Quixoticish

On an actual battlefield the majority of killing was done with longbows and polearms. The sword was commonly a sidearm, essentially like the pistol that soldiers wear today. However due to the nature of the weapons being used hafts would break, points would dull, and people would turn to their longsword more than soldiers do to pistols today. In armour the technique used with the longsword is to "half-sword". This is where (assuming you a right handed) you would keep your right hand on the grip of your sword and bring your left hand to grip your blade roughly half way down. This turns the sword into something very thrust oriented and allows you to close into grappling and wrestling range and potentially slip the point through a chink in your opponents armour to make a kill, or at least get him down on the ground so you can finish him with your dagger. This is essentially because you can hit a man wearing a suit of armour all day with a sword without doing anything other than blunting your own weapon! A pollaxe is actually the best tool to use in reality.

The combat itself is a lot quicker and more energetic than most people think. Contrary to popular belief medieval weapons were not huge, heavy hulking things that require a great deal of strength to use. Many of them were quite light and nimble. Think less "clang, clang, clang" with lots of grunting and heaving of weights and more quick shifting through guards, feinting, parrying, seeking openings and striking at them rapidly.

Judicial duelling was also quite commonly practised throughout the medieval period. We have quite a few sources on this, these range from standard, ritualised combat starting with a casting of spears at one another before moving into sword range. These were often done completely un-armoured, although the layers of woollen clothing people wore did afford some protection. There are also dedicated duelling weapons such as the infamous "duelling shields" depicted in Hans Talhoffer's manuscripts from the mid 1400's. These are essentially six foot plus shields with brutal spikes on either end that can be used in both hands. There is even a section that details a judicial duel between a man and a woman, and presumably to equalise the combat the man sits waist deep in a pit armed with a club and is not allowed to move, whilst the woman can move freely around him and strike at him with what can only be described as a large heavy stone wrapped in a length of cloth. A rock in a sock, if you like.

As you can see there isn't a "usual" medieval fight, however one thing they all have in common is a set of highly skilled combatants using very effective martial techniques to kill, disable or disarm one another.

A machine gun, because my lovely swords would be useless! In all seriousness, smallswords put the fear of the gods in me. They are essentially very sharp, very pointed knitting needles that will slip into you and out again before you even realise what's happened. Unless you hit the heart or puncture a lung the death can be slow, painful and agonising and often takes place many weeks after the actual combat, especially given the state of medical knowledge around the time these weapons were used.

I've just asked my brother (a fellow WMA practitioner) and his answer was some of the random farming implements people were using during the various peasants revolts in the medieval period. How do you deal with someone coming at you with a pitchfork, or a massive threshing flail, or some other rusty monstrosity designed for use out in the fields? There aren't any techniques in the manuscripts for dealing with these!

Any death in armour can also be pretty grisly and terrifying. You will often get hit on the head forcefully by something and end up with a concussion. There are records (especially in jousts) of knights helmets needed to be hammered off their heads, imagine that on a battlefield when no-one is around to do the hammering, and you're stuck, panicking and bleeding into your helmet, perhaps vomiting as well. Nasty way to go! When someone pins you down and delivers the mercy stroke with a dagger through the slit in your visor I can imagine how that could almost be a blissful release.

This varies from country to country. In England throughout various bits and pieces of the middle ages the cost of a sword was actually controlled by law to make them affordable to almost everyone. The crown often stipulated by law that different classes in society were armed in certain ways so that an army could be raised quickly if ever needed. The people on the bottom rung of the social ladder would have used billhooks, pikes and other implements, but only a few rungs up (and there are a lot of rungs on the ladder of medieval class) swords would have been commonplace.

Many people like to think of the romantic idea of a smith hand forging a blade, however the middle ages saw the rise of industrialisation. Blades were often manufactured by a method known as stock removal and shipped en-masse to places around the globe. So ten thousand blades may arrive in a shipment from one of the famous blade-making centres on the continent, to be distributed amongst local cutlers who would then add a hilt, pommel, crossguard and other fittings. As you can imagine the cheaper swords were often of lesser quality but did the job very well, and there would have been very cheap "seconds" that perhaps had a slightly kink in the edge of the blade, or were slightly asymmetrical. These would be sold very cheaply but would do the job perfectly well.

I'm currently spending a lot of time studying and teaching the langes-messer or "long knife" in the German tradition. These range from machete size up to about thirty inches in blade length, and are often single handed, single edged cutting swords with a clipped point. It's interesting because they are knives no matter how long they become, even if they are longer than swords. Henceforth everyone could own one, whilst there were long, elegant langes messers made for "war" they were utilised by everyone, especially the lower classes in society, for self defence.

If I could pick one weapon that was the most frequently used in the medieval period I'd say the dagger. Everyone had a dagger, now matter what class you were from. There are huge sections in many manuscripts from the period showing us various knife attacks, disarms and how to use them to supplement other weapons. They were used on the battlefield to dispatch armoured opponents, they were used to defend youself if you were attacked and they were generally always there as a fall-back just in case. Everyone carried them, from archers to knights, from peasants to nobility. I think it's also important to mention the staff/stave/stick. However you dress it up it's a simple weapon made up of a length of wood. Everyone could create one and everyone would have known how to use one. There's a reason it's considered "the" weapon of the English throughout the middle ages.

Similarly polearms were the go-to weapon for battlefield combat, be it a spear, pollaxe, or (later) a halberd. These were incredibly common and could be found everywhere in a tremendous variety of shapes and sizes all over the world.

Hi there!

My particular speciality is the medieval period from the late 1200's through to about 1500, and I can honestly say that there are no films I have ever seen that get it right. You learn to forgive and forget though in precisely the same way that I imagine someone who studies Iaido or Kenjutsu watching "The Last Samurai" would.

Kingdom of Heaven was one that made many of us sit upright in our seats. When Liam Neeson tells Orlando Bloom about "Posta di Falcone" (the guard of the hawk) this is actually a guard from De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi by Filippo Vadi. Sadly this was written a few hundred years after the film is set and they hold it utterly and entirely incorrectly, but at least somewhere along the line someone actually took the time to read a genuine historical fencing manuscript which is a step in the right direction.

Outside of the medieval period a lot of my friends and colleagues who teach smallsword, sabre and later styles of swordplay rate "The Duellists" very highly.

Edit : What do I want for Christmas? A shiny a new sword of course! ;)

Personally no, however my brother was once assaulted by an aggressive drunk and utilised a controlling joint lock from the work of Fiore dei Liberi (1340s - 1420). It worked a charm and he was able to escort said drunk to the local law enforcement.

A question I get asked a lot by students is why should I do this? Why shouldn't I do a more practical self defence art like karate? I always tell them that if self defence is your primary goal then you're in the wrong place, but to keep in mind that people lived and died by these arts, their lives depended on them, and they DO work if you train them properly. Admittedly there are some techniques I would never recommend from a self defence point of view (especially those involving dislocations, eye gouging and taking your attackers knife and impaling him repeatedly in the face) however the self confidence of knowing that you know how to look after yourself often pays dividends and there are always basics (especially when working with dagger techniques and unarmed grappling) that do the job very well.

I actually have a friend who has trained in BJJ/MMA for many years and he has turned his hand recently to medieval wrestling techniques, and in his opinion the similarities are striking. An awful lot of what "works" in MMA/BJJ crops up in medieval fighting manuscripts from the 1300's and 1400's.

Our ancestors certainly knew what they were doing! :)