The Armoured Fighter: Medieval Combat with Dr. Tobias Capwell & Matt Easton

Today we're going to be looking at the Armoured Fighter, an amazing event coming up really soon and also talking a little bit about armoured fighting in HEMA with my very special guest today Toby Capwell. Here I am everybody. So hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar of Gladiator and my special guest today is Dr Tobias Capwell who has joined me because we're both involved with an event that's coming up in a month's time which we're going to talk a bit about here but we're also going to talk about armoured fighting a little bit in general as well which might provoke questions from you guys that we could address in future videos. But first up, so Toby, what are you doing here today? What is the Armoured Fighter event? The Armoured Fighter is basically an annual clinic, seminar, workshop, whatever you want to call it. It's a chance for people who want to fight and train in full plate armour to do it really in what you might call the off-season. There's a lot of living history events and competition and things like that that run from you know really sort of Easter to October and nobody has trouble finding things to do but I was aware for a while that in the winter I still wanted to train, I still wanted to be getting in my armour and keeping myself fit and everything and getting together with people and talking about what we're going to do next year and I just felt like we needed some events in this country that kept people who are interested in this sort of thing going through the off-season really. Absolutely, yeah. So for anyone who doesn't know, Dr Tobias Kappel is an arms and armour curator, he's an author, he's written tons of books on arms and armour. If you just type his name into Google you'll find all of the things, many things over the years that he's been been working on and also he is a jouster and is involved in sort of the competitive jousting scene, a little bit of reenactment and also the HEMA scene as well. I'm sure most of you watching this channel know who I am but I'm essentially primarily an unarmoured HEMA instructor but I dabble in the world of HEMA, in armoured HEMA as well. So I own some armour, not as good as Toby's but we'll talk a bit about armour in a second. So you know there are lots of different people who own armour, who have these overlapping hobbies and interests and want to get together and use it. So just briefly before we go into that, can you just tell us briefly about how did the Armoured Fighter event start, who do you run it with and where does it happen and how can people watching get involved in it? Right, yeah the whole idea was really growing out of conversations that I'd had with my longtime friend and collaborator Dominic Sewell, who is the UK's foremost classical riding master. He and I have been jousting together for nearly 25 years. The two of us rode at the head of the reburial procession for Richard III in 2015. We've just been doing all kinds of things together for a long time. For years we were on the same jousting team and we competed in team jousts all over the world. We just work together and we have a similar attitude towards mounted combat, fighting on foot in armour, all the sorts of things we do. Dom runs Historic Equitation, which is his riding school near Kettering in Northamptonshire. We're always thinking of what else can we be doing and what other angles are there for our work. In 2018 I think it was, it might have been 2019, it was right before COVID regardless, I attended an Armoured Fighting HEMA workshop in Germany, the Harnischfechten Seminar in Lauproden in Thuringia, that's run by Arne Kutz, which lots of people probably already know, lots of people already know. I went to that and I had never been to anything like that. For like 20 years I had been focusing mainly on fighting on horseback, fighting in tournaments and jousts and things like that, but I'd started to get back into more martial arts combat on foot. Arne said, look, you gotta come to this. I do what I'm told, so I went. It was just a revelation. I had never seen 40 guys in really good German Gothic armour all there with their axes ready to go. It was just like, where has this been all my life? I have a certain prominence in this community, but I'm not omnipresent or anything. I don't know everything about everything that's going on and there's lots of stuff I've never seen. I just thought this is so amazing. It was like a whole new world opened up to me and I wanted more. I've gone back to the Harnisch-Wechten seminar since, of course, and done some other things with Arne more recently. We got a lot of work on together this year, but I thought this is what the UK needs. The UK needs a Harnisch-Wechten seminar. Then I went back to conversations with Dom and we talked some more about it and he said, look, we've got this riding school, the beautiful indoor riding school, that can be used for other things besides riding. It's a great indoor training arena where you can get 40 or 60 people in full plate armour and let them go. It's got a safe surface to fall in and it doesn't matter what the weather is. It just seemed great. It's like a confluence of all sorts of things that make something happen. Independently, Dom and I had also been thinking, what else can we do to encourage people and support people who are getting into mounted combat? Because riding a horse is one challenge, but then riding a horse in armour brings all sorts of other challenges that you can get