The Longsword and the Fight Books

Indes: Middle High German, 'meanwhile', the instant when the blades touch and you feel which way the other will move. Strasbourg, spring 1570: a cutler's apprentice watches his master's fencing book arrive from the printer, and we go back two hundred years to a master no one ever saw... Inside: the Ox, the Plough, the Fool and the Roof, the Wrath Cut, a lynx with compasses and an elephant with a castle, a duel between a man in a pit and a woman with a stone, a priest's long knife, blood on the scalp at the Frankfurt fair, and a city treasurer hanged for his fencing books. Johannes Liechtenauer, Fiore dei Liberi and Joachim Meyer will be there too. Chapters: The sword itself · The parts of the sword · The master no one ever saw · The flower of battle · In armour · On horseback · The judicial duel · The long knife · The brotherhoods · The fencing school · An evening lesson · The book · The man who wanted everything · The end of the longsword · The return · Evening. Sources: Meyer (1570), the Döbringer manuscript (c. 1389), Fiore's Fior di Battaglia (c. 1409), Talhoffer, Lecküchner (1478), the 1487 Marxbrüder privilege, Paulus Hector Mair. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

There are more books about fighting with the longsword than about any other weapon of the Middle Ages.

Not one or two. Dozens. Hand-written, hand-painted, and later printed... in German, in Italian, in Latin... filled with pictures of men in pairs, swords crossed, caught in the middle of a movement, and pages of careful instructions beside them. Some of them are among the most beautiful books of their time.

The men who wrote them were trying to do something that may be impossible. To put movement into words. To teach, on paper, something that lives only in the body.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode three... the longsword and the fight books.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is the spring of the year fifteen seventy. You are in Strasbourg, a great free city on the river Rhine, with a cathedral whose single tall spire you can see from every street.

You are sixteen, and you are an apprentice in the workshop of a cutler. A cutler makes knives, daggers, and the hilts and fittings of swords. Your master's name is Joachim Meyer. He is a respected citizen, a member of the cutlers' guild, a married man of about thirty-three. And he is also a master of fencing, who teaches the young men of the city in the evenings.

And this week, something has happened in the workshop that has never happened before. A cart has come from the printer's, and unloaded bundles of paper, tied with string. It is your master's book.

It is a large, heavy book, with hundreds of pages of text, and dozens of woodcut pictures. In each picture, a big hall, with high windows, and in it, pairs of men in puffed and slashed clothes, fencing with long swords, with daggers, with staffs, with halberds. In the background of some, other pairs are practising too, and there are spectators watching from the side.

Its title is long, as titles were then. In short, it is A Thorough Description of the Free, Knightly and Noble Art of Fencing.

Your master spent years on it, and almost everything he had. Printing a book with so many pictures cost a fortune. He borrowed to pay for it. He hopes to sell enough copies, and to find a lord who will employ him as a fencing master, to pay the debt.

He will find that lord, in the north, in a city called Schwerin, early next year. He will travel there in the winter. And he will die there, a few weeks after he arrives, of a sickness, before his new work has properly begun. You do not know that yet. Nobody does. This week, the book has come, and the workshop smells of fresh ink.

But that is the end of the story, and the longsword's story begins two hundred years earlier. So let us go back, while your master unties the bundles.

Chapter one. The sword itself.

First, what is a longsword?

It is a straight, double-edged sword, with a grip long enough for two hands, and a crossguard. Its whole length is, usually, between about one metre ten and one metre thirty centimetres... from the floor, up to somewhere between your hip and your chest. It weighs, usually, between about one kilogram and a quarter and one and three quarters. That is about as much as a large loaf of bread. Not more.

The blade is long enough to reach, and light enough to move fast. The long grip lets you use both hands... one near the guard, one near the pommel... so you can turn the sword like a lever, with the hands working against each other. That is what gives the longsword its speed. A small movement of the hands makes a large movement of the point.

It appeared in the twelve hundreds and thirteen hundreds, as armour grew stronger, and knights put aside their shields. It was a knight's weapon, at first. And then something else happened. It became a townsman's weapon too.

