Guy Windsor
I’m here today with David Biggs, who is a lawyer, a diplomat and historical martial arts instructor with The Tattershall School of Defense. I beg your pardon, a senior instructor with The Tattershall School of Defense. He’s known in the SCA as Aeron Harper, where he is a Master of Defense and a Laurel. He’s also the organizer, with two previous guests on the show, Lisa Losito and Monica Gaudio, of Lord Baltimore’s Challenge. One of my favorite historical martial arts events. So without further ado, David, welcome to the show.
David Biggs
Thank you so much Guy, it’s great to be here. I love talking to you.
Guy Windsor
It’s very kind of you just say. We’ve spent rather more time in person lately, over the last five years or so than like, in the previous 15 years put together. Just to orient everybody, whereabouts in the world are you?
David Biggs
So I’m in the DC metro area just north of DC, Washington, DC United States,
Guy Windsor
Which is kind of where you’d expect a sort of State Department person to live. In the corridors of power.
David Biggs
I mean, yeah. If you want,
Guy Windsor
Otherwise known as a malarial swamp that nobody wanted and so got turned into the capital.
David Biggs
Exactly. Right. Inside the beltway, which is all swamp-like.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. So take us back a few decades. How did you get into historical martial arts?
David Biggs
Sure thing. So back in college, I took several years of Shotokan Karate. And as I was leaving college, I married a woman who was getting involved in the SCA. I had gone to a lot of ren fairs, so I kind of knew who the SGA was a little bit. When I got in, I didn’t really care to fence because what I saw was a bunch of people using epees with bell guards, and hoo hoo ha ha, ho ho, and you know, just very swashbuckling. And then a friend of mine, David Watson, introduced me to the three Elizabethan fencing manuals, and suddenly I thought, oh, wow, so they wrote this stuff down.
Guy Windsor
Just for the people who aren’t familiar. What are the three Elizabethan fencing manuals?
David Biggs
George Silver. Giacomo di Grassi’s translation, which is technically an Elizabethan manual, and Saviolo’s manual, which are all collected together into one book called The Three Elizabethan Fencing Manuals.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Turner and Soper, correct?
David Biggs
Yeah.
Guy Windsor
That that was a fantastically useful book because it somehow managed to find his way into all sorts of university libraries and a lot of people, the first treatise they ever saw, which was like Silver in Turner and Soper, or di Grassi in Turner and Soper.
David Biggs
Well, exactly and so I saw that, I got to be friends with Brian Wilson. And so he handed me a sword that looked vaguely renaissance and so I started looking into Saviolo and trying to make Saviolo work. This is before we I think we have now come to the conclusion that Saviolo was more of a sidesword master, more of a cut and thrust. In fact, I’ve documented his entire book straight out of the Bolognese masters. So I think he had some influence there. But I was trying to make it work with an epee, right. So, as I was doing that, and doing more digging, I came across plays from Capoferro. And this is the late 90s, I believe. Then, what was it SSI? Sword Symposium International 2000 happened in Houston. And I was living in Houston. So I was like, oh, hey, I’m going to go around the corner and see what this is about. And this was Greg Mele, and oh, my God, who was there? There was a whole stack of people, but also, Reinhardt was there. Who started the what was it? HACA Historical Armoured Combat Association?
Guy Windsor
Hank Reinhardt.
David Biggs
That’s right. That’s right. So a lot of the people who had been also trying to do this, in some cases better, in some cases about the same as me, were all there. So this kind of opened a lot of our eyes to we’re all doing this. And I think a lot of connections were made at that event. That was also the event of a very famous spoonfechten.
Guy Windsor
We will not discuss the spoonfechten on the podcast because it will ruin it for people who may wish to recreate the spoonfechten of doom.
David Biggs
It was a magnificent spoonfechten combat. So, at some point I got introduced to William Wilson and Gary Chelak and to Roger Siggs. They had just started pushing sidesword in the SCA. And I had gotten a white scarf, which was the highest level of rapier combat in the SCA at that time.
Guy Windsor
Just saying, you got a white scarf, the highest thing of SCA rapier combat at the time, in the late 90s. And you do that by basically trying to do Saviolo with an epee?
David Biggs
I did it by winning tournaments. No one really knew anything. I was trying to study and I was actually giving classes and stuff, trying to make it all work in my head. So they thought, well, I was winning tournaments, I was beating people. And I was actually putting some work in. So some people thought, Okay, well, that’s pretty cool. I was still known as that guy who fights real weird. Because everyone else was training in the in the French epee style, basically. So I was convinced that we were going to kill each other with this sidesword experiment. And then Roger and I had a day together. And I started seeing no, there’s something to this. This is interesting and this is fun. So I became one of their sidekicks trying to push it throughout the SCA, and wrote rules for several of the kingdoms. And we finally got it going. So that was the early 2000s. And that’s when Jherek Swanger and Bill Wilson were working on their Capoferro translation and we’re feeding it out to us. That’s when I started in Tattershall.
Guy Windsor
Just for the record. If they hadn’t produced that translation of Capoferro when they did, I may very well have ended up being a Fabris man, rather than a Capoferro man. You know, it was super important and useful work and massive shout out to both Bill and Jherek for that.
David Biggs
This is an interesting point, it’s no longer as true as it was. But I’ve even said you can tell when people got into western martial arts by what they were studying. Because there was us doing the Italian rapier and then soon after that, Tobler came up with the German stuff and suddenly everyone wanted to do German, then Puck got big with the Spanish and everyone wanted to do Spanish, so you can kind of tell where they started in a three or four year range, you know? Yeah, so I joined Tattershall. They made me an instructor. I started helping with the interpretation.
Guy Windsor
I keep interrupting you for clarifications. I’m thinking the average listener probably doesn’t know what Tattershall is.
David Biggs
Tattershall School of Defense. It started in Arizona. Bill Wilson was the one who I think started in the late 90s. Now, Gary Chelak is our president. It’s run mostly out of Southern California. I’m kind of their wandering instructor.
Guy Windsor
It’s like a historical martial arts club?
David Biggs
It’s a historical martial arts school. So we started out teaching the sidesword manuals and the rapier. But now we have people who are doing Swetnam, who are doing a German sabre, so we’ve got a lot of people now studying different things, kind of like Chicago, but not quite as organized. We have study groups around the US that are all kind of giving us their thoughts of what they’re doing. And we’re trying to get ourselves more organized and more together. So that’s Tattersall. And you and I met somewhere in the early 2000s.
Guy Windsor
It was Lansing 2001, 2002 or both.
David Biggs
There you go. So one of those. I went to two Lansings, I only went to two. You were teaching it there. I can’t remember now because a lot of those classes if you recall, a lot of those classes started blending together because we kept doing the same classes again and again, you know, Intro to Capoferro, intro to whatever, so I no longer remember which classes were WMAW, which ones were at Lansing, you know? But yeah, so that’s kind of what got me kicking off. Then I grabbed d’allAgocchie. Bill Wilson was translating d’allAgocchie and the single sword and that just blended, that made my heart sing, you know, I don’t do it as much as I should. But that is still my favorite sword style.
Guy Windsor
Okay. I my head you’re a rapier man, but clearly I’m wrong.
David Biggs
No, no, you’re right. Because people keep wanting me to teach rapier and I keep having to put aside my sidesword to focus on rapier because that’s what everyone’s asking for.
Guy Windsor
Okay. But d’allAgocchie for the win?
David Biggs
Yeah, I think so. I think so.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I’m still kicking myself I didn’t have the £3000 I needed to buy an addition of d’allAgocchie and di Grassi bound together in a single volume sometime around 1600. And I could have had it for 3000 quid, but I didn’t have 3000 quid, and, and I need my kidneys.
David Biggs
I know, I know. I’ve seen a few that I’ve missed out on. I only have one historical manual personally.
Guy Windsor
Is that Marcelli? Very nice. Okay, so we met at Lansing, and clearly, we’re still friends now. So things must have gone quite well. But you sort of disappeared, you fell off the radar for about 15 years. What happened?
David Biggs
So around this time, I had some mighty waves in my marriage, and we went through a divorce. So around 2003 and 4 is when that was happening. After that is when I started actually increasing my activity because I was going to three weekends a month to teach all around the US. So I’ve taught in 25 different states around the US and most of them was in that time period between 2004 and 2006. I was just going everywhere to spread the good word. Because of that divorce, I had a therapist kind of helping me work my way through it and all the self-esteem issues that come with divorce. And she was saying, you are under educated for your intelligence level, you need to you need to go back to grad school, this would help you refocus, this will help you find yourself. So I started looking into different ideas, and I landed on law school. And so in 2006, I entered law school, and I tried to keep studying, but no, that wasn’t going to happen.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so swords or law, you can really only do one at a time,
David Biggs
I got on Law Review. And that’s kind of like a part time job on top of school. The Law Review manuals here in the US are the academic published manuals of law. And every, most universities, I think every one of them has their own Law Review manual, where professors will send articles, and we will choose which ones we want to publish. And then the students are the ones who do the editing and make sure that the footnotes are correctly cited and then we put them out. So Minnesota’s Law Review. At the time, it was number 10 in the country, possibly in the world. But it was really highly rated. I was so thrilled to get on it. But it was also an entire part time job on top of law school by itself. So everything else just went away.