better at it faster if you've got people who are experienced in pointing out some basics to you. Get the right saddle. Make sure the saddle not only fits the horse, but fits the armour and fits you. It's a whole system that has to work together. That sounds obvious, but it's not necessarily self-evident. We had this separate idea to run something called the Armoured Rider, which is all about supporting people who want to get into this and also just plain old armour coaching. People come in with their armour and they say, I'm having this problem or having that problem. I don't know what to do about this. We can look at that and help people with their armours. Also, I'm always keen to always be working both practically and academically. Traditional academic scholarship has so much it can offer practical work and vice versa. So I thought, okay, even in a practical seminar like this, I can do some lectures. We can get other researchers in who are doing academic work on other things that are related to what practitioners are interested in. My friend Ninya has been building arming doublets and doing a lot of research on that. Let's talk about arming doublets. It shouldn't be an afterthought when you've got your armour already. Lots of stuff like that. The other thing was we wanted to start advocating other periods too. A lot of us are doing the 15th century and we want to keep that going and keep training in armour. But more of us are starting to get interested in the 13th century too. We wanted to say, hey, look, let's do the 13th century at a higher level. This is a newer area. We've got to do the research. Who's doing this anyway and how do we get everybody to talk to each other? There's cool people in Germany and the Netherlands and Italy and France and everywhere else doing this in isolation. Is there a role for our seminars too to just get people together? There's a lot of different threads that came together. Currently we run the Armoured Rider in the autumn. That's a mounted combat seminar. Then we run now the Armoured Fighter in the late winter, early spring. That was a response to the first Armoured Rider where we did it and then people said, great, but do you do something for people who don't ride? We thought, yeah, we should do that. A lot of these things happen at the time that's right for them to happen. I think this event has really come at a time in the evolution of lots of related activities, which in the past have been somewhat in silos and a little bit separate from each other. I think a lot of the time there were jousters, there were reenactors, there were HEMA people, and these were sometimes completely separate people. They sometimes overlapped, but sometimes they didn't interact that much. As time's gone by, HEMA's grown and got bigger. A lot of HEMA people have started to buy armour and started to want to do things in armour. A lot of jousters have started looking at foot combat side of things to create a more full tournament setting. I think a lot of reenactors, certainly since I was first involved in reenactment when I was a historical accuracy, the quality of the armour, the fact that a lot of reenactors are now looking at HEMA or doing HEMA as well, it's just all becoming a lot more linked up. I think it's really the right time for all of these armour-owning people to do things. Of course, as you say, there's the research side of things as well. People like you, obviously, armour research has come forward leaps and bounds. The research on the arming doublets, as you mentioned underneath, the clothing, obviously the fighting styles and stuff like that. A lot of different specialists coming together and communicating. I think it's a really great thing. Yeah, and it seems like, as you say, there's all these different communities doing similar related things, but sometimes in different ways. What I see happening is that in all those groups, there are people who have the same priorities with people in other groups, but they haven't encountered each other because they're in different spheres. I think a lot of this is also about finding people who have a shared ethic or some kind of shared approach or value to what they're doing. They're in different communities because of their different experience. They got introduced to it this way, they've been doing that, and they won't necessarily know that, hey, these people in this community should really talk to these people in that community. It's not that everything is for everyone. There's some people who just want to have nothing to do with that part of it and other people flow through it all. This kind of discourse, I hope, makes it more likely that people who are thinking about the things in similar ways can get together more easily. Yeah, so we're going to talk in a second about how people can get involved. There are some spaces left at the upcoming one and obviously there'll be future years ones as well. We'll talk about that in a second, but just briefly before we do, so what's going to be at this next one, which is coming up in March? Yeah, this is the third Armoured Fighter that we've had and the idea was every time, again, encouraging cross-fertilization and plurality and so forth, we invite different guest instructors to come in, both from the UK and from the continent. This year, it's being run by Matt Easton and Gavin Locke, of course, as well. Yeah, one of my right-hand men, yeah. So you're really the best person to tell us what's happening. Indeed, yeah. So that was a sort of loaded question because I knew it