I have also included as an appendix an article I wrote in 2005 outlining the key changes that had been made to the way I was teaching, in just the first year that the book had been out. I have also corrected my unfathomably bad use of Italian terms (for some reason I have the names of the blows reversed: fendente mandritto, for instance, which should be, and now is, mandritto fendente). I have left the organisation of this book as it was, and simply excised the misleading terms, replacing them with “wide measure” and “close measure” instead. Giocco largo is better translated as “wide play”, giocco stretto as “constrained play”. I go into this at length in Mastering the Art of Arms, vol. Fiore organises his techniques according to the circumstances in which they should be done. The terms refer what you do in a specific tactical situation (of which measure is only a part), and especially to the relationship of the blades when they meet. There are several plays that don’t fit this theory, but most critically it overlooks the fundamental point of his book, which is not a catalogue, but the representation of a system. In other words, Fiore catalogued his longsword techniques by measure. I (and everyone else at the time) thought they indicated the distance at which techniques occurred. I could not resist correcting the single most egregious and pervasive misinterpretation in the book, which was my use of the Italian terms giocco largo and giocco stretto. To that end I have reproduced the text about word-for-word with the second printing, just correcting a few typos, excising a few unfortunate remarks, and footnoting the most outstanding errors. And it offers a window into what was considered state-of-the-art only a decade ago. But I think this book is still useful, in that it contains the essence of why we should follow the art. There was no point in trying to update this book – just about everything would have had to be changed. My understanding of the historical material finally reached the point where it was ready to be written down in full in about 2010, and so I am publishing through Freelance Academy Press a series entitled Mastering the Art of Arms. And an inbox full of emails from people from all over the world telling me how much my book has helped them suggests that it did its job. This was supposed to keep everyone busy while I got on with figuring out the sources. But there seemed to me to be a need for a basic primer in the use of a longsword, so that people who wanted to take up the practice of the art could do so in a useful and systematic way. I knew full well that I as an instructor, and we as a community, had not even begun to understand the depths of these arts. I wrote this book at a time when my research into our medieval combat heritage was at a very basic level. So now that the copyright has reverted to me in its entirety, I am free to make the book widely available at a reasonable price. This is a silly price to pay for a book that, from a practical point of view, is thoroughly out of date. It is still in demand today, with second-hand copies fetching sums in the hundreds of dollars. The Swordsman’s Companion put my school on the map, and brought my work to the attention of several thousand enthusiasts worldwide. The Swordsman’s Companion A Modern Training Manual for Medieval Longsword Guy Windsor The Swordsman’s Companion: A Modern Training Manual for Medieval Longsword First published 2004 Second edition 2013 Ebook edition 2013 By Guy Windsor ISBN 974-0-5 (paperback) ISBN 974-1-2 (PDF) ISBN 974-2-9 (EPUB) ISBN 974-3-6 (MOBI) © Guy Windsor 2004, 2013 Images © 2004 by Jari Pallari Illustrations © 2004 by Jani Hyväri Design by Zebedee Design & Typesetting Services Preface to the Second Edition T en years ago I wrote a book that changed my life.
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