German Longsword Fencing

Did a little research the other night on German Long Sword Fencing. For a while, I always suspected that medieval Europe had its own martial arts for their weaponry. Unfortunately, with the over-romanticization of Far Eastern martial arts and the over-deification of the Samurai, the European style of long sword fighting kinda got lost in the mix. When I first saw these videos, I was really impressed by how enormously practical and efficient the German style is compared to how most would imagine the fighting style of medieval knights. To many, they would tend to quickly stereotype knights as being clumsy, crude, and barbaric when it comes to sword play. But as you can all see from the videos below--that wasn't the case at all.



In the second video notice the variety of grabs that they use. In other videos that I've seen, they also have a variety of "take-down" moves that they use to bring down an opponent during a sword-fight.