THE TECHNOLOGY OF PERSONAL COMBAT: ARMS, ARMOUR AND FIGHTING TECHNIQUES IN THE PERIOD THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
THE TECHNOLOGY OF PERSONAL COMBAT: ARMS, ARMOUR AND FIGHTING TECHNIQUES IN THE PERIOD THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

Summary/Abstract: During the Hundred Years’ War, the techniques of personal combat underwent a shift alongside available technology and with the changing social structure of Western Europe. The development of full “cap à pied” plate armour impacted the techniques needed to defeat a knight or man-at-arms. At the same time, the demand for fighting instruction grew beyond the aristocracy and resulted in the production of fechtbücher – fighting treatises, making the practice of combat arts available to the urban-dwelling bourgeois. Based on surviving examples of arms and armour, works of art, literature, the fighting treatises, and the author’s long experience in-harness, this paper examines the interaction of harness and the practice of personal combat loosely during the period of the Hundred Years’ War. It argues that while we find an initial and efficient arte, a principle-based approach to the military use of shock weapons recorded in the early treatises, over time we also see a change dividing of the combat art into the needs of war (emphasizing power and leverage) and the practice of personal violence off the battlefield, as in the duel and in street defense, where timing and distance were paramount characteristics.

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