Guy Windsor
Am I right in thinking, because I’ve seen quite a lot of American TV shows that have lawyers in them. And all the best lawyers were like editor of the Law Review at Harvard. So this is what we’re talking about, good for your career to be involved in the Law Review?
David Biggs
Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of the people who are in Law Review, they’ll go into education, they are law professors. Barack Obama was the senior editor of Harvard Law Review, for instance.
Guy Windsor
There we go. Case in point. Didn’t do his career any harm at all.
David Biggs
Not at all. So it can be a big deal. And one of the things that really does do, and this will play into our conversation a little bit, is it helps you focus on how to read the words as they are, not as you want them to be.
Guy Windsor
Oh, God, that is so useful. Yeah, how many times you’re reading something in Fiore, whatever. And you have this interpretation in your head, and you just need the words to say this thing. And with just a little bit of massage, like subconscious massage, you can actually make them say that thing you want them to say.
David Biggs
Yep, yeah. And this goes back to what you and I talked about, at one point, we are where we are in the martial arts here, because we are all open to each other’s interpretations. Now, there are actors who aren’t, sure. But this is what I loved about Lansing and WMAW is we would all go back to our own little practices and put things in place and try out our interpretations. Then we would meet back up again, and I would see what you say. And I would see what Bill says, and we would go oh, well, I figured this new thing out. Let’s try this out. And it was this constant being open to everyone else being right and you not being right. That was beautiful. It was magical, and it’s now been proven the case, I think, that we did it well. When you look at like, the Vienna Anonymous is really in line with all these things that we’ve been teaching.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And again, not everyone’s read it. So the Vienna Anonymous is basically this description of this this fencing student in the early 1600s who wrote his interpretation of what he was being taught with reference to Fabris and Capoferro.
David Biggs
Exactly. Referenced the three manuals, but no one knows what the third one is. But yeah, absolutely. So he was in I think, what is now the Czech Republic, writing about I think Tom was saying mid-1600s, something around those lines.
Guy Windsor
I could pull it off the shelf, and we could geek out for a bit. I think we need to keep on track. But yeah. So when the Vienna Anonymous surfaced, it did seem to confirm that we had read a lot of Fabris and Capoferro correctly.
David Biggs
Yep. So that again, speaks to the whole reading words as they are, not as they want them to be, which I think we all did a pretty good job of.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. And I think I mean, the critical thing to that is, when somebody points out that you’re reading it wrong, you can actually hear that. And I have noticed that there are some people who are better at that than others.
David Biggs
Yeah, absolutely. There are those who I think they tie their ego too much into, you know, their own interpretation as opposed to wanting to search for the truth.
Guy Windsor
Also, quite a big problem is a lot of people who are working on these things. I’m a good example of one such person. I’m not a trained linguist, a trained translator, I’ve not studied Italian at any particularly high level, you know, I think we had one semester on the Divine Comedy. And we did it in Italian. But that was about it. And so it’s really, really tempting when someone who actually knows what the words actually mean and can actually read it like an actual book, when you’ve read it, and you’ve kind of made some sort of twisted interpretation of it. And they go, no, it just means this. And this is perfectly straightforward. But maybe there’s a word in there, which it sounds like an English word. So you think it must mean the same thing as that English word. But actually, it means something completely different. And so you end up in this sort of state of having created this entirely false reading of this particular bit of text. And then it’s really difficult to just go, oh, you must be right. Oh, yeah. Okay, that doesn’t work. Because that word does seem to mean what we think it means. But actually, it bloody doesn’t. Super hard.
David Biggs
Yep. 100%. I will try and say this without naming names, I see people who blend too much of other knowledge in and they don’t go at it, like we talked about, with an open mind about what may this actually mean? What I did slight tangent, what I did, whenever I sent you that my thoughts on the Stringere, in the Bolognese manuals, what I did was, instead of looking at what the word is interpreted to mean by us, I went and applied how is it used in every case I can find in the four Bolognese manuals.
Guy Windsor
That’s because you’re a lawyer.
David Biggs
Well, sure, sure. But that told me a whole lot. And it changed my interpretation of stringere, because it was used the same way by three different masters.
Guy Windsor
But that in itself doesn’t always work. Because very often the same word means something completely different in different places. And one thing that, you know, I’ve got a couple of published translations out, and sometimes people email me, “But Guy, over here, you translate this word as this English word, but over there, you translate it as something else.” And I’m like, yes, because in these two different contexts, it means two different things, right? Like, if we’re talking about a water table, or we’re talking about a table with a glass of water on it, they’re not the same thing.
David Biggs
Even British to American English, this is what you want to talk about. Also, you know, the word constraint, I agree with you, it’s the best word best academic word for stringere. But when you look at it from the American point of view, that it brings up different connotations. And so you have to be careful with using it because constraint here has BDSM issues.
Guy Windsor
We would say “restraint”. If you’re going to tie someone up, you don’t constrain them, you restrain them.
David Biggs
Right? But “constraint” has come into our lexicon here in America, constraints, you’re under constraints. You’re being tied up.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Okay. Just a segue slightly. I think that’s exactly what the stringere actually is meaning with swords. It’s like the point of my sword position. If I have stringered it, I have constrained your possible courses of action. It doesn’t necessarily imply a physical constraint. But it doesn’t rule it out either. You can stringer someone with physical constraint.
David Biggs
I’m going to talk about what appears in your head. And when you’re teaching a new person and you use that word, the thing that appears in their head may not do what you want it to.
Guy Windsor
That’s always true with every student and every bit of technical terminology. But I’ve illuminated that the first thing that pops into your head when I say constraint is BDSM. David, don’t worry, you’re amongst friends. No judgment here. We should get Ariel back on the show. So you went to law school, so went off on a nice little sidetrack. You’re at law school, and you’re studying what the words actually mean, in their various contexts. And so you’re back at law school, and you’re doing Law Review. And what happened next?
David Biggs
So I graduated in 2009, which is the same year that the world melted down economically. So I had a job lined up at the Patent and Trademark Office, the USPTO here in DC. They called me like a month before I graduated and said, we can no longer hire lawyers for the foreseeable future. Can you hold on for a bit? And of course, my answer is no.
Guy Windsor
Independently wealthy, of course.
David Biggs
So I kind of, I won’t say I struggled, but I suddenly had to get myself going and figure out something else that I could do to make money. I met a diplomat who talked about the Foreign Service process of getting into the Foreign Service and went through the process and I got in. My first try, it’s a year long process. So I was working for a nonprofit until then. But yeah, so then I kind of went directly into the Foreign Service, which then sends you all around the world. My first posting was in Ottawa.
Guy Windsor
So that’s really far away.
David Biggs
I know, I know. I told a friend of mine in Boston, I just got posted to the one place that is closer to me than it is to you right now. But yeah, so I went to Ottawa, and I was busy in my first job. So I couldn’t do a whole lot of SCA, I did a little bit, a little bit of fencing. I worked with a John Encinas, and a couple of others there. So I was kind of picking up a little bit of the rapier, but it wasn’t a big focus. I was trying to work on my new job, right. Then I went into a Year of Russian training, which is kind of like law school. It sucked my entire time. And then we went to Ukraine. And the only thing happening in Ukraine at that time was a lot of the, what I call “cry uncle swordfighting”. Stuff I really wasn’t interested in, you know, putting on armor and beating each other until one of you can’t stand anymore. It was kind of though.
Guy Windsor
So this is what was going on in the Ukraine.
David Biggs
This was the only sword fighting I could find in Ukraine. So I wasn’t really interested in picking that back up. And again, when we were in Ukraine, suddenly a lot of things started happening. And we were on crisis mode for like the last 18 months I was there. So there wasn’t time to do anything outside of working. So after that, we came back to the US. We had Roxanne, we came back to the US. I actually didn’t have any drive to get back into swordplay. I was doing some other things.
Guy Windsor
So you’ve met Alex, and Roxanne is your daughter?
David Biggs
Yes, I’m sorry.
Guy Windsor
So this is my job to look out for the listener and fill in the natural gaps, don’t worry.
David Biggs
So Alex, actually, Alex was a student of a student of mine. And he brought her to me at an SCA event and said teach her sidesword. So this was this was 2004 or five. And then years later, I found out that she was moving to Madison, Wisconsin, which was only three or four hours from me in Minneapolis. So we started dating at that point in time. And then yeah, then when I went to the Foreign Service, she left her PhD program and went to Foreign Service with me. And so we were tandem couple in the Foreign Service being thrown around the world.