was going to come back to me. So, you know, in a nutshell, you can read, if you're interested in coming, you can read the programme outline. But in a nutshell, what we're trying to do this year, so the first year, I looked at Poleaxe and then we had David Rawlings from London Longsword Academy there as well looking at Poleaxe, so there was a focus on Poleaxe. In the second year, Arna, I think, predominantly looks at longsword. He did Poleaxe and longsword. Poleaxe and longsword, right. And the longsword was mainly half-swording techniques and things like that. Yeah. So this year, I thought, well, let's do something completely different. So I'm bringing in the kind of what I call forgotten weapons, so the things which often get overlooked, I think, in armoured fighting. So spears, wrestling, dagger, and also we're looking at mismatched weapons as well, because I think there's an over-focus sometimes on Poleaxe versus Poleaxe, longsword versus longsword. So we're going to look at some, you know, mismatched weapons. What do you do if you've only got a dagger left in your hand and your opponent has a spear or sword? What do you do if you've got a longsword and they've got a Poleaxe? Things like this. But then in addition to that, we're also going to look at some fundamentals to do with falling over and getting up, and we're also going to have some really fun games. We're going to do some spear sparring in armour, both individual and in groups. So we're going to have some melee games, which obviously is a nice crossover joining point between what we train in HEMA and what people might find useful for reenactment. And it's fun, you know, so we can actually get using our armour and donking each other with safe weapons and having some fun, and also some exercise. And, you know, Toby mentioned something really important, which is those of us who don't put our armour on that many times a year, I might run two HEMA classes a week, but I don't put my armour on very often. So I need to remember all of the little, you know, get used to it, get used to the different centre of gravity, build up my fitness levels. Gavin and I have started working on our cardio because over Christmas we got somewhat unfit. So yeah, all of those sorts of things you've got to think about fighting in armour and you get hot, you get out of breath and, you know, getting up off the floor is very different to when you're not wearing armour and things like this. So yeah, super useful. So there we go. So how can people, if people want to get involved, we're going to put some links down in the description down below, but fundamentally who should they contact if they want to get involved with this one or they want to follow the, you know, social media and see the pictures and where should they go? What should they do? Well, I post as and when on social media, on Instagram and Facebook about it when I move to think there's something about the next event that people need to know or might be interested in. Dom does as well on his Historic Equitation accounts and, or you can just email them. We'll provide, you know, the details. Just email Emily at Historic Equitation. She runs the registration and provides, you know, whatever information people need to know about accommodation locally and requirements and can I bring my three valets or whatever, you know. So yeah, you just get in touch with them. I mean, we have a pretty good sign up so far for the next event, but there are some spaces left. So, you know, if you think got to go to this, there's still time and you should get in touch with Historic Equitation. Yeah, and from my part, I should say, you know, it's a lovely riding center. It's a really nice location. It's quite rural and it's just a really nice way to spend a weekend hanging out with people who've got similar interests and lots to talk about and, you know, we have some lectures and some talks and it's just, it's very nice socially. Yeah, and it's a great area to see things as well. When we ran our last 13th century armored rider seminar, we walked down the hill to the local church in Sudbury, where they have a fabulous 13th century effigy of a knight there. We had a whole little mini session on that. The last armored rider one we did, we went, you know, just across the valley to Loic, where they have a fabulous early 15th century monument and a late 15th century one. So this is like, you know, we use everything that we've got at our disposal, really. Fantastic. Brilliant. Okay, before we wrap up, I've got a couple of questions I want to ask you because whenever I have you on the channel, people always want more, more, more. They want more, Toby. They want you to have your own channel. They want more TV programs and more books from you. I know you're being squeezed like a sponge to try to have people trying to get, but two questions. These are personal questions. Give us an update on your armor. I think you're sporting a different armor now than last time I saw you. Well, it's, I mean, you didn't see much armor from me the last time you were at the Armored Fighter because for the last couple of years it's been disassembled and being rebuilt and changed around and everything. So I've had an extended period of futzing around with it, but this year coming up, you know, just in March is like the first year in ages where I've got, you know, a fully functional armor that I'm, you know, that I'm going to get in and actually be able to participate in the proceedings. I'm looking, you know, forward to that. Since like, yeah, since 