Episode 206: You’re a Fechtmeister too, with Liam Clark

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Liam H. Clarke is a historical fencer with a focus on Renaissance-era German fencing traditions, specifically the work of Joachim Meyer. He has been practicing since 2016, first in the Rocky Mountains before returning home to the Pacific Northwest. For the last few years, he has been delving into the archives, researching the lives and times of the contemporaries of Joachim Meyer, publishing his findings, including illuminating Joachim Meyer’s family through his Substack, Evergreen Historical Fencing.

In our chat, we discuss the appeal of delving into archives instead of just doing swordfighting: does having a better understanding of the lives of past masters help us fence better, or have a deeper enjoyment of practising historical fencing?

Liam explains who Meyer was, his family’s background in paper production, and what life was like in city states like Strasbourg in the 16^th Century. Every (male) citizen had a responsibility to own arms and armour and be prepared to protect the city, whether on night watch, military conflicts, or fire calls. Liam’s research can help us picture what daily life was like for Meyer and his contemporaries, and how they had the same struggles with money and other commitments that we have today.

One thing Liam’s research has highlighted is how young these fencing masters were, and how a “Fechtmeister” wouldn’t have been a wizened old man with a long beard. Meyer was only in his early thirties when he died. Many of us practising HEMA today would qualify as a ‘Master’, which is a nice thought for reducing the imposter syndrome!

All of Liam’s research findings and articles are open source and freely available at https://evergreenfencing.substack.com/p/three-other-fechtmeisters-of-strasbourg Check it out!

Transcript

Guy Windsor 

Liam H. Clarke is a historical fencer with a focus on Renaissance-era German fencing traditions, specifically the work of Joachim Meyer. He has been practicing since 2016, first in the Rocky Mountains before returning home to the Pacific Northwest. For the last few years, he has been delving into the archives, researching the lives and times of the contemporaries of Joachim Meyer, publishing his findings, including illuminating Joachim Meyer’s family through his Substack, Evergreen Historical Fencing. And without further ado, Liam, welcome to the show.

 

Liam Clark 

Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be chatting across the world, across the pond and very different time zones.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, modern technology is extraordinary. So whereabouts in the Pacific Northwest are you?

 

Liam Clark 

I’m in Seattle proper, one of the most northwest of the northwests that you can get.

 

Guy Windsor 

I know Seattle very well. For like 10 years, I was there at least twice a year, and then Covid happened, and I've been back, I think, once since. But it's very tricky these days travelling.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, it's one of the big chagrins of coming into doing historical research in the post-Covid era is there's a degree of ease that doesn't quite return with things in terms of scheduling and travelling and all of the costs of going over to Europe to actually look at archives in person. I haven't been able to yet make that jump because of just that little bit of extra post-2020 price tag and things that gets added on.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it's gotten very complicated, but we do have all the good stuff over here, so you should definitely save your pennies and make the trip. Which archive would you be going to first?

 

Liam Clark 

Probably the Basel archives down in Switzerland. There's this weird degree where a lot of the archives that you look at, they tend to have this spread of really good digitized stuff that you can kind of really delve into. And then a bunch of things you can't see very well, because they put all the digitized things up front. And then the non-digitized are much harder to sort through. Or with Basel, they've got some good digitized things. And then this treasure trove of just like, mouth wateringly, ambitiously, here's 30,  40 years of records that I want to get at, but none of them are online, and I just want to spend a few days inside, digging through some old books.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, there are two kinds of people in the world, people who can describe the contents of an archive like Basel as mouth watering, and people who just can't. There's definitely a section of the listenership who are going, oh my god, that archive. Oh my god. I so totally would. And others are like, why on earth would you want to go and dig through ancient, old bits of paper?

 

Liam Clark 

I like to describe doing HEMA research. It's like, the big H at the start of Hema is it's the same kind of pyramid of specialty that you get with any niche subject, like if you're getting into any science or biology, even like sports itself, you have, like the base level of people who know about it and think it's cool and interesting. And then the higher you go, the more and more niche and specialized it gets and actually going and looking at scribbly German on old vellum manuscripts and things is probably about as niche as you can get inside of HEMA. And with that, it also has this kind of oddity where it's so amazingly internally motivating for me. Where I see someone, I go, Oh my god, they've got these 30 years of records of the court documents, and I know that his dad should be there, and I want to go see and I get so excited. But you would tell someone else that, and they'll go… Versus, here's a cool sword. And most people would look at that and be like, hell yeah, it kind of gets a much broader brush with that kind of motivation.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, swords are, I think, more generally shiny and attractive to most people than dusty old archives, very much. So yeah, in that pyramid, I would be probably one or two levels down from the top. I do the research because it's a necessary part of the job. It's not my favourite thing. My favourite thing is teaching the art sword in hand. And I do the research to be able to do that credibly. I don't do the sort of digging through archivey stuff. I don't do that for fun. And in fact, I much prefer it when somebody else does all of that, and then I can just go, ah, that research has been done. I can just refer to it. And that's splendid.

 

Liam Clark 

I came to the side of the interest fairly late in the game, in that I've been doing HEMA since 2016 so I just passed my nine year mark, and I started doing this hardcore research at the very end of 2023 ish.

 

Guy Windsor 

Wow. So that is pretty late.

 

Liam Clark 

After years and years and years kind of getting into it, and it was the kind of interest that surprised me, in terms of how much I enjoyed it, in that, when you start doing sword stuff, a lot of folks like me get the draw of it's the for the podcast listeners, air quotes, real sword fighting that kind of motivation, if it's not LARP, it's not kendo with Shinai and wooden swords, I get to use a real steel sword and fence like they did in the olden days, and do it like the books say. And that drive was a pretty big one for me. Kind of doing it as the historical people were actually fencing. And so once I got later on and started seeing that a lot of the archival references that are in the books, you could find yourself, I got pretty addicted. There was this kind of draw towards that, oh, look, there's the real person. They were standing in a room when something got written down with their name on it, that kind of made me go, oh, this is a slice of life or a moment in time that was a little bit more present and real time than a published book.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, I mean, I can imagine if we found a letter from Galeazzo de Mantua to the Duke of Milan, or something, in which he happens to describe a training session he did with Fiore, that I would burn down castles to find. Because that really hits my special niche interest. But like, if someone else finds it and they put it online that's actually good enough for me. Doesn't have to be me that finds it. I couldn't farm out the actual interpretation of the art itself, of the actual source Fior di Battaglia, for example, or Joachim Meyer’s, I can't pronounce the German name of, I wouldn't outsource that, but all of this stuff around who the person was, where they came from, what their family was like, you know, what their social background was, who they interacted with, all of that stuff, I'm quite I'm very glad that other people do it and summarize it for me. But there are, there are a few things where I would definitely go digging myself for but if I could figure out where to dig.

 

Liam Clark 

it's also a skill that you have to build in, just the same as if you start off doing fencing with the actual classes and hitting people with swords part. There's muscle memory and practice, and you get a sense of it. There's a bit of a naturalistic feel to it, like when you stop thinking about fencing and you're just kind of doing things. One of my old instructors, Jason Behrens, would always call it the lizard brain, if they're at the brainstem, that you start reacting and doing, and you give names to things. Afterwards, you start to do that a lot more, where you can just scan through a page, and your eye just flicks towards really important words or a name pops out. That kind of kind of guides you through, and you get faster and faster. And it's probably a piece like you're talking about, wanting other people to do it where I as someone who's really into it, never expect another person in HEMA to want to do what I do. There's a degree of do you want to look at a screen and hit the next button on your keyboard and stare at scribbles for probably 1000 of hours of doing research over the last few years. And the large answer is no, it's tiring, it's difficult, and you have to have a little bit of a draw to want to keep going and doing it. And luckily, I was able to find that hook.