Guy Windsor
So what was her specialisation in the Foreign Service? You’re a lawyer, what does she do?
David Biggs
Well, so actually, I wasn’t a lawyer. Well, so I was in the Econ specialization, which is basically there’s political economics management, which is the people that run the embassies. Consular, which was Alex, they’re the ones who are focused on visas and immigration. And then public diplomacy. They’re the ones who are the voice for all the embassies.
Guy Windsor
So what most people will think of when they think diplomat.
David Biggs
Right, right. And they’re the ones who arranged all the press briefings and that kind of stuff. It’s their job to do that. I was in the Econ. And I was I specialized in science and technology diplomacy. So that was the thing I wanted to do most of all, Alex did consular work. She was the immigration consular chief in Ukraine and came back here and kept doing fraud work. So yeah, so that’s kind of what we did. But you’re also supposed to be able to move around in different jobs when you’re in the Foreign Service. So there’s no way to really stay in any one thing. Because you just go to where you need to go.
Guy Windsor
So then you came back to the US and took up swords again?
David Biggs
Well, I came back to the US and a friend of mine here, Candice, called me and said, hey, we would love you to come train at this practice, this SCA practice that’s close. So I dug out all my old notes to remember what it was that I used to know and went and just started teaching basics, how to lunge, which people still have a hard time with. How to hold the sword, as you well know is right? So yeah, that kind of got me back into it. And then I discovered that HEMA had popped up while I had been roaming around the world. And I know the history of the of the HEMA and WMA is kind of split and whatever.
Guy Windsor
Okay, there isn’t really one. There’s Western Martial Arts was what was what a certain group of historical martial artists were calling it in North America. And the term sort of was used a bit in Europe and then historical fencing, historical swordplay, Historical European Martial Arts, these are all basically the same thing over here. And now, for a lot of people HEMA is synonymous with the longsword tournament scene. But that’s really only true for people who are in the longsword tournament scene.
David Biggs
You’re right, and that is how it’s viewed in Europe. Here, as I watched it kind of pop up. And this is possibly my faulty memory and Greg would probably kick me for saying things like this. The western martial arts world really wasn’t interested in tournaments that much, they are more interested in the study and the academics.
Guy Windsor
And fencing as a research tool rather than fencing for competition.
David Biggs
Absolutely, absolutely. Now, Tattershall and I, we hold that tournament is just one more tool to apply, to test you under pressure, right? And to try to force yourself to continue to use the right techniques in high tense situations. So we still agree that tournament is a useful tool. It’s not the end result. It’s not what you should be aiming for. But it’s a good tool. My view from here in America is people were getting frustrated by not having tournaments. And so they started putting together tournaments and that’s where HEMA started popping up. The word HEMA is attached to those tournaments. So if you see from our point of view, they started using HEMA as their umbrella to do tournaments where Western Martial Arts was the umbrella to do the academics, right.
Guy Windsor
I have a funny little aside on that. I’ve had Jake Norwood on the show. And I remember when Jake Norwood first came to the Western Martial Arts Workshop in Racine in like, 2008. And he was like, from the HEMA side of things. He famously helped start the Longpoint major event, massive tournaments, and blah, blah, blah. And he came out of the WMAW thing saying he had never felt so much in a weekend in his whole life. It wasn’t tournament, like competition tournament fencing, but everyone fenced him, whenever, you know, he could get a pickup fight in two seconds, or anytime he wanted. And he spent most of the weekend fencing. And at the same time, he was also highlighting to us, Longpoint was not just tournaments, they had classes and stuff as well. It’s just people didn’t talk about those as much. But if you look at the actual schedule, there was as much class time as there was tournament time. So I think the black and white division of it is, is necessarily leaving out an awful lot of grey areas, there’s a lot more overlap.
David Biggs
I’m painting with broad brushes, I absolutely will say that, but I’ll say this too, about Longpoint. The classes were ancillary, the classes were scheduled up against other tournaments. And so you had to choose whether you wanted to fight or go to a class. And so it automatically filtered those who wanted to do study versus combat. And, in fact, jumping ahead. I don’t mean this as bad as I say it, but I went to the last Longpoint that had rapier tournaments here and watched how it ran. And that’s what kind of cued me in I can do something better than this. I can make it work better.
Guy Windsor
Okay. With all due respect to the Longpoint crowd, many of whom have been on the show. And yeah, they were doing something different. Okay.
David Biggs
So and they admitted they’ve admitted that they bit off way more than they could chew that last year with rapier, all the tournaments they had, so it was a whole lot.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so this might be a good time to think about Lord Baltimore’s Challenge. So you’d come back, you rejoined the SCA, and…
David Biggs
Rejoined the SCA and met Lisa Losito. She was a student of Tom Leone. And so she was interested in historical swordplay more than the SCA. So this is kind of why Candice dragged me back. She said Lisa wants more of the historical stuff. And you’re the one I know to do it the best. So Lisa then kind of started poking me to come to HEMA events. And so I went, and in my very problem solving brain, I was watching what was going on and thinking about how to twist it and do a little bit better and how to whatever. And so that kind of built the idea of, I think I know how I can do something here better than this. The Kingdom I live in doesn’t really do tournaments.
Guy Windsor
Spoken like a good US diplomat.
David Biggs
I mean, they do every once in a while, but it’s not to the level that I was doing when I was in Texas. And they don’t tend to want to do things like just a skill based tournament, they tend to do fun things like here, win some coins and you know, go chase the box.
Guy Windsor
And just again, there will be people listening who don’t know what an SCA Kingdom is. It’s like a large regional organization of the SCA. So my joke about you being a US diplomat living in a kingdom is kind of ironic, that’s probably quite a bad joke. It was a terrible joke.
David Biggs
No, it’s fun. I know of actual diplomats, who are like, I know of an ambassador who’s in the SCA, who’s posted abroad. So that’s it’s kind of even funnier for someone like that. But yeah, so this idea got in my head, and I kept rolling it around. And so I reached out to a few of my friends, because this is not something I could do on my own. And that’s a big hurdle for me, because I hate asking for help. It’s difficult for me to ask people to help. So I pulled together a group and who all said, yeah, this sounds great. And then we just kind of rolled with it. And so I funded it, the first one, out of pocket, got all that, you know, we made a profit on the first one, but it was just a matter of getting a bunch of people who have all run SCA events. So they’ve all been involved in what it takes to put together an event and you know, insurance, whatever, all the whole thing. And I came up with the rule set. And I came up with the concept of we need to bring in experienced instructors as a draw, but then use those instructors for directors, because what makes a good director and a good judge, is the experience, is being able to break down the fight in your head, run it backwards and see what happened. So that’s where I was coming from. So yeah, my first year, I had a lot of maestros. I had a lot of people who had classical fencing masters. And they were able to do exactly what I wanted, to be great ring directors, and we had some good judges. So it ran well, a lot of people said, this is the best thing I’ve ever fought in. Let’s do it again. So you know, now we just finished last year, our third iteration, you know, pandemic being in the middle of all that. You were there, you remember.
Guy Windsor
So, I mean, to my mind, Lord Baltimore’s Challenge is half tournaments half classes. All you’ve mentioned so far is the tournaments, and it feels like you what you’re really doing is setting up a tournament that was like an alternative to HEMA tournaments.
David Biggs
I’m actually doing the opposite. If I had my druthers, I would want to do a weekend of just seminars. But like I said, I do believe tournaments have a purpose, they have a use. And the tournaments are one, kind of a draw for a lot of people, but two, they are what funds half of LBC.
Guy Windsor
Okay, because people will pay to travel to a tournament more than they’ll pay to travel to seminars.
David Biggs
That’s the first thing. And the second thing is the way I broke down the pay structure in order to not be overwhelmed by everyone entering a tournament, you have to pay 25 bucks to get into a tournament. So you enter 40 bucks, and then you pay 25 bucks for tournament. Because my thought was, if I just say pay to enter, everyone’s going to sign up for a tournament whether they fight in it or not. And then that’s paperwork.
Guy Windsor
So by having the tournament as like an optional add-on that costs more money use it filtered out those weren’t that interested.
David Biggs
Exactly. And if I charged instead say 80 bucks for a weekend seminar with you, with Puck, with Dave Coblenz I might get fewer people and therefore couldn’t have afforded to fly you guys in.
