Episode 182: Messers and More, with Bob Brooks

 

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Robert (Bob) Brooks is one of the original generation of historical fencers, who began training with me in the Dawn Duellists’ Society in the early 90s. He founded the Hotspur School of Defence in 2003. So it's turning 20 this year. He has been teaching primarily German historical martial arts and he has taught in over 30 countries on five continents.

Bob is the author of the new book At Your Mercy: The Foundational Guide to the Messer. We talk about why it was needed and what the book covers. You can find it for yourself here: At Your Mercy on Lulu.

We also talk about a fascinating academic study into Bronze age weapons, which Bob and his school were involved in. Here’s a link to the study: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10816-020-09451-0.pdf

And here’s a link to the James Dilley episode where we also talked about the battle of Tollense and forging bronze swords.

This is Guy’s own bronze sword:

 

Other links we promised to share:

The Book of Judith – the one and only Italian Storta treatise. https://guywindsor.net/2015/04/previously-unknown-falchion-treatise-discovered/

Hans Sebald Beham woodcuts of the 12 months images, showing Messers in daily use:

Transcript

 

Guy Windsor 

I'm here today with Robert Brooks, who is one of the original generation of historical fencers, who began training with us in the Dawn Duellists’ Society in the early 90s. He founded the Hotspur School of Defence in 2003. So it's turning 20 this year. Congratulations, Bob, and he has been teaching primarily German historical martial arts since then. He's taught in over 30 countries on five continents. And he is the author of the new book At Your Mercy: The Foundational Guide to the Messer. So without further ado, Bob, welcome to the show.

 

Bob Brooks 

Good to see you, old man. Good to see you.

 

Guy Windsor 

It's great to have you on. And so just to orient everyone, they can probably hear it in your voice that you're not from these parts. Where are you at the moment?

 

Bob Brooks 

So I'm a native Northumbrian, hence my accent is quite strong. So I'm up in Northumberland, the English border county with Scotland. Just on the opposite coast from Cumbria. North of Newcastle, so about 30 miles north of Newcastle and 30 miles south of the Scottish border. But I have an interesting mixed heritage. I'm half German, as well.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so how did that happen?

 

Bob Brooks 

My mother is from Niedersachsen. So mother and father met, he was in the forces post war, and the rest of history.

 

Guy Windsor 

Classic sort of, you know, soldier posted away finds local girlfriend, brings her home.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, well, he was from an Irish Catholic family. And my mother was a Lutheran. And they ended up having six kids. I'm the youngest. So I've always said that when an Irish and a German marry they become very efficient at having large families.

 

Guy Windsor 

I actually probably know all the answers to these questions, obviously, right. But the listener maybe doesn't know you quite as well as I do. So forgive the obvious questions. How did you get into historical martial arts?

 

Bob Brooks 

It’s an odd one. Growing up in this county, which has seen 400 years of continuous warfare between England and Scotland, we have more castles per square mile and probably anywhere in Europe, with exceptions to small border regions. Pretty much every village has a fortified building of some kind, and in some cases, they are huge. So growing up in that environment, I was always aware of history. And that gravitated me towards sport fencing originally. I think the summer of 1987 I began to study in Newcastle with Pat Pearson, who was the very famous British Academy of Fencing coach. Bath life member, contemporary of Bob Anderson. And Pat was a wonderful instructor. And I continued that for the next seven years, came to Napier University in Edinburgh. That’s where I met you.

 

Guy Windsor 

I was at Edinburgh University. So we didn't actually meet at university because you were at Napier. We met because Paul was at Napier. And we met through Paul and I think I probably met you at a fencing competition or two because I was also sport fencing back in those days.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah. And so joined Napier University fencing club, where I met Paul MacDonald and others. And at that point, our paths crossed. And at some point during the sport fencing sessions, the crazy idea came about to explore historical weapons. And a thing this was born really from the discovery of William Hope, the Scottish fencing master who wrote The New Method of Fencing in 1697 I believe.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, New Short and Easy Method of Fencing is 1707. His Scotch Fencing Master is I think 1687.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, not my period.

 

Guy Windsor 

I lived through the exact same bit of history and I remember it slightly differently. My recollection is frustration with historical with sport fencing, wanting it to be more realistic. And then coming across The Sword and the Centuries in my granny's house. Alfred Hutton’s book and bringing that up to Edinburgh and showing it to Paul and we were like, oh my god, there are actually books out there and then we were looking for books. And then we found I think, Hope in the National Library of Scotland,

 

Bob Brooks 

You may remember the other thing we discovered was a VHS cassette of The Blow by Blow Guide to Sword Fighting in the Elizabethan Style.

 

Guy Windsor 

Right. Yeah.

 

Bob Brooks 

And obviously Mike Loades as well was quite prolific in that period. So it was almost the perfect time. And just sheer circumstance, sheer chance, that we happened to have all of these different factors feeding in at once. And then The Dawn Duellists’ was founded in summer of 1994. And, you know, as I say, the rest is history. I've always liked when you refer to that period and your own writing, Guy, that you said, you know, was it HEMA? Was it Western martial arts? It was pure experimentation at that point.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. And the term HEMA didn't come about for another, getting on for 20 years. I mean, at first it was Western martial arts. Then it was historical martial arts. I think that the whole HEMA became a popular acronym right about the time that the sport longsword scene kicked off in like 2005, 2010.

 

Bob Brooks 

I think HEMA itself was coined initially from the creation of HEMAC, the historical European martial arts coalition. I believe Matt Easton coined that term. I think it might have been slightly earlier than 2005, maybe around about 2001.

 

Guy Windsor 

But yeah, we were basically just reading books, making shit up and trying to stab each other. I mean, it wasn't terribly sophisticated and scholarly as I recall.

 

Bob Brooks 

I think the interesting thing was that we did have a good background in sport fencing, we were all fairly accomplished sport fencers at that point, we'd been fencing for the best part of a decade, maybe. So I think we went into it with the right approach. It was more of a scarcity of source materials, I think was the issue at the time.

 

Guy Windsor 

Finding stuff was super hard. And yeah, occasionally, we would look into, I mean, I remember Craig Cousins from Glasgow invited me and Paul over, and we left with what now would be 15 grand’s worth of old fencing books to copy and return because he trusted us. And it included at least one Hope. I forget the rest of that haul. But it was like late 90s. And it was just oh my god. We couldn't get access to these things. The only way to find these books was to find them in people's personal collections or in libraries, and then arrange to copy them, or in the case of Craig, who very kindly lent us the books, we just took them to the copy shop and had them copied, because again, this was the pretty much in the days before most people had scanners in their house, let alone smartphones.

 

Bob Brooks 

And even to consider that this was pre internet age, we didn't have the internet. And of course, we also had the access to facsimiles from the late, great, Patrick Pugliese. I'm trying to think of the other people in the US. Was there also, Brad Wall in the US and a few others who were who were actually making or sharing, arguably, what were illicit photographs, or photocopies. Illicit photographs. We were waiting for our lithographs to arrive by air mail. But yeah, I remember getting huge wadges of photocopied paper sent from the US at enormous cost. Airmail in those days was like having a small mortgage. But over time, I think by about 1997, we had built up a fairly good library of material. And we really, I would say, that was the true foundation, that we really began to get to grips with the source material. For myself, it was the Kunst des Fechtens of Joachim Meyer. But also, Achille Marozzo played a very important part in my early journey.

 

Guy Windsor 

But could you read Italian back then? This is something else that we should perhaps highlight for the for the casual listener who maybe started this sometime in the last 20 years rather than before. Is that back then we were working mostly from the pictures because none of us could read the source languages. I mean, you could read German. Because, sort of native German speaker. But, yeah, I mean, we were looking at these Italian things, and I had like, a few terms of Italian at school and a bit of Italian at university and I could speak Spanish and read Spanish. Better then than I can now. Add a bit of French and a bit of Latin from school and that was that was it. And it's like a fifth generation photocopy. So reading it is quite a challenge anyway. There was quite a lot of making shit up from the pictures.

 

Bob Brooks 

Looking at the pictures and reverse engineering was certainly one of the first tools, I think Edinburgh itself was a perfect confluence because as students, obviously Edinburgh has always had a good number of international students. And so I think once we got over that initial hurdle and people started finding out that we were a thing. We began to attract people in and we had, you know, Jared Kirby was one of the earliest, he was a US student in Edinburgh at the time.

 

Guy Windsor 

And he came to Edinburgh to study with us. With the DDS. He didn't go to the university, he came to study with us.

 

Bob Brooks 

I thought he was a student. Again, we're talking about 30 years ago.

 

Guy Windsor 

What he said on this podcast, when I interviewed him, was he came to Edinburgh to train with us, because he met it met us at some sort of events or something and like, Okay, I'm going to go train with them.

 

Bob Brooks 

I feel quite proud of that.

 

Guy Windsor 

I'm very proud of it.

 

Bob Brooks 

And obviously, we were beginning to make contact through the reenactment scene and we have many stories of amusing reenactment experiences.

 

Guy Windsor 

Pleurisy, Bob? Are you talking about catching pleurisy? No, Moving swiftly on, we all behaved ourselves impeccably at reenactments.

 

Bob Brooks 

We pretty much went through the phase where we ended every reenactment tournament we could find to test our skills and the look on a reenactor’s face when you pull a posta di donna and they use the basic fives. We rapidly run out of grace.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, let the record show that actually there were times when we behaved in a sort of a dickish manner. I mean, because we were showing up basically to their thing. And we were doing our thing at their thing. It was tournaments. We weren't breaking the rules or behaving dangerously. But we did tend to obliterate them. Because our main thing was studying fencing, and their main thing was doing reenactment and the two are not the same. And if you're in a tournament, fencing is more useful than the reenactment.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah. It leads me to this interesting paradox about reenactment, especially battle reenactment. But yeah, I think really, what could you expect from a bunch of testosterone-fuelled weirdos in the mid to late 1990s suddenly let loose with swords? What could possibly go wrong? So I apologise. I've built a lot of bridges. As I've got older, four children, you learn to be an adult. And so anybody I offended during the mid to late 1990s, you have my heartfelt apologies.

