which chapter, where he’s talking about the different blows. And I think fendente in particular, he’s talking about it.
Guy Windsor
Fendente gets its own chapter.
Jamie MacIver
Let me look it up.
Guy Windsor
With the magic of technology, we can trim out any embarrassing pauses, although I tend to leave them in because, you know, otherwise, you can sort of give people the impression that you have the entire thing memorized. And it’s a bit untrue.
Jamie MacIver
I haven’t quite.
Guy Windsor
Chapter six, seven blows of the sword.
Jamie MacIver
I’ve lost it. Yeah, chapter six. So chapter six has a lot of these in it, right? So, from the fendente chapter, I’m going from a different translation.
Guy Windsor
Shock horror. So whose translation, are you using?
Jamie MacIver
Mine. So he’s got the downward cuts, low guards, a fendente, he’s then got downward cuts are well suited to wound, from one pass or another, we return to guard. Note, we are not slow to strike. At least that’s in the translation version that I’ve got, which is the fourth paragraph, fourth stanza. He’s also talking about ending.
Guy Windsor
Oh yeah. Okay. So fourth paragraph striking, we are well endowed, returning to guard from pass to pass. Note, we are not slow to strike. That’s my translation.
Jamie MacIver
So there are plenty of times where he’s talking about moving from guard to guard. He does never, you write that. He never says, oh, I started in Archer and I ended in boar’s tooth or anything like that. The start positions are pretty clear, he doesn’t describe it coming to a guard, but it does end up coming to one anyway, in the defence against the rising strike chapter. So this is the start in archer, your opponents in iron door.
Guy Windsor
That’s a weird section, like, why the hell are we there?
Jamie MacIver
It doesn’t match to anything else in the chapter either. It’s a bit annoying.
Guy Windsor
Yes, yes. I assume you’ve seen my interpretation of it.
Jamie MacIver
I have, yes, yeah.
Guy Windsor
Can you improve on it?
Jamie MacIver
My main improvement, I mean, I think the first part is pretty clear. It’s kind of coming down on top of the sword and straightening up. I think the main way of improving the interpretation is forgetting about whatever the hell play 13 is supposed to be. Because I don’t think,
Guy Windsor
It’s risky.
Jamie MacIver
No one has ever convinced me of any plausible thing that adds up to 13, that naturally flows from the position you end up.
Guy Windsor
I mean, he clearly, when he says, When your sword is joined at the crossing, then do the 13th stretta play, as you can plainly see pictures in our book, on page seven, and it’s like, yeah, but there ain’t no page numbers, and page seven starting from what, and, I mean, you can think that maybe the 13th play is the 13th play of the longsword. That’s not an unreasonable supposition. What else could it be?
Jamie MacIver
Yep. There’s an article by a guy who works for the Louvre where he cares about the Vadi medallion rather than the Vadi book. So for those who don’t know, there was a Vadi got a medallion cast about 30 years before the book, it’s got the same kind of image of fencing on it, so we’re pretty sure it’s Vadi’s, but he’s talks a bit about who Vadi is. And I don’t know whether this is true or not, but his claim is that the two books were separate and later combined, the written part that ends with telos, the end, and the image part, his theory is that the paper changes. I’d never seen the manuscript. I’ve got no idea.
Guy Windsor
That’s an interesting idea. I think that’s very unlikely.
Jamie MacIver
I have no idea. And having no opportunity to examine the manuscript, so I’ve never been able to find out whether this is just hare brained or not. This guy is not a fencing person, as I say.
Guy Windsor
Presumably, he has the collation, right?
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, but the cut is, is immediately after the telos line.
Guy Windsor
Sure, but is it? Is it at the end of a quire? Because that is so 14 v.
Jamie MacIver
I don’t remember, is the cut of the swords, but basically, immediately after telos, that’s the end of the quire.
Guy Windsor
Okay. So it’s so it’s plausible that it has actually been stitched together, whereas obviously, if it came in the middle of a quire, that would be unlikely.
Jamie MacIver
No, I double checked. I checked your second book that describes it, or was it wherever you describe it? I don’t
Guy Windsor
In the introduction to The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest, because I actually have the Sotheby’s sale, you know, when they were selling these manuscripts, I have the Sotheby’s sale catalogue, the actual one, I’ll grab it. It’s amazing what you can get on eBay.
Jamie MacIver
I hunted down the PDF, that was hard enough.
Guy Windsor
Well, if ever you need to refer to it, just let me know. The Getty manuscript was sold in, I think 1966 and a year later they have the Vadi one. So I’ve got the Getty one, I’ve got the Vadi one, I’ve got both of them. This is the Vadi one here. So that is 28th of November 1967.
Jamie MacIver
Two years before I was interested in it, sadly.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I just found these on eBay. I found the date of the sale, and then I just hunted them down, and bought them both, and I think I’ve scanned them in, and I’ve put them online, so the PDF probably came from me. I didn’t scan the whole thing because who cares about, you know, a bunch of religious texts. Yeah, exactly. No, not interested. And what’s fascinating is it actually has some pretty good pictures from, I mean, there’s,
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, it’s not bad at all, I’ve seen worse.
Guy Windsor
My first exposure to Vadi was this really, really shitty partial photocopy back in about 1998. And I was like, I can’t do anything with this. And then the scans became available. Thank God for that. We can actually do some work.
Jamie MacIver
We’re definitely luckier that we used to be, 100%.
Guy Windsor
So is there anything else regarding Vadi that you think we should discuss?
Jamie MacIver
Well, I mean, the only thing I’ll add is that, of course, I’ve been working from my translation for this conversation. So I do have a new translation coming out.
Guy Windsor
In what way coming out?
Jamie MacIver
I’ll putting it open for a PDF as an open, pay as you like link at first, and then I’ll be getting a print version of it out on Lulu. Hopefully soon after that. The PDF version will just be the translation, really, with some notes, not a lot of extra material, but the Lulu version, I hope to put in some kind of, at least more descriptive content.
Guy Windsor
And some justifications for why your translation is different to my version.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly.
Guy Windsor
It’s funny. Actually, I’m glad we sort of brought this up, because I occasionally get emailed by people asking me why my translation of Fiore or Vadi or whoever else is different to some other person’s. And it’s like, sometimes it’s because the other person clearly can’t read Italian. I mean, there are some egregious translations out there, but often it’s just because they are expressing the same basic idea, but in a different way, because their use of English is different. Or every translation has an element of interpretation in it. And if there are two possible translations of a particular word, and one supports your interpretation and the other one doesn’t, you’re likely to go with the one that does.
Jamie MacIver
I completely agree. And you know, I mostly use your second translation, but I’ve got pretty much every written translation there is of Vadi in this house right now, right? So, yeah, there’s Greg Mele, Luca Porzio has one.
Guy Windsor
Okay, something you should know about Greg and Luca’s, yeah, the night before, I think it was July 4, so major party time in America. Greg stayed up all night getting the final corrections done to that document before it was being sent to the printers the next day. And he got it in under the wire, just in time, and the fucker sent the wrong text to the printers. So what we actually have in that published book is not actually finished. That is way worse than my Veni Vadi Vici fuck up, because he had no control over it.
Jamie MacIver
I will double check my translation again before I publish it. I think these two conversations that we’ve just had.
Guy Windsor
If you’re publishing it yourself, you have complete control over when to do it. And also, if it goes out and then you decide you’re not happy with it. I mean, I have a few corrections I want to make for The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest. And I’m going to be doing a not a second edition, just a slightly updated first edition is, it’s not much stuff. It’s mostly being more consistent about zogho stretto, zogho largo, and things like that. You know I’ve got a facsimile out, of course you do. But I’m going to be producing another version of the facsimile which has the original facsimile in it, unchanged, but a second copy of the facsimile with my English over the top. I wouldn’t want to sell a book like that that didn’t have the original with it, because I don’t want anyone to get the idea that this is actually what the book looks like. It’s got to be absolutely clear that no, this has been fucked about with and English put in where the Italian should be. We’re doing the same for my translation of the Getty manuscript that should be coming out in a couple of weeks, but Vadi is next. I’m going to get a few corrections in there. So if you have any notes for me, this is a perfect time to send them over. And I will take them seriously. No promises.
Jamie MacIver
I will take them seriously. I’ll look at it. But I’ve also got one other thing that I can offer you that I was planning on getting out after I got the publication out. One of the things I’ve done as part of this is to get the high-quality images from the library that has them, and get the backgrounds removed so they can be look better on a printed page. So I’ve had permission from the library to release them again on a pay as you like basis. I want to get them out there so other people can use them too, not just me. They still got the same copyright. So you’d still have to go back to the library to get permissions for any kind of commercial publication, but the background images have already been removed. Cost me a few quid to pay someone to do that. Hence the pay as you like, model for it. But I want to get them out there so other people can use them too.