Guy Windsor
I just had an idea. So, the problem with tournaments, as a learning environment, is there is lots and lots and lots and lots of competitive free play, which is great, but there’s no space to do the competitive free play, learn something, go train it and then go back into the environment. It’s really useful. But let’s say you learn early on that your defense on your inside line isn’t up to scratch. And that’s what knocks you out halfway through the day. That’s a useful thing to go away and train in your home thing. But you’re missing the use. So here’s a thought, right? You have a group of students, 20, 30, 40, whatever, maybe you split them into groups. They, they run a pool, where everyone gets four or five bouts in a tournament type setting, which is more than enough to learn something useful. Then their ring director sets up the training so that whatever issues they were finding they can work on, so that’s like for an hour, and then you run the pool again. So it would have to quite small pools and you may not complete the pool. And then at the end of the day, or at the end of the weekend, you have a record of all of these tournament fights. So you can have a winner you might even have like, the last event is a knockout tournament. So you have a winner if you want, but rather than it being fence all day, and then study the next day, it’s fence for an hour, work on those corrections for an hour, fence for an hour, work on those corrections for an hour back and forth. Wouldn’t that be better?
David Biggs
We are on the same page. In fact, this is a variation of what you suggested when you left last time, and I’ve been rolling this around my head, because your suggestion was that you teach your ‘how to evaluate yourself’ class and then break up into pools and then do exactly what you just said, and then spend the rest of the day, once they understand kind of a better idea of how to evaluate themselves, then send them off. And that’s basically kind of a tournament training process, which is exactly what you just described. So this October, so neither Lisa nor I had the spoons to do a full LBC this year, you know, we were both busy, we both have a lot of things going on. So I’m going to make the LBC tournament thing every other year. But this October, I’m going to rent a kind of a park. And I’m going to bring Kajetan and I’m going to bring probably Justin back, and I’ve reached out to a few others. If I can afford it, I’ll bring you in. That’s the big question with you. Because this is going to be a very light lift, inexpensive, but I want to do exactly what you said. So here’s what my thought is for October, one day, everyone gets to teach whatever classes they want. But I’m going to give everyone like two and a half hours. So teach a 90 minute class and then spend an hour helping everyone walk through what you just taught them. Then the next day do exactly what you just said, make it all a big tournament thing. So put everyone in pools and then have them evaluate and put everyone in pools and have them evaluate.
Guy Windsor
I just had another idea. Oh, right. So let’s say you’ve got Kaja, Justin, and me and you. Four people, and there’s like 80 attendees. So we’ve got 20 each, and they are randomly assigned to our various groups. This is probably a terrible idea, but who knows? Our job is to train those people to beat everyone else. And so the final round of pools is like my top four versus your top four, versus Kaja’s top four versus Justin’s top four.
David Biggs
Team Guy, Team Justin, Team Kajetan.
Guy Windsor
Exactly, exactly. Because then also, think about it, let’s say, let’s say I had 12 students, or maybe it’s 20, whatever, right? You probably want a fairly small number for this to work really well, because then you don’t have to spend so much time setting things up. There’ll be some kind of tournament process within their group that gets them that decides which two people get sent into the finals, or three people or whatever, you know tournament numbers better than I do. But it has to be a bit of fun. It mustn’t be taken too seriously. But then those two people when they are representing their new club, they have a bunch of cheerleaders with them who are invested in their success. Because when you’re training with your each other, you’re making each other better. So in the training portions of the session, whoever you’re training with, you’re trying to make them better. So if they go off and win a tournament, then you have part of that. So the prize is distributed amongst the entire group.
David Biggs
Yeah, I like that.
Guy Windsor
Big problem with it. Some people would have literally flown across America, because they want to take Kajetan’s class, and they get stuck in mine.
David Biggs
Well, but that’s why we have individual classes on one day, and then we do this thing on the second day, so they have a chance to take Kaja’s classes. So if I haven’t decided to make it two days yet, but I’m rolling around my head, because the place that I found is pretty cheap. I can get it for not much at all. The question I have, in order to make this work with the amount of bandwidth we have, this would have to be a self-call tournament only.
Guy Windsor
What I would probably do, if I have one of these groups and we need to start eliminating, I will say, Okay, you guys split up fence to five hits. Winners go in this group, they fence each other, losers go in that group, they fence each other. So there’s there isn’t too much of that. I mean, something’s riding on it, because you’re trying to get through to the next. And there will be occasions when a bit of friendly oversight is necessary, but they should be able to judge themselves. So if they’re in groups of three, you’re going to have one presiding, two fencing, one presiding, two fencing, one presiding, two fencing. And so they have a supervisor to kind of call fair hits or if there’s any dispute, tell them to run it again or whatever. So there’s ways of doing it which aren’t entirely casual. And also give them the experience at redirecting and presiding and judging.
David Biggs
I love it, I love it. I’m going to roll this around and play with it. You tell me how your October looks later on. And let’s look at the cost. Okay, I mean, seriously,
Guy Windsor
I’m talking myself into the job. Brilliant, lovely.
David Biggs
I know you hate that.
Guy Windsor
All these swords and stuff, incredibly boring. I’ve just checked my calendar and you’ll be happy to hear it’s currently relatively open in October.
David Biggs
Fantastic. All right. Let’s keep talking about that later on.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. All right now, we’ve been talking quite a lot about the SCA. And anyone who’s spent any time on social media where swords are mentioned, will be aware that there’s some major kerfuffle going on within the Society of Creative Anachronism, that, before we get into it, I just want to be clear to people listening, that you are a longtime member of the SCA, and have its best interests at heart. And so many of the people I respect in this field comes from the SCA. We’re not talking about the people, we’re talking about the structure.
David Biggs
100%. So, let me start there. Let me start there. Everyone I know. And I mean, almost literally everyone, they go into the SGA because their friends are there, because the people are there. And almost everyone I know has complaints about the culture and the structure of the SCA. So there’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll start with what happened. There was a war, Gulf War, which happens in South Mississippi,
Guy Windsor
By war you mean a great big event where everyone gets together and fights.
David Biggs
Great big event, everyone gets into fights and there are large melees of hundreds of people on each side. So many of them there, lots of different melees. So we consider them friendly. They have their own kind of their own rule set. Because all these different regions, these kingdoms are coming together. And so they have to all agree on which rules are which, which ones we’re going to follow. As you might guess, the SCA has safety manuals, where you have to show that you are safe, that you know what the armour requirements are, you know what the fighting requirements are, before you can get authorized to fight. So we’ve had these for years, they changed slightly.
Guy Windsor
Like a driving licence to go on the field, effectively.
David Biggs
And then we have we have marshals and marshals have to go through their own training, kind of like an umpire or a you know, a referee, right? They have to know what to watch for. And they are empowered to toss people off the field if they’re being unsafe, or if they can’t find that they’re authorised. Okay, important points here. So there was a person who has high rank, a duke in the SCA, who word on the street a week before the Gulf Wars happened was that he was going to come fight rapier and that no one could figure out whether or not he was actually authorised to do so. He showed up, he walked up with an authorisation card that wasn’t properly signed, the rapier marshal in charge of the entire event, eventually it got to him and he bounced him and he said you can’t fight. That guy went and threw a huge fit, got his own rattan marshal, not rapier but the rattan fighting to sign off and to give him a sticker. And then he came back and he tried to get in again. Once more got bounced after a lot of back and forth for not following the rules. And then he complained up the chain to the top of the SCA, he did not complain up the chain to the top of the war. So the war has its own structure and its own marshallate structure. He went around all that and complained up to the president of the SCA. Because they’re all dukes and because they all know each other. So the feeling was that he had broken the rules. Okay, I’m sorry, the feeling from the rapier people were the he had broken the rules. The feeling from a lot of the heavy fighters is that the rapier person was acting outside of their authority by telling a duke, no, you can’t come on the field. So in the end, the SCA sanctioned the rapier person, didn’t give any sanction at all to the dukes who were trying to break the rules. And this caused a big kerfuffle.
Guy Windsor
What you need in a safety marshal is someone who can tell it duke to go boil his own head because he’s not qualified and can’t step on the field. That is what you’re looking for in a safety marshal.
David Biggs
100%. You want someone who can stand up whenever they’re saying something isn’t right here. You need to sit out today.
Guy Windsor
I mean, even if he’d misread the paperwork and so it was technically wrong. Even so, you need him to be able to say no, there’s your paperwork is not correct. Therefore, legally, I can’t let you on the field, terribly sorry.
David Biggs
The corporate documents say that the authorisation paperwork needs to be properly signed, and you need to be able to present it when asked. It was not properly signed. And from what I’ve been able to tell none of the rapier marshals in that region ever heard who authorised this guy. And people keep claiming, oh, but he was definitely authorised. And no, there’s no definite because no one can tell anyone which rapier marshals were the ones who watched him and taught him.
Guy Windsor
And if he was authorised, he would have a piece of paper saying that if you don’t have the paper, you’re not authorised.
David Biggs
And also, there’s a rule in the corporate government documents that say, once you are authorised that has to go in the database. So they are required to put in a database which no one did. So there was a number of reasons that the person in charge of rapier said, you did not meet this rule and this rule, basically. So for safety reasons, and I’m sure there was more heated discussion than this. But for safety reasons, you can’t come on to my field. What the SCA has basically said, what the board of directors has said, is that a duke’s right to go on the field and fight is more important than all the safety rules that we have in place.
