Sean Manning wrote: |
The source nobody seems very interested in is the 16th and 17th century Italian rotella material which deals with a strapped shield about 60 cm in diameter used together with sword, partisan, or two partisans. There isn't a huge amount of it, and it feels quite different from what little we know of the long prehistory of European martial arts. The sources have trouble describing shield position and shield actions, they are arts which teach a shield rather than arts which are built around a shield, so you would have to spend a long time studying Manciolino and di Grassi and Capo Ferro only to learn something which probably isn't the same as how people before 1400 used a shield. |
Agippa also has a small section on the use of shield and strapped shield and Thibault has a chapter on how to defeat a sword and shield neither which I have studied. I am curious if the Spanish Esgrima Vulgar has anything to say on shield use.
I don't think we know how people used their shields pre 1400 but there may be echoes of the earlier use in the later written material. I don't think the post Agrippa Italian material is the best source because i expect i underwent the some reductive analyses that produced rapier play and in doing so lost a lot. Of course that is just speculation on my part.
mackenzie