Gathering of Wolves 2025

A sabre workshop focused on improving your ability to give thrusts and to defend against them, drawing from both technical source material and competitive experience.

We're going to primarily work with Johannes Lecküchner's epic, witty, majestic, and at-times-bewildering tome in and effort to understand the subtleties underlying the messer as well as how adaptable and unique it as a weapon that works across all ranges, whether you are keeping good measure with your fancy fencing or closing in for disarms, locks, trips, throws and grapples.

You will need a mask, light gloves and groin protection should your anatomy require it. Some spare messers will be available to loan.

A cutting lesson to help people understand more about how to use a sharp sword to cut a target. It sounds much easier than it actually is in practice!

You will do some solo drills with your own blunt sword, to practise the mechanics that I will be demonstrating against cutting targets. I will identify various common problems that people tend to have, and will demonstrate why these problems often result in failed cuts. I will also demonstrate how to develop your cutting skills beyond the basics, so that your movements in cutting and sparring begin to look more similar, and so that you can learn to apply more structure and control over the effects of your sword when you are sparring and even competing.

Depending on time, and number of participants, there should be some opportunity to try at least one or two cuts with a sharp sword yourself.

You will need a blunt longsword. If you have your own sharp sword, you are welcome to bring it.

Philippo di Vadi Pisano was an Italian fencing master in the late 15th Century.

While sharing some core over-lapping concepts with Fiore de’i Liberi, his treatise explores different ideas about footwork, guards (posta) and generating power.

The class will explore some of his unique and (according to him) original concepts using Longsword and what they reveal to us about different strategies and chains of movement you can use in a fight.

Requirements: You will need a longsword/feder, a fencing mask and padded gloves.

We will look at the little understood, often overlooked, and surprisingly well documented practice of two swords in Renaissance Italy. The two masters who we will be referencing are Francesco di Sandro Altoni, whose manuscript is dated to circa 1540, and Marco Docciolini, whose work was published in 1601.

This introduction to case will focus on footwork, movement and coordination. If you have studied Bolognese fencing that will help but is not essential.

You will need mask, gloves and two single handed swords, steel or nylon (feders work too).

A workshop on tactics and techniques for and against the left hander.

If you’ve ever been frustrated when facing a leftie or if you yourself are left-handed and want to elevate your game this is the class for you.

Taking inspiration from multiple sources we will look at what they advise, what adaptations lefties need to make when performing conventional techniques and the biomechanics that make these differences work.

Requirements: Mask, gloves, single handed sword, arm and leg guards if you want a bit more spice.

A lesson for entering the fight, whether in the Vor or the Nach, with Bravery and Purpose. We'll look at identifying our own effective distance, how we can enter that distance safely and how we can make purposeful actions in taking the fight to the opponent or allowing the opponent to bring the fight to you.

Students will need a mask, gloves and a longsword. (Optionally) A gorget for comfort.

Drills and Melee games for sword vs bayonet/spear combat.

Drawing upon 16th to 19th century sword vs pole arm methods, we will work through methods for dealing with thrust based polearms before moving on to a number of melee games based on historical encounters, such as during the Anglo-Indian & Anglo-Sudan wars where bayonet equipped formations and skirmishers had to do battle against a range of sword, and sword & buckler/shield combatants.
Weapons to be used – Bayonet trainers, spears, any synthetic one-handed swords, synthetic longswords, bucklers, and shields & axes etc.

Written in the early 1500's this comprehensive manual is part of the Bolognese tradition which offers both instruction on how to fence as well as the mindset a fencer should have. We will be looking at some of the core principles as well as techniques from the largo.
Working from the translation by Stephen Fratus.
Requirements: Mask, gloves, gorget, sidesword (or equivalent). Optional: Plastron, Jacket.

Paulus Mair was a wealthy man in the service of the city of Augsburg. He was a fencing enthusiast and collected arms and armour, and also books by earlier fencing masters. He wrote his own Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica - in fact, he wrote three versions of it across the 1540s, in his attempts to record and preserve the fighting methods of the day.

One of these methods was fighting with the sickle, a short and curved agricultural implement that was not something you would particularly want someone to put into your body. The method is quite brief and quite brutal.

This will be an introduction to the method and ideas of Mair's sickle fencing. There will be ~30 synthetic sickles available to borrow for the lesson.

You will need a mask (preferably with back of head protection) and light gloves. You might appreciate knee protection and a groin guard.