In the German cities, in the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, ordinary citizens... craftsmen, merchants, apprentices... learned to fence. Partly for defence. Partly because the cities required their men to be able to fight, to guard the walls. And partly, quite simply, because they enjoyed it. Fencing became a sport, a pastime and a source of pride, in the way that football is today. There were fencing halls, fencing masters, fencing contests at the fairs.

And the weapon they learned first, the weapon that was considered the foundation of all the others, was the longsword.

Chapter two. The parts of the sword.

Before the masters, the words. Every art has its own words, and the longsword has many.

The blade has two edges, but they are not equal. The edge that faces forward, toward your opponent, when you hold the sword naturally, is called the long edge, or the true edge. The edge that faces back toward you is the short edge, or the false edge. A great deal of the art is about cutting with the short edge... turning the hands over, so that the back of the sword strikes where nobody expects it.

The blade also has a strong part and a weak part. The half nearest the hilt is the strong. Pressed there, it has great leverage, and it is hard to push aside. The half nearest the point is the weak. It moves fast, and it reaches far, but it is easily pushed. When two swords meet, it matters very much which part of your blade is touching which part of his. Your strong against his weak, and you control his sword. Your weak against his strong, and he controls yours.

The Germans called these simply the strong and the weak. The Italians, later, had words for it too, and those words are still used in fencing today... forte and foible.

Then the hilt. The crossguard, which stops a sliding blade from reaching the hands, and can also hook, catch and strike. The grip, wrapped in leather or cord, sometimes shaped like a long, slim barrel. And the pommel, the round or pear-shaped weight at the end, which balances the blade, keeps the hands from slipping off, and, if needed, can be used as a hammer.

When the swords cross, and the blades are pressed together, the masters called it the bind. Nearly everything that matters in a longsword fight happens in the bind, in the second or two after the blades have met.

Chapter three. The master no one ever saw.

Almost every German fight book of the next two hundred years, including the one in your master's workshop, goes back to one man.

His name was Johannes Liechtenauer. And we know almost nothing about him.

He seems to have lived in the thirteen hundreds. He is said to have travelled through many lands to learn the art of the sword, and then to have put everything he learned into a short poem. That is all. No portrait. No grave. No date of birth or death. Just a name, and the poem.

The poem is strange. It is written in short rhyming couplets, in old German, and it is deliberately obscure. A line might say, roughly, cut crooked to the hands... or, he who goes after, sees what comes before. It was meant to be memorised by students who already understood the art, and to be meaningless to anyone who did not. A kind of secret code, in rhyme.

Liechtenauer's pupils, and their pupils, wrote commentaries on it, explaining each line, sometimes in many pages. The oldest of these commentaries is in a small manuscript from Nuremberg, written around the year thirteen eighty-nine, which belonged, as far as we can tell, to a priest. It mixes fencing with recipes, fireworks, and magic charms. Scholars have spent their lives untangling it.

From these commentaries, we know some of what Liechtenauer taught.

He taught that there are four main guards... four ways to stand and hold the sword, ready, from which everything else begins.

The Ox. The sword held high beside the head, the point toward the opponent's face, like the horn of an ox.

The Plough. The sword held low beside the hip, the point up toward the opponent's face, like the handles of a plough.

The Fool. The sword held low in front, the point toward the ground. It looks foolish, open, as if you are not ready. It is not.

And the Roof. The sword held up over the shoulder, or above the head... ready to come down.

He taught five master cuts. Each one was both an attack and a defence in a single movement, so that the cut that struck the opponent also closed off his attack.

They have wonderful names. The Wrath Cut. The Crooked Cut. The Thwart Cut... sideways, across, with the hands high. The Squinting Cut, which looks one way and strikes another. And the Parting Cut, which falls straight down on the crown of the head, where people part their hair.

And above all, he taught a way of thinking.

Every fight, he said, has a before, and an after. The fighter who strikes first, and keeps the other busy defending, has the before. The fighter who is defending has the after. The whole art is to win the before... or, if you have lost it, to take it back.

