Welcome to The School of Arms and Armour

Welcome to The school of Arms and Armour, You’re about to embark on an exciting adventure in which you will learn the arts of combat as they were practiced by real medieval knights and recorded in medieval books. The first thing you’ll have to learn, however, is to throw away all the things Hollywood and popular literature have taught you about medieval combat and get ready to see an art like nothing you’ve been led to expect.

The School of Arms and Armour teaches the art of foot combat appropriate for a medieval European knight. Why resurrect these lost arts in the 21st century? Each student must answer that question for himself, but many of us have a real fascination for the Middle Ages and the knights who lived in that violent and bloody time. Martial arts in general give a focus and discipline to our lives, and medieval martial arts give us a connection to that culture, so combining those two things can be extremely satisfying.

Our purpose is to learn what medieval combat was really like and gain some insight into how it was performed. In a way, we are like modern craftsmen who learn to recreate medieval crafts such as calligraphy, armour making, or cooking: we want to recreate a medieval art as accurately as possible in order to understand it. 

There were two main schools of combat in our period, the German and the Italian. While there are some gross similarities between the two schools, there are major differences of philosophy and approach. We have chosen to limit our curriculum to only one, and for a variety of technical reasons we have chosen the German school. Thus, the focus for The School of Arms and Armour is German Fechtbücher, or “fight books,” from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.