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| "walking stick" by nicolas.boullosa is licensed under CC BY 2.0 |
I was chatting with a martial arts instructor the other day when he mentioned that most martial arts schools involved using a sword at some point in their history because they came out of a time when everyone carried swords. It was a simple observation, but it got me thinking.
Well, I suppose it's true enough that everyone who was of the right class to study martial arts was probably also in the right class to carry a sword around. As a fencer,1 I'm well aware that a) swords are cool, and b) traditional swordsports are traditionally for rich people. In this day and age you can borrow equipment from the club, so you don't have to be rich to participate in swordsports (but being at least middle-class helps - especially if you want to buy your own gear), but you can still tell that sports like fencing came from the likes of the idle rich.
Working class people would never wear white clothing for a vigorous physical activity. They know what it's like to do laundry. Plus everything costs money. You can't make any part of it yourself in your shed, you have to pay some skilled craftsperson to make it for you.
Now, I come from a long line of fishermen and farmers.2 My ancestors did not carry a sword around - even when it was that time in history when people did carry swords around. A working man hasn't got the time or inclination to carry around a heavy chunk of metal that doesn't do anything useful apart from defending your honour.
No siree. Fishermen and farmers would be carrying around a knife and a stick. A knife is one of the most useful things on the planet, and you can use it to defend your honour as well if push came to shove. Same with a stick - a good stick is worth it's weight in gold. You can do a lot with a stick. Swords on the other hand? Pfft! They're the wrong shape and size for almost anything you'd want to do except fight.
In times of war, the working folk might need a sword, but (especially in Europe) they'd probably have a short sword (really just a big knife) because they spend their days working, and haven't had time to learn how to use one of those big swords with any kind of efficiency. Most likely, they'd get an axe, a spear or a pike to play with - much closer to tools they've actually spent time with.
But really, for the vast majority of people throughout history, you were better off learning how to fight with a knife and a stick. Or, perhaps, learning how to defend yourself with a knife and a stick, or defend yourself from someone trying to attack you with a knife or a stick.
And it's interesting to note that in modern days you will probably never be attacked by someone with a sword (unless they're a meth head with a decorative katana set that they've stolen from the last house they broke into), but people do still go around threatening other people with knives. I'm telling you, knives are just more useful than swords all round.
I know a number of martial arts have working with staffs and disarming people with knifes as part of their programmes, and I'd like to know a bit more about that. But what I really want to know is why this sort of thing doesn't seem to have come up in Europe? Why isn't there an ancient tradition of elegant and efficient fighting techniques that involve using your stick to disarm someone carrying a knife that has risen out of thousands of years of peasant farmers carrying sticks around while brigands and vagabonds ran about with knives, robbing people on their way to market?
Is it just that it would have been a peasant art and therefore not considered worth perpetuating? Is it because fishermen and farmers were too damn busy working and didn't have time to come up with an elegant and efficient way to fight and defend themselves?3 Or is it because Europeans just didn't have that same kind of elegance and efficiency that you see in a lot of the Eastern arts in general?
1. I'm going to keep calling myself that, even though I don't currently fence, until I completely give up on the idea of going back to fencing
2. Actually, I come from a long line of women (from fishing and farming communities), and they definitely weren't carrying swords. Knifes and sticks? Probably. Knives and sticks are very useful, and these women worked.
3. Probably.
4. I somehow managed to write this entire post using the word "knifes" instead of "knives". I don't know why. I think I caught them all and fixed them.
