Fight like a Landsknecht - Armoured Greatsword / Montante Sparring

Welcome back to the Academy of Historical Fencing. I'm Nick Thomas, second on the left here, and today I'm bringing you a video or fight footage of montante or greatsword fighting in armour. Now if anybody is familiar with the use of the montante or the greatsword in HEMA, you're probably used to seeing lots of twirling, spinning around, huge cutting arcs, that kind of thing, and that's because a lot of montante usage is to do with fighting multiple opponents, often with shorter weapons, trying to sort of use area denial and that kind of thing, protect objects. But when you consider a greatsword or a montante in this kind of more military setting, especially when it's having to fight something similar to itself, then things change. And if you look at a sword such as Gordinho, you'll see that he recommends if you use a montante against another montante, rely on thrust work, and that's because when you're fighting something that has equal range to you, when you're using too many cuts and particularly big cutting arcs, you create big openings upon yourself. And so what you're seeing here is going to look a little bit like a halberd fight at times. Sometimes it might look more like a longsword fight. You're going to see grip shifts that you might do with a halberd or a poleaxe, for example, so there's quite a lot of variety going on here. Now these swords were commonly used in the 16th century when partial or half armours were really, really common, and that's what we're practicing with here. So the armour is considered completely functional. A sword wouldn't be able to really do damage through this kind of armour, and so the armour is non-scoring and therefore functional in the fight. And that goes for the burgeonette overlays that are on top of our masks as well. This was our own design that we've prototyped and then sent to Superior Fencing, and we are now wearing the production models from them. Not on the website yet, but you can order them. You can just go ask. Now about the swords we're using, the Regheni Rainer model. Now bear in mind this is a full-weight greatsword. It is 2.6 kilos. That's close to 6 pounds. It's a big, heavy sword, and whilst we can spar with them, you do have to show some restraint. You can't go wild. But do remember, as I've said with these swords, when you're fighting something of a similar reach, you're not going to be using huge cutting arcs as you would against somebody with shorter range weapons or trying to deal with multiple opponents and that kind of thing. Now do bear in mind in this kind of armour you might often have a sidearm such as a dagger or a short sword, but in this instance we didn't, and of course historically speaking you might not always have it. You might have lost it, that kind of thing. So yes, during some of the close-up grapples you might actually go to a sidearm, and sometimes we wear them and sometimes we don't. In this particular instance we didn't. You're also going to get a bonus fight at the end which is a sword and buckler, so stay tuned for that as well. But I hope you enjoy the video. Let's get into the combat. you