Hi!

I’m writing this in Minneapolis St Paul airport, waiting for a delayed flight to Chicago to connect to my flight home. This three-week trip has been extremely eventful, so much so that I’m going to split telling you about it over a couple of emails.

After a magnificent week with Jessica Finley (as you no doubt recall from the last missive), I went to see my friend Jason James, currently stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. Just getting “on post” (as these military types call it) involved a vetting procedure worthy of getting into the Secret Service (the UK version, or the US, though they do very different things). What better place to spend the 4th of July? it was dead quiet. Soldiers do not generally approve of setting off fireworks around heavy ordnance.

And there was some damn fine ordnance on display. This martial lunacy was built to fire atomic shells.

As well as some light utility vehicles:

While I was there I got to try on Sergeant 1st Class James’s body armour. It’s surprisingly heavy and awkward to get on and off, though he says the newest version is easier.

But can I do push-ups in it?
​https://vimeo.com/985224814/5451bdb208?share=copy​

Then it was off to Madison to see my friends Heidi and Chris, and also teach a seminar. It went very well, and was pretty full- we had 24 rapierists on the Saturday, and 19 Longsworders on the Sunday. Thanks to everyone who showed up; teaching seminars is one of my favourite things to do, and I can only do it if people attend.

New this week

Pedro Velasco, one of the organisers of the excellent Panoplia Iberica I attended last December, has shared the video of my lecture on making a living as a historical martial arts instructor, here:
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDDOTxX4DWo​

And I was interviewed by Madeleine James about the things fiction writers should know about swordfighting. Part one is up here:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/1NiuBcmuw9g?si=aZm48SkXTs4CWQIw​
Part 2 is linked to in the comments there. It was a pretty long and detailed conversation!

And my new book on how to teach historical martial arts is up for pre-order on my store, here:
​https://swordschool.shop/collections/get-them-moving​

This week on the podcast: Crystal and Silver in a Shakespearean accent, with Ben Crystal

In today’s episode we have another audiobook/interview mashup!

The Paradoxes of Defence Audiobook Project involved me hiring two narrators to record George Silver’s 1599 book, Paradoxes of Defence. Ben Crystal is a Shakespearean actor, specialising in original pronunciation, and Jonathan Hartman is a modern dramatic actor who narrates in modern English. Renowned historical harpist Andrew Lawrence-King provides the musical punctuation.

George Silver, an English gentleman, was appalled at the influx of Italian rapier fencing into England, and set out his arguments in favour of the traditional English weapons. He rails against the fashionable new style on the grounds that it is both dangerous to the practitioners, and of no use in warfare.

Whether he was right or wrong, history was against him and the fashionable Italian rapier took over. But his work offers a vital window into the theory and practice of martial arts in England in Tudor times, and ironically provides much of what we know about several Italian rapier masters: Rocco Bonetti, Vincentio Saviolo, and Jeronimo Saviolo.

This podcast episode contains a couple of sample chapters of the audiobook read in original pronunciation by Ben Crystal, which is then followed by my interview with Ben, from episode 58. Here’s a bit more information about the interview:

Ben Crystal is an actor, author, producer, and explorer of original practices in Shakespeare rehearsal and production. In this episode we talk about Ben’s work in exploring how actors would have rehearsed, staged, and performed Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, and how the original rhymes and pronunciation would have sounded. It makes for a completely different experience to what we think of as “Shakespearean” in modern times. Even if you aren’t into Shakespeare this is a fascinating conversation about theatre, memory, language, and of course, swords.

Which leads us on to George Silver. Find out what Ben thinks of Silver and whether he would have wanted to go to the pub with him. For those of you unaware of our project, in 1599 George Silver published his Paradoxes of Defence, offering a window into the Tudor and medieval martial arts as practiced in England. You can find the audiobook at https://swordschool.shop/products/paradoxes-of-defence-in-audio-original-pronunciation-audiobook​

yours,

Guy