 

Guy Windsor 

Somehow I doubt that they’re listening, but never mind.

 

Bob Brooks 

But it was an interesting time because we were crossing paths then with what we could really call the proto historical fencing scene, making good contracts, and then once those numbers build up, we hit upon forming the British Federation for Historical Swordplay.

 

Guy Windsor 

I was the first secretary of that organization.

 

Bob Brooks 

In 97, 98. Trying to pull like minded groups together and create not quite a rule set. Every group was autonomous. But to try to set a standard.

 

Guy Windsor 

What we were looking for, as I recall, was setting safety standards. And providing opportunities for cross pollination, interaction, and learning from each other. I still remember, it was at a British Federation event. Might have been in Leeds, or Bolton, but it was there that I saw Andrew Feast, Duncan Fatts and was it Chris? Somebody else? Anyway, they did this fantastic demo of Saviolo. One of them was reading from Saviolo's book, while the other two demonstrated what was being basically put those words into action as they were being spoken out in the book and I was like, holy fuck, that is what we are trying to do. It was fantastic. And that that was that was British Fed. I don't know really what it does now. I haven't had anything to do with it for years. But certainly back then that was its kind of stated function.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I was elected president of the British Fed in 2013. Not a great experience. I think the problem when you bring a lot of groups with their own, not just their own ideas, but multi periods. Very hard to coordinate, very hard.

 

Guy Windsor 

It's not like historical fencers are renowned for their playing nice with others. I mean, we do tend to be rather individualistic, and we’re training duelling arts, it's kind of it's not surprising that we're somewhat individualistic.

 

Bob Brooks 

So that was, you know, having been the secretary for the first seven years of the Fed, and then having a break and focusing on my school, and then suddenly being shot into the president’s seat in 2013. Yeah, turned out to be a little bit of a poisoned chalice.

 

Guy Windsor 

Is it still going?

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes. But it taught me an important lesson is that you can't be everything to everyone. And trying to please everybody is a fool's errand.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. Tricky. I sense that we're sort of delicately dancing around certain personalities that we just don't see any good reason to offend on air. Shall we just say, British Fed, fine organisation, we started it in late 1990s. And it's still going, and I'm sure it serves a useful function, or it wouldn't still be still going.

 

Bob Brooks 

Very, very noble enterprise. I just think that it's almost a guaranteed conflagration when you bring so many people together, and you try to establish some mode of leadership, which is why HEMA is this really interesting anarchical beast, where you tend to gravitate towards the people you can share with, who will reciprocate. And you build personal relationships, which is, I think, far more important.

 

Guy Windsor 

And that's one of the things this podcast is doing is it gives me an excuse to talk to people who are in historical martial arts camps that I wouldn't normally have a reason to interact with. And so, those people then talk to me, and so the people who listen to me listen to them. And it just creates sort of just a connection between all these different groups, all these different ways of doing things, all these different people. And it just creates just a gossamer thread of connection and interaction. So when somebody does maybe show up from somewhere else, and there's somebody there who they've heard on the show, or maybe somebody there has heard them on the show or whatever, and it just makes it that little bit easier for people who don't know each other to start out with a positive interaction.

 

Bob Brooks 

I'd certainly like to come back to that at a later point. Because the Hotspur school has had and continues to have a very meaningful working relationship with academia. And we've been involved heavily in some groundbreaking research projects done by some world class historians and archaeologists. In fact, we just finished a documentary. The documentary is on the Tollense bronze age battlefield.

 

Guy Windsor 

Tell us something about it because most people will not have heard of it.

 

Bob Brooks 

The Tollense Bronze Age battlefield is in northern Germany. And it was long thought to just be the site of a local skirmish there were some human remains found. And in a nutshell, it turned out to be not only the biggest Bronze Age battlefield site ever found, but the oldest battlefield site on earth.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think that's the one that Dr James Dilley. I think he mentioned it when I interviewed him a while ago. People can find that in the show notes. I will put a link to that in the show notes. So Bronze Age battlefield. What are you doing on a Bronze Age battlefield?

 

Bob Brooks 

So in 2016, we became part consultants for the Bronze Age combat project run through Newcastle University and Bronze Age combat project wanted to explore what the material science of Bronze Age weapons could tell us. And they had some bronze swords, made by the wonderful Neil Birch, and began to test and really, perhaps unsurprisingly, and this isn't a criticism, ended up bending one of them.

 

Guy Windsor 

They're very fragile.

 

Bob Brooks 

Using it very much in a hammer fist kind of way. And at that point, they discovered that the Hotspur school was actually on the doorstep. We'd been there at that point. Well, this is 2016. We've been there since 2003. And they asked us if we'd like to get involved and we were given the task of creating a methodology for bronze swords, based on the best evidence that we have.

 

Guy Windsor 

By methodology, do you mean a way of fighting with them?

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes. So we had to factor in, consider, not just the metallurgy, bronze is malleable. It's not as malleable as people think. But it is still malleable compared to steel. The length of the weapons, the form of the weapons. And this all fed into the project and so we took a handful of very simple plays from, now I should caveat this was coupled with the with the leather buckler, very common combination in the British Bronze Age. The type of typology of the sword is the Ewart Park sword, which is a beautiful shaped sword, looks like sting from Lord of the Rings, it's got this beautiful curve.

 

Guy Windsor 

And if people check the James Dilley show notes, maybe I’ll put pictures in these show notes as well, when I went on this bronze sword making course with James, we made a Ewart Park style Bronze Age sword, which I still haven't polished and finished. And I'll try and get that done in time for this episode to go out for people to see pictures of the finished thing. So you get an idea of what it's like.

 

Bob Brooks 

The choice of Ewart Park as the archetype for the experiment was really interesting because Ewart Park is in Northumberland, it's about 18 miles north of me. I said in the documentary, this is really the next best thing we can have to having a time machine. And so we used our knowledge of what the weapon was telling us, how did the weapon want to be want to be held? What were the parameters for engaging with it in a martial context, rather than a sporting context? You know, what were the risks? Where were the highest risks, performing certain actions? And we gradually began to figure out how we thought these swords wanted to be used. What the scientists did, the archaeologists and the historians was look at original pieces. And they looked at about 120 I believe, from not just the UK but also a small collection in Italy. And they found wear patterns on the original blades, they found not just different types of markings. And I think there were there were about 25 different categories of marks that would arise on the blade edges and across the flats of the blades from where you'd get striations where the blades would make contact. But there were some very peculiar marks that they couldn't explain on the originals. And so we did some fights under scientific conditions filmed in high definition so that we could see where the contracts are being made. And certain types of actions that we determined that were effective. Interestingly the way we have to think about the bronze sword is a bronze sword is really just a large knife. They're not very long, you can't go in with these first big first attention strikes because the weapon’s just too short. You haven't got the length, the measure is very different. So when we're talking fencing theory, length and measure. The fully extended length of the arm and the weapon, measure the distance between the two protagonists and what we found was that this was a very close same thing and in an approximated quite well to what we see in medieval sword and buckler, but this initial binding with the sword and the shield and then we're using the shield really to limit our opponent’s actions. It’s an Occam’s Razor situation really this is a logical way to use a sword and buckler. So they went away and they looked at the they looked at the edge marks that we created during the actualistic test. And what they found blew my mind, absolutely blew my mind. Not only did we replicate the most unusual marks they couldn't explain, and they knew how they happened now. We did it. But we matched the clustering patterns on the original blades. This tells us two things. First thing is it tells us the type of edge damage will tell us what the sword was doing at any given moment while it was in contact with the other with the other sword. And what we found was that there was a peculiar type of edge damage that they called the folded notch. Which if you think when a blade bites into another blade, it's going to leave a V, if a blade scoops it's going to leave kind of like a U, or a part of a circle. The folded notch was a steep V. And interestingly, there was a piece of the sword edge bent inwards through what we call in medieval German fencing, versetzen. Displacements, where you'd occupy the space your opponent wanted to occupy with a blade, with a type of winding action, and the clash of the blades and the turn, would scoop out this little bit of metal. It only happened when you did that. So we know that these Bronze Age soldiers from the original pieces, were using something methodologically similar to what medieval Germans were using. Really incredible. Well, because we're talking about here, we're talking about a period of from 1800 BCE to about 800 BCE. So you're looking at back in history about 3000 years. But the clustering marks, the clusters of marks on the blade, tell us that there is a methodology, because you will defend with the strong part of the blade, and you will strike with the first third. And you'll begin to find that if you're a trained swordsperson, you will find that repeated actions upon the sword will create clusters of marks where you're performing certain actions. And these clusters will accord to what's happening with the sword. And so what that study proved, was that there was a living Bronze Age combat system that was being taught. And that this was a methodology and on all of these separate plates, they find these patterns. The paper went live in 2019, the paper was written by Raphael Herman, a good friend of mine. And to say that it broke the archaeological community is perhaps an understatement, because nothing like this had ever been done before. And it led to an explosion of interdisciplinary research. So we did that. We went back and did some more. We've done some other work with students and graduate students at Newcastle Uni. Bronze Spears is the current one.

 

Guy Windsor 

I have a question. To my mind, most of the work done with a spear is done with the shaft and the head of the spear is just the bit that you shove through the squidgy bits, right? Does having a bronze head make any difference to having a similarly patterned steel head?

 

Bob Brooks 

That would be an interesting one we could test because so far we only really tested the bronze heads. So if we need to find out information, we need to look at grave finds. So you're looking at human bodies, or the remains of human bodies. The only place you're going to find evidence for a spear strike is bone. Spear strike with soft tissues, you’re left with nothing. So the only real indicator that we can get where a contact has been made with a weapon is on the bone. That's the only place you can go. We took some medically accurate synthetic bone and thrust it with spears. Upper arm, upper leg, thigh.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what you are talking about is a synthetic product that mimics bone. So it's a little bit like ballistic gel but designed to be like bone.

