We began by working the Sixth Master of Dagger at some length using a piece of cloth as the defensive weapon. This maneuver is almost incredibly effective when it works.
It’s most effective against a straight overhand stab and becomes a more interesting drill when the attacker mixes it up with attacks from different angles and with repeated stabs.
Proceeding to longsword, we began by doing some free sparring in a fishing expedition to find areas where we need improvement. We found one when an attacker, coming up out of full iron gate, got hit in the hands. We boiled this down into the following drill.
Thruster/Sniper Drill
The job of Thruster (T) is to strike Sniper (S) with a thrust, typically out of full iron gate or boar’s tooth. The job of S is to snipe at T’s hands whenever that is possible. Typically it becomes possible when T gets in too close, and/or begins holding his hands out in front of his body in a middle iron gate sort of position. This forces T to use hand-safe positions and to maintain greater distance. It also obliges T to make fully committed attacks when he does attack, since a half-hearted thrust just exposes the hands to S’s blade without creating any threat that S is forced to respond to.
The drill gets a lot better for S if S engages in correct defensive tactics when T makes a good thrust–this means moving offline while employing one of the two canonical Fiore thrust defenses: breaking the thrust or exchange of thrusts.
Additional note: in practice, this drill seemed to lead to a lot of “high hands” situations, in which T and S had swords crossed with upward pressure of the hands. Today the tendency was for both combatants to back away at that point, but a better approach would be to segue into appropriate “high hands” techniques. In general this means closing in rather than backing away.