 

Guy Windsor 

So how did you learn to read scribbly German?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, that's a good question. Partially, one of the things that first got me into doing this research stuff in the first place was in Forgeng's translation of Meyers 1568 treatise, The Art of Sword Combat. The back of it has an article by Olivier Dupuis, one of the great OG HEMA researchers, and wrote the initial biography of Meyer's life. That kind of did the big bulk of the Meyer research for almost over 20 years. It was just the thing. And right after that is a collection of all of the archival references in Strasbourg for where Meyer appears, and it's all translated. It has the name of the archival reference numbers and page numbers that you can find it at. And seeing that, I went like, ooh, can I find this myself? And actually see the original? And they're all digitized. There's a few hundreds of years of these Council records that are digitized. So I could just use the back of the book, and I went, oh, look, there's the one where he requests effects. There's his name. He was in the room. And I could kind of see the translation and hold it up against my screen and see the pattern of it. So luckily, with Dupuis’ work with the translation, I was able to kind of start with a baseline of, oh, here's a smattering of records that exist. Here's the scribbly stuff that goes with it. And that kind of acted as my baseline impetus to start doing the research, of seeing that these things were actually available. The barrier of entry is extremely small to find them, relatively speaking. It is now. And that was kind of probably the biggest thing that got me into learning the scribbly German, was having that pre-existing resource, which was really great.

 

Guy Windsor 

When I produce a translation, I am deeply aware that some people will take the manuscript in one hand and the translation in the other and go line by line through it, and basically use my translation to teach themselves the original Italian. And so when I'm producing it, I try to keep the line breaks to make that easy. It's super hard actually, because often the sentence should be structured in a way that puts this critical bit of the sentence, like a full line or two lines further down or further up the page, and to kind of keep that sort of end use in mind. I mean, a lot of people will just take the translation as gospel, which you shouldn't, but they do, and forget about the original altogether. But for that, that kind of core, little, maybe 2% of the readership, I know they're going to be doing that side by side thing. And so I try to organize it so that the translation works easily side by side. So you learned German that way. I assume you can actually read the German?

 

Liam Clark 

Partially. And as an aside, if anyone hears that kind of process and is interested, one of the best newer resources is Dr Garber's translation of Meyer's 1570 the kind of the quote, unquote, new Meyer book that came out at the start of last year, the blue book, the reference edition, is side by side, transcription, translation, so you can cross compare page by page.

 

Guy Windsor 

This is the one published by Michael Chidester?

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, and HEMA Bookshelf. If you feel a draw going, ooh, I can see what the actual word was. I would highly recommend you pick that up. It's a really great resource to literally just look back and forth and go, wait, what is the word that they used for thrust here, and you can find it and highlight it and draw all over it and build your own reference that way, to start to get familiar with the actual German terms more deeply. But I also utilize some AI tools in my research to help with transcription and things like that. It's a way just to take the scribbly German off the page and turn it into typed text.

 

Guy Windsor 

How good is that?

 

Liam Clark 

It is always wrong. And that's one of the first things that people say, like, oh, you use AI tools for research. I was like, no, no, I don't use them and then say, good, I’m done. They always do things wrong. But what's great about using these tools is you can take two pages of scribbly German and it spits them out into typed text form, and then you're doing revision, instead of doing from scratch, letter by letter, front to the end, you can look at it and every word that it gets right, you're saving yourself five seconds. And over the course of two pages, that saving you 10 minutes of work in the end.

 

Guy Windsor 

And it's interesting because it is much, much easier to correct a draft than it is to create a draft. Get the AI to create the draft. My problem with it is that my handwriting is abominable. And whenever, whenever any computery thing of any kind has tried to read my handwriting. Yes, your handwriting could be confused for mine. Yeah. So my handwriting, generally speaking, like if, when I sign a book for somebody, I always put little notes in. And I don't think I've ever had a reader who could actually read my handwriting straight away. Yeah, they always say, what does that say, Guy? And yeah, so no computer thing has had the slightest hope of reading mine. But, official records, tend to be written in a consistent hand, relatively speaking.

 

Liam Clark 

Consistent per scribe, because the scribe changes over the years, and so the tools have gotten better, and they've gotten more training on them. So over the last few years of using it, they've gotten actually better and better at getting the transcriptions more correct over time, showing less revision.

 

Guy Windsor 

So what AI tool are you using for transcription?

 

Liam Clark 

I use Transkribus with a K. I actually wrote an article on my Substack about how I use AI tools to aid in completing transcriptions and translations with kind of the whole process in it. And I like to summarize it as it helps me do, like bulk note processing and rough draft review and creation. It's a way to take content and way more quickly, kind of crank out a whole bunch of draft transcriptions that I can find interesting things in, or kind of triage what I want to work on first for the big time, I'm doing it fully from scratch work, rather than kind of going through a note, and I figure out, oh, wait, this is about them borrowing a cow for two weeks. It's just a page long, because somebody said, nah, there's an argument, and I don't really care. It helps me kind of go, okay, I'll do that one later, and I'm going to go to the more interesting one, where there's a fight in a Guild Hall or something. So it's something where, when you use tools as an aid, and especially if you're new at doing this, it can help out a ton. Because I started off, I knew how to say a few things in German, like how to order food or say hello, but I couldn't read German, especially not 16th century scribbly German. So having a transcription tool and then some. BYU puts out a lot of old language, written, spelling and guide resources. Brigham Young University, because if a lot of the parish records and things are also through Family Search, because the Mormons.

 

Guy Windsor 

They really care about genealogy, so they have all sorts of historical research tools to help you figure out genealogy.

 

Liam Clark 

There's a ton of resources there. So I combined using transcription tools that kind of cranked me out things so I could recognize letters and words using these kind of what does a P look like from a bunch of different handwriting examples to kind of get used to it now. And now a few years on, I don't have to use AI tools to do transcription. I can do it all from scratch, from front to bottom, and be pretty good at it. I work with my research partner, Miriam, who's a trained historian, who actually did work in this sort of script for their undergrads. They did this for their education. So I make drafts and go check this for me, please. And she's able to check it for me.

 

Guy Windsor 

I was wondering, because when you said and yeah, they're pretty accurate, I was wondering, how do you know they're pretty accurate? And now you've explained it.

 

Liam Clark 

I work with Miriam. She's amazing. She's a history buff and has a degree in history and worked on 16th century manuscripts and things for her education. So for me, it's a really insane resource where I'll find something interesting that names like Gottfried of Ottingen, one of the nobles that someone taught in Strasbourg, and five minutes later, she'll come back with cool, here's where they lived, here's some resources about them. And just know so much about the era that I learned new things constantly through working with her. And because of her tutelage over the years, I could now transcribe from scratch. I can't translate German, still. I can read bits, and I can tell when they're saying this is allowed or not allowed in small sentences, but I can't translate. It's a big jump, and you can transcribe, if anyone wants to practice and do learning, transcription is really fun and challenging, and it's way easier to do than once you get to the translation part, but it's a fun little game to play if you want to work on some notes and see if you can solve a little puzzle.

 

Guy Windsor 

And speaking of like, AI tools like the transcript for this and every other podcast episode is first run through an AI engine, which makes an amusing hash of it. But then my assistant, who produces the actual transcription, she sort of goes through the whole thing and just corrects it. And that takes much, much, much less time than just transcribing it, you know, typing along as somebody's talking.

 

Liam Clark 

That's exactly the same process. It's, yeah, it's really useful. And as you start to learn more and see things relating, it speeds you up, and you'll start to recognize patterns in it and the way that they write had structure, because these are, most of the time they're legal records, or council records, even letters from one to another had structure at the time with, especially between nobles, they had these big old titles at the top where you'll see like, oh, my dearest highborn, well-esteemed, with title, title, title. And there's a certain line where your eyes just go boom and skip all of that, and then you get to the meat of the note. Luckily, one of Meyer’s students and my one of my biggest research subjects, Wygand Brack, has a very unique name with a big W at the start. Big W's in German are quite large and crazy. So I can look at an entire scribbly page and my eyes just go bang, and can find his name right in the middle of it, because it's so drastic. Versus Hans, there's Hanses everywhere and everything else. So there's a little bit of serendipity there too, where luckily one of the subjects of my research had a very unique name, so that could kind of jump out and kind of help me train along the way.