And between them, there is a third thing. The Germans called it indes. It means meanwhile, or in the instant. It is the moment when the swords touch, and you feel, through the steel, whether the other man is pressing hard or soft, and you act on that feeling before he has finished his own thought.

The masters said that the longsword fighter must feel, with his blade, as if with his fingertips. Hard, soft. Strong, weak. Many of them wrote that this was the most important lesson of all, and the hardest to teach.

Chapter four. The flower of battle.

At about the same time, on the other side of the Alps, another master was writing.

His name was Fiore dei Liberi, and he came from Friuli, in the north-east of Italy. Unlike Liechtenauer, he tells us about himself... rather a lot. He says he studied with many masters, German and Italian, for many years. He says he taught great lords and captains, and prepared them for duels. And he says that he himself fought five times with sharp swords, for his honour, against other masters who were jealous of him... wearing nothing but a padded jacket and leather gloves. And that he won all five.

He was, perhaps, not a modest man. But he was a very good teacher.

Around the year fourteen hundred and nine, when he was an old man, he wrote down his art in a book called The Flower of Battle, and dedicated it to the lord of Ferrara.

It is a book of pictures, with short verses above them. Hundreds of pictures... wrestling, dagger, sword in one hand, sword in two hands, sword in armour, spear, axe, and fighting on horseback. Each picture shows a master, wearing a small golden crown, and a student, wearing a garter on his leg, demonstrating one technique against an opponent.

Fiore's guards are Italian, and their names are just as good as the German ones. The Woman's Guard, with the sword drawn back over the shoulder. The Iron Door, with the sword held low in front. The Boar's Tooth, the point low and ready to rise. The Window, with the hands held high beside the head, looking out over the blade.

And on one page, he draws four animals, around a figure of a swordsman, to show what a fighter needs.

A lynx, holding a pair of compasses... for good judgement and a careful eye. A tiger, holding an arrow... for speed. A lion, holding a heart... for courage. And an elephant, with a castle on its back... for strength, to bear the weight of it all.

It is worth saying what these books are not.

They are not books of grand, spinning sword fights, of the kind you see in films. The movements in them are small, quick and economical. The swords are mostly held in front of the body, not swung around it. The fights are short. Many of the techniques end with a step close in, a wrestling throw, a disarm, or a grab of the opponent's blade with a gloved hand.

And many of them deal with something we rarely think about: what to do when you are wrapped in armour.

Chapter five. In armour.

Fighting in full plate armour is a different art.

A sword cannot cut through good plate. So all those beautiful cuts, the Wrath Cut and the Squinting Cut and the rest, become almost useless. Instead, both the Germans and the Italians teach the same thing: shorten the sword.

You hold it by the grip with one hand, and by the middle of the blade with the other... gloved, in steel gauntlets... and you use it like a short spear, a stiff steel bar, to push, lever, trip and stab. You aim the point at the places where the armour has to leave a gap... under the arm, inside the elbow, the back of the knee, the palm of the glove, the slit of the visor.

This was called half-swording.

And, as we heard in the first episode of this show, sometimes you turn the sword all the way round, hold it by the blade, and strike with the hilt... the crossguard catching behind a knee or a neck, or the heavy pommel ringing on a helmet.

An armoured fight, in the fight books, often ends on the ground. A throw. A man on his back. And then a dagger, very carefully, through a gap. It is not glamorous. It is very precise.

The books also show something else: that a man in armour can do almost anything a man without armour can do. He can step, turn, throw, kneel, rise. The pictures were drawn by people who had seen it.

Chapter six. On horseback.

Both great traditions also teach fighting on horseback... the Germans called it riding fencing.

It is different again. A rider holds the reins in his left hand, so the sword is held in the right alone, or the left hand lets go of the reins for a moment. The horse does much of the work... its speed, its weight, its turning. The masters teach how to pass an opponent on his left side or his right, how to strike as the horses cross, how to catch his sword arm, how to seize his reins, and how to pull him out of the saddle.

Fiore draws a rider using his sword against a lance, and a rider on foot against a rider on horseback, and he is cheerful about all of them. In his pictures, the horses look calm, and rather pleased with themselves.