 

Bob Brooks 

A skull, a pelvis. And all I can say at this point is the expectation we had for the type of mark we would see on a piece of bone whereas there'd been a spear injury. Logically you would think that because the spear is pointy and fairly flat, you're going to see a slot where the spear has gone in and then pushed the bone aside and not much different to an arrowhead. The reality, it was horrific. Every strike we made, broke the bone. And it didn't just break it. It caused it to explode. We have video of this.

 

Guy Windsor 

So basically, getting hit with a spear is closer to being hit with a bullet.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes, exactly this and you've stolen my thunder on that one because the best approximator being hit with a spear is like being shot. To give you an idea of when we thrust the pelvis. One good overgrip from the hip thrust shuttered the pelvis into three pieces.

 

Guy Windsor 

Wow. You ain’t walking after that.

 

Bob Brooks 

That’s with a bronze spearhead. Perhaps the most horrible one we did.

 

Guy Windsor 

“Horrible” he says, with a maniacal grin on his face.

 

Bob Brooks 

Thrust to the hip. The upper thigh bone and the ball of the hip. Entirely severed the ball of the hip, And what I'm looking at now is you've seen these ballistic videos that generally come from the US where they shoot these torsos that are essentially, complete human reproductions, they've got a skeleton, they have organs and they are covered in ballistic gel. And there's a company in the US makes them, I think they call them its ballistic torso or something.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s for testing bullets and whatnot.

 

Bob Brooks 

$7,000. And they're used by battlefield scientists, because they want to tell what what's happening, especially when small arms penetrate the human body, they want to see what it does to organs, they want to see the kinds of things that have happened to the bones. This is ideal. If the company is listening, if you donate one, we will sell your company through what we do. But one of these ballistic torsos would be an ideal because we were really striking these in isolation, it would be good to see what would happen actually against the next best thing to a human cadaver, which would be very unethical.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, you could just use a pig.

 

Bob Brooks

You could, and we did.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’ve done a bunch of stuff on lambs and whatnot.

 

Bob Brooks 

There are certain things that don't replicate particularly well. Pigs are a fairly good approximator, but they're not perfect. Certainly with small bone structure, because if you look at for example, you’re going to target the face quite a lot when you're when you're in combat, you're going to target the head and the face for pretty much fatal injury. You look at a spear thrust of the cheek, for example, I think, Henry V getting an arrow. The strange thing with pigs is that the actual morphology of the pigs face is not the same as a human. And so get glancing happening, that doesn't happen or wouldn't happen generally on anything that's anatomically human. So the structure of the head really matters as well. There are certain points which you're going to catch, there are certain points which you're not. A pig has a snout, it’s not a great approximator.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sir Richard Burton got a spear through the face too. Yes. Through one cheek and out the other. And he was bloody lucky.

 

Bob Brooks 

He continued to hack away with his sabre. Tuareg tribesmen, I believe.

 

Guy Windsor 

A few inches further back, though, he would have been dead.

 

Bob Brooks 

There was one tough bastard. He was a tough guy. So yeah, the Bronze Age project has been a massive one. And there's beautiful things have come from it, not just you know, that we've continued the study, but we were starting to see the similar studies being done elsewhere in the world. And so, I'm very proud of being part of this initial interdisciplinary approach to understanding the physiological effects of sword fighting, because I think in the in the community, it's something that we don't think about a lot.

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean, I've done some work on it, obviously, with animal carcasses and whatnot. Talking to pathologists who have seen some, I mean, there are sword injuries occurring, blade injuries occurring to this day. Talk to a trauma surgeon about what a knife will do. It's horrifying.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's something that we can't lose sight of. And in fact, in recent years, I've very much made this a point of my not just my instruction, but also in my approach to studying these arts is that there is a moral side that we have to consider. And this is evident in the source material itself. But that's another subject.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, well, let me ask about it. So I didn't actually have a question for you about the Bronze Age project. And I should have done. And we will put links to it in the show notes and you need to send me links to the best place to go and find it. But you're generally known for your work on the German stuff. I'm assuming that that's mostly because you can read German. It’s like me and Italian, the reason I do the Italian stuff is I can read Italian.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah. The German material obviously has a place in my heart, culturally. But we also study 15th century Italian sources, Fiore, Vadi. But largely, we focus on the on the German material. The key for me, everybody does longsword. Longsword is the is the new foil. Everybody fences longsword.

 

Guy Windsor 

Messer is much more foundational for Germans. I have a question for you. Now, this is not on my list of questions. You just have to extemporise. Obviously, looking at the German material as I see it, the Messer is the foundational weapon that everybody learns. And then the longsword is like the expansion pack on the Messer. Why don't we see any period Italian sources for the Storta, which is the same damn weapon?

 

Bob Brooks 

Very interesting. I'd love to find a Storta source.

 

Guy Windsor 

You know, there is one it's called the Book of Judith, which came out in 2015.

 

Bob Brooks 

I haven't come across that.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, my God. Oh, it is the best is the best April Fool's prank in history.

 

Bob Brooks 

I remember. Yeah, remember it.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’ll also put a link to it in the show notes. Because basically what it was, was me and my friend, Heidi Zimmerman,  she did the art I did the concept and provided the language and stuff and whatnot. And we between us, we faked up if we found a early 15th century Italian Storta/Messer/Falchion treatise, this is what I think it would look like. And it had a deliberate anachronism so no one would think it was real. But of course, it just blew up the sword internet when we launched it in 2015. And the Americans got so cross because I launched in on April 1^st in Italy, where I was at the time, which was of course, it was still March 31st in America, and the Americans were still awake. So they all thought it was March 31st. But actually, it was April 1st. And the funniest thing was, one guy got really cross with me, because I shouldn't be basically making people think this thing is real, when it's not real. No fucking sense of humour at all. But also, he then goes on to say, well, of course, I didn't believe it because and he quotes one of the sentences from the fake book that we created, which isn't proper 15th century Italian at all, which I actually lifted word for word, spelling and all, from Vadi. I’m like, “Oh, you dozy fuck.” Some people just don't like to find out that they have been hoodwinked. So there is one source, but it's just how I think if we do find a source, that's what I think it's going to look like, but obviously, we don't have an authentic one. So sorry, carry on. So why don't we find Italian Storta sources?

 

Bob Brooks 

I haven't got a good answer for that. It is one of these things that I've thought about a lot is. Much like we don't really see any sources for arming sword, just arming sword. You know, I think there's a possibly a commonality that if we look at any medieval fight book, they expect you to already know how to fight, to a degree. But yeah, I'd love to find that. But Messer is not just a great weapon to study because of the source material. But because it tells you so much about the people of the time. Messer is the everyman weapon. I've said many, many times. Messer is the Colt 45 of the Holy Roman Empire. It's an everyman weapon. Look at the Hans Sebald Beham woodcuts of the 12 months, where they are at the dance and the farmer’s got the Messer at his side.

 

Guy Windsor 

We're going to need links and pictures and stuff for the show notes because most people have no idea what you're talking about. We'll put stuff in the show notes.

 

Bob Brooks 

So we see woodcuts, for example, whether people are going about everyday business and they've got the Messer, and it was Barbara Tlusty’s book The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany, published in 2012, that really forced me to think more deeply about what it is we think we're doing. Because we can go and play with swords, that's great. But because I do this for a job, I have to think a little bit deeper than that. And I encourage everybody to. And it tells us about society, it tells us about the context in which the primary sources themselves exist. And this leads to a very fundamental question I believe every historical fencer should ask themselves, it’s not just what is it? And how do we do it? But why is it written in the way it's written? Why is it presented in this fashion? Why do we see these things happen? There's obviously 100 different things you can choose, but we see a certain path being taken. And this is reflective of societal norms in the period. And strangely enough, murder in the 15th century is still murder.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's one of the great myths about the Middle Ages, like, oh, yeah, if you're a knight, you can just kill people and no one's going to do anything about it. It's like, No. Not true.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's almost like there's a there's a desire to see medieval Europe as kind of Kurosawa's Japan. Yeah. Where there's just wild abandon murder everywhere. And while it is, arguably a more violent society, there was probably a higher incidence of violence per capita.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think that's unarguable. I think that the evidence is pretty damn strong. Definitely people were more likely to die by violence in 1400 in Europe than they were in 2000.

 

Bob Brooks 

However, there are strict regulations on what is acceptable. And so you see a similar and, obviously Guy with your life and your background, you're very aware of culture in Central America. Very much an honour driven society where things will be settled in a certain way. But there is a level that's acceptable. And you will have the authorities pay attention if there was, say, for example, militia on the scene. They will allow a fight to happen, because it'll sort out a problem that they don't have to deal with. And it allows honour to be satisfied. And I also like to think of hypothetical situations where you can imagine we have a farmers’ market in Munich, or let's say, Nuremberg, because it's a fencing centre in 1450 1460, and there's a disagreement between two market traders. And it comes to blows and somebody is killed. Let's just now imagine that one of those traders who's killed is a master saddlemaker, who just happens to make saddles for the Duke of Bavaria. Where is the Duke of Bavaria now going to get a saddles from? How long is it going to take to train somebody up to that level of mastery? And so we see this reflected in society that life is very sacred in the 15th century. It's a very religious society. And so the idea of murdering somebody over a trivial matter is viewed like we would view it as the most extreme outlier. And in fact, like today, the only arenas for legal killing are warfare, matters of national or local defence or judicially. You have to have the authority of a higher power. There is manslaughter.

 

Guy Windsor 

And they have self defence as a defence also.

 

Bob Brooks 

But again, you're leaving it in the lap of the gods at that point. So really, the parameters for killing people and this is why it moves. So in recent years, I've began to have a problem with Hema tournament formats. Because Hema tournament formats, do one thing very well. This top triangle scores the highest points. If you strike somebody in this top triangle or thrust them the chances are, you're going to kill them.

 

Guy Windsor 

By top triangle, do you mean like neck and head? Because the listeners can’t see what you're doing. We're not a video.

 

Bob Brooks 

Sorry. Neck and head. So this top triangle. You strike somebody in the neck or the head with a sharp weapon or even worse, a pole weapon, poleaxe or spear, there’s a very, very good chance they're going to die. And so I, with my leftfield way of thinking about things ask the question. What is a tournament replicating? Is it replicating warfare? If it's replicating warfare, why aren’t you in harness? Why aren't there 50 of you?