Guy Windsor
Is that out now?
Jamie MacIver
I haven’t yet done it. It should be out soon. Should be out soon.
Guy Windsor
When you say pay as you like, where are you hosting that?
Jamie MacIver
I will host it through my website, and I can do it. I’ve got a Historical Fencing Research website that will also have a link.
Guy Windsor
Dude, this is a podcast. You have to say the URL.
Jamie MacIver
Historicalfencingresearch.com.
Guy Windsor
Historicalfencingresearch.com. Did I get that exactly right, Jamie? People could go to Historicalfencingresearch.com.
Jamie MacIver
Historicalfencingresearch.com will have a link to the pay as you like version. It should be out probably before the end of the year. I suspect they’ll be out sometime in November this year.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. That’d be great. And we can maybe scalp those, handy for like sticking the translation on.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly, yeah, the intent is to get a printed version, because I tried to print out some of these just with a regular printer. You can’t see anything because of, you know, completely extraneous detail.
Guy Windsor
The reason I did this facsimile, is because I wanted a printed version. And the getting it done at home is expensive, and getting it done at a local print shop is expensive and not particularly much better than getting it done at home, but getting it done on the best quality paper at print on demand or whatever, I can actually sell it to people for cheaper than it would be to print it at home. And it’s better quality. So it just struck me as a really fucking good idea. So I’m glad you got a copy. I would like better scans, though. They’re ok.
Jamie MacIver
There are new scans that are really good, you should see them. They are so much better than the ones that I’ve seen before. They’re library published, and that’s the ones I’ve used for the background removal.
Guy Windsor
So where would you find those? Are they on Wiktenauer yet?
Jamie MacIver
I think there is a link on Wiktenauer now. I think they’re not the main images on Wiktenauer. But I think Wiktenauer has a link to it. If not, you can definitely get them through the Bibliothèque Nationale, the one that has the Vadi scans through there, if you go through their manuscript portal, I’m pretty sure there’s a link to it from that as well.
Guy Windsor
Okay, handy, yeah, I’ll have a look because better quality scans would be helpful.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, they are significantly better than the ones I saw before.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Jolly, good. All righty, so are we done with Vadi?
Jamie MacIver
We can move on, yes.
Guy Windsor
Well, I always want to make sure. All right, so London Historical Fencing Club has graduated to having its own space. So what made you take the plunge? Because that is a big commitment.
Jamie MacIver
The worst big commitment. We outgrew our old space a long time ago. Years ago, we were almost outgrowing it, at least for longsword, before the pandemic. But basically what we had were two halls that were very close together. They weren’t big halls, community centres, in Kennington, which is still kind of central to London, not that far from Vauxhall. Actually, you couldn’t really have more than about 14 people in each hall for a class. So it wasn’t big, and they were close together, but not that close together. So we had two classes a night, and they were spread over the two different halls. They also weren’t especially cheap. I mean, they weren’t too expensive, but they weren’t especially cheap, and most of our classes post-pandemic really exploded, and we were selling out routinely on the Rapier class, on most of the longsword classes, on sabre. We also do a smallsword and a Fiore class that were a bit smaller than the other two, but they were also well attended. And as well as that, we were really restricted. Like space in London is really hard to find. Like everything is booked out, and particularly when you worry about space over multiple nights with rental for keeping all your kit there. But it’s basically a problem. We when we added the Fiore night, it’s a great example. Actually, we wanted to do it on a Tuesday, but none of our halls had availability on a Tuesday, so we did it Thursday, because we had some kit there. We also wanted to do it where the longsword class was, because they use a lot of similar equipment, but we couldn’t because it wasn’t available. So we had to buy a whole new set of longswords to put in second hall. So, you know, all these kinds of challenges, and then we would do things like, oh, we want to do a weekend class, or we want to do a tournament, and finding a place for that was, was 90% of the work of running that. So both for giving our regular classes some room to grow and to get the flexibility for these other things, as well as kind of better options for storage, all of our kit was bundled into a cupboard or a bag after class. It didn’t make for the freshest of kit, as you can imagine. We had a long-standing plan to try and get a permanent venue that was initially we thought we were going to try and get, because we’re charity, so we initially planned to get some funding for it, for lottery funding, we applied for it. And they said, great idea, but we’re not funding that way now, so sorry. And we thought, okay, well, that screws our plans. But we were lucky, sort of, that the London business market business rental has tanked quite a bit, so the price of venues was significantly lower than when we first looked. And actually, we could just about take the plunge with a bit of a risk, accepting that we were not quite breaking even yet. But if we add some more nights, if we run some of these one-off classes, actually, we’re not that far away.
Guy Windsor
And it’s your own space. So you can add as many nights as you want.
Jamie MacIver
And it really changes the equation, right? So we worried about this before it’s like, okay, if we do this, will we get enough people to break even, or we’re going to be losing money on this night? And sometimes we did. It was fine, right? Because we ran something that people enjoyed, but now it’s like anything we run, if five people and a dog show up, whatever, it’s still money.
Guy Windsor
So are you charging by the class?
Jamie MacIver
We do charge by the class, yeah.
Guy Windsor
Oh, if you don’t mind my saying, that’s a terrible idea.
Jamie MacIver
Why?
Guy Windsor
Because you have a major monthly outgoing, right, which is non-negotiable and it’s fixed. First, if you have your all of your members paying a monthly fee that is automated, then your cash flow stabilizes enormously. And this is good for several reasons. Firstly, you will know, based on the number of members you have, whether you can afford the rent or not. Not how active they are, it’s how many members you have. And secondly, it means you can afford to also run classes which aren’t as popular but are probably good for people. Like, just as one possible example, you might have a women’s only class, for instance. And maybe, if you didn’t have enough women to really properly fill it and justify it financially, you don’t have to care, because you have the space, and everyone is paying a monthly fee, you have all this flexibility for doing the thing that you know is the right thing to do, and you don’t have to worry about, you know, do we have three people in here tonight, or do we have 20 people in here tonight?
Jamie MacIver
To be fair, it’s not generally an issue for us. We have considered it. We have discussed it and discussed a few different models. We’ve stuck with pay by the class, kind of deliberately. A lot of our members can attend every week. A lot of our members are not able to come to everything, and most of our classes are pretty close to selling out, even after the move. I’m pretty sure tonight is sold out or within one or two from it. And it means that those people who are doing it transiently can do it a bit more transiently, and those who do it more regularly, we’ve got some ways of them getting discounts if they’re coming to multiple classes a week, and at least the admin overhead is nothing, because it’s all just to our website. It really just ticks along with nothing extra for that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, risky, complicated. Your club, you do what you want. So how big is the space?
Jamie MacIver
Size wise, I forget. Hang on. Essentially, it’s a long railway arch. So it’s about nine meters wide, about 25 meters long.
Guy Windsor
So that’s about 240 square meters. That’s about the size of my salle in Helsinki.
Jamie MacIver
No, it’s a bit smaller than that, sorry, a bit smaller than that. But because you’ve also got some changing room space, which we never had before. Kit storage and that kind of stuff. So we can comfortably fit about 28 fencers in there. So it’s quite sizable.
Guy Windsor
You wouldn’t really want a class any bigger than that if you’re running good classes.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly. One of the things we’ve been able to run from this, I did a beginners’ Crash Course. We did a half day longsword course to try, and I normally have a beginners’ intake for longsword, but it impacts regular training a lot more than this half day Crash Course did, because this is independent, and then we get a few beginners. And for that, I had 24 and that’s a lot. In a single class anyway. We do have two classes running at once, so that means that, okay, does restrict it to be a bit more, but we’re able to balance between it. So if, like, one is bigger than the other, they can take a few extra and be, like, 18 and 10, rather than maybe split down the middle, which is what we used to have.
Guy Windsor
Of course, it’s in the same hall. So you can be flexible about how you divide it. How do you divide the space? Because that gets very confusing.
Jamie MacIver
Essentially, it’s some scaffold poles, and it’s on wheels, and it’s got this big, thick cloth curtain between it. So we can move it to make each hall as big as we want. So one’s much smaller the other room, one will get more room. Then you pull the curtain across, and it doesn’t fully block out the sound, but it does create a physical separation.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, the psychological separation is the important thing.
Jamie MacIver
It’s quite a heavy curtain. It’s quite a hard hall, so it’s a bit echoey, right now. When we add some soundproofing to it, I think the curtain will mean that you pretty much are in two separate rooms.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Well, I look forward to seeing it sometime. Sounds great. And are there any other permanent historical martial arts training spaces in London?