Chapter seven. The judicial duel.

Some of the fight books were made for a very particular purpose: preparing a man for a duel by law.

In the German lands, in the fourteen hundreds, when a serious quarrel could not be settled any other way... an accusation of murder, or of treason, or a dispute over land... a court might allow the two parties to fight. It was believed, by some, that God would give victory to the one in the right. It was called a judicial duel, or a trial by combat.

The fight was carried out in a fenced field, with judges and a strict set of rules. Each fighter could hire a master to train him beforehand.

One of those masters was Hans Talhoffer, who lived in the fourteen hundreds and wrote several fight books. His books show duels with longswords, with long shields as tall as a man, with daggers, and on horseback.

And one of them shows a duel that has made readers stare for five hundred years. A duel between a man and a woman.

The man stands in a pit, dug into the ground, up to his waist, with a club. The woman stands outside it, with a stone wrapped in a cloth, like a sling. The pictures show what each could do. Sometimes she wins. Sometimes he does.

Did such duels ever really happen? A few written accounts say so. Many historians suspect they were rare, if they happened at all. But Talhoffer drew it, very carefully, step by step, as if he expected someone to need it.

Chapter eight. The long knife.

There is one more weapon in your master's workshop that belongs in this story. It is the one he makes most often.

It is called a messer, which in German simply means knife. But it is a big knife... as long as a short sword, with a single edge, a slight curve, a straight crossguard, and a curious little nail sticking out sideways from the guard to protect the hand. Its handle is not a sword's grip, but a knife's... two plates of wood or horn, riveted on either side of a flat tang.

Why a knife, and not a sword? Partly because, in many places, the law said that ordinary people were not to carry swords. A knife, however long, was a tool. A cutler could make it. A craftsman, a farmer, a traveller could wear it.

So a whole fencing art grew up around the long knife too. A priest in Nuremberg named Johannes Lecküchner wrote a long book about it, in the year fourteen seventy-eight, with hundreds of pictures. Many of its techniques mirror the longsword's... the same guards, the same cuts, the same feeling in the bind... but with one hand, and with all the tricks that a heavy single-edged blade allows.

The cutlers' guilds and the swordsmiths' guilds argued for centuries about who was allowed to make what. Was a long knife a knife, for the cutlers? Or a sword, for the swordsmiths? The answer usually depended on the length of the blade, and the shape of the handle. It was measured, and fought over, in council chambers, more fiercely than it was ever fought over in the fencing hall.

Chapter nine. The brotherhoods.

Back to the spring of fifteen seventy, in Strasbourg.

Your master is not only a cutler. He is a recognised master of fencing. And to understand what that meant, in his time, you need to know about the brotherhoods.

In the year fourteen eighty-seven, the Emperor Frederick the Third granted a privilege to a society of fencing masters, the Brotherhood of Saint Mark. They were called the Marxbrüder... the Mark brothers. Their seat was in Frankfurt, on the river Main. The privilege said that no one in the empire could call himself a master of the longsword, and teach for money, unless he had been examined and accepted by the brotherhood.

The examination took place each autumn, at the great Frankfurt fair. A candidate had to fight against several masters of the brotherhood, publicly. If he did well, he was accepted, paid his fee, and was given the right to teach. He was a Master of the Long Sword.

A century later, a rival society appeared: the Free Fencers of the Feather, the Federfechter. Their favourite weapon was the rapier, newer and lighter, and their name may come from the feather, or from the long thin training sword. The two brotherhoods competed, quarrelled, and sometimes fought each other in public, at the fairs, for decades. The cities sometimes had to step in to keep the peace between two groups of people whose whole business was fighting.

Chapter ten. The fencing school.

So what did a fencing contest look like, in a German city of the fifteen hundreds?

It was called a Fechtschule... a fencing school... but it was not a school in our sense. It was a public event, held on a Sunday, or a holiday, or during a fair. A master who wanted to hold one had to ask the city council for permission. Then a herald, or a drummer, went through the streets announcing it, and the master hung up a notice.