 

Guy Windsor 

That is very helpful. Okay, we've sort of skipped over my second and third questions, which was, how did you get into historical martial arts? You kind of covered that, and what got you started in historical research side of things. We've sort of covered that too. So it does occur to me that there will be some listeners who aren't quite sure who Joachim Meyer is. So could you just give us the overview of who he was and why he matters as a historical fencing resource?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, Joachim Meyer was a 16th century fencing master and Cutler by trader, Messerschmitt, not the airplane for the other newer history buffs.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. Messerschmitt means knife smith,

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. And he was one of the kind of very end of the German tradition of fencing, going back to, like the fellowship of Liechtenauer, or that, what they call the KDF, or the Kunst des Fechtens kind of line of historical fencers of that era, starting from the early 1400s up until the early 1600s. He was the last major figure who was doing big work in it. And one of the reasons why he's kind of most significant for people who are out there, even if they study the early stuff, is that he was kind of in that new renaissance era, a new renaissance mindset using the old fencing systems. In that he was in an era where the idea of systematizing things, writing stuff down, creating categories for things. People were naming things and counting stuff, because you do this now it's the Renaissance. You make things logical and good, and people started having addresses for their houses rather than, oh, it's two houses down from Billy's and across from the fountain. They started to put numbers on stuff more and more. So he was at an era where he said, in his intro, all the other arts have art books, and they've started systematizing what they do. Why not us too? So he was honestly one of the first of the modern era of HEMAists, where he interprets Liechtenauer Zettel, this old poem of how to fence with a sword, and is doing what we do in terms of interpretation, but also writing an instructional manual. His 1570 treatise is one of the only ones that starts off with, here's a sword. Here's the parts of it. This is the handle, the pommel, the quillan. He does that sort of thing that if you go to a 101 class down the street nowadays, they say, all right, everybody, here's a sword. That's surprisingly rare in sword fighting treatises where they assume you have a certain level of baseline knowledge. The 1570 is an instructional treatise, and it's printed and published. It was mass produced, relatively speaking, compared to all these manuscripts, and that is something that's decidedly modern, even though we read it nowadays, and it sounds pretty gnarly. It's pretty new.

 

Guy Windsor 

But I got to say that Fiore, writing 170 years earlier, organizes things according to numbers. Like nine masters of the dagger. And I mean, if you look at how Fiore presents his stuff. He's basically two centuries ahead of his time. And if you look at kind of European culture, generally, some people are going to scream me when I say this, but it has to be said that in 1400 Italy was about two centuries ahead of everywhere else. I mean, if you look at the cathedrals they were building in the 11th and 12th centuries, which are still standing today. You get a sense of the sophistication of that culture for already 1000 years ago, compared to what they were building in England at the same time. There's no comparison. And if you look at the way a 15th century German swordsmanship treatise is organised, you have, here's a bunch of this person's sword stuff, and here's a bunch of this person's dagger stuff, and none of it is really organised and structured as a coherent and consistent work of art, where one section leads to the next section and they inform each other in a really deliberate way, which is exactly what Fiore has. And then 70 years later, you have Vadi, who introduces us to the whole idea of putting a great, long explanatory like theory section at the beginning of the book. Now, he's addressing the Duke of Urbino. So he is addressing an informed person. So he doesn't explain what a sword is, but he does say how long it should be. He describes the proportions of the sword and the various parts of the sword, not in the same way that Meyer does, but he actually does say, and the cross guard should be like this, and the pommel should be round to fit your hand and that kind of stuff. So, I think, yes, in terms of like in German, you're right, but I think in terms of historical fencing literature in general, Meyer represents the Germans catching up to the Italians, who've been doing it like that for over a century by this point.

 

Liam Clark 

I think a couple of my favourite parts in that kind of realm of what are the ways in which you can see those kind of more modern interesting like pedagogical inclusions for things being an instructional manual within Meyer, there's a couple of them. One of them is, he uses an analogy that kind of explains how plays work. It's one of those old HEMA things that everybody does where it's like, all right, let's all stand in a line. The play says, cut from your right, then thrust to the face, then cut from below this way, then parry here. And now we all do it. And now, you know the play, and there's kind of this disconnect from how it's supposed to work. And he provides this analogy during part of his longsword section where he says, these plays aren't meant to be something you do from top to bottom. He uses an analogy thing where to spell a word you need to know all the different letters, and not every letter goes with every single word. And you rearrange things based on how you're talking. And so all of these plays are just to teach you your letters, and you're going to rearrange these however you want in the end. And that kind of an explanation is really cool, and it's kind of thing that's so missing in older German stuff, where people go, well, how do you do the Zorn Ort? Here's the Zorn Ort. You cut here, you thrust. That's it done. And there's a degree of more you do that and why are you doing it? You're learning it to learn these things you can rearrange in other ways. And that side of Meyer, if you take that through and look at all the plays, not as prescription, but as a way to kind of build understanding for tactics and mechanics, and then say, ooh, but what if you did it this way, saying, but what if, in the middle of one of his big old paragraphs that everyone says is complicated and completely changing it would be 100% what he would encourage you to do way back in 1565.

 

Guy Windsor 

That is extremely cool. And, yeah, you don't get that sort of explanation or, I mean, I've not come across it in any of the earlier Italian stuff. It does seem a little bit, I think it may be assumed, because again, what's pretty unusual about Meyer, as you said, is that he's explaining stuff that shouldn't, that wouldn't need explaining to someone who already has a background in swords. So, I guess there are all sorts of social changes that make it so that people who don't come from a family that's been doing swords for centuries are suddenly doing swords. So like the sword is no longer the exclusive preserve of the nobility. It's becoming more generally available to a rising middle class. Would you say that's true?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, one of the parts about when everybody looks one of the big kind of complaints about Meyer, one of the things that you'll often hear is you've probably heard the idea of Meyer sport fencing. Meyer is not real swords. It's sport back then, they weren't using swords. But he was in an era where the distinction between your kind of civic life and your military or, I hate to use the word martial, but like, the way your martial duty interacted with your civic life was actually pretty complex, like you're saying, there's that rising middle class, This kind of burgeoning, we can call it an equivalent of a middle class, of people who are living in the Holy Roman Empire in these small city states like Strasbourg and et cetera, where you would have citizenship. And part of citizenship of a city was that you have privileges in the city where things were benefited of you, you had certain legal rights and things within this state, and you had responsibilities. You were, as a citizen, required to own arms and armour, all of them. If you were a male citizen of able body, you were required to have swords and armour because you had to run City Watch. You had to be available for musters, for military conflicts that would come to the walls and defend the city. You had to be available to do night's watch duty or for fire calls if things burnt down. And so just like nowadays, if you are required to have swords and know how to use them, you're probably also going to have a recreational side of doing it as well. Especially in the US if you're every day carrying, a lot of people who carry guns also go target shooting, and there's a way that you involve recreating with the other.

 

Guy Windsor 

I wish more people who carry guns in the US actually trained with them properly.

 

Liam Clark 

I agree. But that's I could go on that front, but that's the kind of thing that kind of drove me and made me quite interested in doing a lot of my research in the first place, is that there's this sometimes fetishisation of old fencing masters, where you'll hear people, especially in the US, they switch to like a pseudo German action accent and say my like Meister Meyer or Maestro Fiore, and they'll do a little tapped R, Maestro Fiore, in the middle of the class, and there's this sort of, ah, they're better than us. They're on a pedestal. They're these mystical old swordsmen. And part of my research, and Maché Talaga called it microbiographical research is, I love the idea of, well, who was he really? Meyer, getting called up to do watch duty and complaining about it, or his pal down the street opening a shop. Or the ways in which that their lives were more practical and real to kind of take them out of this master status, versus being like, nah, they had to get called on fire watch, and so they owned armour, and that was normal. Everybody had swords, tons of people fenced, it was no longer a niche thing. It was a past time and a way to teach bravery, just like you do sports nowadays to learn teamwork and gumption and character. It was more complex than I want to learn how to do unarmoured longsword duels in the streets. It had this big social and cultural impact of how they interacted with swords in their daily lives as well.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, yes, absolutely. But why do you think Meyer felt it necessary to explain everything in such detail if everyone is already fencing?