 

Guy Windsor 

Exactly. Yeah, my first thought is, why aren't there 50? Why aren't there lots of you?

 

Bob Brooks 

Why aren’t you on a horse?

 

Guy Windsor 

Also, why are you using a sword if you’re on a battlefield? You're much better off usually with a spear or an axe or something.

 

Bob Brooks 

So that leaves us with the you're replicating a trial by combat. Okay, that's fair enough. Or a dual. But again, the dual, very likely, unless you're very aristocratic, will be illegal. So you're replicating a very, very, very tiny sliver of 15th century life. Messer, on the other hand, taught me something really, really interesting. Messer is a weapon of peasants. Peasants, routinely, are not free to do whatever they like in the eyes of society or the law. And especially if peasants start offering each other in large numbers, because it's now a familial blood feud, ranging between two families in the same settlement or two families and different settlements.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, the nobility that they're farming for are going to get very pissed off that their workforce is being slaughtered.

 

Bob Brooks 

And not only that, you've got exponentially increasing civil unrest. The one thing that the higher ups don't like, is civil unrest, because that's when people get deposed. They don't like it. And so, Messer itself is filled with artifacts from this society. A lot of non-lethal resolutions. We know from medieval German law that there is again, a permissiveness in terms of the types of injury you can inflict. A slice is perfectly fine. The minute you begin to stab at somebody everything changes.

 

Guy Windsor 

This is true in Finland today. If you and I got drunk and ended up having a knife fight, if I cut you and you died, I could plausibly argue accidental manslaughter. We were just arsing around. I didn't mean to kill you. If I stab you and you die, it's always murder. There's a fundamental difference in the law in Finland even today, at least that's what I was told.

 

Bob Brooks 

And you also find, I think in Washington State and there might be one other state in the US, there is a mutual combat law. As long as you agree with somebody and it's overseen by a peace officer. No weapons are allowed. That's the key. So you can legally fistfight somebody, there was a guy wandering around years ago dressed as a superhero, basically beating the shit out of criminals. Through the mutual combat law.

 

Guy Windsor 

I remember, I didn't realise that was the law he was using. But I remember seeing it. I travelled to Seattle many times, and I've seen him in the paper.

 

Bob Brooks 

And so the interesting thing with this is that there are vestiges of this left, peppered throughout Messer, peppered throughout it. And when we look at contemporary accounts, we see things like for example, if you're going to fight somebody in a German town in 1460, or including into the 16th century, providing you announce your intentions, “Draw your sword, you've insulted me, let's fight.” They then have the opportunity morally to apologise and make good or fight. Perfectly legal. But the minute vital fluids, what they call the wet fight, the minute vital fluids begin to spill on the ground. And this again, is very biblical in terms of blood atonements, the only way they can atone for certain sins is the shedding of the blood of the sinner on the ground. And that's the only thing that works. The minute that happens in a trivial fight what they call a “Frevel” in medieval German, that's the point at which the law intercedes.

 

Guy Windsor 

In other words, you and I can fight with swords and if I cut you, and we stop immediately, that's okay. If we keep going after the first cut, then that's bad. But what if I only cut you once but I kill you because I cut your head off?

 

Bob Brooks 

Again, if there's a mutual agreement at that point, that honour is going to be satisfied you could plead manslaughter. There's part of me that wants to go and maybe do a degree in medieval German law. I understand it from a reader’s perspective. But certainly there are grounds for an acceptable level of violence. And it's certainly a more violent society in that respect than it is today. But we've got to remember that murder is still murder. And the punishments for murder are pretty horrific. And so this got me looking not just at Messer, and why we see a lot of these vestiges within Messer. But I began to look at all the sources that we look at, we look at a range of sources between 1389 or 1400, for Ms.3227a, which is the earliest Liechtenauer fight manuscript that we know of, through to Vadi, so 1487, we look at we look at that kind of 100 year gap, because a lot of the sources are contemporaneous, not just geographically but written within the same few decades of each other, and they all cluster in the centres like Nuremberg or Augsburg, or certain parts of Italy. And so you can get a pretty good picture of how this is cultural, as well as martial. There's a very cultural aspect to it. I find something very interesting with Fiore. If we look at the dagger. 76 plays of dagger spread across nine masters of dagger. These nine masters are situational, so it could be you're unarmed and you're fighting somebody who's using the rondel dagger, using an icepick grip. Or they're using it in the knife grip. Fiore goes through these nine situational masters and shows you. How many times does it show anybody being stabbed in the face?

 

Guy Windsor 

Actually being stabbed in the face? Not once. Stabbed in the chest? Yes. Stabbed in the chest, the belly and the thigh? Absolutely.

 

Bob Brooks 

What is it caveat in the text? He says, I can do this if I wish. And he's giving you a moral choice. And if you look at the sheer amount of non-lethal resolutions in Fiore’s dagger, the five things. He can strike you, disarm you, lock you, break you or throw you. The throws, yes. And he says, if you throw somebody on the back of the head, chances are they're going to die.

 

Guy Windsor 

He doesn't say that. But that's the implication.

 

Bob Brooks 

That’s the implication. So it's not just we find this this idea of morality within the Messer, we find it within the context of European Martial Arts in the 15th century.

 

Guy Windsor 

I've been saying for a long time that people need to study ethics. I even produced a short book on ethics about seven years ago, which is incorporated in my Theory and Practice book. Because if you're not thinking about the morality of stabbing people, you shouldn't be training to stab people, frankly.

 

Bob Brooks 

This is why I began to diverge from the tournament ideal, which is just about killing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Were you ever involved in the tournament ideal?

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I competed in a fair few tournaments. I organised a fair few tournaments. My students compete in tournaments. But it's really about the direction that the tournaments have taken where the optimal outcome for a tournament is killing. This is an extreme outcome, represents a fraction of what we see in the art.

 

Guy Windsor 

And it's worth pointing out that one area where we have longsword that is clearly intended, at least in part for non-lethal but competitive fencing environments, Meyer’s longsword, so late 16th century. They're giving each other bleeding headwounds and whatnot. But no one's getting killed except by accident.

 

Bob Brooks 

Again, look at the guild ordinances for Fechtschule, it tells you specifically. The Prague Ordinances from 1597 are among the best written and 34 rules. I like rule 34 which says anybody being a dick is allowed to be beaten with a shovel.

 

Guy Windsor 

How accurate a quote is that?

 

Bob Brooks 

Look it up, it's brilliant.

 

Guy Windsor 

But what is the actual expression for being a dick?

 

Bob Brooks 

I think it's anybody bringing disorder or disrepute on the fencing school and entering the fencing area when they shouldn't be in is allowed to be beaten three times with a shovel and there should be a small shovel hung on a post at the edge of the fencing area and the Burgers decide who's going to do the beating. If you behave like an ass at the Fechtschule the people moderating the Fechtschule, the Alterherren of the old town, the Burgermeisters, they have the power to fine and imprison and they could fine or imprison you for being a dick at the fencing school.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh God, I wish I could do that. Oh my god. It will be £1000 and a week in the smelliest jail for you, sir!

 

Bob Brooks 

We’d stop dickery in tournaments overnight if we could do this, but the interesting thing is that the rules themselves on how a fencer should behave. One of the rules, I think it's rule 14, might be wrong. I'm just going off my memory and there’s 34 to remember. 34 is that easy one because it's shovel beating. But one of the rules, I think it's rule 14, which says the fencers should not grab a weapon and rush at each other like peasants and beat upon each other like witless oxen.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, are you not describing most of what appears on YouTube under the HEMA banner?

 

Bob Brooks 

Fencers should fence lengthily and cleanly. Shouting, sticking your tongue out or coaching from the sidelines is expressly forbidden. I see tournament fencers now bringing their line cultures with them.

 

Guy Windsor 

If you're a sports person competing in a sport, having your coach there is de rigeur. And your coach should be able to coach you between bouts or between passes or whatever, as boxers do, as fencers do, whatever, because it's a sport. And there's nothing wrong with that if it's a sport. But I absolutely detest it in event in a historical fencing tournament, because personally, I'm not interested in the sporting side of things. But a lot of these tournaments are being run as sporting environments. So I think the coaching thing is perfectly reasonable if the rules of the tournament allow it, and that's the kind of environment they want to create. I don't have a problem with it myself. Just saying.

 

Bob Brooks 

I remember one of my now instructors, Jo York, lovely Jo York.

 

Guy Windsor 

Who has been on the show, and wasn't she lovely.

 

Bob Brooks 

Jo’s a wonderful human being. Jo being at a tournament and Jo going to the tournament alone, coming up against somebody who had their line coach with them. And hearing the line coach saying to their fencer, whatever you do, don't get into a winding fight with her. Jo's wonderful in terms of that she's  very, very interested in the tournament scene as a means of pressure testing, but she always wants to go in and fence with the material from the historical perspective. And that's a noble aspiration. But the interesting thing with the Fechtschule rules and how we could apply these today, there are things in there, I mean, shovel beatings might not be specifically legal today. But there are things in there and there's 34 rules that we can certainly apply in terms of standards of behaviour. But the interest the most interesting one for me, given that now, entering a HEMA tournament you need a bespoke modern harness. You need a full modern harness, effectively a full armour of plastic. Why not just do harness fencing. But anyway, harness fencing is horribly expensive. But one of the rules I'm most interested in from the Prague Ordinances says this: some fences make their fame through the wearing of long gloves that protect them to the elbow. This is not allowed. Fencers should only be considered worthy from the skill with the sword. And that's really interesting. Admonishing in the 16th century the use of wearing forearm protection. This is not the way. They tell us that. This is not the way, this is against the old way. And we shouldn't do it because people will build their reputations on wearing armour. Can we replicate that safely today?

 

Guy Windsor 

Course we can. I do it all the time. I routinely fence people with a fencing jacket on in case of puncture injuries, but I don't normally have any kind of protection on my forearms. My gauntlets stop at the wrist and I have an elbow cup just protect the tip of the elbow. But like I can get clonked on the forearm or clonked on the upper arm but there’s no padding there at all. Why would I want padding there? The sword will protect it.

