Raglan Fair took place at Raglan Castle in the shire of Mynydd Gwyn (Wales) in the beginning of August. It is the Principality's major event with ten days of camping around a ruined castle, which is our playground for the event. Unfortunately, this time, on the last Friday the event steward made an informed and likely correct call to close the event early and advise those who could to leave due to some very bad weather rolling in. I, in the meantime, had allocated the first part of the event for non-fighting activities I enjoy: cooking, sewing, and camp life, and had intended to devote the second half of the event to fighting. As it was, I got only two days of actual fighting and four pretty intensive sessions of unarmoured training in.
Wednesday: I sponsored several tourneys during this Raglan. One of them I called the Path of Chivalry, which was adapted from the concept of Tournament of Chivalry from Double Wars in the Principality of Nordmark, which is less of a tournament and more of a large practice with knights. In the end, only two knights out of our very small chivalric population were available on the day, so the King, who was ill, was substituted by two of his squires, me and my brother. The tenans were arranged in different spots of the castle, where challengers could come fight them for feedback, circling between the locations on the evolving Path.
In the afternoon, I participated in small melees to amuse Her Highness the Princess, which was great fun.
Thursday: In the morning, I took part in the Principality Protectors Tournament, which is an hour-long bearpit and one of my favourite tourneys. There's always a great, relaxed atmosphere, despite the victory of the tourney being prestigious. In the late evening, my very favourite tournament took place: torchlight Pas d'Armes, where tenans with closed face helms fight challengers in the castle courtyard lit by (gas) torches. This time, the misfortune that was the second weekend's bad weather already started on Thursday evening, so we all got soaked to the bone and eventually the King ended the tournament early. Usually I have fought this tourney as a tenans, but during the past year I sold my closed face helm due to being broke, so this year I was fighting as one of the challengers. As the conditions deteriorated, my invisible marshal hat sank deeper and deeper in my head, and I found it difficult to simply enjoy the fighting without being distracted by safety conditions.
Analysis: I am reasonably happy with how I fought overall, although realistically I was only just about getting warmed up. The Protectors went the best of the lot - I think I got six points out of it. I had spent the two months previously basically practicing footwork out of armour, with very little else, and it seems to have borne fruit in that my footwork was better, even if still not great, and my power generation had improved considerably. As an important progress and success marker, I killed someone on their knees exactly the way Duke Gerhardt taught me at Double Wars. However, I need to keep working further on the footwork and start properly applying weight shifts to change angles and keep adding power. I also wasn't paying attention to range sufficiently well, ending up too close a lot, and failing to take much advantage of sideways and diagonal movement. I think what is happening at the moment is that I hold myself back too much, in an attempt to retain control of myself, my equipment and the fight, but by doing that I'm blocking my own natural flow. For much of the summer, I have felt like I have been right on the threshold of cracking the next level of movement and controlling the space of the fight, and I had had hopes that I could actually crack it Raglan. It was not yet to be.
I do seem to have got over the idea that I still need to desperately prove myself to other fighters, though. I felt much less need to fight on every single opportunity to demonstrate keenness, as I would have had in the past, even when there was something else on at the same time that I very much wanted to do. It seems that I am now pretty confident that other fighters know where I'm at, and I am comfortable with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment