On a grey November afternoon, clad in a borrowed—and somewhat smelly—fencing outfit, I spent two hours going through the basics of the aspiring duellist: saluting before putting on the protective mask, pinching the grip of the sword with the thumb and index finger, gliding back and forth while keeping the feet planted. But this wasn’t the kind of fencing you see at the Olympics—the dazzling speed of the athletes, electronic scoring, and seemingly nonsensical rules. The instructions came with a twist: our back hand, we learned, could be used to grab the opponent’s sword and disarm them, or even to wield a second weapon. We could move in whatever direction we chose. We could aim for pretty much any part of the body.
This was historical fencing, an approach that seeks to recreate the way people fought centuries ago by interpreting ancient documents. Also known as Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA, it simulates the life-or-death feel of combat that would have been commonplace in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and up to the early modern era.
I had been cast in an amateur theatre production of The Three Musketeers, playing a guard of the scheming Cardinal de Richelieu. To make our stage fighting look convincing, the actors had committed to training weekly for the next four months. Understanding the strange blend of decorum and brutality that defined historical duels was exactly what we needed.
Teaching us that day was David Farley Chevrier, a medical librarian with degrees in medieval and classical studies and a passion for Scottish dress. In his free time, he oversees a small historical section at a Montreal fencing club, Escrime Mont-Royal, specializing in the smallsword, a weapon introduced in the seventeenth century.
Things got stressful when Farley Chevrier demonstrated basic attacks, parries (for defence), and ripostes (for striking back). Before I was able to absorb them, it was time to spar. I saluted my opponent, put my mask on, and found myself en garde, a weapon pointed at me. Mildly panicked, I clumsily went after them, figuring the best defence was offence. Which was, I later learned, the surest way to lose.
Originally, swordplay was “an art that taught you how to use weapons that can do real harm in an efficient way,” says Orlando Di Ciccio, who owns and teaches at a historical fencing school in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawà:ke. HEMA is more rigorous than live-action role playing, or LARP, whose aficionados can occasionally be spotted in parks, engaging in foam-sword duels. It’s also not always as geared to education as historical re-enactment. Since the goal is to save yourself from a fatal blow, HEMA fighting can look slow and messy.
“It’s a game of chess with swords,” says Véronique Meunier, who practises HEMA at two clubs. “You’re trying to analyze your opponent, trying to find out how he’s going to react to something.” Meunier started out learning Olympic fencing as a child. “I liked it, I liked the sport of it, I liked the rush of adrenaline, but I hated the rules,” she recalls. “Here comes historical fencing: you don’t have [the same] rules, it’s fun, it’s more wild, it’s more to the core.”
It was a James Bond scene that sparked Meunier’s interest. Die Another Day (2002) features a breathless duel between Bond and villain Gustav Graves. The fight starts as a conventional match at a London fencing club but builds up into spectacular, over-the-top combat as the opponents leap through the building, swapping their modern épées for older, heavier swords on display. “I was like: ‘Okay, I’d really like to do that,’” Meunier says.
When Die Another Day came out, the historical fencing community was still small and relatively obscure, and Meunier wouldn’t have known where to look for teachers. Years later, she wound up connecting with a club and buying her first rapier, at the Salon de la Passion Médiévale, a three-day fair in Quebec with exhibition fights, concerts, and plenty of merchandise. (She has since acquired seven small swords, three more rapiers, one sabre, and more.)
In the spirit of historical accuracy, HEMA weapons are generally steel replicas of what fighters would have used in the past. Popular ones include the longsword, a heavy weapon with a cruciform hilt permitting a two-hand grip; the long and thin rapier, a civilians’ favourite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its nimbler version, the smallsword; and the sabre, typically a single-edged curved sword often used by the cavalry and tracing its origins to West Asia. Modern fencing swords—foils, épées, and sabres—descend from some of these weapons, but they were developed for competing, not killing, and tend to be lighter.
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