 

Liam Clark 

I think it's because the books that he was writing, especially the later ones, he was trying to conform with a lot of the Renaissance social ideas of the categorisation of stuff that you do. When there were books being published for the first time about like the Arts and the Sciences and how these things work from the most basic level. It was the era of Luther and writing the Bible in German and the Reformation where look now the Bible is accessible to everyone. Now the arts and the sciences are as well. So there is this kind of push and Reformation ideology built into how he was writing, of making it available from the basest level that everyone else would as well. And he was only like one degree removed from Martin Luther and John Calvin himself, in terms of the people he interacted with. Meyer was active in Strasbourg in the 1560s as far as we know, the earliest record is his marriage record in Strasbourg, in that city in 1560 where he married Apollonia Ruleman, and as he was there, he interacted with and published fencing treatises for various nobles. And those nobles corresponded with Martin Luther and John Calvin and things. Calvin preached at the St Thomas parish in the south end of downtown, back then, downtown Strasbourg, before Meyer arrived, but he had met John Sturm, Johannes Sturm, the head of the university inside of Strasbourg who Meyer most likely met. His student, Wygand Brack taught students of Johannes Sturm who were at the university. So there's all these connections where a lot of the big names in the Reformation interacted with the councilmen and the educational classes inside of Strasbourg at the time. And then those people then interacted with folks like Meyer, because they were kind of on that up and up burgeoning middle class.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, so my primary interest, and I think this is true for quite a lot of listeners too, is in figuring out how the sword fighting works. So all the stuff around that, like their family background. I mean, it's fascinating to me that Meyer got married in 1560 it was like, it's so cool that we know that. But that to me, falls in the that’s really cool kind of bucket, as opposed to the we need to know this to hit each other with swords properly bucket. So to what degree do you think it's more than just interesting for historical martial artists to be aware of the family background and the milieu from which he's coming?

 

Liam Clark 

Oh, it's not.

 

Guy Windsor 

Oh, okay, that's my I was not expecting you to say that.

 

Liam Clark 

My unbiased answer is that it's not. But I found a record of like George Frieder, who's one of the fencing masters, and he gets a job working at the Armoury in Strasbourg, and that's one of the records that I found. That's not going to change the way that you throw a cut or parry. I made a video on my YouTube channel a couple of years ago, after I'd done my first year of research, and I was like, after a year of digging through the texts, what has it taught me about fencing itself? And then, like, hard cut to the Monty Python Llama song, and just “absolutely nothing”. There's nothing that I've done or that I found that would change the way that you fence. But what it does do, if you're interested in the historical side, it changes your view of the people who were doing it back then. So you can more better relate with them as you're doing the practice. Because if you see them as these mystical sword fighter folks, you kind of build a fantasy of what they were doing, versus if you learn about their lives and see how they were living, you could be like, Yeah, look, there's George Frieder, the guy who I just mentioned. He was a part of the Marx Brüder guild. He had the title of certified master of the longsword. He looked like an official dude. Then he had his first kid, and then stopped. And how many people do you know in HEMA who you've met, you've played with them, they start a family, they have a kid, and they just stop showing up to classes.

 

Guy Windsor 

How many students have I lost to children? Yeah. And how many I get this? And normally, or quite often, 1015, or 20 years later, they come back.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. And that's the sort of thing where, when you think of people like, like Meyer or his pals, it's the exact same. The things that we're doing nowadays are not that different from how they were doing it in 1560. People who had day jobs. They were trying to make rent. They couldn't afford things like, there's a guy who pawned his practice swords and then heard that a fencing master got thrown in jail. He was like, hey, can I have this job doing this actually? Like, this is something that is not so separate. And for my more biased answer, that's the part that I find to be most motivating and interesting about people who are doing HEMA. Why they should care is that can drive some motivation when you put your gear on, you're like, yeah, this is I'm not fulfilling some sort of high fantasy of what sword fighting was. I'm literally doing what they were doing when you show up and you're going, man, work was hard, and I got to skip the next two weeks because of this sort of thing happening, and I feel so overwhelmed and busy, or I just got a new job, all of that's the exact same as what was happening back then, and they were bringing those same feelings and life things into how they were practicing swords just the same as we are nowadays.

 

Guy Windsor 

That is a really good answer. That is a really good answer, yeah, what it sort of puts me in mind of is understanding that helps you get into the headspace they were likely to have been in when they're showing up to the school, when they're actually fencing. And I mean, any particular art will work in a particular context. So, maybe an Olympic level modern sport fence that is absolutely brilliant at playing the game of foil may not be particularly good with the longsword, although there's all sorts of attributes that will cross over. But longsword fencing, should we say 15th century longsword fencing is fundamentally different to foil fencing in all sorts of ways, because the context has changed completely. So I, I feel it sort of gives us a window onto the context in which they're going to be fencing. There's a significant chance that they're going to end up actually on the walls of Strasbourg, or somewhere like that, actually pulling out a sword and using it in earnest. So they absolutely care about the real thing. But at the same time, they have their Fecht schools where they are fencing each other and splitting each other's heads open with kind of blunt feders. And that is not the same thing they're going to be doing when they're actually doing it in earnest. And for some reason, that makes perfect sense to me, but I'm interested to hear you just chat about it. That is, it made sense to them to do both.

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, one of the first things that my, one of my big subjects that I investigate, is Wygand Brack, if you want to do the actual German with it, but I'm an American, which means that I pronounce anything however I want it, and that makes it correct. He was a fencing master that was Joachim Meyer's kind of chief student. And he got trained up by Meyer in 1563, and Meyer made him a fencing master that year and in that same year, and this is an article that's upcoming. So sneak peeks, he went off and fought in the French wars of religion with the Huguenots, and went off to go to battle and broke a regulation in Strasbourg to go off and fight in a foreign war, which they had regulations against because they didn't want princes and people coming in and recruiting people off the streets. So he broke that and went off and fought in a war two months after Meyer made him a fencing master. So the things where people say, oh Meyer is just sport fencing, not used in real war. His top student went off and fought in a war immediately after Meyer made him a fencing master, and he got in big trouble for it. But that sort of idea of why these people had those dualities of kind of both the recreational, kind of aspirational, cultural side of fencing with swords, and also there was the practical you might need to use this side of things as well. It's not the whole fantastical, longsword duels in the streets sort of thing that you hear people fantasize about, but they were on guard duty. Brack became a captain of the Night's Watch, and would walk around with arms and armour at night and have to keep the streets safe. And Meyer's dad did City Watch and got thrown in jail because he missed one of his watch shifts. And it was serious stuff, even for the kind of go up and sit in a tower for the night like they took it seriously enough to you get thrown in jail if you're not there. Or Meyer's brother showed up to a fire call without his arms and armour, and it turned out he'd like gotten rid of it and sold it, and he got in trouble for that, like it was a big deal to have these sorts of arms and armour. And again, the ‘M’ word ‘martial’, martial duty in your day to day lives was something that was very ingrained. It wasn't separate from folks during this time.

 

Guy Windsor 

So just for the lay listener, what is a fire call?

 

Liam Clark 

Fire call back then was like, if there's a fire in a warehouse, for example, in the 1560s where Meyer’s brother gets called in, they would have a muster, or certain bells would be rung to mean ‘fire’. People would come down to do the fire brigade and try to put it out. But also they would have guards come in and block off the area with arms and armour.

 

Guy Windsor 

I was thinking to myself, hang on a fire call is when something's on fire and you go and put it out. So why the hell do you take armour to that? You're going to cook.

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, keep people away, and also to stop from looting afterwards. There's regulations that say we have to be there with arms and armours to keep them away, to make sure there's no looting or rabble rousing or chaos that starts. So people come in to put it out, and guards are present to kind of keep people away, because it was a time of kind of chaos.

 

Guy Windsor 

Actually, the police will often do that at a fire scene today.

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, exactly, exact same stuff. That's actually another upcoming article is about the we found the muster ordinance for Basel in Meyers hometown, including who were the captains assigned to his old neighbourhood where he grew up, and what towers were assigned for what folks during a fire call, and what flags they should meet at, for what bells. And so it's quite complex, so that's coming out soon as well.

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, at some point you have to put this into a book.

 

Liam Clark 

Possibly. I've been asked that a few times. My biggest thing is, is I don't have enough stuff for a single book on a single subject. It's a whole bunch of little, teeny, tiny things. My dream, this is jumping way ahead into the our question list. But one of my dream discoveries would be to find a Wygand Brack fencing treatise, even something small, and then I could write an intro like, I've got enough stuff to write a pretty meaty intro for one of these, stuff about these certain characters, but not enough for like, an extensive full on.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, no. Because the book in my head, so this is a massive sort of sidetrack, but the book in my head that you should write is a series of vignettes. Basically a picture of what life was like for Meyer and people like him, and the various people around him that you know, with the information that you know, and the little kind of cool stories about, well, Wygand went off to war and he got into lots of trouble for it. Exactly what kind of trouble, did he go to jail? Was he fined? What actually happened? Do we know anything about what he actually did when he was on campaign? That sort of stuff. And it doesn't have to be this overarching, like academic tome, which is the definitive volume on the life of a burgher in 1570 Strasbourg, right? It can be like a whole series of little bits. So you get lots of little pictures of what was going on. Because, honestly, for me a question of format, because I would buy the book, and I would read the book, and I would find the book fascinating. I have my own newsletter, and, you know, people read it sometimes, and sometimes they even reply to some of my emails, and that's lovely, but I don't really read other people's newsletters, because the email format is for me is, get this out of my inbox as quickly as possible. That's the mindset I go into it. And so, bang, bang, bang. So, yeah. Reply, delete. Reply, delete, delete, delete. Reply, delete, that's it. But a book I can sit down with or lie down in bed with before I go to sleep, and I can go, oh, this is marvellous. And just bore the crap out of my wife explaining how somebody you know showed up without their armour to a fire watch in 1572 and got into trouble for it. It doesn't have to be a great big academic tome with one total thing. It can just be a series of vignettes and that would be awesome.