 

Bob Brooks 

I never wear gauntlets.

 

Guy Windsor 

It changes things considerably. Firstly, you start holding the sword properly. I was coaching some fencing last night for some local historical martial arts chaps. And the one thing I wanted them to do that they just didn't want to do was take their gauntlets off and fence without them, because it was messing up the way they were holding the sword. And it was messing up how they were approaching their opponent's weapon. And you can't you simply can't manipulate a sword properly wearing these modern shitty plastic gauntlets. They didn't want to do it. And, I was just there as a friend kind of helping out. So I didn't insist on anything, and I wouldn't insist that somebody takes off their protection. I get my gloves out occasionally.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's food for thought because the famous Fecht book written by Paulus Kal, who was the toll collector for the Duke of Bavaria, and a bit of a big fellow by all accounts, quite a tall man. And he was a Liechtenauer master, he’s named in the Liechtenauer fellowship. And he has this wonderful image in his manuscript that disturbs a lot of people for the right reasons of essentially a man's body wearing nothing but a blue thong with a bird’s head, the legs of a deer, and a little lion on the chest. And again, it has scrolls with the mnemonic devices on, I have the legs of a hind and a spring to and fro, you know, the heart of a lion. I have the eyes of a hawk and I see all, so very much in line with what we see in The Flower of Battle.

 

Guy Windsor 

More like Vadi, to be honest.

 

Bob Brooks 

Interesting thing is he's holding a Federschwert. So he's holding the training sword, the medieval training sword, goes through to being the Renaissance training sword as well. The interesting thing I always wondered is, why is he naked?

 

Guy Windsor 

Good question. Because he’s German, and they like that sort of thing.

 

Bob Brooks 

Ja! But I think there’s a deliberate reason why that figure’s been left literally in his underpants. And that reason is he just needs his sword, his feet, his heart and his eyes to defend himself.

 

Guy Windsor 

He’s fully defended. Okay. So now you're obviously very, very keen on the Messer. And I imagine that listening to you blather on about Messers for the last half an hour has made me some people listening, possibly interested in taking up the Messer, or at least looking into it further. Is there a book you might be able to recommend? Tell us all about this this book? I believe it's written by somebody called Robertino Brookseroni?

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes. The famous Sicilian Messer master. Yeah, this bloody book that was the bane of my life for such a long time. But finally got out there and has had a wonderful reception. I think it's worth explaining why I wrote the book.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, first, let's tell everybody what it's called. So they can go find it. I will tell them so you don't have to shill your own shit on my shirt. It's okay. I'll shill it for you. At Your Mercy by Robert Daniel Brooks, which everybody should go and buy immediately. All right, carry on. Why did you write it?

 

Bob Brooks 

Why did I write it? I founded a group, Facebook group with some friends who were interested in Messer called the HEMA Messer Guild. Now got 2000-odd members, worldwide community of Messer fans. And one of the reason why I set that up was to bring people together. And the other reason was to share Messer materials and insights. But what I found and it was something that began to irk me was the you get a newbie, who would ask for some advice. It might not necessarily be a newbie, that's not fair. It might be somebody who's done some longsword who's wanting to look at Messer. And they would ask, I want to do some Messer, where's the best place to start? And so many times the answer was the manuscript of Johannes Lecküchner.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh Jesus, that's like 500 pages. And it’s in German.

 

Bob Brooks 

220 folia. So 440 pages, naught but Messer. And Lecküchner, fantastic source, directly lifts the methodology from Liechtenauer’s longsword and shoehorns the Messer into it. So he takes Liechtenauer’s methodology for the use of a longsword and he turns it to Messer. So two problems with this. I coined the phrase a good number of years ago. Lecküchner is the PhD of Messer. It's a huge work, a complex work. It's not a beginner's work. It's a massive volume. And unless you're already familiar with the fencing of Liechtenauer and the terminology and the theory, it is a difficult source. The problem with the old sources is they’re very fragmentary, there is one very, very good source, the Glasgow Fechtbuch only known by its catalogue number, Ms. E1939.641, referred to as the Glasgow thick book, not because it comes from that famous Scottish city of knife fighting. Because it resides in the RL Scott collection in Kelvingrove in Glasgow and the Glasgow manuscript has 11 plays of Messer. And whoever wrote this, because it's in harness, was a true genius, because in those 11 plays who manages to encompass pretty much everything you would need to survive a Messer fight. The beauty with Glasgow is it is not only contemporaneous, but geographically connected to other Messer sources.  all from this Augsburg, Nuremberg kind of region of southern Germany. So, obviously, what's now Bavaria. And we have other sources that were written at the same time from that region. And so notably, we have a section in Paulus Kal, there's not much maybe half a dozen plays, so Paulus Kal 1460. There is also some quite a weighty Messer section in the Von Bowman Fechtbuch, formerly known commonly known as Codex Wallerstein, which again, did some of the same period in the same region.

 

Guy Windsor 

And that has a great one where you can convince a peasant that you've cut their throat even though you haven't, by pinching the skin of the throat and cutting it. Why the hell you would want to do that I've never figured out but it goes to your point of non-lethal solutions.

 

Bob Brooks 

Money. Yes.

 

Guy Windsor 

You steal his purse.

 

Bob Brooks 

Then we can add the appendixes. Hans Talhoffer who really doesn't include any written instruction, just some beautiful images. And we can also include Albrecht Durer’s Hoplomachia. Now Durer is early 16th century, the first decade of the 16th century, however, it is a direct lift, he’s used the images from Codex Wallerstein/Von Bowman's Fechtbuch as the source for his own anatomically beautiful drawings. And so we can use Hoplomachia, the Messer section in Hoplomachia to actually see some very good modern anatomical, more modern anatomical drawings off people fencing with Messer, it's really beautiful. And we can also add in a couple of other bits and pieces that we find from this. So by combining these, we find a lot of overlap, the same things appear over and over again. So, as a place to begin to learn what I called pre-Lecküchner fencing, or Messer fencing, I compiled a simple syllabus that covers everything you need, fundamentally using the sources that are outside of Liechtenauer’s system, because Liechtenauer’s system is very much an artificial construct. There is no evidence before the Lecküchner that Liechtenauer’s system was used for the Messer. In fact, he acknowledges himself Liechtenauer very much paid lip service to the Messer, there’s very, very little. The Messer section and in Ms. 3227a, is general advice. It's very, very, very basic. And also we find that for example, key here is Paulus Kal. Paulus Kal 1470. He's roughly 10 years before Lecküchner writes the Kunst des Messerfechten, the art of Messer fencing. Lecküchner does something very interesting he shoehorns Messer into Liechtenauer’s system, but he also includes a lot of the other material, the street fighting, grapply, wrestling stuff that comprises most of the other earlier manuscripts.

 

Guy Windsor 

It's a really thorough book.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah. And in fact, what you find is that Lecküchner is the first manuscript really for Messer that deals with fencing with the Messer, because all of the others before that there was very little fencing. There is using the Messer as an equaliser in an armed grappling match. The Messer is a force equaliser. Anybody armed with it can injure anybody. So as I said, it's the Colt 45. So I built this system using primary sources from the same region, from the same time. Because this gives us a picture of what people are doing outside of Lecküchner’s work. This is common Messer fencing. And as such, I made this the syllabus for the Hotspur school for in the introductory syllabus for Messer. And what we find is that people really like this system.

 

Guy Windsor 

For people who can't see, I just picked up my copy of the Founder’s Edition beautifully hardbound. This is the only one I've got. Is it available in a cheaper format?

 

Bob Brooks 

It’s available in soft back and digitally. Hardback is for the special people.

 

Guy Windsor 

Can the good people go and get them anywhere?

 

Bob Brooks 

So, at the minute they are available via Lulu.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, they're just on Lulu. All right, we will put a link in the show notes. For sure. As I look at it, what you have here is the basic blows and the basic guards and the basic actions of the Messer. And if you do all of these things, you will have a foundation course in how to fence with this particular weapon.

 

Bob Brooks 

So the key with this was really twofold, was to produce a guide that was so comprehensive, and so clear that anybody could learn Messer.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so I do have a question. My question is, why the fuck did it take you so long to write?

 

Bob Brooks 

Life generally getting in the way?

 

Guy Windsor 

We had conversations about this book about six, seven years ago.

 

Bob Brooks 

I think the key for me was the way my mind works, often against me. I wanted it to be right. I wanted it right from the start. Bit of background, personal background, for 20 years, I was a journalist, and a newspaper journalist. And in contrary to what people think, in today's post fact, post expertise world, journalists actually, certainly during my time are highly trained. And if you make shit up and you lie about people, you get sued and you lose your job.

 

Guy Windsor 

Or you become prime minister. Because fuckwit Johnson lost his job twice for journalistic fabrications, basically lying in print, and then became prime minister. So some people do get away with it. But generally speaking, yeah.

 

Bob Brooks 

It depends on how wealthy you are, I suppose, but the story of human history actually depends on how wealthy you are. So the key really was to get it right first time. Because I think the worst thing I could have had personally was a book going out in it, people pulling it to bits, and saying, you know, there's errors here, this doesn't explain anything clearly, it needed to be right.

 

Guy Windsor 

I know about that, but here's something just to prepare you for, even if the book is absolutely perfect, and it's pretty bloody good. He says flicking through it. There will be people who just don't like you, and will find reasons to tear holes in your book, regardless.

 

Bob Brooks 

I’m happy with that. I have a very healthy approach to life. I don't make enemies. If people want to be my enemy, that's their time and their energy, not mine. So, the book itself was twofold. One was to teach the individual, somebody who's living out in the sticks, who wants to learn something and get some history with it and understand the context. So this gives them that basis. But the other one was that if you want to set up a Messer club here is a premade syllabus. In its entirety.

 

Guy Windsor 

And from experience, people will do that. And what they will do, they'll decide they want to change things, and they'll fuck things up royally. And they'll still think they're doing your stuff, even though they've mixed the drills around for their own purposes, and whatever and then they hire you for a seminar and you go out there and they proudly show you this clusterfuck they've made out of your syllabus, and all you got to do is applaud the effort because they really care and don't take it personally.