Jamie MacIver
In London, no. There are two other than UK I’m aware of, there’s one in Sheffield, the Valhalla Centre. They do a lot of axe throwing as well. So it’s not just HEMA, it’s also kind of HEMA adjacent stuff. And Vanguard Centre in Glasgow.
Guy Windsor
Is that Keith Farrell’s.
Jamie MacIver
I mean, he’s not there anymore, but yeah, he kind of set it up.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay, yeah. I mean, it’s transformative. I remember, I started my school in March 2001 and by June, I’d found a permanent space, and as a business decision, it was probably terrible. And totally unjustifiable. And I didn’t care, because it was clearly the right thing to do. And, yeah, it makes all the difference. You could just organize whatever you want exactly. I’ve shot a bunch of my online courses in my Salle because the space is there. We’ve had parties there as well.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, we’re considering that too. We’ve got some things coming up that we never would have been able to organize before. And it was easy. So we’ve got an armour fencing class coming up. We’ve got other kind of fun stuff coming up. We’re doing a Halloween special, smallsword and lantern class, which, you know, turn all the lights off and play about with that, and a few other things that just fun things. It’s so much easier, is the main thing. The hassle, weeks of work to find a venue in London, and sometimes the venues are like, Oh no, yes. Sorry, last minute. Sorry, we’re not we’re going to prioritize this other booking, and it’s happened to me more than once, I was thrilled about so we know that that’s going to happen to us in our venue at least. So that’s good. Excellent.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that’s pretty good. So here we are two middle aged white dudes, two middle aged, bald white dudes, I should say, talking about running clubs. So of course, we’re going to discuss diversity, because we’re so good at it. All right, so I’ve noticed, I did a little bit of digging around on the internet. You seem to have a pretty diverse club. How do you encourage that, and what are the effects of your approaches?
Jamie MacIver
We do have a pretty diverse club, I think, at least in terms of gender diversity. And we have a large number of LGBT in our club as well.
Guy Windsor
I noticed the picture of your space you have like, rainbow colours in the inside of the dressing room.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly, the dressing rooms are rainbow coloured. You know, it is a constant thing, right? If you want it, it’s never once and done is the main thing. And one of the principles when we founded it, we said, look, this is something we will aim for. And you know, we’ve made mistakes along the way. Nothing’s been perfect. But you know, part of it is, is branding. You need to be kind of clear about this one. Some things people will look for as standard, if they are worried about inclusivity, are things like code of conducts. If you haven’t got one, that will be an immediate red flag to somebody kind of looking into it. Likewise, getting images out there. If you are diverse, as diverse as you can, get images out there that show you’re not just 10 bald white dudes with beards. You know, as far as possible. Again, it’s quite encouraging. But even with all of that, there is a snowball effect from it. And I was quite frustrated for a while, actually, that the club in general was more diverse than the longsword class. I could never understand why. And a large part of it, you know, from speaking to people, was that actually we only had a couple of women in longsword. So when women came along and they were like, I don’t want to be the only woman in longsword, and they’re like, I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to go do one of the other ones where there’s more women. And that has kind of shifted over the years, which is good, but a lot of that is just constant messaging for it, constant actions to it. Our code of conduct goes out to every enquiry. So people get sent it straight away. Lots of people say, “Great, love that you have this. Really agree with it.” Sometimes we have people go silent and never show up.
Guy Windsor
So the Code of Conduct did its job.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly that, it’s working to make our lives easier. It’s much easier that than showing up and dealing with it later. And our committee has always had women on it. Has always been quite diverse from that side of things. So people in leadership positions where possible, makes a big difference too. And then there’s some small stuff, like, doing pride announcements and things like that. We did “give a girl a sword,” which was something that, again, that Esfinges ran, where the intent was to get women in fencing. So we did a few free classes for women. One year, one of the things we kind of did, and then some non-binary folk called up on it. We kind of extended that to include non-binary fencers as well. And I had some HEMA non-binary friends who reached out and said, actually, hang on. This isn’t really the right way to do it. So the year after that, we ran our own flavour, which was called “blades beyond the binary”, which was intended for same idea as “give a girl a sword”, but for trans and non-binary folk a free class, come along, purely a class for that. And both actively getting people in from those classes, which is fewer than you might think. Actually, we definitely have some really committed people that came through from those but if a 14-person class for that, you’re going to get one or two. You’re not going to get 14 coming back regularly. But the very fact that you’ve done them and that they’re there, and they’re part of that club persona or image, people have joined, have said to me, I saw that you did that way back when, and that looked really good. And that made me comfortable about joining and that kind of stuff. And the funny one is, is our logo. So, our Facebook logo was a pride rainbow version of our official black and white logo. And we did it for pride one year, and then I think it was November or something like that, I realized we haven’t changed it back. And I was like, why change it? Why not leave it up? Like, you know, it’s clearly doing its job, like, there’s no harm in leaving it up. Actually, it’s better. So even small things like that can, can show that you are kind of receptive to it.
Guy Windsor
And I guess it’s consistent messaging over time. So this is, it’s clear, it’s not just one woke person on the committee decided to do an event one day.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, yeah. The other less pleasant side, actually, is that you’ve got to be willing to act on some of these things too. And you know when, when issues do come up, someone in who is acting in a way that you know is counter to that code of conduct. You’ve got to act on it. First talk to them and kick them out, if necessary, in extreme versions of it.
Guy Windsor
How many people have you kicked out?
Jamie MacIver
It’s like four or five. In eight years. So, it’s not even once a year. But yeah, it has happened.
Guy Windsor
Hang on, but that’s a lot more than none.
Jamie MacIver
It’s a lot more than none, yep. And there are many that have been short of kicking out. And actually, for the most part, we don’t want to jump straight to, oh, you made one joke, you’re out. Yeah, most of the time, a direct conversation from an instructor or committee member, “this is why what you said was over the line, we need you to stop doing it” is enough. And a lot of people have had that and corrected, and then that’s been sufficient to keep a nice, friendly space that is inclusive for a variety of people.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Okay, so what prompted you to start a company to do research into historical martial arts safety?
Jamie MacIver
For most things, the way to convince me to do anything is to get me annoyed enough at the status quo. And this is really one of them. So I run a lot of stuff. I run a historical fencing club. I run the Wessex league tournaments. And in running a club and running a tournament, running even just a little event like you’ve got to make safety decisions, and you’ve had to do it. Pretty much anybody organising anything has had to do it. And you know, we make them particularly for the Wessex League, based upon what we see, what our experiences, and all this kind of stuff. And I’ve had a lot of people over the years saying, well, why are you doing that? That’s just your opinion, right? Or, you know, it’s just based on anecdote, and it is true, but there’s nothing else to base it on. By and large, there isn’t really any research into HEMA safety. A lot of the stuff, the protective gear that we use, they’ve got safety standards for completely different purposes, right?
Guy Windsor
Most have a safety standard, basically for foil, epee and sabre. So like, the puncture resistance on the jackets is for foil, epee and sabre, and the resistance in the masks is for foil, epee and sabre.
Jamie MacIver
And the mask is tested. They’ve got impact tests for it. But what they’re worried about is a small, stiff spike puncturing the mask, not a big, heavy concussive blow. So they’re testing completely different things. And you know, HEMA is getting bigger, and I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with making risk decisions based upon, guesswork and hearsay. And you know people are right that I’m not basing it on research, because it doesn’t exist. So the safety tips project was really the first thing that kind of sprung into thinking, what else could I do? And the original question I’m trying to answer with it, though it looks like it would be more stuff as well, is particularly for rapier. What should you do with the tip of your sword? And I’ve seen so many different answers to that question. Like some people say, pretty much no one uses just a rounded off rapier tip these days.
Guy Windsor
25 years ago, I stuck one of those four inches in somebody’s leg by accident. That was 25 years ago. I learned very quickly. And that’s not hearsay, that’s personal experience. And I will never use one of those rapiers ever again.
Jamie MacIver
Absolutely right, but so most people will then put something on the end of it. And what that could be, could be anything. I’ve seen bullet cases. I’ve seen rubber tips for archery blunts. I’ve seen walking stick tips. I’ve seen different varieties of plastic, leather. Thermoplastic is the one that we promote at the Wessex League, which is a kind of malleable moulded to the shape, which one is better, right? It was the simple question I wanted to answer, because we made a decision to stop allowing rubber tips. We had a few cases of mass getting pushed into people’s heads and concussions from rubber tips. We were kind of on the fence. And then a few more cases happened, and we decided.
Guy Windsor
So you’re distinguishing between rubber and plastic.
Jamie MacIver
Yep. Absolutely.