On the day, a hall or a courtyard was cleared. People paid to come in. And fighters came forward in pairs, with blunt swords, or staffs, or long wooden sticks, and fought, one bout after another, for prizes.

The rules were strict, and some of them are surprising.

Thrusts were usually forbidden... too dangerous, with no masks. Many bouts were won by drawing blood from the opponent's head... a small cut on the scalp, which bleeds generously and heals quickly. When blood ran, the bout stopped, and a judge with a long staff stepped in between the two fighters to separate them.

The winners received a small prize... often a few coins, or a garland, or a pair of gloves. And the honour, which mattered more.

The contests were rough, and the city councils knew it. There were rules against fighting drunk, against hitting a man when he was down, against carrying a grudge outside. They were not always obeyed.

The swords used in the fencing schools were not sharp. Many were a special kind of training sword, called a feder. You can see them in museums... a long, slim, flexible blade, with a blunt, rounded tip, and, just above the guard, the blade flares out suddenly, wide, like a shoulder, to stop the opponent's blade from sliding down onto the hand. It is light, springy, and safe... or as safe as a steel bar can be.

Wooden swords were used too. The fight books show both.

Chapter eleven. An evening lesson.

On most evenings, your lessons are quieter than any fencing school. A long room behind the guild house, its floor of beaten earth sprinkled with sand. Racks of wooden swords and blunt feders along the wall. A few lamps. Eight or ten young men, apprentices and journeymen, in their shirts and hose, and your master, walking slowly between them.

The lesson always begins the same way. With the feet.

Stand with your feet apart, one before the other, the weight between them, the knees a little bent. Now step... forward, and back. Forward, and back. Not with little hops, but with full, calm steps, the back foot passing the front. Now step out to the side, at an angle, and turn the body as you go. Your master says that a man who cannot step cannot fence, however strong his arms. You will step for a quarter of an hour, before you are allowed to lift a sword.

Then the guards. The Roof. The Ox. The Plough. The Fool. From one to the next, slowly, again and again, until the sword moves from guard to guard without your having to think about it, the way a hand finds a door handle in the dark.

Then the cuts. The Wrath Cut first, always. From the Roof, over your right shoulder, straight down and across, diagonally, with the long edge... stepping in with the right foot as you cut, so that the weight of the whole body goes into the blade, and the point ends up aimed at your opponent's face. Again. Again. Your master watches the line of the blade, the turn of the hips, the place where the feet land.

Then pairs. Your partner cuts at you from above. You meet his cut with your own Wrath Cut, so that your blade strikes his and your point is in his face. If he is soft in the bind... if he gives way... you simply thrust. If he is hard... if he pushes your blade aside... you let him, you turn your sword around his, and cut at the other side of his head, with the short edge.

Soft, thrust. Hard, go round. You do it slowly, a hundred times, so that one day you will do it fast without thinking. Your master says almost nothing. Now and then he moves a hand, or the angle of a foot. Now and then he says, quietly: again.

Chapter twelve. The book.

Back in the workshop, your master has cut the string on the first bundle, and lifts out a copy.

His book is different from the old manuscripts. Those were each made by hand, one at a time, for a lord, and kept in his library. This book is printed, in hundreds of copies, for anyone who can pay. He is writing for the citizens... the young men of the towns, who learn fencing in the evenings, as you do.

And so he does something the old masters did not. He explains. Clearly. Step by step. How to stand. How to step. How to train. He describes exercises, practice drills, ways for students to work in pairs. In the old style, the art was secret. In his book, it is open to anyone with the price of a copy and the patience to read it.

He covers the longsword first, and at the greatest length. He says it is the foundation, because once you understand the longsword, every other weapon is easier. Then the dussack... a short, curved training weapon, made of wood or leather, for practising cuts. Then the rapier, which is new and becoming fashionable. Then the dagger, wrestling, the staff, and the halberd.

In one passage, he draws a square, divided by lines, like a target... the lines showing the directions of the cuts, high to low, left to right, across. Students practised against a post, or a wall, cutting along these lines, over and over, until the movements were part of them.

