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Historical HEMA Tournaments and Deeds of Arms

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Sir Edward:
(BTW, I went ahead and split/merged topics)

Based on what I've seen (and to some degree participated in, such as at WMAW), it really comes down to the participants fighting safely. That is, controlled, without too much power, and not intentionally thrusting into the eye slots. Some people use perf-plate or mesh inside the eye slots, but that seems to be in the minority. When they go for throws or general wrestling, they ease the other person to the ground, since the fall can really hurt. Safety matters more than winning.

So far with our demos, we have a lot of participants who haven't been doing Harnessfechten very much outside of the demos themselves, and admittedly we can ramp up the power at times. Also, when you can barely see your opponent, the armored fights can feel very chaotic. So at this point, we've favored "definitely won't go through the eye slot" over other considerations. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way, or that it's a perfect solution by any means.

At VAF, we did it with steel as well, but it was relatively slow and controlled, didn't have mordschlags for the most part, and focused more on point control. We were able to do it with visors open if we needed to.

Historically speaking, the visors weren't always used in foot combat. The manuscripts do show them used in duels, but there's also reasonable evidence that they were favored more for horseback, and dropping down to on-foot often meant raising the visor, or discarding the helmet, so you could actually see your opponent.

This of course is a problem we face in all aspects of WMA/HEMA-- There is no way to have a 100% perfect simulation, because we aren't killing each other with sharps. Any training weapon, any rule set, and any safety consideration will always introduce artifacts. It becomes an exercise in choosing which compromises are acceptable and which are not.

Sir Edward:
As an aside, on Sunday we tried a new rule-set that limited each fighter to only one point-earning mordschlag per bout. My wife and I came up with that idea, because I felt we were becoming too reliant on using the sword like a hammer, when in a real armored duel, the mordschlag is really more of a distraction than a fight-ender. It can really ring your bell, and if done really well, could smash the crap out of a helmet, but that's no guarantee. If you really want to "kill him to death", you still need to work on point control, wrestling to the ground, and so on. So while the mordschlags were super effective in our previous rules, I started to see our heavy use of it as taking away from the art.

As an analogy, it started to look like "saber" in sport fencing. That is, two guys walk in, and it's just a matter of who can hit the other guy on the head first.

Sir Martyn:
I'm up for giving this a try for sure, but agree it would also be better/safer if could practice and test out, etc in controlled conditions before doing it in front of a crowd.

Ian:
I think people just gets caught up in the fallacy that steel is dangerous because it's made out of metal and therefore must be more dangerous than wood...

There is of course the component to this that historical eyeslots are VERY NARROW.  Modern reproductions tend to favor ridiculously wide eyeslots because of the SCA's rattan rules.  The odds of a sword tip going in to a historically shaped eyeslot complete with forward projections like historical helmets have, is exceedingly low. 

Now if you take eyes out of the equation you're left with a weapon that behaves like a real sword so proper techniques and binds work a lot better, and you're left with a tool that flexes when thrusted and struck with.  I think those things make steel safer than wood.

It doesn't seem like it would be difficult to place a rule that says no thrusting to the face.  No one wants a thrust to the face with a wooden waster because it doesn't give AT ALL when it impacts, so it's already a risk of injury.  It's far more likely that you'd be injured by a wooden waster thrust to the face than have the sword point perfectly align with the opening of an eyeslot at the perfect angle when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars so that it will penetrate and go in.  That's why the whole eye thing to me isn't a good enough reason.  It would seem the benefits of steel outweigh the risks when compared to wooden wasters.

Sir William:
Whatever happened to the Laurin tournament.  Was hoping to go and witness it one day when I discovered it was actually a real thing back in 2011.

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