 

Liam Clark 

That's an interesting idea. Speaking of books and as a segue, one of the things that I also found interesting in my research was Meyer’s connections to books overall, in doing all this. In that one of my biggest kind of aha moments in doing historical research was actually finding all of Meyer’s family in Basel. So for a long time, there was a lot of hypotheticals around who Meyer’s dad was. There's a few baptismal records in the early 16th century that had some dad with a Joachim Meyer being baptized, but none of them was definitive, and I was able to find a note that connected son and mom, his mom, Anna Freund, and then a record that connected Anna Freund to his dad, Jacob Meyer, which then definitively said who was his father, and his profession was papermaker.

 

Guy Windsor 

That is way cool. And that is way early.

 

Liam Clark 

Yes. He was a paper maker. The first record I have of him is 1532, and he’s down as a paper maker. And this was the era where the paper making industry in Basel started popping off. There were mills popping up. The printing press was starting and going in the St Alban neighbourhood, where you can go back to now, on the east side of the city, on the south side of the Rhine, there's the Basel Paper Mill Museum you can go to. They're the original paper mill buildings. Thanks Swiss neutrality for not having your old buildings get blown up. So you can actually go there and walk the same halls that Meyer and his dad likely went and worked in. And Meyer was a part of this neighbourhood and industry where paper making was a big deal. He was one of 13 kids, so a pretty big family. And looking through the godparents of all of them, one of the kind of the layovers of the Reformation is that a lot of the old Catholic things of having godparents still stuck around. So even though they are Protestant, they had godparents listed on all their baptismal records. And if you look through the list, it's mill owner, mill owner, printer and publisher, paper workman, miller. It's all these people who worked in the paper industry. He was neighbours three doors down to Hieronymus Curio, who was a big Reformation printer. His dad printed things for Calvin and Luther and Busor and these different big names in the Reformation era. One of the big questions is, well, how would Meyer have written these books when his first treatise he put out when he was 24 and it's like, well, it wasn't foreign to him. He grew up around paper making. He grew up around printers and book binders and publishers. He knew these people. One of the fencing masters who was active in Basel from the 1530s to 40s was Hans Rohrer, who was a printer and a fencing master and a Marx Bruder at the same time. So these things weren't foreign to Meyer. So it's like, nowadays, if somebody puts out a really banging YouTube instructional video and like, wow, this is so good. How'd you make such a good YouTube videos? Like, well, I do video production at home. And, you know, I do it for a hobby. It's like, yeah, you take the things you know, and you apply it to your hobbies and things. So the idea of publishing a book wouldn't be a completely foreign thing to him. He grew up around it, and was a part of things. His eventual publisher, who published the 1570, Theobald Berger, worked in Basel when he was a kid, and they overlapped his childhood and his eventual publisher overlapped in the city, along with all these fencing masters who were also active there. So it wasn't such a weird thing to be like, am I going to print or write a fencing book? It's like, yeah, dude, if you have a hobby and you're good at it, you might write something about it, because you've been around people writing books your entire childhood.

 

Guy Windsor 

And he had access to the means of production.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, he knew the people. He had connections. For all we know, he probably had scribes write stuff for him. But if he wrote his first manuscript, this first manuscript by himself, which we're not really sure of who wrote it exactly. It has a signature in it, but he could have just gotten, like, a bound book or something, hypothetically, and written it himself that way. The paintings were definitely not him. But there's a degree in which the mystery of, wow, how could he have done this when he was so young? It's like, yeah, dude, he was around paper makers and printers. He changed professions, professionally into being a knife maker. He didn't follow his dad's footsteps into paper making, but it wasn't some weird, gigantic Quantum Leap of some of that era to go like, how am I going to write a book? It's like, yeah, literally, go three doors down and ask Hieronymus about it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Have you read Roland Allen's book, The Notebook, a history of thinking on paper? No, okay, this episode is coming out probably in November. Roland's episode on this podcast is coming out in September, so listeners will already have probably heard this, and you might have already heard it by the time this comes out, but he wrote this fantastic book, which is all about, basically the history of notebooks and how they came to be. And like how he describes people in Europe in the early 1500s using notebooks, right? Because of suddenly, paper is cheap and available. And there's all sorts of technological and cultural reasons why suddenly people started writing notebooks. And so Meyer is at just that right time to, you know, it's not weird for someone to write an extensive notebook, if you like, on a particular subject. And then if it turns out to be actually quite good, and maybe one of the printer friends saw something he was just writing for himself to kind of keep his notes in order, and said that could be turned into a book. You know, we might make some money, let's tidy it up a bit and get it out there. You can totally see how that would happen.

 

Liam Clark 

Like Martin Fabian put out Fechtbuch Fabian a Fecht Book with his name on it that has his own original fencing treatise, theories in it, and some translations and things of other works that's the same as what Meyer did. There's nothing revolutionary or crazy about Meyer doing it, yeah, in the fact that they were largely literate. His student, Wygand Brack, when he applies for a job as a council messenger, and he says he was trained in the language of the laity as a child, like they went to school as kids and learned to read and write. They weren't illiterate serfs looking back in the day, wearing shifts and things. They knew their stuff.

 

Guy Windsor 

And they knew how to wash their faces too.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, they were clean. They knew their stuff. They there was status involved. And so there's a degree of like, if you're a hyper nerd about sword stuff and you're really good at it, you might spend 2000 hours doing historical research like me and putting things out. Or you might write a fencing book in 1561, and go and get excited and do it. It's not so crazy to think about. The part that's the most frustrating for me is that that builds bias in my head of going, oh, if you're really into fencing, you write stuff about it, because we have such an easy barrier nowadays of going, I'm going to write something on Discord or my Facebook.

 

Guy Windsor 

But that's like the equivalent of writing a note in a notebook. How many people in historical martial arts have actually published books, even though now it's easier than it's ever been in the history of the world, of the 10s of 1000s of people doing historical martial arts have 100 published a book?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, it's still niche. And that's the thing about with Meyer, is, as much as I say, it's unmiraculous, it makes sense why he would do it and do this large scale publishing at such a young age. He died when he was 33 and when he put out his last treatise that year before. It's still a niche thing to do, and one of my biggest frustrations is that Meyer fenced relatively few times in the historical record compared to some of his contemporaries like he had, I'm going to get the number wrong, like seven or eight Fecht school requests at the time, if you wanted to hold a fencing event in Strasbourg called a Fecht school, you had to go and ask the council to for permission, because it was held on public grounds and things and involved hitting people with swords. They kind of wanted to know. His student, Wygand Brack, did 30 some. Way more than Meyer did and George Kellerly, who practiced for like, 40 years in the city, requested 80 something, like dozens of these things, and neither of them wrote a word about fencing, as far as we know. And that's the thing that irks me, is I'm like, well, of course, if you fence for 40 years, you had to write something down. Where is it? I'm going to find the book.

 

Guy Windsor 

Can you just describe again, for not everyone's a Meyerist. What is a Fecht school exactly?

 

Liam Clark 

Great question. So a Fecht school, the literal translation, is fencing school. Fecht school, but it's not like a fencing school, like you would think of it today. It's more of a fencing event, something that would be held across multiple days. It would consist of parades and bouting for money, but also for a wreath and prize. It'd be a place for testing so fencers could get elevated in status, up to be made a Freifecht or a Fechtmeister, something that gave them a little bit more clout and the ability to teach folks. There's a lack of data on what privileges those things actually gave. It was also a party, and people would just be drinking. It was a spectacle and entertainment. It was a little bit more like a fencing tournament nowadays, like one of the big ones, like SoCal or fight camp, where you have lectures and competition. It's multifaceted in that way. And so people would pay, it would be paid admission. So the fencing Master would make a cut off of the money from people entering it. Wygand Brack actually requested to Fecht school a couple times because he's like, I need to make rent. Please, can you let me do one? Because they were also scraping by.