Guy Windsor
Well, it is a monarchy.
David Biggs
It is. This is part of the problem. This is why I’m saying the culture is a problem. The culture is that we unconsciously accept that these rulers, these dukes, actually have power when it’s actually just a game side thing. But people conflate the 501 C 3 organization, tax free organization with the inside game, you know, structure. That’s what’s happening. The game structure people are also the ones who tend to step up to the board. And so it gets very blended together.
Guy Windsor
Right. Okay. So you got involved, why?
David Biggs
So my wife noticed in the corporate documents that it says very clearly, any communications with the board of directors that aren’t marked confidential, are public. So she wrote the board and said, hey, I note this rule that is in the governing documents. I would like you to send out and present to us all of these documents that are exchanges of information between the board and these people that aren’t marked confidential and that aren’t otherwise protected by privacy laws.
Guy Windsor
Basically doing a Freedom of Information Act request.
David Biggs
In fact, we use that term and people were like, oh, but this is not the government. I’m like, no, no, we’re analogising is what we’re doing. So yes, she did exactly that. And they told her no. So she came back and she’s like, no, I don’t think you understand. This is what the rules say. I’m requesting this. And they started getting ruder and ruder in their notes. And so they were dismissing the smartest person I think I’ve ever known, out of hand.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I’ve met Alex. I wouldn’t want to argue with her.
David Biggs
Yeah. So I decided that I guess this organization was based on a hierarchy needed to see a JD riding in. So I wrote in support of her request, laying out in very large detail with 83 footnotes on why they were incorrect about what they were saying to her, and why that they are now legally liable and opening themselves up to lawsuits by not doing what their corporate documents say they’re supposed to do. That got a very interesting response. And I can’t remember what made me do this, but I followed it up now, by taking a look at some of the sanctions that they have passed down and how the SCA is not following its own rules. And it’s important to say, I wasn’t looking at the facts, because I don’t have all the facts. I was looking at the rules put in place and how the board followed the rules and how they broke all these rules.
Guy Windsor
Because the rules of the thing, because it’s a legally incorporated a nonprofit organisation. Its corporate governance, if you like, those rules are absolutely explicit. They’re written down, anyone can read them, and you are obliged by law to follow them or you are breaking the law.
David Biggs
You are obliged by law to follow them and you cannot go outside them. You cannot just make up your own rules and say we’re following them. There’s a legal concept that I wrote about, and I’m going to slaughter this because I’m not a Latin speaker, but it’s Ultra Viras. And that means you’re going beyond your power and organisations have been shut down because they were shown to be willy nilly making up rules without actually putting them in their corporate documents. You have to bring them up, vote on them, publish them, you know, there’s this whole process.
Guy Windsor
If you want to change the published rules, you have to go through a proper procedure, publish it, make it public. And now you can then follow those new rules. They didn’t do that.
David Biggs
No. And you cannot just simply say, well, we could pass this rule so therefore we’re going to do it. You know, that’s, that’s not the way this works, right?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And companies do this all the time. I mean, how often does a week go by where you don’t get an email from some company saying we are changing our terms of service, please go and have a look and accept them? Because that are obliged to inform you of any changes to the Terms of Service. Okay.
David Biggs
So what I did is basically, I showed the emperor has no clothes. And again, the members of the board, all the ones I’ve known are great people. My argument is they are in over their heads, very few of them have legal training, very few of them have a background in in the ability to read corporate documents and apply them, let alone read the laws of California and the laws of the United States and see how those all mesh. So we don’t have a professional board, we don’t have professional officers. And I was trying to point out, this is a problem, people. So that’s kind of what it came down to. The SCA has lost multiple lawsuits or settled multiple lawsuits. And a lot of the ones that I’ve read, have this exact same argument in it that you guys aren’t following your own rules. You have rules in place, and you’re not following them.
Guy Windsor
Okay. And as a result, dukes are getting preferential treatment at the expense of safety.
David Biggs
I mean, yes. So what it seems to me is that, and I’m going to be as generous as I can here, it seems to me that everyone simply assumes that certain people have power. So when they read the documents, they read into it, well, clearly these guys have this power. So oh, look, here’s this one clause that backs me up. But they don’t read the six other clauses that limit that power, you see what I’m saying? So that’s what’s going on is everyone is trying to read these governing documents with an already assumption in their head of what they should say. And they stop when they find a thing that backs up that assumption, and then they wave it around.
Guy Windsor
Now, there has been some, shall we say… what’s the kindest way to put it politically stupid comments? Let me float a catchphrase out you and see if you catch it. All right, half of 1%. What’s that all about?
David Biggs
So someone who is the spokesperson for the board of directors, who is apparently no longer the spokesperson for the board of directors, made an unwise, and this is not the first time she’s done it, posting on her private, well on her very public, but her own Facebook page. And it seems very much that it was dismissing the concerns of all the people who are writing letters in to the Board of Directors. That has now lit up a lot of other people to start writing more letters in. So now there’s also a hashtag, I’m seeing that #wearenumber126. In other words, we’re sending in after the 125 that you quoted.
Guy Windsor
So basically, 125 people sent in letters of complaint. It is a 25,000, strong organization, and 125 out of 25,000 is a half of 1%. It’s still 125 people.
David Biggs
Well, let me put this in context. That’s 125 people who wrote over the course of about five days. And if you know anything about marketing, you should know that for every one person who wrote there’s between 10 and 30 who didn’t write, yeah, now you’re looking up at around, you know, 10%, who are pretty upset at the SCA, if you take that marketing, that very well researched marketing to heart. And I suspect that they have far more than 125 that have written at this point in time.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. Where do you see this going?
David Biggs
Um, Alex has put out a petition, that is asking the board to reorganize. They need more people on the Board of Directors. They are overwhelmed. They only have between five and seven people at any one time. And they need more people because they’re always overwhelmed. We need professionals at the top. The President’s position needs to be professional, the Vice President of Operations, the one who basically interprets the rules, needs to be professional and needs to have training in rules interpretation. There needs to be training for every one of the board, the board of directors who comes in so that they understand how documents work and how to interpret them and you know, what their own personal liability is, if they get it wrong, they should all understand that clearly. And this is what effectively, Alex is saying is we need to bring in an outside corporate, not investigator, but someone who can basically look at the state of the business and say, here are my recommendations. A management consultant, a good one for nonprofits who understands nonprofits. And one of the issues that I’ve heard is that they tried to do this years ago. And in one case, they decided not to listen to the person. And in the other case, the person basically, in theory, was enacting a lot of shady financial things. So they don’t have a lot of good experience with bringing in people from the outside. So this is where the petition that we have in place is trying to get at and it’s not pointing fingers, it’s saying you guys are overwhelmed, and you need help, effectively.
Guy Windsor
So if all goes well, this will be a stimulus to a useful change in how the SCA is run.
David Biggs
One would hope. There’s a few other things that I think should happen. And a lot of other people too, they need to really divide the game side versus the corporate side very clearly, that needs to be a very clear divide. And the rules in place need to be very clear. I also think that we need to rework the marshallate structure in a very significant way. And that will get a lot of a lot of pushback from the armored community.
Guy Windsor
How do you mean? What changes would you recommend?
David Biggs
Right now, the armored marshal, the rattan fighting marshal is the one in charge of everything. So the society earl marshal is basically the rattan marshal. And that’s how it happens in every kingdom, the kingdom, earl marshal, is the rattan marshal, and then everyone else is a deputy underneath that.
Guy Windsor
So basically, what you’ve got is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is always from the Navy.
David Biggs
Yeah. Right. And therefore the Navy gets a lot of perks. And so my changes, well, mine and many others who had the same thought would be that the senior marshal needs to be an administrative position, who collects reports and who basically reports to the board. And then each of the deputies needs to have the full power of their discipline. So an equestrian deputy, an archery deputy, a rapier deputy, that kind of thing.
Guy Windsor
So actually, the person who is top of the tree when it comes to the actual boots on the ground, practical marshalling stuff is the deputy. And the marshal is the man who can basically interfaces between all the different disciplines and the board.
David Biggs
Yep. And the one who should be able to pull together reports quickly, you know, what are our what are our injury rates in all the different disciplines? You know, that person should be able to say, I can quickly get you that.
Guy Windsor
And here’s the thing, right? If it’s got a title like Earl Marshal, people will want it who shouldn’t have it. Because, honestly, when you describe that job, I think that is the last job on Earth I would want. I would rather clean toilets in a nasty pub, than do that kind of admin stuff, because it would just melt my brain to pieces. And I’d be rubbish at it. A lot of people would get cross with me for good reason.