 

Bob Brooks 

Not at all. Really what I want the book to be is a gateway drug to more Messer. People can look at this understand because again in the back, it contains a glossary of terms of common Fechtbuch terminology. So you can take this book, and you can springboard your way into Lecküchner. I almost think that this is GCSE Messer. Gives you the chance to become familiar, to learn it, to understand it. Familiarise yourself with the lingua franca that it started to written. But it's accessible. And that's the key. It's an accessible book.

 

Guy Windsor 

I just had a thought of what I think your next book should be. What I think you should do. And this is just me, the idea came to me just now. So feel free to shoot it down. I will not take it personally. I think you should do a critical edition of the Glasgow Messer transcription. There aren't any pictures in Glasgow, are there? So the transcription, translation, explanation, and a video clip of how you would perform that action choreographically. It'd be a nice, tight, small book that won't necessarily need to grow, because it's just the Glasgow. Do not be tempted to include the other ones. You can do those as separate volumes later, if you want. What the At Your Mercy book shows is that you're a competent instructor who has a good syllabus, it doesn't really go into any depth of detail about how you're coming up with these precise interpretations. So what you do is, and this is what I've done, I've got a bunch of books on like how to train like, Armizare Workbook, or Medieval Longsword or whatever. But I've also got books, which are translations and my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series, which now has two volumes out. It takes it does the exact same thing. It has the picture from Fiore, it has the transcription, translation, explanation what I think's going on, and a link to a video clip. And what that does is it means you don't have to do a photo shoot, because that's an absolute pain in the ass. It shows the actual movement, not just static pictures, yes, it's much easier to print and produce. And, you know, there are only 11 plays in the Glasgow so with an introduction, and a conclusion, and some suggestions to go and buy At Your Mercy at the end, we're talking a tiny little book.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's a really interesting one. Yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

But it's a book that'll be super valuable for two things. Firstly, it will give people who don't read German access to the source from a historical martial artist’s perspective, and access to your interpretation,  which they can agree with or disagree with, because they can see what it actually is. And it will establish your academic credentials. And it’s the academic stuff that you've done that you've kind of based your At Your Mercy book on. No one's really seen that. So what it'll do is it'll establish that you can actually read the source and have informed opinions about it, and how you set about constructing or reconstructing the actions described in that source. And most importantly, because I know what your book projects turn into, it’s short, it's defined, don't do it with Lecküchner, that will take the rest of your life, do it with Glasgow, because it's 11 plays. And you know, maybe a 50, 60 page book, it's going to be tiny, but it's going to be super useful, and help also establish your academic credentials.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, the interesting thing with Glasgow is there's things that are in Glasgow that appear elsewhere. So there's a lot of cross referencing can be done. Well, yeah, that's a very good one. I have got a project. So the next the next book I'm going to be writing, obviously, that might be yours. Might be the one you just suggested. But certainly the next one in the series that I wanted to do in the same style as At Your Mercy, working title of The Serpent's Tongue. It’s a compilation of German medieval dagger. Because there's a lot a lot of German dagger material.

 

Guy Windsor 

It's all mixed up hodgepodge and scattered about it over time. You don't have 76 plays organised in nine masters, you have ten here, five here, seven there.

 

Bob Brooks 

But the interesting thing with it is when I collated the primary source text, 13,000 words, of primary source material. There's a lot.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s not a lot. For historical sources that’s quite a lot of material. It's a sufficient amount of material. But when we're talking about a book 13,000 words of original source material, 13,000 words approximately of translation. That's 26,000 words. Another 13,000 words, at least, of explanation. That is the 39,000 words. Add 5000 word intro 5000 word outro. You have a precisely regular book size project.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, it's a big one. I'm thinking at the minute whether to divide it between the armoured and the unarmoured fencing, and actually do two volumes.

 

Guy Windsor 

Do. Anything that makes anything that makes the volume more likely to come out in a timely fashion is good.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, that's the key. But yeah, now that's a good idea. Thank you, Guy. I think I might look at that. I've already got quite a lot of written material on the Glasgow Fechtbuch.

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean, you've done the work already. You just haven't written it up. Yeah, seriously, okay. And there's a section, I've put this on a blog post, Show Your Work: how to present academic historical martial arts stuff, which goes into the details of how you produce the videos, and where you put them, and how you link them through the book and all that kind of stuff. All that is on a blog post. Anyone can go and look at it. On guywindsor.net. And it's Show Your Work.

 

Bob Brooks 

This could be an opportunity for a PhD by publication, maybe?

 

Guy Windsor 

Sure, why not?

 

Bob Brooks 

Herr Doktor Messer.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yes. And let me confirm that any idiot can get a PhD. Because some idiots have. Alright. So yeah, I think we've established that people should go and get your new book, because it's all about the Messer, and you're very keen on the Messer. I am actually as interested to know how you've kept a historical martial arts school running for 20 years. That is not a small achievement.

 

Bob Brooks 

21 in May. It's been hard. It's tough. Doing it from 2003 to 2013 I did as a labour of love alongside being a journalist.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, a part time job.

 

Bob Brooks 

Doing it full time, I wouldn't want to do anything else. This is me. This is who I am. I've been fencing now longer than I've done anything else. I had a similar conversation. It's when I realised that I've been I've been doing HEMA longer than I knew my parents.

 

Guy Windsor 

Fuck.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes, I was in a position where I was in my very early 20s when both my parents passed away.

 

Guy Windsor 

I met your mum. And I remember she passed away a long time ago.

 

Bob Brooks 

So I've been doing HEMA longer than I knew my parents, which is quite a terrifying prospect. But keeping it gone for 20 years. Any club that has longevity can be achieved in some in some ways that are good, some ways that are bad. I mean, for example, a McDojo, you're churning through students and you don't give a shit. I've got students who have been with me for 10, 15. In one case, actually, a student has been with me, pretty much since the start, who's no longer a student. I think the key really is to build relationships with all of your students, no matter what level they're at. Build a positive relationship, have a healthy culture. But don't force that culture in a specific direction. Let that culture develop on its own, let it develop naturally. Because people will gravitate to where they feel comfortable, they'll gravitate people to places the activities they like to do. If it's forced, if you're trying to power up your club by organising 20 different things in the course of the year. You're going to burn yourself out, you're going to burn people out. Let things progress at a natural pace. That's the key, to me. That's certainly what helped me. The other thing is kill your darlings. Constantly reevaluate.

 

Guy Windsor 

You’re a Quiller-Couch fan? Murder your darlings. When writing, those phrases that you are most attached to are probably the ones that make you sound like a twit so get rid of them.

 

Bob Brooks 

Don't ever think that you it just so because there's always something that will come in from left field and completely upset your apple cart. Adapt, grow, more than adapt and allow others to feed you with knowledge and insight. Never be proud enough as an instructor not to take advice.

 

Guy Windsor 

And this is a funny thing, right? I've come across clubs, for whom like organising a seminar with a guest instructor is almost unheard of. Whereas, from day one in my school, we've had an average of four guest instructors a year, every year without fail, and usually almost invariably coming from outside the country. So getting completely different perspectives on systems that we are studying, on systems that my students have never seen before. Just that constant sort of refresh yourself from the stream.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah. Absolutely. It seems trite, but keep it fun. The minute people stop having fun, is the minute they’ll walk. Keep it fun, be serious in your training. But be serious with a smile on your face. Keep it enjoyable.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, if your students never laugh in class, there's something wrong.

 

Bob Brooks 

And that's really the key that I found. The other thing I found from a personal level, is to kill your ego, to undergo a degree of ego death, as an instructor is very, very important.

 

Guy Windsor 

Almost impossible. Very, very hard.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's hard to put aside the things when people are being deliberately hurtful. But with that, if you receive fair criticism, constructive criticism, or for example, if you're compared to another instructor who happens to be doing the same thing you're doing except somebody thinks that they're doing it better than you are. Don't let it eat you up. That's a signal for you to grow.

 

Guy Windsor 

Same is true with writing. When you're writing a book or whatever, it's the people who will tell you that this chunk of text just doesn't make sense. Or I don't agree with your argument here, you haven't convinced me. It's those people will make the book better.

 

Bob Brooks 

And they’re the last people you want to be combative with.

 

Guy Windsor 

Exactly. They're literally helping, they're putting in time and effort to make your work better. So it feels like they are shitting on your head. And it feels horrible. But actually, it's the best thing. So what you have to do, is say thank you very much. That's very helpful. Thank you, I shall apply your corrections.

 

Bob Brooks 

But it's hard. I raised my kids with a very, very simple life lesson is that no matter what you do, no matter what you excel at, there will be somebody who is better than you at it. Measuring yourself against the performance of others is a fool's errand. Because you're always going to be playing catch up.

 

Guy Windsor 

You're always going to find someone who is better than you on some metric that you care about? So if you want to be miserable, you can make it happen.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yes, absolutely. This is the path to being to being depressed. The only person you can measure yourself against is yourself.

 

Guy Windsor 

I have a tweak on that. Because I have a lot of friends who make more money than me and I have a lot of friends who write better books than me and I have a lot of friends who have all sorts of things better than me. So, when I'm comparing myself to a person, I usually think, okay, how have I organised my life, what do I actually care about? I have the freest schedule of anybody I know. I can choose to fuck off to New Zealand for a couple of weeks to do a seminar thing because I feel like it. I can do that. I can take Monday off to go and see a friend because they happen to be visiting from America and Monday's the day they have in London. So I just take the day off and I go down to London, I see my friend and that's that. That's what I've optimised for. And at that I have all the freedom I want. And sometimes actually perhaps a little bit more than is good for me.

 

Bob Brooks 

Sometimes very much a double edged sword, I think, I find coming from coming from a career, which was highly dependent on deadlines. Very high pressure, suddenly being the master of your own destiny as a quantum leap.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s great, isn’t it?

 

Bob Brooks 

It taught me one thing was to look after myself. If you're not working, nothing else does.