 

Guy Windsor 

So hang on. So that means that Wygand Brack organized a bunch of these Fecht schools. Does it actually mean that he fenced in them?

 

Liam Clark 

That's a good question. We have no actual data of Meyer or any of these dudes actually fencing. They held Fecht schools, which you can assume there are accounts of other Fecht schools where the fencing master, who helped them, does fence during them. So they most likely fenced during them.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ask any organiser of a modern historical martial arts event, how much time they get to fence?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, there are accounts where it says, and then the fencing master entered the ring and did a thing. So it's likely that there's a bit of a degree of watch me. I'm as the big guy and kind of show off and do some fencing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Maybe it's a demonstration bout.

 

Liam Clark 

Exactly, yeah. We also know that they taught students. There's a couple of Wygand Brack’s students who do a petition for him to help to push some fencing regulations in the city that he proposed. And they say, oh, he educates young men daily in this art. So he was working daily and doing fencing lessons and stuff like that. So they were definitely doing fencing. But there's actually no data that says, like, all right, cool, here's how many bouts that Meyer won, or that Brack won, or how much fencing did Meyer do versus requesting Fecht school. Did they do a lot of them because they had to make money, and Meyer didn't, and that's why he did fewer. There's a lot of kind of empty bits. But my brain sees quantity of Fecht school versus quantity of writing works. And I'm like, why isn't there a book?

 

Guy Windsor 

But then I know many people who have organized many events and not written a book, yes, and I've written many books, and I've never organised an event. It's a question of personality. I am not mentally built for the organising of events. Happy to go to them, happy to do stuff at them, but organising in an event it's not something I have a natural aptitude for,

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, or doing historical research. As that pyramid gets higher up and you get niche. It's not a straight pyramid with a single top. It kind of splits off into little branches at the top and gets a little bit weird. So everybody has their own little niche piece. And publishing seems to still be a very, very narrow niche of that, even in the 16th century, even with all the caveats of it, of why it was natural for Meyer to do it was still rare.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, okay, I do have a question. You mentioned that Wygand Brack was qualified as a fencing master by Meyer. Do you know how long it took him to train to that level?

 

Liam Clark 

No, there's some data and stories about when people started fencing and going along the way, we'll see people who are marked as fencing masters, or certified masters of the sword in their early 20s or late teens, where they're in their kind of journeyman phase of doing their professions. Because during the era you'd be an apprentice at a trade, go on your waltz and be a journeyman. You'd wander around to different cities to get trained up and then settle somewhere, get citizenship, get married. And usually that period of time where you're getting married and kind of settling down is in your early 20s, 22 to 25ish. And we found a lot of fencing masters of that era, kind of fencing right before they start that I'm getting married and doing stuff era. So people were becoming Fechtmeisters from about 19 to 24 some were older, Meyer taught until he was in his 30s, and he became that sort of thing.

 

Guy Windsor 

In the 15th century, it was common for, you know a knight, you know a soldier from a noble family would be trained and then knighted at the age of about 18, 19, 20 something like that, which is basically like getting a commission in the army. So they're getting their fencing master thing. It's sort of like a coaching license. So yeah, if you're an apprentice from seven to 14 or so, journeyman from like 14, 15, to like 21, 22 it makes sense that you would get your fencing coaching license, even if it's a side gig. You’d get it around that age, because once you get married and settle down and have kids, as you said, there's a good chance that you won't have time to fence. But if you're a qualified fencing master, at that point, you can justify going off fencing every evening to your wife by saying yes, but it makes money. And ask me how I know that.

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, exactly. And there's also a degree of, we have some records of people starting fencing when they're very, very young. I can't remember the name, but there's a journal that someone wrote about the upbringing of their kid, and there's a note about them starting with the fencing master when they're eight years old. And fencing and that kind of martial stuff wasn't something that you do like nowadays, it's college age. People get in the early 20s. People were starting when they were kids.

 

Guy Windsor 

As sport fencers do today.

 

Liam Clark 

So people are like, well, how did Meyer write a treatise with all this intricacy and detail when he was 24? Meyer might have started when he was nine. How many pro footballers, to use the non-soccer term, are like, in the Premier League when they're 17, 18, years old. How old was Ronaldo when he started playing at the highest level of the game?

 

Guy Windsor 

I mean most top level football players, are basically like 18 maybe and like 24, 25.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, it's not unheard of that someone who's really good at something could be at that aspirational level at that era. So you had a lot of people who were becoming fencing masters in their early 20s. It was rare to see someone who was like, in their 30s or 40s getting it. I only have one example of that that I have, like, a good solid approximate age around his dad's age, who Meyer taught to be a fencing master. His name was Thomas Spengler. Thomas Spengler, the reason why I know how old he was, Spendler, Spangler is I found a marriage record for Thomas Spendler's daughter, like a year later. So if his daughter got married that year, minus 22 to 24 years from that date to get how old he would have been when he had her then, minus age there. So he would have been in his 40s ish when Meyer made him a fencing master, which is pretty rare in terms of we have good dates and ages for some of his students, but not all.

 

Guy Windsor 

But this, this makes me think of, you know, if you go to university and get a master's degree, well, I got mine when I was 22

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, right. I was 28.

 

Guy Windsor 

But again, in the British system, I left school at 18, went to university, did a four year degree, which sort of included an undergraduate degree, and then was a master's degree at the end of it. That's how they do it in Scotland. So after four years, I had an MA, and that was that. And so at 22 I am a Master of Arts, air quotes all over the place, and it doesn't mean what we think of as you're a master of martial arts, it's not like you're some sort of 60 year old wizard. The way I think of it is it means that you can solve whatever problem comes up using the tools of that trade.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. The equivalent that I like to give nowadays is, during one of my lectures, I had people interact with one of the slides, and it was one says, draw a fencing master. When you hear the word Fechtmeister, what do you picture? Draw them. And so many times it's the picture everyone’s seen of the wood block of who might be Liechtenauer. He's sitting on the chair with his staff, and they picture the long, bushy beard. Then that sort of thing is really pervasive. And then partially, it's like, cool. How many of you have been doing fencing for greater than six years, and how many of you have taught classes, ran things, helped with events, and then hands go up. All of you would be Fechtmeisters. 1562, you'd be sitting next to Meyer doing the exact same thing as him. There are so many people nowadays when people say, oh, what's the equivalent? Master Meyer, he was so unique. Like, not really, there are people nowadays who would be equivalent to what he was doing back then. And it's kind of a fun thing to think about, of being like, yeah, we are doing HEMA in a way. And the idea of being passionate about something and getting involved in it to that extra degree. That's all that it really was. It was just that going up that pyramid of nicheness back then, just as it is today. So, yeah, there's a degree where, like, if you went back and hung out with him, he'd be like, oh yeah, hi, Fechtmeister Guy. How's it going? And it would be just about the same thing,

 

Guy Windsor 

You know, one of the most profound compliments I have ever received in my whole life is I bumped into a chap who I know through martial arts circles in Finland, who's a kind of senior like he does like traditional Japanese stuff, right? We were just chatting, and he says something along the lines of, yeah, he'd been talking to some of his friends in the in his martial arts club, yeah, we should get Sensei Windsor over for a seminar. And outside, of course, that's super cool, but internally, I did this huge kind of squee thing, right? Oh, my God, this books just called me a Sensei, but actually, when you look at what the word actually means, it's like, yeah, it's like, it's just basically, the day I taught my first class and started doing this for a living in Japan, that was what they would call you.

