The Gunner's Blog

This is the third time I have taken up the matter of Burton's New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry . Here is my first article about it, a book review, not altogether favorable. http://shootery.blogspot.com/2013/07/simplified-swordsmanship-burtons-new.html Second I examined some good aspects of his system and modified them slightly, to better suit my own tastes.   http://shootery.blogspot.com/2013/07/improving-upon-burtons-saber-method.html Now I am going to consider Burton's method of attacking the opponent's sword hand, wrist and forearm. It is the flower of his system. Indeed, the whole system makes little sense without manchette attacks as its focus and best purpose. Continuing what I started in my second article, I am going to propose some changes that I take to be improvements. I think Burton's manchette method as he wrote it down is hampered by certain technical inconsistencies within it and by the terse and in places opaque explanations he gave. But I...

I previously critiqued Sir Richard Francis Burton's A New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry . In that posting you can find links to his book, free online and in print for money. There is much that I do not like about Burton's system, but some parts of it stand out as meriting further attention and the honest form of flattery, imitation. I here offer what I think are improvements to the method Burton published back in 1876. Burton wanted to scrap the old and well-proven method of teaching soldiers to use their sabers, in favor of something quite different. The sturdy old system of five parries (or a few more) did everything that was asked of it, for as long as men wore sabers, cutlasses and hanger swords. It is still in use in today's sport of saber fencing. This fine old method, which Burton sought to replace, is good because it is defensively oriented. The parries are the main things; it is then a matter of discovering practical ripostes from these very secure pa...

Sir Richard Burton (not the actor, the other one) was hardly the first man to discover something clever and mistake it for something profound, and surely not the last.  So then we need not blame him very much, but would be better and more charitably advised to learn from his mistakes. When closely analyzed, his "semi-moulinet" technique, which forms the heart of his saber system, consists of a clever flip of the wrist, allowing whiplike snap cuts to be made promptly from any parry, and a parry to be made at once, following any cut. There are some advantages that are worth knowing about in this scheme, but the method brings along with it some difficulties and disadvantages that Burton does not fully acknowledge. Burton's cuts. Cuts 1 and 2 are the same as 3 through 10, except for their height. The   New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry ,* published in 1876, radically simplifies the foundation of saber fencing, reducing it to just two guards and what amounts to...