Guy Windsor
What’s the difference?
Jamie MacIver
Soft versus hard, really. So even the hardest rubber has some give to it. And the thought that was playing out with what we were seeing was that these soft tips, especially when they hit to a mask, have this tendency to stick to the mask rather than glance off it. And we were seeing a lot of cases of masks being pushed into people’s faces, as I said, and a few concussions, or near concussions, and we were concerned about it, and said, okay, we’ve been keeping our eye on it. We’d been debating it. And then a few more happened at one event. Okay, we’re done with this. We were on the fence, and we’re now not on the fence, so we switched to hard tips only was the rule. For anything, but particularly for rapier. Hard tips. But then, is it better? It’s a very simple question, and I came up with a couple experiments where I kind of thought, well, could this work? I don’t know, to test both, whether different tips affect how likely it is for sword to glance off a mask or to stick to a mask, was one of the risks that we were worried about, and of course, the second risk, the one that you talked about, stabbing someone. Which tips affect that and how much?
Guy Windsor
I’ve also seen a rolled tip longsword go into somebody’s arm through the skin.
Jamie MacIver
There was one fairly recently in a tournament in Prague where a rolled tip longsword, I think it was rolled tip, might have been flared, but either way, punched straight through the SPES jacket. SPES light, I think it was, but still punctured through it like, you know, it’s not pleasant. They don’t want it. No one was injured.
Guy Windsor
Well, that’s lucky. Yeah, but yeah, those spade tip things, I think they’re horrendous.
Jamie MacIver
You mean, the historical,
Guy Windsor
Those flared tips, because their job, historically, their job was to split your head open. What the fuck are people doing putting them on swords where you don’t want to split somebody’s head open? What the fuck?
Jamie MacIver
I 100% agree. First time I fenced someone I was like, can have a look at that closely? I’ll go fence someone else now. Thank you very much, right? I mean, it was very flexible, but even so, it was super thin at the end. Missed the point. No pun intended on what they’re supposed to do for. So yeah, that was the main reason we wanted to do this. And then I realized there’s lots of other research projects that could spin from that. So it was originally to structure for that stuff, but we’ve also been looking at safety standards. So I’ve been able to look at a lot of the different safety standards for different sports and what they entail and what they actually measure. And one of my other projects right now for the Wessex League, we decided to do a bit more rigorous sword checks than we had in the past. So I’ve expanded that to be able to record even more data about swords and linking it to injury and breakage information. Once I’ve got that process down, I’m hoping to work with other tournaments so that they can also collect similar information, start understanding sword patterns of breakage, like what’s durable, what’s causing injuries, because, again, stiffness or point type, all this kind of stuff. Manufacturers make the choices. They don’t even list them in a consistent fashion, let alone have any kind of common message for testing.
Guy Windsor
At the end of the day, no matter what you do, you’re hitting somebody with a four-foot-long steel fucking bar. It is not safe.
Jamie MacIver
Never going to be 100% safe. 100% Yep, but, but definitely, we can, we can understand what’s risky and what’s not risky a bit better.
Guy Windsor
My reservations around equipment generally, is that it leads to complacency. And I found that my students who have experience of slow speed sparring with sharps and no protection, fence differently when they’re wearing protection and they’re using blunts because they know what they’re trying to simulate, and they know what it feels like to actually treat the sword as a really dangerous object, which it is. But when you put a rubber point on the end, it’s disguised as a safe object. And we make all sorts of misjudgements about the level of risk we’re actually engaging with.
Jamie MacIver
I don’t think it has to lead to complacency. This happens. People say that a lot, and certainly there are people who, when they’re geared up, are complacent. Probably they wouldn’t be complacent if they were naked with sharps, yeah, fine. But I also don’t think you necessarily have to become complacent about safety, just because you are kitted up. For me, where I find the most risks come are actually when there’s a mismatch of expectations. The event that I went to many years ago that had the most injuries, that kind of made me set up, was just an open sparring event. It was just a free open sparring event in London, a bunch of clubs came. The problem was none of these clubs were really interacting. They all had very different expectations of, well, what’s an appropriate force level, what’s the right kit, what’s the appropriate sword? And there was no explicit conversation between people to kind of match levels and understand what’s going on. And I think there were like three hand injuries that went to hospital. I got a cut on my hand. I didn’t go to hospital, but my hand got cut. Also I wasn’t using unsuitable equipment. I was using Red Dragons for steel longsword. So this was nine years ago. So, you know, there’s that too. And when things change and you don’t realize it, that’s when I think the biggest issues happen. The only two times I’ve injured someone in tournament have both been in tournaments with provided swords where the sword was stiffer and heavier than the sword I normally use. And maybe it might be a coincidence. Or might be that I was fencing in a way that was completely appropriate for the weapon that I was using and used to and hadn’t done the adaptation to realize the risk of change. Need to adapt my behaviours to go with it.
Guy Windsor
That’s tricky. So why form a limited liability company to do this?
Jamie MacIver
Well, a few reasons. We ran a Kickstarter to raise the funds for the first safety tip experiment, which is the first one we ran. And I wasn’t comfortable that going through my personal account, per se, and I wasn’t comfortable going through the Club account. As well as that, this is important research. I want it to be done. It’s also very time consuming and quite expensive. Most of HEMA runs on free labour, and I dedicated a lot of free labour to HEMA over 10 years, and I decided that this is something that is going to benefit HEMA across the world. I think it’s reasonable for my time to be paid for it.
Guy Windsor
No argument from me, I’ve been getting paid for my time since 2001.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly so, but then also for these people who are collaborating with me on it, you know, I wanted to make sure that it’s recognized what it is. As well as that, other things coming up, where I wanted to put everything through it, so the company will also be where any proceeds from book sales and things like that go through. It isn’t just safety research, it’s also the normal, traditional research of into this text or writing training documents and that kind of stuff, just that the safety research stuff needs to be kind of community funded, whereas the other stuff is probably going to be kind of self-funded from book sales or anything like that.
Guy Windsor
Because the first thing that sprung to my mind is that when you do this research, you will come up with a set of recommendations. That’s the point of it, right? And when you come up with a set of recommendations, you immediately become vulnerable to people who are following or think they are following those recommendations, and get injured nonetheless. And if you have a limited liability company, yep, right, they, and they decide to sue you, well, you can just fold the company and walk away. It’s a useful legal distinction.
Jamie MacIver
There is that. Yeah, that is not out of my mind, either. And there is a lot of risk involved, like, if I stand out and say to whatever there is, you know, 100,000 people, you should do it this way, and they’ll do it, you know. Great,
Guy Windsor
Somebody’s going to get hurt anyway.
Jamie MacIver
But someone will get hurt anyway. And actually, to your point, what you were saying earlier about we’re hitting each other with big, heavy swords.
Guy Windsor
Four-foot-long steel bars was exactly the expression I used.
Jamie MacIver
There is no way of turning the risk to zero. We can lower the risk. We can understand what they are, and we can make choices about it, but we’re not going to be able to make no risk decisions and still do what we do.
Guy Windsor
I am fascinated to know the results of the tip experiment. Because it was just last weekend that you did this. Can you run us through how the experiment was set up, what you were looking for and what you found, if you can speak to that?
Jamie MacIver
Absolutely, so there are two experiments that kind of go at the same time, we’re testing for two different risks. And as I say, the first risk we’re worried about is, does the sword hit and push on a mask, or does it slide off? And is pushing on the mask bad, slide off good? Second risk, does a sword hitting skin, flesh, is it likely to punctuate it? Or how much less or more likely is it to puncture? So we have two different experiments. The first one, the concussion experiment. Essentially what we have is we have a movable stand. It’s a boxing ball stand that’s been pretty heavily beefed up to take a hit from a sword. And we put a mask on the ball. We then attach an accelerometer to the stand so that when the mask is struck by the sword, it moves, and we can measure the acceleration that gets transferred to the stand, which would be equivalent acceleration transferred to your head, which would be bad, in case that wasn’t clear.
Guy Windsor
That’s good to be really specific, because not everyone listening has ever set up an experiment. In fact, I would wager that most haven’t.
Jamie MacIver
That’s fair. Yeah, I had not done one until, well, not fully until this weekend either. So we also had a secondary measure on that one, because there were some issues with accelerometers. So the secondary measure was we had a person stand to the side to assess how far it moved, and that gave us a rough indication of whether it skipped off the mask, whether it was a relatively light hit or was a heavier hit. That’s more of our backup plan, just in case the accelerometers didn’t work out because, turns out, accelerometers are quite difficult to work with.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, anyone who was doing electric sabre in the early 90s curses the very word accelerometer.