David Biggs
And let me take that and run with it. My argument that I made in one of the papers that I wrote was, if you’re an earl marshal of a kingdom, you shouldn’t want to have the ability to override the equestrian experts in your kingdom and the rapier experts in your kingdom. You should be saying no, no, no. I have to listen to them because they know what they’re doing. And I’ve never trained in horse before. I’ve never trained in rapier before. So my argument is, from a legal point of view, you should separate yourself from those other disciplines that you’ve never trained in. But what do I know?
Guy Windsor
Well, quite a lot apparently, I mean, it could help. You know, I have an interview coming up, actually, in the schedule it’s the next one after this, with someone who was injured in the SCA during a safety test thing, because the person running the test basically overruled the protests of the person being tested. And basically made this person keep hitting harder and harder and harder until eventually an injury occurred. And it was basically manipulating their position to get a pesky woman out of the way by injuring her. You probably know what I’m talking about,
David Biggs
Actually, there’s a problem. I don’t because I’ve heard the story many, many times from different people. This is a culture in the SCA. And you will hear mostly on the armored field but also in rapier, teaching through pain. You will hear that over and over again.
Guy Windsor
The thing that I’ve never attracted me about the SCA is the hierarchy. I just can’t get my head around the idea of calling someone lord or duke or whatever, when they’re just Bill from accounts, you know?
David Biggs
So, yes, I have used the SCA for my own purposes the entire time I’ve been in it. And that is a testbed for rapier, to use the structure to practice in SCA practices or to go to tournaments or whatever. So I’ve never really been taken with the whole with the persona play with the Lord, Lady with the Duke, Duchess, whatever. And that has given me kind of the ability to be somewhat distant from it, as opposed to really engaged, and my title being part of my personality, you know.
Guy Windsor
What is your title? Master of defense?
David Biggs
Master twice because the Laurel is a master and the Defense is a master. So, some people say maestro, some people say magistra. My wife uses magistra because it’s a 12th century term for teachers, for professors. I don’t tend to go by my titles. Usually I just write my name and then order the Laurel or order defense. I don’t put Master Aeron Harper.
Guy Windsor
You chose the name Aeron Harper. Am I right in thinking the Harper is something to do with actual harps?
David Biggs
Interestingly enough, so when I was looking at names, my little sister’s name is Erin. And I saw the Gaelic Aeron and thought that sounds interesting. I like that. Well, I like to roll that r sound and then yes, I had just started building harps. And so I was like, and I know that Harper is a period name. It’s easily documentable. So I just threw that together. And that became the name.
Guy Windsor
Yes. That’s someone who plays or makes harps?
David Biggs
I think it’s someone who , I don’t think it’s the one who makes them. But I do.
Guy Windsor
Yes, I am being a bit disingenuous, because of course, I’ve been to your house and I’ve dug around in your woodpile, and I’ve actually played one of your harps. That’s overstating the case, I have sat on the sofa and strummed the strings of one of your harps, we wouldn’t call it actually playing. As you know, I’m a woodworker, I think everyone listening is probably the bored to death about me talking about chisels and stuff. So did you start your woodworking career with harps?
David Biggs
I kind of did actually.
Guy Windsor
It’s a hard place to start.
David Biggs
It is. But I’ll say this, and this is why I say kind of my grandfather was a carpenter and a woodworker. He was not a fine woodworker. He was a nail it together and glue it down and make it work. He built houses for a while. And then he started building kind of simple furniture. So I grew up watching him in the woodshop just out there kind of seeing what he did and how he did it. So when I was dating my first wife, she had a little harp made by someone in Louisiana, that had fallen apart or actually it had pulled itself apart when it sat in the sun, the glue melted. So she had it repaired and they repaired it just fine. But I looked at the design. And I was like I know how to fix that. So back to the whole Longpoint thing. You know, I looked at it and thought I can do better than that. So I sat down and designed, engineered a harp, and thought I want to make this and so we took a week and went to my grandpa’s farm and sat in his woodshop. And I banged out like four or five pieces, four or five harp pieces. So I had enough for like four harps or so and so I put one together, and it worked just fine. Eventually, I had put enough together that I started selling them. And at this point in time, I think I’ve built about 30. I mean, it’s over the course of a long time. You know, it’s over the course of what 20 years plus. But I’ve changed my design a few times. And the one that you played, I got a hold of blueprints from Germany of a supposedly 16th Century Gothic harp and built that, designed and built that. So that’s how that’s how I got into it. Basically, it’s just been over the years. You know, I try something I look at it. Oh, look, that joint didn’t work well, how can I fix that joint? Go back again. So I’ve gone through like three or four iterations of my design.
Guy Windsor
You must know Andrew Lawrence King. He’s been on this show before we’ll put a link in the show notes. I’ve been in his kitchen where his wife at the time who also builds harps had just finished quite a big one. It must have been about four foot tall and he would play it a little bit. And then she would sort of open up this box in the middle of it and reach in and scrape a little bit with a chisel, brush out the shavings and then close it back up again. He played again it would sound different, even to my ears. I have cloth ears, it would sound different. How do you learn that?
David Biggs
You learn it by doing it. I have only tuned by soundboards a little bit. I haven’t tuned to that degree, she was very good.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. She was making harps for a professional world class professional harpist.
David Biggs
Right. And she also she was making a Baroque harp, if I remember correctly, that was her specialty, the larger Baroque, the bigger bodies. With the smaller Renaissance harp, there’s a question about whether they actually tuned that way. Whether they actually really fine-tuned to that point. But my favorite lute maker, Robert Lundberg, who bless his soul has died. He talks about tuning lute bodies, lute bellies. And what he would do is before he put it all together, he would hold it up, and he would hold it by the base support, and just tap it all around. And then he would shave off bits of the support until he had the tone where he wanted. He localised the base to the bottom of the belly, and he localised the tenor to the top of the belly, that kind of thing. So there’s lots of different ways to tune the belly of your harp or of your lute. And it really just simply takes doing it and figuring it out. I mean, you know this, each piece of wood is different from each other piece of wood. So it takes the experience of knowing where to remove the thickness without compromising the strength versus you know, the thickness, right?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and two bits of oak might be more different than a bit of oak and a bit of ash. Just depending on how the tree grew.
David Biggs
The seasons, the water table, the whole thing.
Guy Windsor
So do you make anything else other than harps?
David Biggs
I’ve made a few lyres. And I’ve made a whole bunch of furniture of different types. I’ve made sword stands, I’ve made.
Guy Windsor
Everyone’s made sword stands, whether they are woodworkers or not.
David Biggs
I can’t think of much else. I mean, anything that comes to mind I can make out of wood I make out of wood. This desk I’m sitting at right now, I made. The one beside me my grandpa made. Whenever I think of something looks interesting, or I want to test myself, I do it. But unlike you, I don’t continually do it. So every time I come back to my project, I have to relearn how my chisel works and kind of relearn how to tune my planes.
Guy Windsor
So you jump in and out?
David Biggs
I do, I do.
Guy Windsor
So I’m guessing you didn’t do a lot of woodwork in the Ukraine?
David Biggs
No. Zero. I had to pack my entire shop up and leave it. I had to pack up a lot of my hobbies and leave them behind because we had an apartment in downtown Kyiv. And that that was that was a no no.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I have a friend who used to do woodworking quite seriously and then moved to an apartment in the middle of Edinburgh. And so he switched to stained glass.
David Biggs
I can see that. I did. So there’s an article I read about a guy who’s one of the top violin repairists. And he lives in an apartment, a small apartment in New York City. And he has this closet where he just opens it up, his entire shop kind of just comes down and he has all of his hand tools in front of them. I’m in awe of that guy.
Guy Windsor
That’s fantastic. Yeah, I do like these hideaway workshop setups. I mean, I really like having an enormous workshop and loads of space and natural light, that would be ideal. But yeah, like, tool organization. And I’ve seen like in woodworking magazines, people have these amazing, it looks like an ordinary cupboard, but open it up and it’s just like chisels and planes and everything. And then there’s this table underneath it actually happens to be super stable and bolted to the wall. And there’s a vice that kind of just pops onto it. I love that stealth woodworking. I’m guessing a violin repairer like that working at that level. He’s working on instruments that are worth hundreds of 1000s of dollars. He’s probably working on one at a time. He’s never in any rush. And you don’t really need a lot of space for that sort of thing.
David Biggs
No. You might have seen you know, the planes that you use on violins are tiny little things, about the size of your thumb. I agree. I mean, the fact that I want to work on big furniture and harps kind of makes the fact that I need a bigger shop than that guy does.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. I have an optimal kind of working size. I like to work on things that are sort of between about four feet long down to about six inches on the side. Anything smaller than that, I get a bit lost. Although I have taken up watch repair a little bit. And that is really ridiculously tiny and impossible and difficult and it melts my brain.