2018, I've been working on this Innsbruck armor project where, you know, one of my favorite armors of all time, which is in one of my favorite places in the world, is the armor of Gaudens von Match, who was a Tyrolean nobleman in the late, mid to late 15th century. He's famous as, you know, one of the generations of the Match family who owned the castle of Kerberg in what is now northern Italy. And, you know, that's like the Jerusalem for medieval armor lovers. It's this castle where all the armor survives, you know, since its time of use. And that armor has just always spoken to me. It's one of the earliest armors I can remember looking at books as a kid that really made an impact on me. And I've sort of, and I tried to, I tried to reconstruct it or I took some inspiration from it when I built my second armor back in the late 90s. I didn't really know what I was doing back then and I, you know, I lost track of it. But then I've, over time, I've built like seven other armors and then I've come back to it and I'm working on it again. It's an extraordinary armor because it's, we know who it was made by. We know who it was made for. It's still in the original owner's house and all of the pieces are, you know, that are there on the armor are there for the same armor. It's totally homogeneous as it was worn by its original owner. It's covered in battle damage. Gaudenz was the commander of the Imperial Army at the Battle of Caliano when Archduke Sigismund was fighting the Venetians. And that's also the famous battle where Roberto de Sanseverino, the Venetian commander, was shot, stabbed and drowned to death. And parts of his armor are now in Vienna. But Gaudenz's armor as it is now has the helmet, cuirass, legs and shoulders, but there's some pieces missing, you know, obviously the arms and the gauntlets. And that's always tantalizing to me when you have solid evidence, but then there are questions, there are missing pieces that you need to find answers to. And Innsbruck armor, the armor making center of Innsbruck is hugely important in the 16th century because that's where Maximilian founded his court workshop in the early 16th century. But the early history of Innsbruck from like the 1460s through to about 1490 is lesser known, but very interesting to me. And they have a unique style that doesn't look like other German armor. It's very organic, very, very anatomically pure. It tries to follow the human anatomy without mechanizing it too much, without introducing artificial mechanisms that don't exist on the human body. And visually as an artwork too, they want to avoid artificial breaks in the body that don't exist. You know, when you have like, you know, you have a separate gauntlet, there's a hard break visually in the middle of your forearm where the gauntlet stops and the armor begins. And that's not what the human body looks like. So Innsbruck armors are trying to find interesting ways of getting rid of that mechanizing of the human body and get back to something kind of purer. And, you know, it's very, it's very much in line with Italian humanism and Italian Renaissance thought. And the Treitz family who, the workshop that built Gaudenza's armor may have come from Italy. They may have been, they may have come from Trezzo near Milan and then, and then gone to Innsbruck to build new clients and find new work. You know, who knows? So I then, I then started with, you know, building Gaudenza's armor as I thought it might have been when it was new. But then I started to see, I learned more about what was going on in Innsbruck at, in the 1480s. And I thought, well, they, they could be building this as well. And they could be building that. And they came up with that. And they, then they went on to build this. And I realized that like, we're familiar with, we're familiar with garnitures in the 16th century. Armors that come with all these extra pieces that match. So you can put a different helmet on for heavy jousting, or you can put a different shoulders on for foot combat, or you can put different leg pieces on for infantry fighting or, you know, whatever. That's that we think of that as a 16th century phenomenon. But what I realized was all the thinking, all the technological development and the thought about more highly specialized armor for particular kinds of fighting, all of that was happening in Innsbruck in the 1480s. And I thought, you know, I can actually use this armor to project to explore that and build a kind of proto-garniture to show how all of the technological development was in place. And then, you know, learn more about how our garnitures really came into being in the 16th century. Super cool. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. And I saw bits of it, I think, before. And the mail. Have you still got gold mail? I've still got gold mail. I'm stuck with that now. But I like it. And so, yeah, I've still got a number of commissions going of new parts of this armor that are still coming in. I'm doing a big joust in Switzerland later in the year, which requires a jousting helm. So I need to figure out a way of integrating that into the armor, looking at Innsbruck jousting helms, the 1480s. And, you know, what is the most appropriate thing for this armor? There's another salad. There are ultimately three pairs of gauntlets and an armet as well. So there's a lot going on. And it won't be finished this year, but there will be a new form of it that I'll be, a couple of different forms of it that I'll be using this year. Well, it's great to always have new projects