Jamie MacIver
I’m getting there. The last three days. I do data with stuff in my day job. I can program. I can do Python and stuff like that. If I couldn’t, we would be screwed, because it is difficult to get data out in a meaningful way. But thankfully, we’re mostly there. So that was experiment one. Experiment two was the puncture test. And what we did for that one was we set up a what we called a drop rig. So we have these vertical bars that have a smooth, controlled drop. And essentially, we clamp a sword between them, and then when the sword drops, it drops completely vertically, straight down, pretty much at the force of gravity. It’s consistent. Doesn’t wobble with this all clamped in place and moving correctly. The target area we can hit is about a two-centimetre diameter, consistently. It will not go outside of that diameter. So it’s a very, very consistent, smooth and accurate drop. And by adjusting the height, we can then adjust the force levels that are in the drop, or the energy levels in the drop, rather. And we then have a target at the bottom, and we’re able to see, does it puncture the target? And if it does puncture the target, how far does it puncture the target? And then, from knowing the weight of the sword and the frame and the height we drop it, we can calculate what was the energy in the drop, and how does the energy in the drop relate to whether and how deep it punctures the target.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so how did you make the strikes to the mask on Bob consistent?
Jamie MacIver
So Bob is the name of the stand, because I wanted to name him. And the way we did it, we had four experimenters. So the four experimenters each took it in turns to strike. We all did the same strikes. And what we had, we had a defined pattern of strikes where we set the start position and where we were targeting on the mask, and they were then done in a random order. So especially, we had randomized the order, but you did all the same strikes over that period, and the start positions were either on the right, on the middle, on the left, so equivalent to kind of third, the middle guard and fourth. And you were either striking to the right of the target, the middle of the target, or the left of the target. And every combination.
Guy Windsor
Was this with a rapier?
Jamie MacIver
With both, with both conditions. Rapier was the first experiment. We tested different tips. We also did an experiment testing different varieties of longswords. We tested both of those. Went through both experiments. And so each person did that same pattern for each condition we had. So that means we got about 100 strikes per condition. Bit over 100 strikes. So if we’re testing four types of rapier tip, that’s 400 and something strikes for testing that one thing. We also have an accelerometer on the sword as well as the target. So that means we’re able to compare how strong the hit from the sword was compared to how strong the force transferred to the target was. So that means we can, we can directly measure the strength of the hit versus the strength of the target. And the defined pattern means that at least it’s the same defined pattern. So any randomness about hit location, it’s the same randomness for each condition.
Guy Windsor
Having the accelerometer on the sword is probably the critical bit. Because different people are going to strike with different levels of force anyway.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly that. And in theory, if, if the mask is not doing its job, and things are sticking to the mask, what we expect to see is a completely linear relationship. So the harder the hit, the more the mask moves. If they’re skipping off, or there’s something that’s stopping it from connecting properly, then what we’ll see is some very hard hits not moving the mask very far, and that’s pretty straightforwardly recognizable in the data.
Guy Windsor
And so what have you concluded?
Jamie MacIver
So we haven’t fully done the stats yet. So any conclusions I say now are tentative, I’ll stress that.
Guy Windsor
This is going out in a few weeks. So when you have your results, send them to me. I’ll stick them in the show notes, so people who want to see the exact fully worked out stuff, that’ll be in the show notes probably by the time this goes live.
Jamie MacIver
Good, fine. We should be able to get some stats in a couple of weeks. So we didn’t really find any obvious differences with comparing different longsword brands. So we compared, we had a Sigi light, a Sigi maestro, a Regenyei stiff and Aureus Alexander III.
Guy Windsor
Hang on, I thought you were measuring tips, not swords.
Jamie MacIver
We had a few things to test. We had some strange experiments that we asked people to comment on to our backers. And our backers voted that they wanted to have testing longsword brands higher than testing other longswords with tips. So we did that one. Our third experiment that we would have done if we had the time, was testing longsword tips, and we are going to go back and do that one, I think.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you tested longsword models, not longswords with tips. Okay, so did you find any significant differences?
Jamie MacIver
No, I don’t think so. Certainly there were, there were small differences in the numbers. But I think when we do the stats, I don’t think they’re going to be significant. I think they’re just going to be kind of random chance.
Guy Windsor
So, one longsword is pretty much as safe as another, in this regard.
Jamie MacIver
In this regard, it seemed to be at least, yep, it seemed to be.
Guy Windsor
That’s very interesting.
Jamie MacIver
Or the differences are small, at least. And considering, on one end of the spectrum, we have a stiff bladed Regenyei. And on the other we have the SIGI light, which is like 1200 grams and like a six-kilogram flex. It’s very light. I was expecting bigger differences from some of that than we saw. Maybe there will be small differences that appear in the stats, but they will be small differences. The tip test, even before I ran the accelerometer numbers to kind of confirm it was very, very obvious. Even just looking at it was very obvious. And the numbers kind of stressed it. So untipped rapiers, we have confirmed, are very dangerous.
Guy Windsor
Yes, I know I told you that.
Jamie MacIver
Surprise to no one. We really struggled to find a height where we didn’t penetrate our target. And the target that we have is its ballistic gel at 20%. So most guns are tested on 10% ballistic gel. So we’ve doubled the strength. We’ve then got a layer of foam, and we’ve then got a layer of chamois leather. This is based upon what some people, have used to try and simulate the full body, so basically gel simulates muscle, foam simulates fat, chamois simulates skin. We pretty much couldn’t not puncture that target with a rapier.
Guy Windsor
So your rapier just has a kind of smooth, rounded tip?
Jamie MacIver
Smooth, rounded tip. No flaring at all.
Guy Windsor
My training rapier has a nail head. So I think that you probably find quite different.
Jamie MacIver
With a nail head I think we’d find a difference. Yeah, this was just rounded off, literally, just a little dome, rounded off, ground off.
Guy Windsor
So technically not sharp.
Jamie MacIver
Technically not sharp. It’s probably about two or three millimetres thick at the end. But, yeah, it’s really not very thick. And so that was really bad for puncturing, but it was also really good at skipping off. It didn’t stick to a mask at all, kind of as predicted. So no surprises, really, on that one. The big surprises were bullet cases, which a lot of people use, still, were only slightly better.
Guy Windsor
Sorry, are you using bullet cases just as by themselves?
Jamie MacIver
Yeah.
Guy Windsor
Okay. I used to use archery blunts before the people actually developed proper tips for rapiers. I was using archery blunts because that’s what we had access to, and I would wear through an archery blunt every few weeks. And a friend of mine said, put a shell casing inside the archery blunt, and its purpose was to stop the tip of my sword going through the archery blunt. I wouldn’t want to use just like the brass, because that’s nasty.
Jamie MacIver
Plenty of people still do. I did a survey at fight camp who was using, and bullet cases they weren’t ubiquitous, but they’re not the most common, but it is common to see them, just on their own. We used a 303 brass bullet case. It was the second worst in both tests, basically. So it was slightly less dangerous in terms of puncturing than untipped slightly, and it still stuck to the mask quite a lot, right?
Guy Windsor
Brass is sticky.
Jamie MacIver
Brass is sticky, and it got damaged quite a bit, from 100 strikes to a mask, it was pretty damaged by the end of it. And there were some sharp burns on the mask as well. We test the mask damage. We had a different mask per condition to test for damage as well. So there wasn’t most pleasant. So that was worse than I expected. The rubber behaved pretty much exactly as I expected it to. So it did indeed stick to the mask. It made it more likely to transfer force to the mask, and it vastly increased the highest reading that we saw. So it basically made the likelihood and the severity of the risk both increased from using rubber for tip for pushing on the mask. It was pretty good at not puncturing targets.
Guy Windsor
That’s what we always used it for.
Jamie MacIver
We had to actually change the target, we didn’t get a puncture on the target I just described, a ballistic gel foam leather at the highest height I was happy to drop it at which came to it was half a meter. Comes to 30 joules. For context, because no one knows what a joule is, motorcycle equipment is tested at 50 joules. Fencing equipment is tested at 10 joules. So 30 joules is substantial. Yeah, a lot of force. So we thought, well, what if we take off the top layer? So we just do the ballistic gel, because it’s a softer target. And with that, we got a puncture at about 20 centimetres, or 25 if I remember. So it was still a lot of force before it punctured even just the ballistic gel. So that was pretty good. Made some quite spectacular holes when it did, but it was a lot of force to get through that target. The surprise for me was that plastic did better than rubber on the puncture test, I wasn’t expecting it.
Guy Windsor
By did better, you mean, was safer?