 

Guy Windsor 

Honestly, Bob, I've known you a very long time. And I will tell you as a friend to your face, that you could do a better job of looking after yourself. Just saying.

 

Bob Brooks 

There are times in which, you know, life gets to you, but in terms of keeping the club running, that's the key. And the other thing as well as is, use people's talents, when they give you them, when they present them. I'm blessed with a fantastic team.

 

Guy Windsor 

I would say accept, rather than use. I mean, because if you're doing something cool, people will want to come and help you. I mean, I remember when I first started my school, before I even moved to Finland. So after I decided, and I'd got swordschool.com as the domain name. And it was maybe October or November 2000, before I moved to Finland in 2001 to actually start the school, Andrew Feast, who these days makes beautiful, beautiful smallswords down in the south of England. He had those sorts of skills, and he just made me a website. I had no idea how to, back then you actually had to have skills to make a website, there was no WordPress or any of that sort of stuff. And he thought what I was doing was cool. And he built me a website. And that was the school website for some years. And thanks again, Andrew, if you happen to be listening, but people will help if you're doing something cool.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I'm very lucky that I have a fantastic instructors team with me. Andy Milburn and Ian Lowry who routinely kick my ass to make me a better person. Jo York whose organisational skills are out of this world.

 

Guy Windsor 

She was involved in getting your book out, wasn't she?

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, Jo was a constant source of write the book, write the book, finish the book, get the photographs done. Write the book, where's the book, when’s the book happening? But I love Jo, brilliant. And yeah, Jo's a motivator, very much a motivator. And a great fencer, a great teacher. So yeah. When you find people like that around you, let them shine. Because you're going to bask in that for a good degree of the time. And it's great to see people that you've brought up from beginning of their journey in historical fencing to actually becoming not just an instructor in their own right within your own organisation, but actually starting to be recognised outside of it, and starting to travel. And to be seen as a good instructor on their own merits from what they themselves bring to it. That's all part and parcel. Don't run before you can walk is probably the last thing I'd say. I hate to say it, but I see a trend within and this is not a new thing. I've seen a trend within the wider community, of the global community, for people to do a year and then be an instructor.

 

Guy Windsor 

Sometimes people tell me, they've been into martial arts for 10 years that, I think, oh, so you've just begun. And obviously then I think how when I been doing it for 10 years, that I was not a beginner anymore, and I had to kind of reset my internal thing. So when people tell me how long they've been doing it, I just tend to kind of edit that bit out in my head, because it's almost invariably sounds like a very short period of time, even when it isn't, objectively. You study medicine for 10 years, you're like a consulting surgeon or something.

 

Bob Brooks 

As we've mentioned earlier did sport fencing from 87, Dawn Duellists from 94. The beginnings of HEMA, Western martial arts, historical fencing, whatever you want to call it. I didn't set up the school until 2003. So arguably, at that point, I'd been 1987 to 2003. And I remember the first session I taught as if it was this morning.

 

Guy Windsor 

Me too. Oh my god. When I set up the school in Helsinki, the first class I taught as like a free demonstration class at the Olympic Stadium on the 17th of March 2001.

 

Bob Brooks 

Baptism of fiery razorblades.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, exactly.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, it was terrifying. And there's one thing about starting a club now, or going from the route of learning the art and then becoming an instructor is that we have the internet. I think the access to information is an important thing. And this is the opportunity of absolutely got to give a shout out to the person I think who's actually done probably the greatest thing since I began this, and that’s Mike Chidester.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, yeah.

 

Bob Brooks 

Think back to us in 95, 96. If we had access to Wiktenauer.

 

Guy Windsor 

We’d have given our bollocks for Wiktenauer, we would. And that was before we had kids.

 

Bob Brooks 

What he did is a labour of love, for the art, is unbelievable.

 

Guy Windsor 

He’s the Patri Pugliese of his time, I would say.

 

Bob Brooks 

Michael, you've done a good thing. That's going to live on for a long time.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, and he has been on the show. So people can find my conversation with him.

 

Bob Brooks 

I occasionally bump into him that on my foreign jaunts. So I'm looking forward to seeing him again. Probably at CombatCon.

 

Guy Windsor 

Alright, so I have a couple of questions that I ask most people. The first is, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet? Your dagger book doesn't count. Because you’re acting on it.

 

Bob Brooks 

The best idea I haven't acted on is leaving the UK.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay. Tell me about that. Your school is in Northumbria and you are Northumbrian. I mean, that's baked in.

 

Bob Brooks 

I have a sense of feeling that I'm in quite the fortunate situation now with that I could comfortably hand over my school to my instructors, and let them run with it.

 

Guy Windsor 

I did that in 2016. And it was a very good decision.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's a good feeling. But there's parts of the world that are calling out to me and often for quite a long time. I mean, at the minute for those who can see I'm kind of really channelling my inner man. Because I absolutely love the US with a passion. Love being in the US. I’ve almost felt for the last 10 years that it's hard to describe. There are places I've been in the US that I could see myself living. Connecticut is one of the most wonderful places and the people are fantastic. And the environment is beautiful. And New England has a very, very special field. But I also like the desert states. I love Arizona and Nevada, California. California is beautiful. People are great. bit wacky. But I wouldn't be necessarily somebody who will gravitate towards a big city. I've been in New York several times.

 

Guy Windsor 

I love New York.

 

Bob Brooks 

I love New York as a city, visiting, but living in New York.

 

Guy Windsor 

I would want to make probably 10 times as much money as I do to live in New York.

 

Bob Brooks 

As a country mouse. You know, the place where I was born and raised and where I still live now.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s a tiny little village near a very small town.

 

Bob Brooks 

The village I live in at the minute has 500 people in it.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's plenty for you.

 

Bob Brooks 

And strangely five pubs.

 

Guy Windsor 

How can you fit 100 people into a pub?

 

Bob Brooks 

The other place I really love is New Zealand. New Zealand is paradise. I've some exceptional friends in New Zealand.

 

Guy Windsor 

So would you move to New Zealand and start a school there? Or would you do something else?

 

Bob Brooks 

I'd certainly take my HEMA journey in that direction, no matter where I was. Would I do it to the scale that have done it now? I mean, the Hotspur school is a big school.

 

Guy Windsor 

How many students, more or less?

 

Bob Brooks 

It fluctuates. They peak at over 100, four nights a week. Winter is understandably quite quiet, scaled back a little. At the minute, we have about 55 in Newcastle, about another 10 In our second chapter in our chapter in Middlesborough. And, again, about the same number in our chapter in Ullapool. So yeah, you end with good problems, like how do you fit all these people when you get a longsword class, for example, with 40 people turning up?

 

Guy Windsor 

Yes, it's tricky.

 

Bob Brooks 

It's one of the things I love when I meet somebody who's really arrogant. To be able to say to them, one of my regular classes is bigger than your entire school. I don’t say that.

 

Guy Windsor 

You just think it in your head.

 

Bob Brooks 

But yeah, I would certainly take my HEMA somewhere else. One of the places I absolutely adore is Galicia in northwestern Spain. Good friends. There’s a very good club, the club Falcata in Vigo. Well worth a look at. If you're in northwestern Spain, check out Falcata in Vigo, very, very good club.

 

Guy Windsor 

So why don't you go?

 

Bob Brooks 

It's been a combination of family things. My two youngest children are now coming up 18 and 21. Again, the other thing that that you that the viewers and listeners would never be aware of was, I was effectively a single parent for 10 years. So I got full custody of the two youngest children in 2012. So they would have been six and nine. And that curtails pretty much everything. My life went on hold for a long time. And when I say my life, I'm talking about, you know, social life.

 

Guy Windsor 

I've often thought about maybe moving somewhere else. And yeah, we're not even going to think about moving out of Ipswich until at least my younger child finishes school here. So that nails us down for at least the next three years.

 

Bob Brooks 

Well, I think there's something I've found that it's actually an intrinsic part of me and that's wanderlust. I just have a desire to travel. I love seeing different places, meeting different people, experiencing different cultures. And the one thing I despise is you get the package holiday thing where you go to Benidorm and the first thing you do is find a full English breakfast. It’s the last thing I will do. Immerse yourself in the local culture. And that's one of the real joys in life is to be able to not just meet different people, but understand a different perspective on life.

 

Guy Windsor 

A different way of thinking about things.

 

Bob Brooks 

Anybody out there who's listening, if you want me for a HEMA workshop at the minute, I'd love to do Alaska.

 

Guy Windsor 

Alaska, okay. Yes. Well, there are definitely historical martial artists in Alaska. I have friends who have been there to do seminars, so yes. Alaskans, get Bob out.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I am available for workshops, so let me know. But yeah, I think on a personal level, the one thing that I'd like to go back to university. So, my other passions in life? Well, I have a passion for astrophysics. Love space science, ever since I was a kid.

 

Guy Windsor 

You want to do a degree in astrophysics?

 

Bob Brooks 

I think the maths might be a non-starter.

 

Guy Windsor 

You wouldn't be the first astrophysicist we've had on the show. So you're in good company.

 

Bob Brooks 

Maybe not astrophysics, maybe something to do with space, maybe cosmology. Astrology.

 

Guy Windsor 

Astrology?

 

Bob Brooks 

I'd love to do something to do planet related, especially exoplanets. Okay, just waiting with bated breath for the 75% chance that Planet X is found. Planet X is the hypothetical Super Earth that is sitting somewhere way, way out in all sorts of stuff. And they've narrowed it down to a 75% chance that it's there. It’s perturbing the orbits of the trans Neptunian bodies. So there's a couple of scientists who have led this. And again, it's just such an amazing story of hopefully discovering.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you’d go back to university and you would do a double major in medieval German law and cosmology.

 

Bob Brooks 

Exoplanets geology, yeah. Now, the other, the other one, given our work with the Bronze Age combat project, to do a degree in ancient history. Because again, it's a fascinating period, especially with the finds that are really shaken our understanding of human origins in Cappadocia. These 12,000 year old structures when people weren't supposed to be building anything at that point in stone. And you've got these 12,000 year old structures that are defying the odds. So, I don't know if there's maybe a little bit of Indiana Jones in there.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, it must be said, there's quite a lot of variety. So what you could do, you could have a look at how planetary influences are reflected in Cappadocia 10,000 BCE.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, so there's actually quite a quite a heavy amount of study being done on celestial alignments of ancient monuments.

