George Silver Fencing
The English fencing teaching of 1599, set against the fashion for the rapier. Its core is Silver's doctrine of four true and four false times of the blow.
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About George Silver Fencing
George Silver was an English gentleman and the author of Paradoxes of Defence (1599), in which he set himself against the Italian fencing masters working in London and against the fashion for the rapier. His argument was not patriotic but technical: the rapier, he held, is too long to parry and strike safely with, and it forces the fencer to stand at a distance where chance decides. Against it he sets the English short sword and backsword. Silver's teaching rests on the idea of time. He distinguishes four true times by what moves first — hand, hand and body, body and foot, foot and body — and four false times that reverse them; whoever moves in a false time gives the opponent a lead he cannot recover. To these he adds the four governors, principles of judgement, distance, timing and restraint. His second work, Bref Instructions upon my Paradoxes of Defence, stayed in manuscript in his lifetime and was published only in the nineteenth century; it is that text which contains the actual techniques. Silver is today one of the main sources of the English branch of HEMA. Silver publicly challenged the Italian masters to a meeting; by his own account they failed to appear.
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