 

Liam Clark 

There's a lot more people today who would hit that level than they think they do. And one of the hardest parts for me in doing research is historical research is a really small, niche crew. It's not a large group that does it. And I've always for the long it's been really hard for me to get past imposter syndrome of being like, I'm not actually all that good. These are the real researchers. They're the ones who've been doing this for years. They know their stuff. I'm a new guy on the block. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not that cool. And at SoCal sword fight, I made a new friend, which I was really happy about. But I was just chatting with somebody, and we were introducing ourselves, like, oh, hi, I'm this person. I was like, oh, hi. I'm Liam Clark. It's nice to meet you. And they went, wait, are you the Liam Clark? And somebody goes, next was, Are you? Are you HEMA famous? No? Do you read my blog? Like, yeah. It's like, okay, that's why, you're just a history nerd, right? And it was the one person in the entire event who's like, are you that guy? But it was one of those moments going, oh, like, there are people out there who find my research interesting and engaging and are excited to meet me because of that. And that was pretty big for me. If I could tell 15 year old me, like, hey, you're going to go and do sword fighting and someone's going to know your name from things you do because you're contributing. That would be really exciting for me. And there are tons of people nowadays who are doing exactly that, who are contributing to that degree.

 

Guy Windsor 

And that's, honestly, one of the big reasons why I picked historical martial arts. I was always going to teach some kind of martial arts, but historical martial arts, because if I'd become an Aikido instructor or tai chi instructor or whatever else, I wouldn't be contributing anything to the art itself, necessarily, not really. I mean, maybe a little bit, but I wouldn't be, like, fundamentally producing something. Whereas with historical martial arts, particularly 20 odd years ago, there was so much scope for anybody coming into the field to make a significant contribution in a reasonable period of time. I know people who train for a couple of years and produce something useful.

 

Liam Clark 

One of my biggest drivers is this, this drive to be useful. And HEMA is a space where you can be useful in a way where if you create a really good learning environment, like a club that people want to go to and are welcome at, and they keep coming back every day, and they feel engaged. They want to keep going in it, and they and being doing that is oftentimes just as useful as like, hey, I'm putting out this Fecht book, or I'm making swords and doing research. If you're building an environment that people want to go into. And there's a degree of impact that you can have with the niche hobby that is so cool.

 

Guy Windsor 

Honestly, just becoming someone who is really nice to fence, that, by itself, is a contribution to the field. Because honestly, there aren't that many people out there who are really nice to fence. I mean, some hundreds, maybe 1000s. But, you know, it takes a lot of skill and dedication and practice to get to that place which becomes you part of the rising tide that's lifting all the boats.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, one of the things that I that I like in part of my research, is that with Meyer, we have these kind of things of where he came from and maybe why he wrote books, but there's not a lot of like biographical data about him, like what his favourite food was, and things that the stuff that kind of humanises in a way, or can make you relate to them that way. But that's what part of my research was, was finding that about other people, and studying his peers in Strasburg at the same time, and finding those little stories. You can find the ways that people are contributing or seeing where people are, like doing other parts of their lives at the same time, or having happiness or sadness. So when you're in that environment doing it, you can think of yourself more as that person. Like Simon Eckhard of Strasburg or whatever, and that can kind of build up that degree of, yeah, this is normal, in a way, and maybe add some kind of fuel to what you're doing in fencing.

 

Guy Windsor 

I just had a thought, right for your book that you haven't written, maybe you won't, but who knows, but the vignette thing, like Facets of Meyer, title, working title, Facets of Meyer, just little facets, like a cut diamond. You're just looking at all these little outside pieces from which you can sort of construct the inside.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. I think that if one of the things that I've done in my research that if anyone listening is interested, all of my research work, and all the sources that I find is all open source. If you go to any of my articles, I have links to every translation.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s at evergreen historical fencing which is Substack.

 

Liam Clark 

Substack.com. Free, no paid subscription required, all of my research. You can find links at the top of the articles to every translation and transcription that I do, the ones that aren't finished yet, you can help out on. It's got links to the actual books and primary sources. And so everything that I've talked about today and every name and every note that I've referenced is available to you right now. And that degree of just here's everything, I think, is one of the ways in which I want to take this niche thing of historical research and make it a little bit more useful, like you shouldn't have to scan through 1000 pages of document because someone else hasn't told you where that page number is yet. There's a degree of here it is. Go check it out yourself. Correct it, change it, alter it. But all those things are available for everything that I've talked about so far today, and I'm always adding to it and building new things, and you can too, because it's open source in that way.

 

Guy Windsor 

Fantastic. Do you actually train the swords these days?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, currently, I'm training at Eastside Fechtverein over in Issaquah, Washington, which is just east of Seattle. I first practiced at Creek School in Denver with a bunch of folks out that way for a few years. Then fenced with Denver Historical Fencing Academy, which is Jason Behrens and Aaron Carnuda and that whole crew out there in Denver for the bulk of it, and then moved back to Seattle in 2021 and fenced at Lonin for a while. Who you know well. And then have been fencing over on the Eastside for a few months now. And so I've been doing fencing stuff. I got a bronze in sabre back in March somewhere. I'm not a very good competitive fencer. Generally, I'm not a very competitive person. I enjoy doing it for the fun of it, and I try really hard, but as soon as I start to lose, I go, ah, it's fine. I'll just lose, whatever. And I kind of crumble a little bit. So I with the PMA, the positive mental attitude, and then as soon as that starts to wane, I go, okay, I'm out. I can't struggle or be mad about it. So I do fence competitively. But I do fence with swords, and did that for quite a few years before I started doing this.

 

Guy Windsor 

Are doing are you primarily training Meyer stuff these days?

 

Liam Clark 

Meyer, for the most part. Meyer is my biggest focus, and I dabble into Marozzo for kind of my secondary. My extracurriculars is partisan and spada due mane stuff and, Following Moreno de Ricci and copying how he looks so I can look cool while I fence.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent. Okay, so there are a couple of questions that I ask most of my guests, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?

 

Liam Clark 

I think a couple of them are actually going to the archives themselves, to bring it way back to the start of the conversation. All the barriers around it. I've got a big old like wish list of all the records that I'd like to go and see and check out the ones I can't get or they're too big to be digitized. It would cost 1000s of dollars to do so. The kind of the big trip down the Rhine of going like Bern, Basel, Strasbourg, Freiburg, and kind of just going from archive to archive for weeks and just spending time with dusty books.

 

Guy Windsor 

You need a patron.

 

Liam Clark 

Probably, yeah, I have a buy me a coffee page that I'm like, yeah, for everyone to send three bucks this way. But I don't encourage it much, because I just do this for fun. But if there's somebody out there who’s like, I could bankroll someone to go and spend four weeks walking through archives, and I would not say no, but that's one of my bigger ones that I that I want to do. The other is my open source research pages. I've got specific ones for fencing masters. I've got 80 years of Strasbourg records for fencing that are all open source and accessible, but I started building a lot of them before I knew what I was doing. So making them into a better resource and a better archival resource,

 

Guy Windsor 

Organising more like Wiktenauer.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. Something that's organized in a way that's more user friendly and intuitive. I just got too deep and built too much of it to go back and redo it, and it'd be like hours and hours and hours of work of just reorganizing stuff. And it works for me, and not that many people use my stuff anyway. So it's better that I just know it.

 

Guy Windsor 

All sorts of people listen to this show, and there maybe someone who goes, Do you know what I like to do to relax on a Saturday night, I like to organize, archive Wiktenauer type stuff and all that coding. That's my jam. So if anyone listening is thinking, oh my god, I'd love to do that, then feel free to send me an email and I'll pass it on to Liam and you never know. You never know who's listening.

 

Liam Clark 

One of the dumbest things I did to kind of talk about that, the level of which I'm lazy about it, is, when I first started off, I forgot how the numbering conventions for pages work, where they number only the right most page, and then there's front and back.

 

Guy Windsor 

So it’s a folio, recto and verso.

 

Liam Clark 

F and then R.

 

Guy Windsor 

Folio is F, and then you got recto is the right hand side. Then when you turn it over, the back of the page is the Verso. Standard practice.

 

Liam Clark 

The first dozen Council books that I did, I forgot how to do that. I was just new at it and was going through. So I was, like, looking at the page and going, Oh, it says 124, the left page that I'm looking at right now is F, and the right side of the page is R. There’s 12 years and dozens of records that all the page numbers are off by one because I'd never done it before, and I was just literally learning as I went,

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, an AI can fix that. Yeah, all sorts of computery AI shit could fix that.

 

Liam Clark 

I've done so many though, that I'm like, I can't be I'm not knowing. I was like, go look at it. I have a warning on my thing is a lot of these are off by one. Just literally, look at the page. It's hyperlinked to the source, the page itself. Just take two seconds and look at it. Sorry. That's the level of organisation. If I had the time, I wish I could go back and make it better. But I tend to be utilitarian with it, and I've got so many new things that I like to dig into.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, you're never going to go back and fix that pagination. And honestly, if it's good enough for Capoferro, who whose pagination is all over the place, I think it's good enough for the rest of us. Okay, last question, someone gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide. How would you spend it?