 

Guy Windsor 

Have you read this new book called Inanna? It's a novel based on the Sumerian goddess Inanna. And Gilgamesh. It’s fantastic. I can't remember the name of the woman who wrote it. It's so good. I read it. And then I just started reading it again. She takes a somewhat science-fictiony slant to the kind of the practicalities of how you have these gods and goddesses walking around talking to people. They have sex with each other in the temples to make the land fertile. She has interesting, non-archaeologically based, because it’s fiction, it is a novel. But I think you might really enjoy it.

 

Bob Brooks 

Origins of civilization is something I'm very, very interested in.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what you need to do is a series of degrees.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I could while out the rest of my life, going back to unit. Try and get on the university fencing team.

 

Guy Windsor 

I don't think you'd do too well these days. But yeah, last question, somebody gives you a million quid to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide, how would you spend the money?

 

Bob Brooks 

A million?

 

Guy Windsor 

It's hypothetical money, you can have as much as you'd like. A million is just a great big chest of imaginary doubloons.

 

Bob Brooks 

I think one of the best things anybody could do would be to secure a historical venue. There's loads of places at the minute, which are literally falling down. In fact, that was one just near me, Otterburn Hall. Right next to the famous battlefield, a beautiful building, absolutely beautiful building, sold at auction for £250,000. It's incredible.

 

Guy Windsor 

And it's going to cost 10 times that to fix up.

 

Bob Brooks 

It’s going to cost a lot to fix up. But if the money wasn't an issue, if say rather than millions, it was £10 million. Buy a historical property. Turn it into a dedicated centre for historical fencing excellent. That would be one thing, it would have to be somewhere fairly accessible.

 

Guy Windsor 

And a scholarship program. So that people from places where $300 is a lot of money to feed a family of five for a week on.

 

Bob Brooks 

It would be residential, as well. Well, actually, I've got a slightly more realistic idea than that. I think if we got a million pounds is scour auctions, and private sales for any surviving fencing manuals, but also engage somebody in a search of some of these more voluminous university archives or national collections. You never know you're going to turn up a lost copy of Fiore in the Biblioteque Nationale as you know, for example happened. I think there's probably a lot of material sitting in Eastern Europe.

 

Guy Windsor 

There's a lot of material sitting everywhere. I mean, I think the Vatican is probably sitting on a ton of it. But here's a thought for you. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to sources. I would say that lack of access to the sources, thanks Wiktenauer and other efforts, is not really a limiting factor in people's study of historical martial arts anymore. So I understand the urge to basically send drones into archives to find all the fencing books, I totally get the desire to do that. But I think maybe your historical martial arts centre in a castle with scholarships for people to come and train for months at a time might be a better use of the money.

 

Bob Brooks 

What would you do?

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, when I was asked that question, about a year and a half ago, when I interviewed Mila Jędrzejewska, she pushed it back at me. And I said, I will create a social media platform for sword people. And then I looked into it and I found out you don't need 100 million quid to build a social media platform, because people actually have social media platforms. They have all the architecture, and you can basically hire it. So I actually have my own social media platform for sword people. It's called swordpeople.com, you should definitely join if you’re not there already. Because she said, if you had all that money, what would you do? And then I found out, I didn't need all that money to do it, I could just basically hire this product that this company produces. It's not particularly cheap, but it's certainly nothing like a million quid. So that's a risky question. Because when you make me think that then another project comes into my head, and I ended up having to build the bloody thing. So, what I would do now, with that money…? I really don't know. I think perhaps the most useful use of the money is I fundamentally believe that the long term good of the art is served by qualities such as diversity and transparency. Because when you get people from different cultures, different backgrounds, different ways of life, different walks of life, looking at the same problem, you come up with a whole bunch more interesting solutions, than if you get a whole bunch of people from just one demographic looking from it. So historical martial arts are better served if we have a more diverse base of people doing it. And one of the things that gets in the way more than anything else is lack of money, because this is an expensive hobby that doesn't have any reasonable path to making money at it. It's very, very difficult to make a living, producing stuff for historical martial artists, or being a historical martial arts instructor or whatever. It's not an easy road to hoe. So I would probably use the money in some sort of scholarship fund to enable students of historical martial arts from all over the place to interact with each other more and to do more interesting work. So for example, flying people from wherever to Swordsquatch in Seattle, for instance, or some other sort of event or fly them so they could go and train with you in Northumbria for six months and take the art of the Messer home and then spread the word, that sort of thing. I mean, one of the advantages of my salle in Helsinki is because it was my own space, people came and they could stay there for free. Which meant that it was sort of subsidising the trip, it was much cheaper for them to stay. So we have people who came, literally lived in the salle for six months. Because we have the permanent space. And there's no way they could have rented an apartment in Helsinki for six months. And nobody wants a guest sleeping on their sofa for six months. So the money side of things. I mean, the model I'll probably go with, like the charity I give the most money to is an organization called Lend With Care. And what they do is they provide micro loans to people in the developing world to do various things. And the options come up on the home screen and you can send out like $20 for this person to buy produce for their shop to sell, or $30 for this person to get another sewing machine in their shop because they're making clothes for people or whatever. And relatively small amounts of money go a very long way if they're applied properly. I've been doing this for like seven or eight years now. So far, the money almost always comes back because they repay the loan because they're doing it to support businesses. So these businesses make money and they repay the loan. Sometimes, there's one guy in Peru who I supported, his truck was destroyed in an avalanche. And so I never got the money back. Fair enough. And there's always there's always that sort of risk. From my perspective, it's just a charitable donation. So I'm not expecting the money back. But when it comes back, if they're in the Lend With Care thing, and I can just send it out again to other people who can use it. So that same relatively modest amount of money that I put it a while ago, and I keep the I top it up every now and then. But in effect, I've been able to lend out £1000s to these small businesses, without actually having £1000s to lend. I had a really good year one year, so I stuck in £1000 to see what would happen. And I top it up every now and then. But so much of it comes back to be reinvested because they're repaying their loans, that there's this very positive cycle. So some element of that. So there'd be, for example, business loans for people who want to maybe set up a school that's actually going to produce some revenue, or scholarship loans for people who want to go and study under a particular historical fencing instructor, or travel grants for people who want to go to things. So, I would probably set up a foundation to support historical martial arts in that way. That's how I think of it. Fucking hell, Bob, now you've told me I've got to go and do it.

 

Bob Brooks 

You suffer from the same malady I do.

 

Guy Windsor 

And the goal being, as the goal of the podcast is to improve diversity in historical martial arts. The podcast does it I hope through representation, because we have people from all walks of life coming on the show. The money would do it through subsidising people, giving them small business loans, giving them travel grants, giving them scholarships, that kind of stuff. And I mean, that sort of thing, if it's going to be persistent, if it's going to continue over time, it is going to have to have some way of it to actually get more money in. And simply asking rich people to give you money is an approach and nothing wrong with doing that. But it's also better, I think, if it has some assets that it can make. Maybe, here's a thought. This literally just occurred to me, you're writing books, I’m writing books, loads of people write books, what we could do is maybe produce editions of those books, or donate a particular book or some books, so that the copyright is transferred over to the foundation. The foundation then uses the income from those books as an income stream, and maybe online courses and stuff as well. Build a little sort of historical martial arts self-generating money engine to bring this trickle of money in, and it doesn't have to be a great deal of money to make a big difference in some areas. It really doesn't have to be that much money.

 

Bob Brooks 

It doesn't, no. I think that's a really good idea. I think I'd certainly be happy to contribute to that at some point. The other thing is that there are some very rich people who partake in martial arts. Looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg.

 

Guy Windsor 

He does to Jiu Jitsu, doesn’t he?

 

Bob Brooks 

Donate a million quid to help people. Drop in the ocean for you guys.

 

Guy Windsor 

Again, that is an approach. Getting rich people to fund stuff is a perfectly good thing to do, and nothing wrong with it. But I think it's more stable if it's not dependent on the goodwill of very rich people. And you look at these fundraising dinners and events and whatever, where very rich people pay $10,000 to go to this dinner. And it's like, why the fuck don’t they just give that money to the charity and not spend all that money on the dinner? It's ridiculous.

 

Bob Brooks 

How about if Elon Musk was to pay you $10,000 to hit him with a longsword?

 

Guy Windsor 

Obviously, I would pay him $10,000 to hit him with a longsword. “X this motherfucker.”

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, I'm sure there's some fun that can be had. Be first people to fence longsword in space. SpaceX put us in one of your capsules.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sparks in a capsule. No. Have you not seen Apollo 13?

 

Bob Brooks 

I have, yes? We’ll use aluminium Messers.

 

Guy Windsor 

I don't like aluminium swords, they go clonk.

 

Bob Brooks 

Many Messers have a good weight.

 

Guy Windsor 

They have their place as a training module, maybe. I'm not too hideously against it, but I just don't like them. Back in the days when Sword Forum was the place where everyone talked about swords, I put a post saying “Aluminium wasters: no.” And I got like shitloads of very negative feedback. And people didn't like me for a while. And then funnily enough, two or three years later, aluminium swords disappeared.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, we use them for Messer because there’s certain parameters with the Messer.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, that makes sense. Because the resonance of the blade is much less important when they hit each other. It’s not like a longsword where you've got that much metal and the way it wobbles when you hit it makes a big difference to how it handles. Whereas the Messer is less prone to vibration because it's shorter. It's still a part of it, but it's not to the degree that you find with a longsword or a rapier.

 

Bob Brooks 

Yeah, we'll be doing electric longsword before long, anyway.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, fuck off Bob, get off my show this instant. Excellent. Well, it has been great talking to you, Bob. I didn't mean it when I said “fuck off my show.”

 

Bob Brooks 

I just hope everybody out there in the great wild yonder got something out of this, you know, two old friends catching up after a long time.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, thanks for coming, Bob.

 

Bob Brooks 

A pleasure. Absolute pleasure.