This weekend, along with nearly a score of other hardy souls, I spent two long days learning from a gentleman who's spent years translating and interpreting a treatise from 1410 on various combat techniques.

We got a chance to learn and practice period wrestling, dagger, baton, short sword and long sword; and we learned techniques of armored combat, with sword, pole-axe and spear.

It threw into sharp focus how inauthentic SCA combat really is. Many of the unarmored swordfighting techniques found in Flos Duellatorum are prohibited by SCA rapier combat rules (such as deliberately disarming your opponent, binding his arms, throwing him, or — with certain blade types — grasping his blade). And swinging a sword, at least in Fiore dei Liberi's manual, was simply not done in armor. (Why? Because unlike in the SCA — where a good swing can count as a killing blow — in the real world, armor was proof against cutting swings, as well as nearly every thrust. The only way to kill an armored opponent was to stab an unprotected place: the face, under the arm — if you could thrust strongly enough to get through the mail worn under the plate armor — behind the knees, or the buttocks.) Nearly all of the armored sword techniques involved holding your sword with one hand on the hilt, and the other halfway up the blade, unless you were thrusting from a certain position. (I'm definitely going to have to check out other fighting treatises and Fechtbücher to see if they're similar.)

But the techniques we learned were absolutely astounding. They were elegant in their simplicity; sometimes brutal, sometimes comical (grab your opponent's elbow and push him backwards, then simply grab his near knee and pull — and down he goes).

SCA fencing would be several dozen orders of magnitude cooler if they did stuff like this, instead of crap like rubber band guns and "le poulet gauche"; judging from some of the comments made by the heavy-weapons fighters (such as their scheming to get some of the moves deemed legal), it seemed just as cool for their idiom.

It's just impossible to convey in words how sweet this stuff was; how magical it seemed to just move your hand a certain way, step backwards, and watch his sword or dagger fly out of his grip. All weekend, I was just shaking my head and smiling in wonderment at how simple the moves were, yet how fantastic were the results.