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, safer. So we matched the diameter of the rubber and the plastic so that that wasn’t a fact. The difference that we did in the shape was that the rubber was domed, because that’s how those tips normally end up. So it’s just kind of a big, big, round dome. But dome nonetheless, whereas we used an archery blunt, which is kind of ridged on the outside with a little recess on the inside side, so one is convex, one is concave, that’s really the only difference between the two of them in terms of shape and size, was, as I said, pretty similar. We couldn’t get a puncture with the plastic tip on either medium.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that surprises me.
Jamie MacIver
I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting rubber to be worse at puncturing. You know, I mean, better risk than plastic and plastic to come second, but no, plastic outperformed it. We had some spare targets because we didn’t do a third experiment, but we ran out of time because we had some issues. So we had some spare targets, so we ran again.
Guy Windsor
You had some technical issues with your highly technical experiment? What a surprise.
Jamie MacIver
A lot of technical issues, last minute adjustments. And things had to happen, which slowed us down, but it made for better results in the end. But yeah, that was a shock. And then plastic also was pretty much equivalent to the untipped for skipping off. It might be slightly worse, or it might be the difference. I’m not sure if that’s significant or not, but it was pretty similar to it, and certainly better than the other two.
Guy Windsor
I just wandered off to make sure that my tips are plastic, not rubber. They are. They’re plastic. They’re new -ish.
Jamie MacIver
So, definitely, for the rapier, it was pretty, pretty incontrovertible. Even before I’d done the stats analysis, the plastic came out on top.
Guy Windsor
By a way.
Jamie MacIver
By a way.
Guy Windsor
So, basically, you can go to someone who’s thinking of running a rapier tournament and say, look, the only tips you can legitimately allow are plastic for this reason.
Guy Windsor
Yep, absolutely.
Jamie MacIver
Then if and if and if you go ahead with allowing bullet cases or anything else, then you are culpable of negligence.
Jamie MacIver
So let me just put this into context for that, that puncturing things, if I pull the numbers up. So to put the energy levels we talked about in a bit of context. We were puncturing two centimetres into our human equivalent target with an untipped rapier at less than one joule. We actually had a funny moment in the other test. We accidentally there’s a tin can on the boxing stand to add weight to it, for reasons, we accidentally punched that and punctured through the tin can with the untipped sword. So pretty bad, right? But one joule, you get easily hit one joule of energy with any kind of thing. We didn’t get a puncture on the softer target with plastic at 35 joules.
Guy Windsor
Jesus, it’s way more than 30 times safer.
Jamie MacIver
More than 30 times safer than leaving it untipped and even bullet cases. So bullet cases, we were puncturing that at about 12 joules.
Guy Windsor
So actually, it’s a lot better than untipped.
Jamie MacIver
A lot better than untipped. Yep. No, wait, sorry. Scratch that. My apologies. This is because we did some extra tests on the bullet case, and that’s still on the softer target for comparison. Sorry. No, my apologies. So, so bullet cases. Bullet cases were puncturing the original soft target at about eight joules. Okay, so eight times better than untipped sword. When we used it on the softer target, it was still about 12 joules.
Guy Windsor
Why would it require more energy on the softer target? That doesn’t make sense.
Jamie MacIver
I can’t read. I can’t read. I got that backwards. Yeah, it’s 12 on the hard target.
Guy Windsor
By hard target you mean simulating skin and flesh.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah. So on the starter target, it was about twice the chance of puncturing. But then again, we got to 35 so not quite more than four times as much as that, and still weren’t puncturing again on the plastic. So it’s not a small difference.
Guy Windsor
Basically, your inescapable conclusion is, if you’re fencing with rapiers, use plastic tips and nothing else until something else gets invented that is demonstrated to be better.
Jamie MacIver
Absolutely. And it’s worth pointing out as well, these are quite large plastic tips. I don’t know whether we’d see the same in smaller tips, for instance.
Guy Windsor
Well, that’s the thing, what’s the diameter of the tip?
Jamie MacIver
These were 18-millimetre diameter for both the rubber and the plastic.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that’s about what I would expect. That’s about what I’ve got in the end of mine.
Jamie MacIver
I mean, we essentially matched to the archery blunts that people were using, right? So we found with archery blunts people were using at Fight Camp. We said, okay, that’s the size that people are using. So we said, okay, we’ll match to that. And then even at that size the thermoplastic we use, you’re adding about 12 grams of weight. It’s nothing, right?
Guy Windsor
Do you still have your rigs?
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, 100% yes.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Because what I’m thinking of is, I know friends in America who use plastic tips, which are literally branded for being used as rapier tips, that manufacturer should send you a box of those and have them tested so they can demonstrate that their particular brand, this size, this model, has this effect. And of course, you could charge them for that.
Jamie MacIver
I have considered it, yes. I also want to do some more follow up, kind of open experiments as well.
Guy Windsor
I was going to ask, what’s the next experiment. Is it tips for longswords?
Jamie MacIver
I think tips for longsword is that is the next candidate. We did a few preliminary tests, we had a few spare targets. Longsword was set up. So we tried this one longsword, we just added the height, the weight, it was already puncturing. We added the leather tip. We added a rubber tip, because we could easily do it and the same height, it doesn’t puncture, so it clearly has an effect, how much effect? We didn’t have targets to check, and is plastic better we didn’t check the other condition, I think there’s definitely legs in trying it for longsword, because then we tried kind of the two extremes of HEMA, and if the same pattern appears for both of those, actually, it’s probably true of anything in between as well.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Actually, one thing I’ll be very interested in is getting you to test my Terry Tyndall style fencing mask, and how much force gets delivered into my head when I get hit with a longsword versus a regular fencing mask.
Jamie MacIver
Unfortunately, the rig wouldn’t work for that.
Guy Windsor
No, this would be a whole separate experiment.
Jamie MacIver
The issue is weight. So the fencing mask versus the Terry Tyndall mask is a very small difference in weight compared to you or human. Yeah, you specifically a human, but it’s very big compared to our movable rig. So that was one of the issues we had at first actually, the rig was too light and we were blowing past the accelerometer. I had to add some weight to it to basically slow it down. But if it’s a twofold increase in weight, it’s got a much bigger effect on this measurement than it would understanding what would happen to a human. We could probably control for that, it would be doable, we could control for the weight.
Guy Windsor
My experience has been that they are just vastly better than fencing masks for preventing, well, for basically, for making it so that your friend can hit you carefully in the head without significant risk of injury. I phrased that very carefully, right? I mean, people in full armour in the 15th century were killed with longswords, so no amount of equipment is going to keep you safe.
Jamie MacIver
And actually, on that point, for the mask skipping off test, this is, this is a really good point, because while some tips were more likely to skip off and some tips reduced the likelihood of a heavy hit, there was no combination of weapon or tip type that we tried that didn’t have some heavy hits. So, even the best tip that we’re recommending here, it’s not a risk-free tip. And what was really interesting, it was so hard, there was no way of working out whether something was likely to there’s some conditions that make it more or less likely that use a heavy hit happened. The more direct it is to the fencing mask. So a sword coming from the right to the right of the fencing mask, or hits on the flat of the mask, is slightly more likely to hit hard. But some of those skip off, some of the other ones hit hard.
Guy Windsor
I do like striking to break stuff as well as striking to not break people. And it’s pretty straightforward to hit somebody lightly in the head, if you’ve got the proper training. It is pretty straightforward to smash through a fencing mask, if that’s what you want to do. It doesn’t matter what tip’s on there. I mean, like you’re dropping a sword half a meter, and that was all the force you wanted. I mean, I can literally put the force of both my legs behind my sword, which is like an ungodly amount of power compared to dropping the sword half a meter down.
Jamie MacIver
Well, it’s half a meter. It also has a six-kilogram weight added to it from the from the rig.
Guy Windsor
I weigh 80 kilograms.
Jamie MacIver
It’s a lot more force than you think.
Guy Windsor
No, I know, I know it’s a lot of force, but I can carry a six-kilo weight upset. I can do jumping jacks with a six-kilo weight, but the amount of power available there is vastly more. My point is just that no amount of having safe equipment is going to protect people if the person they are fencing hits them hard, because a human being can develop a huge amount of force.
Jamie MacIver
Yes, and for the mass test, we were that we were all intentionally doing it as if we were fencing, not as if we were trying to kill someone. That was the most interesting way of doing it.
Guy Windsor
I trained to hit hard, and I also trained to hit barely at all, if you know what I mean. I’ll be very curious to test the actual difference between me when I really want to hurt somebody, not that I would ever do such a thing, and me when I’m at my fencing level.
Jamie MacIver
These are many of these things that I’m hoping to test in future through historical research.
Guy Windsor
Well, if you ever need any help, let me know. Ipswich is two hours away from Vauxhall.
