The disappearance and the return of the cutting rose

From Pepper’s manual of 1797, showing six cuts only, dropping the vertical line, as does Taylor.

With the more thrusting oriented use of the later Renaissance civilian rapier and smallsword etc, the cutting diagram naturally becomes less relevant and we don’t see it much in the treatises. However, the mental image of this diagram we instead see transformed and expanded into application of footwork for rapier in many sources, primarily Italian and Spanish, but also in the Lowlands as in Delineatio Lvdi Pvblici Gladiatorii Vrbis et Academiae Lvgdvnensis Apvd Batavos, by Jan Cornelisz, dated to 1610, depicting fencers at the University of Leiden, where mathematician and fencing master Ludvig van Ceulen taught, and of course again in the works of Gérard Thibault d’Anvers (1628).

However, as a tool for learning cutting drills we see it return again in the cutting oriented military fencing, for example in John Gaspard le Marchant’s ‘Broadsword Exercise’ of and W. Pepper’s ‘An abridgement of the new Broadsword Exercise’ both of 1797, John Taylor’s ‘The Art of Defence on Foot with the Broad Sword and Sabre’ of 1798 and continued with Antonio de Brea’s ‘Principios universales y reglas generales de la verdadera destreza’ of 1805, The Artillerist of 1821, ‘Cavalry Exercise’ of 1824, Alfred Hutton’s ‘Cold Steel’ of 1889 and Allanson-Winn & C. Phillips-Wolley’s manual on Quarterstaff, broadsword, single-stick of 1898.

Categorizing cuts

However, this is only one of several possible ways of grouping cuts together, a topic we will look closer at shortly. For example we can group them according to:

• Cutting Angle

• Blade Angle

• Tactical Function

So what defines the cuts when we categorize them according to these groups and what are the further implications of these groupings? Returning to the first, we have…

Cutting Angle

From Meyer’s von Solms treatise

This is the simplest possible grouping, where we look at the directions of the cut, although note that we are not talking about where to place or target the cut, only at what relative angle to the opponent the weapon moves. All cuts will follow these lines although at different heights and angles relative to the opponent’s body, limbs and weapon.

Examples of this categorization would be defining the cuts as cutting along the Ober (Upper), Unter (Under), Zwerch/Mittel (Across/Middle), Scheitel (Scalp/Vertical) and Zorn (Wrath/Diagonal) lines, marked in the diagram on the right and shown in the image below as well.

 

From Meyer’s 1570 treatise

This diagram is taught both for the longsword, the dussack and rapier, but is also used “in spirit” with the dagger and polearms. Meyer uses it to describe how you use the cuts and cut from one guard to another.

As he describes it:

… it will behoove you to pay good attention to how these guards follow from one another, which I will briefly explain with cutting through the lines or routes.

Firstly when you execute the High or Scalp Cut, you find three postures: for in the beginning you lie in the Day, in the middle in the Longpoint, at the end in the Fool; thus in the straight line down from above from A to E you have three guards or postures… (2)

He then continues to describe the transformation of all guards via the cuts, using the letters to describe the cuts and their directions (upwards/downwards, left/right).

However, although this is the common and most basic way of describing the cuts, it doesn’t give us all the characteristics of the cut, thus a need for further division.

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