And he says something, in his own words, that might surprise anyone who thinks of fencing as only fighting. He says, in effect, that the purpose of the art is not only to defend oneself, but to make a young man strong, quick, steady and graceful. To keep him from idleness and bad company. To give him good habits of body and mind.

He may have been thinking of his apprentices. He may have been thinking of you.

Chapter thirteen. The man who wanted everything.

There is one more fight book that you have heard about, though few people have seen it.

In Augsburg, a city official named Paulus Hector Mair spent much of his life collecting the art of fencing. He wanted it all... every master, every weapon, every technique, preserved before it was lost. He hired fencers to demonstrate. He hired painters to draw them. He hired writers to describe them. The result was an enormous work, in several great volumes, in German and in Latin, hand-painted, with hundreds of pictures, and techniques for almost every weapon of the time, down to the sickle and the scythe.

It was magnificent. It was also very expensive.

Mair was the city's treasurer. And it was discovered, some years from now, that for decades he had been quietly taking the city's money to pay for his books and his way of life.

He will be tried, and hanged, in the year fifteen seventy-nine.

His books survive. They are kept now in libraries in Dresden, Vienna and Munich. Scholars use them still. The city of Augsburg, presumably, would have preferred its money back.

Chapter fourteen. The end of the longsword.

By the time your master's book is printed, the longsword is already becoming old-fashioned.

On the battlefield, it has almost disappeared. Armies fight now with pikes, with halberds, and with guns. Knights in full armour are fewer every year. And in the streets of the cities, men no longer carry a longsword to defend themselves. They carry a rapier, or a short sword, at the hip... lighter, quicker, and better suited to men without armour.

The longsword lives on, for a while, in the fencing halls. It is taught as the foundation, the way a pianist learns scales. It is fought at the fencing schools, for prizes. The brotherhoods go on examining masters in Frankfurt for another century.

But slowly, through the sixteen hundreds, it fades. The great war that tears through the German lands from sixteen eighteen to sixteen forty-eight leaves little room for sport. By the seventeen hundreds, the longsword is a memory, and the old fight books are kept in libraries, where hardly anyone reads them.

Chapter fifteen. The return.

And then, after about three hundred years, people began to read them again.

In the late eighteen hundreds, a few scholars in England, Germany and Italy started to collect the old fight books and puzzle over them. In the late twentieth century, small groups of enthusiasts began to try to rebuild the art... reading the old texts, translating the strange rhyming verses, studying the pictures, and then going out with training swords and trying, with great care, to do what the pages said.

They were surprised by how much made sense. The cuts worked. The guards worked. Feeling the opponent's blade, through your own, really did tell you what he would do next.

Today, there are clubs in many countries, and tournaments, with masks and padded jackets and blunt steel swords, where people fight with the longsword according to the teachings of Liechtenauer and Fiore. They have a name for what they do: historical European martial arts.

And the book that came off the cart in your master's workshop, in Strasbourg, in the spring of fifteen seventy, is one of the books they study most closely. It has been translated into English. It is read, line by line, in fencing halls on the other side of the world.

Your master would, perhaps, have been pleased. And a little surprised.

Chapter sixteen. Evening.

It is evening now in Strasbourg. The light is going amber on the spire of the cathedral, and on the roofs and chimneys of the city. The workshop is closed. The bundles of books are stacked in the back room, ready to be sold.

Tonight there is a practice in the hall behind the guild house, and you will go, as you always do. You will stand in the Roof, and the Ox, and the Plough, and the Fool. You will cut the Wrath Cut, a hundred times, against a wooden post, until your arms ache. And at the end, your master will pair you with someone a little better than you, and watch, and say almost nothing, except, now and then, one word.

Indes. In the instant. Feel it.

The swords are put away in their rack. The lamps are put out. You walk home along the river.

There are more books about fighting with the longsword than about any other weapon of the Middle Ages.

They were written by people trying to put movement into words. And the oldest of the masters, whom nobody ever saw, left behind only a poem, and one idea in it that his pupils repeated for two hundred years. The Germans had a single word for it.

Fühlen. To feel.

Also from the late hours: Embers of History · Slow Orbit · Myth and Score