David Biggs
Yeah, I saw you doing that. That’s amazing. I’ve known one other person who did that. And that’s one of those, like, wow.
Guy Windsor
Don’t be, yeah, I mean, I haven’t yet actually disassembled a mechanical watch movement and reassembled it, because you have to clean it. And it needs special solvents. And you need special lubricants and stuff which are applied in the most microscopic quantities. I haven’t got there yet. At the moment, I’m sort of changing batteries and crystals and straps. And I’ve replaced the movement. This watch here, in fact. This this rotary watch, which I got in a bunch of like spares and repairs on eBay. And changing the battery didn’t fix it. And it was one of those movements that can’t really be worked on. So I just got a new movement and put it all back in. And that’s why it’s got all these fancy chronograph things, actually it is missing one of the hands because I lost it. So it wasn’t a fully successful job.
David Biggs
It’s a learning and this is why you and I are on the same page. I mean, so I wanted to get a new bike. So what did I do? I bought all the parts and built it while I was going through Russian training, you know. Never done that before. I spent way more on the tools, and I probably would have just buying a new bike.
Guy Windsor
But then you understand how it works. And you can fix it if it breaks. I am very much in favour of you learn it by doing it. It’s funny, because you don’t learn swordsmanship from reading a book. If you can’t read the book, you won’t learn swordsmanship, at least if you’re doing original research,
David Biggs
Yes. But this has been the argument for academics for a long time. You cannot learn any discipline by just talking about it, you have to be doing it.
Guy Windsor
Except philosophy.
David Biggs
True, but you still have to see it in action, you still have to be able to point to things and say this is how things work. I’ve sat in meetings in my day job with professors who tell me what the State Department should be doing without ever having had to go through the process of making something happen in the State Department. And it’s really easy to say that we should be doing this thing. But you don’t understand all of the interagency hoops and whistles we have to go through to get anything done. But they don’t care because they don’t have to. That’s not the thing.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. I mean, theory has its place, but it should be theory and practice. Now, you’ve obviously done a lot of stuff. But I have a couple of questions that I ask most of my guests. The first is what’s the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
David Biggs
So I thought of three. The sword focused one is and I’m started doing this translate Ghislieri. No one’s done Ghislieri. I know that Gary Chelak was working on it at one point. I know that Justin, one of Justin’s friends is working on it. But I want to see what Ghislieri says because he has a fascinating background history. He was cousin to a pope, and was a general on the battlefield. And then he wrote his manual. So he had all that experience. And then he wrote this manual. So that’s the sword one.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what’s stopping you from doing it?
David Biggs
Oh, I’m doing it little by little I just give and take putting aside so many other things to focus on it. And so that’s why it’s, you know. I’ve acted kind of on it. But I haven’t gotten more than like, a couple paragraphs into it, if that makes sense.
Guy Windsor
Okay, yeah. Yeah. What do you are translating a whole book, a couple of paragraphs is like, the warm up to the beginning.
David Biggs
Exactly. The thing that I’ve thought about a lot of my life that I haven’t done is I want to buy a timber frame barn and construct it out on some land and build a house around that barn.
Guy Windsor
Okay, not what I was expecting.
David Biggs
I love timber frames. I love timber frame houses. And I love the idea of this three or 400 year old timber frame structure that I can then feel free to design, my living space inside, you know.
Guy Windsor
There are people doing that at the moment and documenting it. They also they run a woodworking magazine. Dammit, I’m on their mailing list and I’ve bought some of their books.
David Biggs
Okay, I have two of them. I know you’re talking about. Mortise and Tenon magazine.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And then they have this project of their restoring this old house and it’s all wood and it’s all very jack planes and mallets. So why haven’t you done it?
David Biggs
Because I haven’t settled down in any one place to have the land that I want. After we were in Houston, and then I went to law school and then we were in foreign service. So we moved around the world a couple times. And then we came back here to DC, we bought this house, and we’ve been working. Not the Foreign Service anymore. I resigned from the Foreign Service, resigned my commission and took up a civil service position, but still in the State Department. So now in the back of my head, I’m kind of keeping an eye out for different pieces of land around, you know, Pennsylvania and New York, something like that.
Guy Windsor
So if anyone listening has a 300 year old barn on a piece of land that they might want to get rid of, they should talk to you.
David Biggs
Sure, sure. There are companies who do it, they’ll buy these barns, they’ll take them down, and then they will sell them as kits.
Guy Windsor
That’s not actually a bad way to do it.
David Biggs
I mean, because anyone who wants to take down their timber frame barn can just contact this company. And they’re like, yeah, well, we’ll give you this money for it. And then we’ll clean the timbers and replaced the ones that are done for you know, and then you can go online and find, they will show you what the barns look like, some of them even use AutoCAD to show you kind of design inside the barn. So it’s a whole thing here.
Guy Windsor
Wow. Okay. So you just need to make a ton of money.
David Biggs
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I mean, there’s not really that much opportunity to embezzle shit in the State Department is there?
David Biggs
I don’t want to. I was asked to break the law once and told him no. And that was an interesting little adventure.
Guy Windsor
Okay, what happened? Or can’t you talk about it?
David Biggs
I worked for an office that, trying to figure out how to say this well. We were asked to share some things with another US agency. And because the State Department is outward looking, there are rules against what we can do with inward looking agencies. Does that make sense?
Guy Windsor
Right, so like differences, CIA and FBI?
David Biggs
Yeah, pretty much. DHS and State Department, right? The State Department is international. DHS is the homeland. Because basically, we can’t spend our money on something that is inside the US. That’s a very big State Department rule. So if we did something, if we did a report that looked inside the US that crosses a whole lot of legal lines. So I was acting office director, and I was asked to sign off on doing exactly that. And the paper that I was looking at had our lawyers’ paragraph telling us, this is something we cannot do. So I just replied to that email with that cut and paste saying this is something we cannot do. And my bosses were not happy with me.
Guy Windsor
You’d think they would be like, oh, well, I’m jolly glad David spotted that because otherwise we might end up in jail.
David Biggs
You’d think, but this was this was an interesting time. And I’ll just leave it at that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so obviously, they knew that it was against the law and hoping you wouldn’t notice. Which is another way of saying they’re hoping you were crap at your job.
David Biggs
That or browbeating, you know, that to just do what we say, right?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. Yep. Fair enough. All right. So that’s two. You’ve had translate Ghislieri, build a barn? What’s the third one?
David Biggs
The third one is I want to ride a bike across northern Italy. Stopping every evening to cook with the local Italians.
Guy Windsor
That’s a brilliant idea. Can I come?
David Biggs
Absolutely man because, it would be like 30 miles a day, wouldn’t be much because you’d have to get there in the late afternoon and then just go and cook dinner. There’s hills. But then, you know, the next day you’d ride off all those calories.
Guy Windsor
Dude, I’m going to be behind you in a hired Lamborghini. I’m not cycling. There’s hills. I once tried to take a walk in the Italian countryside outside Lucca. And it is very difficult to safely be not a car on those roads. And that’s difficult to be safely a car on those roads too. So, what I’ll be doing, not a Lamborghini, because that’d not be a good choice for this purpose. Because it’d be too loud and noisy and it wants to go fast. But you need a car behind you so the other cars behind you are going to kill you.
David Biggs
I have heard hints that there are people who actually have tours like this now, that basically there is a car that goes from town to town and you give your stuff with it if you want to, your suitcase or backpack or whatever, and then you’re just free to ride. So I’ve been told that these things exist. I just haven’t looked them up.
Guy Windsor
Setting up the cooking side of things shouldn’t be that difficult because through the historical martial arts connections, we sort of have access to Italians in just about every town in Italy.
David Biggs
That or even just call some nice restaurants and say, hey, I’d like to learn what you know, I’ll be there this evening and I bet a lot of them would be like, sure, come on by. I thought the smaller restaurants, I’m talking the smaller towns.
Guy Windsor
Have you ever been in a professional kitchen?
David Biggs
In a professional? Okay, I’ve been in one. I’ve never worked in one if that makes sense.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. There isn’t a lot of room for people who don’t know what they’re doing.
David Biggs
You’re right. You’re right there. That’s true.
Guy Windsor
Probably better off getting historical fencers in these places just to take you home. And you can help them mum cook. And you will definitely get the calories in that way.
David Biggs
Yep. And that’s true, because that ties in the whole fencing thing, and that’d be even more fun.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. Well, I think you should definitely do that.
David Biggs
I do too. My brother and I took our kid our sons to Northern Italy and we roamed around Trento and Bolzano. And we saw all the biking trails that were already built into the sides of the hills and stuff. And this is what kind of got my head thinking, either here up in the way North Italy or down in round Florence to Bologna, for instance, you know, something like that. I don’t know.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay, good ideas. I think you should act on especially the last one. Okay, last question. Somebody gives you a proverbial million dollars to spend reading historical martial arts worldwide, how would you spend it?