Jamie MacIver
Well, the tests were actually between Ipswich. They were in my parents’ house, which is kind of halfway between London and Ipswich actually, just the other side of Bury St Edmunds from you.
Guy Windsor
You’re kidding. All right. Well, just let me know if you any help.
Jamie MacIver
There are lots of things I want to test in future, in terms of cut strength, in terms of measuring different force levels. The test that people wanted from our backers, that we really decided not to do for two reasons, was the effect of protective equipment, because, of course, we’re not stabbing unprotected targets most of the time, so puncture-resistant equipment, like an actual jacket, that kind of stuff,
Guy Windsor
Which is difficult to because you’re not going to put a tipped weapon through a jacket with any kind of experiment that makes sense.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, I mean, we could get to the conclusion that we had with this, which is that it won’t go through. So maybe that’s why bullets seem to be fine, because they don’t go through protective equipment, but they do go through soft targets. Could be, don’t know. But we also want to test other aspects of protective equipment, which is why we decided to delay it. So it matters not just does it stab you, but does it hurt? Did you break a rib? So measurements of things like well, how much force dissipated by a SPES jacket versus just a regular Olympic fencing jacket. That requires developing some kind of other things to do it, and also cuts versus thrusts. Our rig can do thrusting mechanics quite easily, but we can’t do cutting mechanics in the same kind of controlled fashion just yet. So that’s a whole different kind of setup for it. So hopefully we can get those built too, which will allow us to do sort of more comprehensive reviews of protective equipment and how good it is and relatively how good it is.
Guy Windsor
And it would be interesting to measure what a full force lunge actually generates. So you would know how close your rig is to, I mean, if it’s 30 joules, then you bang on. If it’s only 20, then maybe you don’t need to go so high. And if it’s 60, then maybe you need to go higher.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, I tried to, I tried to do that. I mean, it’s relatively forward that the technical way of setting it up using force sensors, and they’re essentially the same things that go on your bathroom scales, but they take faster readings. And they’re quite hard to set up directly. I bought a Boxing Punch force testing thing to try it out, so I thought maybe this might work as a quick test, unfortunately, because it’s designed for you to hit with your hand, it’s soft, so it doesn’t really work with the kind of the tip sizes that we’re talking about. So we thought we’d try and use that to judge it. But 30 joules, though, 30 joules, if you see, it’s a lot of force. It’s more than you will see in the finals of a tournament. The amount of bend on my swords just from dropping on this target. From those I was a bit like, I don’t want to go higher, because I want my swords to survive. So, I’m definitely confident that if it can survive 30 tools, it’s going to do good things for most people.
Guy Windsor
Oh, for sure. And again, people shouldn’t be hitting each other that hard. I’m just curious, because I’m interested in the in the marshal side of things, rather the sporting side. So it’ll be interesting to get some measurements on how hard I can actually hit.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, I’d love to know. And the flip side of that is that I think where we would have got an interesting distinction between the longswords is actually on the force transferred, rather than the puncture aspects to it.
Guy Windsor
The flex has to do something.
Jamie MacIver
It has to go somewhere. I had a slow mo video of one of my tests when I was doing early tests for the rapier, the puncturing thing, and when I watched it in slow mo, what was really interesting, because it was a target, not human, was that when the sword first touched the target, this was the softer target. This is before we added the skin layer. This is one of the things that led to of the things that led to it. When a sword touches the target, it doesn’t flex at all until it goes enough into the target that then it’s got enough resistance to start flexing. So on that initial point of contact, flex meant no difference at all, which is why I think we didn’t see any differences in the longswords, because it was before the flex kicked in for it. And that’s an interesting and terrifying result, depending on how you look at it.
Guy Windsor
That’s fabulous. Now, is there anything we haven’t discussed about the experiments that you’d like to mention?
Jamie MacIver
About the experiments? No, I think most of that we’ve covered. I think, as I said, we’ve got a lot of kind of follow up experiments for planning and other ones. I’m going to be running through Historical Fencing Research.
Guy Windsor
Make sure you let me know when you’re raising funds, because I don’t see any party that’s held on the internet, so I don’t do the Facebook thing. The only reason I knew about yours is because one of my students happened to see it and happened to think I might be interested, and so I could back it and tell other people to back it but contact me directly. I’ll be happy to stick this in newsletters and podcast intros and whatever. It’s really important work, and I’m very glad you’re doing it.
Jamie MacIver
I think that’s the main thing we need to do differently next time is crowdfunding. The Kickstarter took a massive cut.
Guy Windsor
I don’t really do crowdfunding directly through a platform like that anymore, for basically that reason, they pay you late, and they keep a monstrous chunk of it.
Jamie MacIver
More than I expected. So that was a challenge. But so as soon as we can work out how we’re funding the next round, which will probably go through the historicalfencingresearch.com website, we’ll be looking at some follow up experiments, the ones I’ve discussed today. And as I say, I’m looking at doing some research to try and understand tournament swords and their use, and actual injury patterns, and how they relate to which sword during use. And other projects. I’ve got a list of projects that I will not be getting through this year that much.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Well, speaking of projects, I do understand you have a book on your interpretation coming out at some point.
Jamie MacIver
Yes, hopefully next year. it’s Vadi, of course, as to be expected, it is kind of building on for what I’ve used as my beginner’s curriculum for a while. And again, it’s part of the things that motivate me. If things annoy me enough, I’ll do it. And I’ve not liked most interpretation books that I’ve read, I’ve not read them all by any stretch of imagination.
Guy Windsor
Interpretations of Vadi?
Jamie MacIver
Not specifically of Vadi, of anything, any way that people have presented interpretation, because they kind of go through, like, here’s all the footwork, here’s all the cuts, here’s all the guards, out of context. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken the beginners’ curriculum, so it will also go with lesson plans to go with it, all of which have tactical context. Every class in that has tactical context built into it. And rather than start with going through the comprehensive aspects of it, the text goes through each of those and gives the theory relevant to each section, so it comes with the curriculum attached to it. And then there’s things that go beyond the beginners’ curriculum that kind of cover off the other aspects.
Guy Windsor
It’s very much a training manual?
Jamie MacIver
Very much a training manual but it’s also going through the theory that underpins the training. So whether you are using it to structure the lessons, or whether you just using it for the theory, you could use it for either or both. It was originally designed to be, oh, I want to give my students the theory about the class they just took. And then it morphed into something bigger. Because in doing it that way, you’re getting all of the relevant bits of theory for a specific part. So you’re not going to see everything about all the guards in week one. But you are going to see stuff about some of the guards in week one.
Guy Windsor
I did this with my Medieval Longsword, it was like 2011 or something, or 2010 I was writing it, and I was giving a lecture, and I was chatting about various aspects of things. So I thought, hang on, I’ve got two ways of structure in this book, and I haven’t really had the chance to talk to the sort of people who might buy it about how they would like it. And I was like, I asked, so should I have, all the footwork here, all the guards here, all the blows here, this sort of technique there, that sort of technique there, whatever. Or should I organize it the way I would actually teach it in class, more or less? Obviously, it’s a book, so it’s going to be a bit different. And there are about 450 people in the room, and I asked for a show of hands, and I got, I think, three people wanted it separated out by topic, and all the rest were like, organize it the way you teach it. So, yeah, it makes a lot more sense. If it’s a training manual. If it’s a reference resource, it’s probably easier to do it the other way.
Jamie MacIver
The reference material, I think I agree. I’m going to put it at the end, basically. So, once you’ve understood it, and you’ve embedded it, and you understand the basic system and how it offers together, sometimes you’re going to be like, oh, I only remember 11 of the guards. What’s the other one? And you want to check all the guards in one place, rather than kind of hunt for the book as reference material. That all makes perfect sense. It’s just not the way you would ever first be presented to it, and you expect it to kind of understand it and follow it in any stretch of the imagination. So that’s what I’m working on again. I’m hoping that one’s sometime next year as well, for bringing that one out too.
Guy Windsor
Good luck. And go publish that through Lulu?
Jamie MacIver
Probably through Lulu.
Guy Windsor
Why Lulu?
Jamie MacIver
Because I can get it out there easily and change it if I need to in future.
Guy Windsor
But their print costs are horrendous.
Jamie MacIver
I still can explore that one. Yeah, I could explore that one.
Guy Windsor
I have thoughts on that which are probably not terribly interesting to most people listening. So if you want my thoughts on that, just we can talk later.
Jamie MacIver
I’d welcome them. You’ve published many books and I’ve published none. So I’d be stupid not to take them.
