I don't know what possessed me, but I downloaded a 36MB PDF yesterday. "Hans Talhoffer, Medieval Combat, 15th Century Manual of Sword Fighting". Interested?
I'm only beginning to realize how much of a "strategic metal" iron was up until the last few hundred years. The Romans considered iron their most important "strategic metal", even above gold. All iron ore was kept in military warehouses until an authorized ironsmith picked it up. Our common steels of today would seem almost magical even 200 years ago.
And we still have "magic steel" today, in the form of single-crystal superalloys. My nephew is working on that stuff for his PhD at Georgia Tech, trying to turn it from "black art" to something that can be simulated with a computer.
Hey Mister Mag... Cool! Though... I do already have a copy of Talhoffer. Haven’t gotten to it yet. But Hans Talhoffer is certainly one of the reference standards. I know that it’s good stuff just from the comments I’ve seen on it from others so far. I’ll be getting to that soon.
Right now I’m still studying Liechtenauer and Ringeck, more or less in parallel, but Talhoffer is supposed to be an excellent companion to those.
Good choice if you want a primer in the use of the sword.
Speaking of iron and steel:
I think we often underestmate the metallurgical skills of our priors. Of course in this last century we’ve advanced metallurgy far beyond what our ancestors could possibly have done. But they did some pretty impressive stuff back then, too. Only lately have we figured out what “damascus” steel really probably was. And we have precious few examples left from those days. Steel just doesn’t survive after that many centuries. Bronze does. That’s why we have more hilts in museums than blades. The hilts were often bronze, and the blades were steel. Steel just dissolves over those centuries. Bronze lasts.
But for example, the concept of folding a steel blade many times and reforging and re-pounding the layers into one piece perhaps 300 layers deep has been around in Europe for far more than a thousand years. There are 8th and 9th century Viking swords made in this way that have survived. Those guys travelled. And they bought stuff.
But don’t tell that to the Japanese samurai dudes.
:-)
It's true that most of the sword techniques often ended up in "grappling" or wrestling sorts of techniques. This involved some "half-swording" or if all failed then dagger or just plain wrestling. Many sword techniques end up in the "winden" or "bind", after which the wrestling match begins...