rogue
05-14-2003, 09:39 AM
Link to complete article (http://www.fightingarts.com/reading/article.php?id=351)
Part 1
By John Clements, ARMA Director
Editor’s Note: The reader should note that this article contains some quotations taken from old English whose spelling is quite different from our modern counterpart.
The skills of grappling and the art of wrestling have a long legacy in Europe. In the early 1500s, many soldiers, scholars, priests, and nobles wrote that wrestling was important in preparing aristocratic youth for military service. The detailed depictions of unarmed techniques in many Medieval fencing manuals (such as those by Fiore Dei Liberi and Hans Talhoffer) are well known and accounts of wrestling and grappling abound in descriptions of 15th century tournaments and judicial contests. A 1442 tournament fight in Paris "with weapons as we are accustomed to carrying in battle" included in its fourth article the stipulation "that each of us may help each other with wrestling, using legs, feet, arms or hands." English knightly tournaments as late as 1507 allowed combatants "To Wrestle all maner of wayes" or to fight "with Gripe, or otherwise". The Hispano-Italian master Pietro Monte in the 1480’s even recognized wrestling as the "foundation of all fighting", armed or unarmed. Albrecht Duerer’s Fechtbuch of 1512 contains more material on wrestling than on swordplay, yet the relationship between them is noticeable. The oldest known fencing text, the late 13th century treatise MS I.33, even states, "For when one will not cede to the other, but they press one against the other and rush close, there is almost no use for arms, especially long ones, but grappling...
Part 1
By John Clements, ARMA Director
Editor’s Note: The reader should note that this article contains some quotations taken from old English whose spelling is quite different from our modern counterpart.
The skills of grappling and the art of wrestling have a long legacy in Europe. In the early 1500s, many soldiers, scholars, priests, and nobles wrote that wrestling was important in preparing aristocratic youth for military service. The detailed depictions of unarmed techniques in many Medieval fencing manuals (such as those by Fiore Dei Liberi and Hans Talhoffer) are well known and accounts of wrestling and grappling abound in descriptions of 15th century tournaments and judicial contests. A 1442 tournament fight in Paris "with weapons as we are accustomed to carrying in battle" included in its fourth article the stipulation "that each of us may help each other with wrestling, using legs, feet, arms or hands." English knightly tournaments as late as 1507 allowed combatants "To Wrestle all maner of wayes" or to fight "with Gripe, or otherwise". The Hispano-Italian master Pietro Monte in the 1480’s even recognized wrestling as the "foundation of all fighting", armed or unarmed. Albrecht Duerer’s Fechtbuch of 1512 contains more material on wrestling than on swordplay, yet the relationship between them is noticeable. The oldest known fencing text, the late 13th century treatise MS I.33, even states, "For when one will not cede to the other, but they press one against the other and rush close, there is almost no use for arms, especially long ones, but grappling...