to get into and get excited about, isn't it? It keeps us getting up in the morning, I think. And so finally, sort of on that topic, what other projects have you got upcoming? Are you writing? Are you lecturing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I left the Wallace Collection a year ago, so I've been a master of my own ship for just over a year now. There's been a lot of lecturing, both live lecturing and online. I've been running an online course for the Victoria and Albert Museum. I'm doing some work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a bit of work for the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the former Higgins Collection. And I was writing one book. I had moved the one book from my back burners onto my front burner. And then I realized that wasn't making a lot of difference and was taking up too much time for the amount of progress I was making. So I put that one on the back burner, but I'm keeping it bubbling away. And then I've got another book that I'm starting to work on now. For a while, though, and one of my main projects is the revised and expanded edition of Claude Blair's European Armor, the seminal reference work that was published in 1958. And Claude had always intended to do a revised second edition. He was aware of how fast in the second half of the 20th century armor scholarship was developing. But he didn't get around to it in the 1960s. He didn't get around to it in the 1970s or 80s or 90s. And he called me up in about 2008 or 9 and said, look, I'm never going to get to this. Why don't you do it? So I took that on board. But then I was working. I had a lot of other things going on, and I was slaving away on the English Knight, Armor of the English Knight project. So I did some work on it initially in 2009-10, but then I had to put it away for a while. And now I've come back to it. And over the last year, I've been working really hard on it. But it's a profoundly time-consuming and difficult project that really requires extended periods of really focused attention. And so it's tough. I mean, it's like the scholarly version of Urban Warfare, this book, basically, because it contains so much dense information. This is the earliest reference we have to a movable visor. This is the earliest reference that we have to plate body armor. This is the earliest reference. This is the earliest depiction of this. And you have to go through and ask yourself every sentence, every paragraph, is this still true? Who's done more work on this? Oh, Stewart did an exhibition about this. Oh, Ralph's done a load of research on that. And you've got to take 75 years, basically, of new research and figure out how to integrate it into Claude's book without losing his voice and his structure and his presence. Because I don't want it to be European armor by Toby. I want it to be European armor by Claude, revised and expanded and worked on a bit by Toby. That's an important distinction. I mean, it's like you say, I mean, I've got a few books on that I've been working on for years. And the problem is, the longer you take, the more material comes to light. And one of my books was almost ready to publish. And then some new source material came along that was incredibly important to that. And basically, the whole thing needed to be pulled apart and reconstructed. So it's really difficult. It is tough. So I'm working on that, but I have enough data now on how it's going and what my progress rate is, having worked on it pretty hard for a year, to know that I can't just keep working on that full time. Because it'll just take away from too many other things I want to do that have short-term virtues and benefits. And just places I want to go and things I want to do while I'm still capable of doing it. I have another book on chivalry and knighthood that I want to write that's for a more general audience. And there's other things one wants to do. But European armor is very important to me. So I'll say it's on the back burner, but I've turned the heat up to max on the back burner with that project now, instead of having it sitting in the refrigerator, if you'll go with me that far with the kitchen metaphor. Well, that's fantastic. And I'm sure that there are thousands of people watching who are waiting with bated breath for your next publication, whichever one that should be, but certainly an updated Claude Blaise European armor, which I have a first edition of here. So viewers, first of all, about the event, the Armored Fighter, that's only in a month. But whether you want to come or whether you want to follow it on socials or whatever, all of the links are down below in the description. It's been great having Toby on the channel again. It's been too long actually, and we need to rectify that. If you're commenting underneath this video and you're a fan of the previous videos we've done in the past, both at the Wallace Collection, but also we've done ones at churches and things like that as well. We've been talking about doing some future collaborations. Are there particular things you would like to see Toby talking about? Are there things you'd like to see us talking about together? Places you'd like us to go? The ideas are always useful. So if you get posting down in the comments, check out those links. Toby, thanks for coming onto the channel. Thanks for having me. I will see you in a month in armor and out of armor. I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you, Toby. Thanks for watching. Check out those links and we'll see you soon. Cheers, folks.