[William J Welch]

After getting a blunt with a long grip, using a waister with a slightly shorter grip, and then using a sharp with a slightly shorter grip than that. I have to say I prefer the longer grip, and it may just be me, but with a longer grip the sword is faster at the tip just from the longer leverage. A zwerch is faster and has more power from one side to the other, and something else I have noticed it is easier to wind with a longer grip.
So I would prefer a longer grip to use for German longsword tech. with a long sword, where as most would agree everything is useful exept maybe rapier with long sword tech.

Cheers,
Bill

[Stephen Hand]

I don't come here very often and have only just noticed this thread. I want to make two points.

Firstly, in some cases very specific swords are necessary to make the particular master's system work as advertised. I am finding this more and more with rapiers. I started studying Saviolo nearly 15 years ago and did so with an accurate replica of a late Elizabethan rapier, with a 42" blade. More and more I found stuff simply not working. On a whim I tried using a shorter rapier I had (conforming exactly to Philip II of Spain's perfect length - for me a 38" blade - and one more circumstantial bit of evidence for Saviolo's mixed Italo-Spanish lineage). In the first bout I tried a technique that I'd never been able to successfully perform in bouting. It worked and I did it another five times, all perfectly as advertised in Saviolo. Many other elements of Saviolo's system work far better with a 38" blade than a 42" one.

I have also dabbled in Pallas Armata and the aggresive stringere used in that text works far better with the lighter rapiers starting to be used in England from 1620 than it does with the heavier rapiers of the first two decades of the 17th century. I now have four very different rapiers, my Di Grassi, my Saviolo, my Swetnam and my Pallas Armata. Please note that these are all tailored to my proportions.

When you look at what passes for "rapiers" in many places, it's hardly any wonder that what's done with them rarely looks anything like rapier fencing.

Which brings me to Swetnam. This is a man who was fencing master to Henry, the Prince of Wales (who died in 1612, leaving his younger brother Charles to become king). Evidently King James I considered him competent enough. People like Steaphen Fick have been able to get Swetnam's system to work well enough to win rapier tournaments with it. Given his acceptance by the highest authority in early 17th century England and the ability of people today to make his system work effectively I would be extremely hesitant to dismiss anything that he wrote (except perhaps his "arraignment of lewd...women"). I have found that periodically I wonder whether an old master's system was actually any good. I have always discovered that the problem was something that I was doing wrong, not the old master. A prime example was with Saviolo where using a shorter weapon solved almost all my interpretive problems (it also raises interesting and complex questions which I don't have time and space to examine here). I think that our first assumption should be that the old masters knew what they were doing. They fought, we play. They saw swordfights. We never have. Many people have never even seen a bout between two competent practitioners of a historical style, let alone a real swordfight. We need a damn site better evidence than has been presented thus far before we dismiss a historical master, particularly one who was hired to train the future king of England. It is possible that some authors of historical treatises were not the best that their age had to offer. However, we will not know who the best authors were until we test each of them thoroughly, something we aren't even remotely close to doing. Even then, even the worst of these authors is probably describing a better way to use historical weaponry than anything we might make up in our back yards, having never been in, or even seen a real swordfight, and thus being totally ignorant of the most basic reality of historical swordsmanship.

Cheers
Stephen