Guy Windsor
Lulu has its place. There are some things that it’s probably, for some people, the best option. But, I mean, the biggest reason to not use Lulu, I think, is that the Alliance of Independent Authors doesn’t rate them as a as a service they can recommend to their members, mostly because their print costs are double what they should be. There’s a whole bunch of options out there, which, again, they didn’t exist necessarily 15 years ago, but over the last 15 years, there’s been this explosion of self-publishing tools. So we have a ton of stuff. And yeah, we can chat it through when you’re when you think you’re close to ready, and you know what the book is actually going to be like. Drop me a line and we’ll chat about it. Okay, so you have a metric fuck ton of good ideas. What is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Jamie MacIver
Oh, that’s a good one.
Guy Windsor
It’s not the book because clearly you’re acting on that, and it’s not the research experiments, because clearly you’re acting on that. I mean, is there a werewolf, vampire, romance novel that you’ve always wanted to write?
Jamie MacIver
Afraid not. No, no. Well, obviously I’ve got several novels in my head, but they’ll definitely never happen. I’m not sure they’ll be my best ideas either. I do have plans I’ve been kind of idly toying with. I want to, I used actually undershirts for HEMA. So this is people that normally do this, so bit like a rash guard, except for with protection built into it. I have a quite unusual protective setup. I’ve moved a lot of protection underneath the jacket rather than on top of the jacket that people would normally have there, which allows using a lighter of jacket and being more manoeuvrable while still retaining protection. And particularly the stuff I use for my arm guards, quite difficult to get in this country, and it’s kind of a pain to attach in terms of how it currently is. So I have a long standing plan that I’ve not really done anything on, because I also use rugby shirts that have shoulder padding, some rib padding, but it’s in all the wrong places for a lot of things, and it’s just much better in terms of manoeuvrability to move your protection to an under layer than to try and put it on top, because it doesn’t add bulk. It doesn’t stop you from doing things like crossing your arms and that kind of stuff. Anyone who’s tried to do finestra or saggitario, whatever, Ochs if you want to talk German cursed in pretty much any modern HEMA kit.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that’s why I don’t use any modern HEMA kit. I got my kit stuff sorted out 20 years ago, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. Like the modern stuff, not interested.
Jamie MacIver
There is a battle with jackets, is some of the lighter jackets these days, they’re pretty good, but they’re they use foam padding to kind of augment it. It doesn’t cover everywhere as well as that. There are lots of places where, as I say, it’s just easy to put it in an undershirt shirt. So if you want manoeuvrability and you want tournament level protection, which I do, in most cases, because I do compete in quite a lot of tournaments, it is significantly better to have it as a layer just above your skin than a layer on top of your jacket. So that’s something I’m looking into pursuing. But when I’ve got some things set up for safety tips in terms of testing levels, I’ll have to do it after that, because I want to know, actually, which material you need.
Guy Windsor
So maybe in five years’ time, there’ll be the Jamie MacIver fencing undershirt.
Jamie MacIver
It’ll be faster than five years. I hope so at least.
Guy Windsor
I was giving you a nice, nice long lead time because you’ve got a ton of stuff to do.
Jamie MacIver
I’ve got a ton of stuff to do, I guess. As you can probably tell, I tend to be busy, and I tend to stay busy. So we haven’t even covered the day to day of running clubs and tournaments and that kind of stuff. But they’re all kind of they’re all ticking along these days. And other people support, which is good.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so somebody gives you a million quid to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide. I’m guessing you’d spend it on the research, safety research.
Jamie MacIver
I would spend it on safety research, we, to be honest, we have a ticking time bomb.
Guy Windsor
Someone’s going to get killed in a tournament pretty soon.
Jamie MacIver
And the problem is that we can decide whether to put this in the podcast or not. Most HEMA providers are not producing anything which is rated as protective equipment. Actually, SPES has this on their website, this is not protective equipment.
Guy Windsor
Because, yeah, they’re protecting themselves against liability.
Jamie MacIver
How much it would do; I’ve got no idea. But at the end of the day, we are using things as protective equipment that are not, at least in Europe or UK, officially labelled as protective equipment or being allowed to be sold as that.
Guy Windsor
They don’t have any of the sort of standard marks, like the British Standard marks.
Jamie MacIver
Exactly that, yep, because there are certain thresholds you have to reach to do that. And no one has done things like risk assessments of how these look and like what is an appropriate level of force dissipation and all that kind of stuff. It’s probable that many of the things that we’ve got, probably would be fine, if there was something that they could conform to. But if we do have that death in the tournament nightmare scenario, and an insurance claim happens on the back of that, there’s going to be suddenly be a very, very focused lens a lot of these things, and everybody worldwide is going to suddenly be in a situation of like, okay, we can’t fence without protective equipment that’s rated, but we haven’t got any, but we haven’t got any, because there’s very few things that are rated. There are a few.
Guy Windsor
I mean, the fencing masks are rated, but they’re rated for something else.
Jamie MacIver
And pretty much everything that has a rating has kind of done it for something else. You don’t need an official standard to be officially rated. If there is one, you’ve got to follow it. But if there isn’t one, there are ways of getting rated protected equipment without that. You’ve just got to prove that you have assessed the risks appropriately. So it’s quite a high barrier. Saying this is the standard I follow, that is relatively easy by comparison to saying I’ve done all this research, this is what the risks are, and I’ve followed it. So what I would be doing with a million quid that I think would benefit most of HEMA, would be creating that open research, and I am quite keen on making it open, that we can then start making equipment manufacturers start to say, Okay, right, I’ll test it against these risks. I’ll make sure that is appropriate, rather than just be like, I think it’s fine, it’ll work. Probably. Looks good to me. I didn’t get hurt when I used it, so it must be good, which is, sadly, what we’re all kind of going around with,
Guy Windsor
Interesting, yeah, and it’s interesting that you’re already taking concrete steps towards what you would do with that million quid. So if anyone listening has a spare million quid, they might actually be more inclined to give it to you.
Jamie MacIver
Hopefully, yeah. We will get less far with less than the million quid, but we can get pretty far with 1000s rather than millions.
Guy Windsor
How much did your campaign raise in the end?
Jamie MacIver
The Kickstarter was just over £4000 and then what we were receiving was just under three and a half.
Guy Windsor
For just under £3500, you managed to establish what you’ve established for rapiers. That is a pitiful sum.
Jamie MacIver
Half of that was in setting up things that we can use again to do other experiments. Repeating it with long sword isn’t going to cost another £3500. It’s going to cost just really, the time, a few materials, but, you know, peanuts, and we could find it out with longsword, with, I don’t know, £1000. We could test the longsword, a bunch of other stuff. The ballistics gel, you can’t reuse it. We’ve got to make that every time. That’s quite expensive. But, yeah, even so, it’s not a lot to run it again for something else and do the same experiments.
Guy Windsor
It is tricky raising money for stuff as a company rather than a charity. Just a thought that’s just popped into my head, which treat it with all the disdain you like. But you could, for instance, have, like, stickers or something that is cheap and easy to have printed on demand and distributed, that people who want to support the work can pay, I don’t know, 50 quid for a sticker that says I supported historical fencing to do longsword tips. And that way you’re selling them a product so that the accounting is straightforward, and you don’t have to explain why people are just giving a limited liability company money.
Jamie MacIver
I do have a way of donating money to the research on the website already, historical fencing research.com.
Guy Windsor
Well done. That was better, yeah, but you mumbled it a bit. Historicalfencingresearch.com.
Jamie MacIver
Thank you, Guy., So what I intended to do is get a way of making it more obvious how that’s tracking through the experiments, so it is clearly funding for the experiment, not just giving me money for beer. I did consider doing it as a charity. The reason I didn’t do it as a charity is, while it’s easier for people to give you money, it’s much harder for me to take any of the money. And as I say, my time for it, you know, is something that, yeah, I’m not making a massive profit on this. But if I’m dedicating a weekend.
Guy Windsor
I get paid to show up and teach seminars in places, and I really, really enjoy doing that. You do not have to justify using your time and expertise to benefit the community in some way and getting paid for it. It’s fine.
Jamie MacIver
But as a charity, you do have to justify that Charities Commission. And that’s what I’ve shied away from in LHFC, because that’s a charity, quite a lot of taking any money for teaching for that reason. So you know, that’s why I didn’t go down the charity path, because there’s a lot of hoops we’ve had to jump through if I did. One set of hoops or another basically, you got to choose one of them.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. And I think, honestly, also the limited liability thing is probably sensible if you’re going to be making safety recommendations.
Jamie MacIver
100% Yeah, that was essential, yeah.
Guy Windsor
Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Jamie, it has been lovely to meet you at last.
Jamie MacIver
Yeah, at last, absolutely, it’s been great. Thank you, good chat and everything. I’m glad we talked about Vadi as well. I definitely was happy to get that in.