David Biggs
So what I came up with is this: I would put that million dollars in an interest bearing account or endowment, and then I would use the proceeds to fund a series of seminars and tournaments. I might also use it to set up a training system or school for training judges, so that we could have an actual training process for judges. And then if it grew big enough, I might take a chunk for research grants and give people a few $1,000 to go study at the New York library or you know, some other place to do some research.
Guy Windsor
I mean, a million dollars, well invested should be bringing in 50 to 100 grand a year.
David Biggs
That’s exactly what I have here. As I was thinking $50 to $80,000. LBC comes in at under $10,000. And it makes a small profit each year. So let’s say I was given a $3,000 grant for Lord Baltimore’s challenge, I could then buy a really nice venue, keep charging the same amount for everyone. And I wouldn’t have to raise my prices. So that kind of a thing you could do 10 of those a year, you know, just help other people out.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it’s a nice broad focus. So you’d like grants for people running events, grants for research, grants for these various other things. The trick, of course, always, is you need to have some kind of filtering process.
David Biggs
Right, you need to have a committee or something.
Guy Windsor
And it can’t be David’s mates get the cash.
David Biggs
Dammit. No, you’re right. Because if I set up an endowment, it would have to be a legal organization. So it has to have its own rules, right?
Guy Windsor
And you’d actually have to follow them.
David Biggs
Yep. Imagine that.
Guy Windsor
To change them, you’d have to go through a due process and let everybody know. Never go Ultra Viras. Okay, what specifically would you want the fund to achieve? What is the gap that you want to fill or the area of weakness that you want to strengthen?
David Biggs
To enable people who are in smaller, distant areas who want to do a small thing, maybe just a sabre only focussed tournament or who don’t have the chops to do you know, 15 tournaments over a weekend or whatever. I want to help out the people who have good ideas, but don’t know where to start with them and don’t have the money to do it themselves. I was lucky enough that I had an open credit card when I started Lord Baltimore’s Challenge and I made all that money back. So I still had an open credit card. But not everyone has that. This is what I did in the SCA. I created some rules under the arts and sciences umbrella for studying historical swordplay. And I wrote the rules broadly so that you can study any type of historical martial arts you wanted to inside the SCA, now, not tournaments, but this is study, this is like demonstrations and things. But I wrote it as broadly as I could. So it can help everyone people who wanted to do armizare, people who wanted to do grappling, you know, whatever. So this is the same kind of thing. I would want to put in place a framework that people could use for whatever study they wanted to do. And I guess the rules would say has to be pre, I don’t know, pre 1900, pre 1800 martial art or something like that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, but then, would you consider jousting a martial art?
David Biggs
I would.
Guy Windsor
I would too. But not everybody would, because the joust is basically a combat sport that has been artificial and it takes a military skill and makes a sport out of it.
David Biggs
Technically, almost everything we do is that. So I have no problem with that. You still have techniques that were used in actual battles that they demonstrate on horseback, you can, depending on how you run your joust, it can be more or less closer to a combat or to the very long lances that were the big demonstrations. Nonetheless, I would want to be more agnostic about make your case, we have between $2 and let’s say $15,000 grants that we can give you make your case to us. And if you make your case well enough, then we’ll give you a grant.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it’s funny how money makes all sorts of things a lot easier. And I would want this to kind of skew towards the areas with lower standards of living, lower cost of living. So $1,000 to somebody living in Arizona, is a different thing to $1,000 to someone living in, shall we say Peru.
David Biggs
Cost of living can be taken into account.
Guy Windsor
So that million dollars will go a lot further in places, which where the money is simply goes further.
David Biggs
That would be part of the judgment, part of the thing would be like, you know, how will this impact you? I mean, some people might say, hey, $2,000, is all we would ever need for this weekend seminar, for instance, right? I’ll say this, this is an interesting point, you know, I talked about this, too, I would never want someone to get a grant that makes everything free for people, right. And here’s why. Throughout my 25, 30 years of doing this, I have grown convinced that students who have a little bit of skin in the game are far more focused and more interested and learn more than if you walk in for free, and you’re just like there. So even charging 20 bucks to enter to get into my seminar, for instance, I get a higher class of interested students than when I teach for free at places.
Guy Windsor
And there’s a big difference between choosing to teach for free for good reasons, and the students getting it entirely for free. And it’s there are places I have been where $10 for a day’s instruction was all that can reasonably be charged. And at the end of the day, I don’t take any money for it, because it’s not enough money to be worth, like, I like to either get paid properly or not at all. I don’t like to get paid a little bit. But having that small fee, yeah, it basically requires a certain commitment from them, which then makes the whole experience better for everybody. It matches my experience anyway.
David Biggs
Yeah. And it’s the same for Lord Baltimore’s Challenge. If I open the tournaments up to anyone who came in to Lord Baltimore’s Challenge, you get overwhelmed by people signing up. But if you make a bit of a price on them, it makes people think, do I really want to do that? Or do I just want to go and watch, you know, and so you filter at that end.
Guy Windsor
And from what I saw at Lord Baltimore’s Challenge twice now, the people who are in the tournament all really wanted to be there. It was most of the people at the event, I think.
David Biggs
I think so. I’m very happy with who has come. And with the camaraderie and you’ve mentioned this, and others have mentioned this. It’s showing that our two on the one hand, very close and similar, on the other hand, very different groups have everything in common. They just need to come together and see it.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So SCA and historical martial arts. It’s tricky, because, one thing I found when I was judging the tournament director was that the SCA tended to hit very light, and the HEMA people tended to hit a bit hard. And so I’d have to kind of force calibrate the HEMA people down a bit and force calibrate the SCA people up a bit to get to a kind of mutually acceptable standard where yes, that hit was definitely made. But the one thing I was really pleased to see is the historical martial arts people very quickly picked up on the SCA thing of acknowledging hits against yourself. And I saw people several times, disallow a hit that they’d been awarded. Like, actually, no, I didn’t. I don’t think I hit him cleanly enough. So I won’t take that hit.
David Biggs
At ISMAC, did you ever go and watch the rapier tournaments there? Did you watch those? Because I’ve got a relevant story.
Guy Windsor
The last ISMAC I went to was in 2007, I think, so I don’t actually recall. Probably. And I was probably involved in judging some of them. And I certainly did demonstration bouts at at least one of the ISMACs.
David Biggs
The two I went to, which I think were like 2002 and 2003, or 2003 and 4, something like that. Two in a row. I won both the rapier tournaments and Martinez ran it, I remember MacDonald was one of the maestros, I think Sean Hayes was. Anyway, I can’t remember. You might have been as well. We had one on each corner and then Martinez was the ring director floating. So the very first tournament, the three winners were all SCA fencers. As we got towards the finals, we were doing the same thing we do in the SCA. One of my bouts was with Brian Wilson, of Darkwood Armory. We had an exchange, he hit my hand, none of the judges saw it, but I took a step back and I held my hand up. Martinez walked up and he was like, everything OK? And I said, oh yeah, he hit my hand. And he looked around and all the judges kind of shrugged, and said OK, point to Brian. And then we had a couple of other things where I think James, the guy who came in third, called back a shot. He was like, no, I didn’t get that shot, I don’t want to be awarded that shot. And he got mad because the judges were like, no you’re going to take that shot. They gave him points and he was like, no, I didn’t hit him. So the very next year, Martinez made a big speech at the beginning of the next tournament, and he said, last year’s tournament was the most honourable I’ve ever seen with people acknowledging blows and he said I would love to see that again, and we did it again. So we were taking the SCA culture of acknowledge your blows and be honourable about it and we were kind of blending it in to ISMAC. I was thrilled, it made me so happy to see that it started coming out. And it happened in Lord Baltimore’s Challenge, like you just said. The HEMA people were like, oh, this is what you do here. This is what we’re going to do.
Guy Windsor
Because people respond to the culture that they are in. And if that’s the expected thing. Most critically, you get social credit for being seen to be honourable. People respect you for acknowledging hits against yourself. That’s the critically important part of it.
David Biggs
All it takes is one bad tournament where you’re not calling blows to destroy your reputation, for everyone to look at you with the side eye.
Guy Windsor
Although I do know someone from the SCA whose arm was broken through their armour who didn’t call the hit because he said it was light. That’s a broken arm through plate armour.
David Biggs
I’ve heard of that before too. I just can’t. So when Roger Siggs was the kingdom rapier marshal for his region, he put in place a rule which is controversial but I loved it, you could not call light, without following it up with “you need to hit me harder.” And so what this did is people would fight and go back up and go, “Light, you need..” and they’d stop for a second and go, “No, no, that was good.” It wasn’t perfect but it proved a point, I think.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Excellent, brilliant. Thank you so much for talking to me today, David, it’s been lovely talking to you.
David Biggs
Thanks Guy, always love talking to you.
