#dussack

A beautifully wrought and etched Dussack commissioned by the Electress Anna of Saxony for her husband August, attributed to Ulrich Jahn,

OaL: 37.1 in/94.2 cm

Blade Length: 31.1 in/79 cm

Weight: 3.5 lbs/1604 g

"The Historical Fencing Channel is an organization that disparate historical fencing groups come together and, through agreement, to collectively validate and recognize the efforts of their individual members. In doing so a "common ground" and sense of community is created within, through which ideas, methods, and knowledge may be shared in order to promote the growth of both groups and their members beyond what would otherwise be separately achievable. This Channel is a common ground for members to submit videos of their interpretations, to create a library of techniques from differing groups"

More specifically we can see Adam Franti of the Lansing Longsword Guild in all the videos of this playlist - covering a lot of the basic strikes, guards and concepts of Meyer Dussack(effectively a form of medieval/renaissance central-european saber that usually had a (semi)complex hilt but was often practiced with leather and wooden practice weapons with simpler guards).

On that note here’s a masterpost of sorts of Meyer content on this blog

You may also remember Adam from the earlier methodology and murderhobos posts.

The provoker-taker-hitter tactical concept and its uses are quite relevant to dussack as a weapon.

You may also enjoy this general one-handed sword according to Meyer video as well

(and keep in mind the dussack is used by Meyer within his 1571 book as a basis for all one-handed weapons).

As well as these videos on how to apply the Meyer square to a dussack, and some other dussack-handling drills.

Lastly you might find the dussack tag of the blog relevant too.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the following links:

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Some advice on how to start studying the sources generally can be found in these older posts

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Remember to check out  A Guide to Starting a Liberation Martial Arts Gym as it may help with your own club/gym/dojo/school culture and approach.Check out their curriculum too.

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Fear is the Mind Killer: How to Build a Training Culture that Fosters Strength and Resilience by   Kajetan Sadowski   may be relevant as well.

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“How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills”  by Rob Gray  as well as this post that goes over the basics of his constraints lead, ecological approach.

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Another useful book to check out is  The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts (while about HEMA, a lot of it is applicable to other historical martial arts clubs dealing with research and recreation of old fighting systems).

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Trauma informed coaching and why it matters

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Look at the previous posts in relation to running and cardio to learn how that relates to historical fencing.

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Why having a systematic approach to training can be beneficial

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Why we may not want one attack 10 000 times, nor 10 000 attacks done once, but a third option.

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How consent and opting in function and why it matters.

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More on tactics in fencing

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Types of fencers

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Open vs closed skills

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The three primary factors to safety within historical fencing

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Worth checking out are this blogs tags on pedagogy and teaching for other related useful posts.

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And if you train any weapon based form of historical fencing check out the ‘HEMA game archive’ where you can find a plethora of different drills, focused sparring and game options to use for effective, useful and fun training.

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Check out the cool hemabookshelf facsimile project.

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For more on how to use youtube content for learning historical fencing I suggest checking out these older posts on the concept of video study of sparring and tournament footage.

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The provoker-taker-hitter tactical concept and its uses

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Approaches to goals and methodology in historical fencing

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A short article on why learning about other sports and activities can benefit folks in combat sports

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They are described as a pair of short, practical, plain looking, curved blade weapons.

As a swordfighting buff I've personally narrowed it down to three equally tantilizing options that are not "just machetes"

Kukri, a sort of long knife from Mongolia. I have zero historical context on who uses them and how they use them, this was the first weapon it sprung to my mind because of bloody One Piece. When I was eleven or something I saw on tv the anime episode with some guy double wielding kukri and that was my first exposure to them, so in my mind they can be double wield.

Look at this doofus I don't even like One Piece

Butterfly swords, used in wing chun and other chinese martial arts, always in pair. Not that I ever practiced any wing chun, to my understanting, watching katas, you can use both weapons at once to block and both weapons at once to strike, creating a flurry of perfectly coordinated slashes. For you to decide if this would count to be a "grease fire" style of fighting. Maybe, to the Nine Houses Cavaliers, used to a rapier-and-offhand system, in which you mantain control of your opponent's blade with one weapon and go for a opening with the other, Cam going loud would seem extremely daring.

Dussack, babyyyyy! The european short, single edged, curved bladed weapon in my heart. To my understanding it is also an umbrella term in german for any weapon with those characteristics, like a pirate's curiass, but I am talking about the late medieval-early reinassance. They came in two form factors:

Preppy swordies with complex hilts

The lockjaw hazard

I can't decide which version I like more for Cam to wield. The complex hilted one are much more in line with the Houses rapier aesthetics, on the other hand the "just a single retorted steel piece with some taping as a handle" fits in with the scrappiness of the Sixth and the fierceness of the "gease fire".

In conclusion

Hello Peter, I’ve been following you for like six years or something at this point and though I’m not on tumble much anymore, I still enjoy your content 😊 and today, I was glad I still remember you because I feel like you would be the perfect person to ask about these things I’ve seen in the park today. We were guessing that it’s some kind of like old timey weapons but they seem very impractical and honestly I don’t even have the words to google them. Could you help out a curious mind? 😊 best regards from Germany! Caroline

TL;DR - the answer to the original question ends with the first photo.

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Bestens Grüße aus Irland rechts zurück, und ich bin gerne behilflich sein!

They’re a practice weapon called a dusack (various spellings) for teaching how to use short cutting weapons. They were also used for exhibition combats fought to first blood between rival fencing schools, to show off who was best and attract more pupils. These combats were also about winning money, a bit like the prizefights of English swordsmen like James Figg.

The ones in your photo look like these, made by Purpleheart Armoury.

Dussacke were made of wood, leather or a combination of the two, but few (AFAIK no) historical examples have survived since a broken dussack went the same way as a broken bow, broken spear or axe: into the firewood-box. However there are any number of modern repros to take their place.

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Nobody’s quite sure of the dussack’s origins; it may have started as just a cheaper, safer training version of existing short cutty choppy sidearms - Messer, Bauernwehr, falchion and so on - but it (or at least its training version) may also have begun as an agricultural tool.

One candidate is a flax-scutching knife, used for processing hemp and linen all over Europe. Scutching involves beating away rotted outer stalks to free the eventually-cloth fibres inside and a metal knife was too severe, so scutching knives were made of wood.

Here’s one, with more at this Google Image link. There’s a definite dussack look to them.

Here are illustrations from ”Kunst des Fechtens”, a 1570 fight manual by Joachim Meyer which may (there were others) be what the two people in the park were working from.

And here’s a handsome photograph from a seminar hosted by Cork Blademasters a few years ago.

As I mentioned, the dussack was a safe practice version of a real weapon. Those ranged from simple barenaked bladies (cough) which might or might not have had a leather wrapping to cushion the grip...

...right through to elaborately hilted swords (German Düsagge, Bohemian tesak, Scandinavian tessack, Sinclair sabre, cutlass and so on) like these...

PIRATE SWORDS! What types of swords did PIRATES use?