Old Fencing Curriculum

In a time that seems so very long ago, my wife and I moved to a new state and found a lack of consistent SCA fencing practices.  So what do young upstart Freescholars of Atlantia do?  That's right, we made our own.  We had a good friend who lived in the area, we called him up, and found a place to practice.  Over time, the practice grew, we became white scarves (I suspect partly because of this practice), and several members joined us.  At one point, we gathered a group of people to sit down and generate a list of topics to cover and hence was born Percy the Pontificating Provost's Practical School of Defense.

Kate has mostly retired after kids (although they're almost getting old enough for her to come back out), and my activity waned for a bit, so others stepped up and led the charge.  I have since become active again, but other life priorities prevent me from taking charge any more, but I promised some folks at the current practice that I would put up this, for lack of a better word, curriculum.

I will state that this list of topics was not just from the minds of my wife and I, but a contribution of various people, many of which I will likely forget, but I will try (SCA names only, no titles because I'm lazy): Galen of Black Diamond, Rosalind Delamare, Gaston du Valmont, now Iskender Bey al-Istanbuli, Marion le Red, Chris MacConing, Ysane de la Selle, and so many more.  (If any of you remember more, please let me know so that I can add note their contributions.)  The list was also heavily influenced by our primary teacher, Giacomo Vincenti (yes that Giacomo), without whom Kate & I would not have been the fencers we became.

This list has not been touched in quite some time.  I leave it here in it's last form of a teacher's list and a student's list.  Neither has a lot of information, mostly being just lists of topics.  At the time, it was what we needed.  I hope that these inspire others and if you can use it, they are free for your use, just please give credit where credit is due.

PPPPD Student

PPPPD Teacher

Class on Leather Doublets & Jerkins

This last weekend with my lovely wife, we taught a class at an SCA event that presented some details and inferences of the research I've been doing in regards to extant leather garments.  I think the class went pretty well, and it was pretty well received.  For those that couldn't make it, the link to the slides is: https://tinyurl.com/ybl8h49r and the spreadsheet that drives it is at https://tinyurl.com/y978b3gb.  The one thing we didn't share with class was a link to my curated Pinterest board with the available museum pictures.

The short version is leather doublets & jerkins were more prevalent than what we generally see in the SCA.  From what I've been able to discover, these type of garments made out of leather were treated just as if they were from any other cloth: could be decorated or not, assembled with regular sewing-type seams, etc.

To recap some of the class, I've found 81 extant doublets and jerkins between the periods of 1540-1650 so far.  43 of those are from the Mary Rose wreck which pretty much requires access to a copy of Before the Mast to get details, and can definitely skew any kind of analysis.  The next single biggest cache comes from the Royal Museum of Sweden, which contains a total of 11 unassembled doublets, which are absolutely stunning.

There was no way I could go over the entirety of what I've found so far in a one hour class (or even on this blog).  I encourage anyone interested to go through the main tab of the spreadsheet for the full list, as many of the items either can't be captured to Pinterest or have no available online pictures.  If you know of one I haven't captured, please reach out as I'm always interested in finding more.

And again, make more leather jerkins.