 

Liam Clark 

I think there's two. There's the selfish ones and then the less selfish ones. I think one of my biggest things with the actual swinging swords part is that we have no data on how a lot of our protective equipment works. And most notably for helmets and masks and things and people have opinions on which ones are the best and which ones are why these ones are best for concussions, but we don't actually know there. We have no idea which one of our fencing masks is better for concussion prevention or safety than any other. It's completely anecdote. So a million bucks to develop an actually for us utilized good.

 

Guy Windsor 

You're familiar with. Jamie McIver’s work?

 

Liam Clark 

Yes.

 

Guy Windsor 

He's starting that process.

 

Liam Clark 

Chuck that over to like, I think University of Virginia does a lot of stuff with NFL football helmets. And be like, hey, build us something like this, and then make it open source in the end, because I'm a big fan of that. And then say, cool. Now go to these different manufacturers. Here's how you make it and make it look cute. Do whatever you want with it. But here's the version that we know based on data, helps reduce concussion.

 

Guy Windsor 

Here's a standard that it needs to be made to, yeah?

 

Liam Clark 

And building a standard that's not off of anecdote, not off of, well, this one's got a harness inside, and so it's got to be better, like all the things. We don't actually know which ones are better or not. If we had a million bucks, say, figure it out for real, for real, and then have that work be available for the community to help prevent head injury. I think that's the biggest one that I would just drop a million bucks, and have that be something that would kind of benefit everyone's brains from here on out. That the other version would be to have just a scholarship pool for folks of hey, if you want to get folks out to events, or if you're a small club that needs to buy foam swords to get started, or little ways to kind of bolster clubs and get people to be able to engage in it in a way that often with financial barriers. That's much harder to kind of piecemeal out than hey, go make us a good helmet based on data. And here's why it feels a little bit more ethereal in terms of how that could be regulated, but something to kind of add a like, oh, I'm making a fencing club for the first time. Hey, you can apply to get five masks subsidized or free from a group, and that sort of thing to kind of lower the barrier of getting started in it, especially at the club level, I think would be a good way to kind of make sure that we keep growing in the future with as many people as possible accessing it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Interesting. Yeah, two completely different uses of the money, and they're both a very good idea. I mean, I would love to see some proper data on helmets and masks and whatnot. Although a friend of mine was injured recently, she was hit over the arm with a blunt longsword in a tournament by this enormous bloke so hard that it basically exploded the belly of the muscle of her bicep. And it's never going to be fixed. There's no way to fix it. So she has a permanent injury from some thug just hitting way too hard. The downside to making masks better is that it encourages people to trust the equipment and not actually control themselves, because at the end of the day, you're hitting people with a four foot long steel bar that is never going to be properly safe, and the safer you feel doing it, the more likely I think you are to injure somebody.

 

Liam Clark 

The safety equation is always protective gear plus training sword plus behaviour, is safety.

 

Guy Windsor 

I would put that in exactly the opposite order.

 

Liam Clark 

Well, they're all added together. If one of them goes away, then it doesn't matter that the other two exist.

 

Guy Windsor 

That's not true. You can do all sorts of training that is useful training, and even competitive training with no protective gear at all.

 

Liam Clark 

Because you have good behaviour, but behaviour doesn’t matter if those things don't exist.

 

Guy Windsor 

Behaviour is the foundation, and if the behaviour is correct for the level of equipment that you have access to, then you can train usefully regardless of what that level of equipment is. So I would say it's the training that is the fundamental piece. The equipment allows us to hit each other in particular ways. But if you and I were fencing and you are not wearing a helmet or fencing mask of any kind. I am simply not going to hit you in the head, at least not deliberately. So the chances of you being hit in the head is much lower. Now, the chance of you walking your eyeball onto a point is much higher. And so it's not a great idea to spend too much time fencing without any kind of face protection. But historically, they did, and people weren't always losing their eyes when they were fencing. So they were doing something in their training that did not involve a whole bunch of modern protective equipment that nonetheless produced fencers.

 

Liam Clark 

As far as we know. We don't have data on we know that people got their eyes knocked out by dussacks and fencing tournaments and people died. We have injury that at the same time. I think one of my hotter Meyer takes is that if he were to teleport to 2025, and see us all fencing in full gear, I think he would be fucking jazzed about it. He'd be like, holy shit. I can do that? I can just fence? I think he would lean in and be so excited to be able to go, like, I can do a big ass thrust to your throat, and it's cool, hell yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yes. But they did have armour. They could have stuck helmets on and gorgets on, and, you know, they had actual armour that actually worked against sharp swords. And, okay, you can still get a point through the visor, if you're unlucky, but they could have been fencing with much more protection than they used, if they'd wanted to.

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah, we also don't have a good record of what protection they actually did use, which is one of the odd caveats is we picture people in T-shirts fencing. We do have a regulation from Prague that says no using long gloves allowed, only gloves that cover the fist. So people were wearing gloves.

 

Guy Windsor 

So they were not allowed to protect their forearms. That’s interesting.

 

Liam Clark 

You can’t put your arms over your head and take shots.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ah, that’s why they're doing it. Basically they would be defending their heads with their forearms. That’s interesting.

 

Liam Clark 

And that's when people do Fecht school rules style fencing, like head only cut stuff. You see that all the time, when folks go, I only wear a mask. And then as soon as you cut at their head, people raise their elbow in the way, and the person stops. And it's like, yeah, back in the day, they didn't stop. If you put your elbow in the way, they hit it to make your arm go down. And we're not willing to do that. But they had a record of a Fecht school that people were fencing and fencing, and then it said, Oh, then the Marx Bruder took off their jackets and padded clothes. And so there is a degree where partway through the Fecht school, they kind of went into serious mode and kind of stripped down a bit to be like, now I'm being brave. So like, people wore jackets and padded stuff when they were fencing, and then they also did the other thing as well. We don't have data on what people actually wore when they did training in any way, shape or form. So they could be wearing helmets and stuff while they were practicing and just never wrote it down. We don't actually have very good accounts of, hey, by the way, Wygand Brack, when he was being trained, wore this. It's we have a lot of guesswork and only partial things like only gloves covering the fists and things like that.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, although, I mean, am I right in thinking that in the Fecht school it was quite common for fencing bouts with the longsword to be done to a bleeding head wound?

 

Liam Clark 

Yes, they had both wet and dry, so the goal is to cut the head, and some are not. People also didn't want to do it.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. I wonder why?

 

Liam Clark 

Yeah. There was a Fecht school in Dresden, where there's a prize pool, and they're like, everyone was fencing, and then the person who was running it said, hey, I'm not going to give out the money because there's no blood yet. I don't see no blood. Nobody's getting paid out, and then a bunch of the fencers seemingly, kind of slunk back into the audience, and there's a degree of everyone is having fun until they're like, hey, nobody's breaking any swords, nobody's bleeding. Get to it. And people went, okay, it wasn't something where everyone's like, I'm going to go bleed. I'm so hardcore, like, it still sucked, and it was scary.

 

Guy Windsor 

Honestly, I had my head split open with a blunt longsword back when I was young and foolish, and I have the scar to prove it. It was not a pleasant experience.

 

Liam Clark 

I was wearing a fencing mask, it was my first three months of doing this, it was loose and it got hit on the top and it shifted and tore my scalp open. The amount of blood, it’s pretty nuts. It’s not fun.

 

Guy Windsor 

I knew about fencing to the bleeding headwound, but I wasn’t aware that people were so reluctant to do it. It doesn’t surprise me, but I’d never thought of it like that.

 

Liam Clark 

They had kids that fenced as well and they said kids fenced and their faces were almost unrecognisable. There was a degree where people were really going for it but also there was the record of yeah, they backed out a little bit because it was a bit scary.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, think of the invention of the boxing glove. It was so that gentlemen could box each other without risking facial injury.

 

Liam Clark 

Throw some Vaseline on. You’ve got a cut man at the side.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah. Funny how these things develop. Interesting. Well, thank you do much for joining me today Liam, it has been lovely to meet you. That was awesome.

 

Liam Clark 

Thank you so much for having me. It was fun to bounce around through history and talk about research and motivations and backgrounds and all that kind of stuff.