Bavarian engraving of a medieval tournament from the 1400s. Public domain in the US

Yesterday’s meeting of the SCA’s Board of Directors meeting approved the addition of “Armored Combat with Rebated (Steel) Blades” to the Marshal’s Handbook. This activity will allow the Society to explore more fully the art of armored combat, using simulators very like the swords used in our period of study. The inclusion of steel fighting in armor is the culmination of eighteen months of hard work and experimentation. Steel combat in the SCA is tournament only, uses only single and two-hand swords, no thrusting, and aims to explore multiple different tournament formats as well as judged blows.

If you’d like to know more about this, check out section IX of the freshly updated Marshal’s Handbook, the SCA Steel Experiment Facebook page – or you can have a look at this YouTube video, which gives a good introduction and shows the fighting form as it was practiced last fall in Aethelmearc.

Here are the links:

Link to Marshal’s Handbook: https://www.sca.org/marshal_handbook/

Link to YouTube video: https://youtu.be/ZW9T-3Mu-Pw

Link to the Steel Experiment Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SCA-Steel-Fighting-Experiment-2248270048818486/

Regards,
Master Alan Gravesend
Marshal of the Society