Meyer s Square

Quick Facts

About the kata

In chapter ten of the longsword book, headed Wie man nach den vier Blössen fechten sol, Meyer describes four cuts to an opponent's four openings. In the Zufechten the fencer swings the blade from the right before the opponent's face once to three times and ends in the Lang ort. He then cuts first from the right to the left ear, second from below at an angle to the right arm guard held high overhead, third from the right to the lower left opening, and fourth on a slant (schlims) to the right ear; finally Zwirch and step back. All four cuts run quickly, opening to opening, together with the steps. To sharpen the practitioner's skill, the first cut varies. The order comes from a small figure (Figürlein) beside the text: first the outer digits, then the second, third, and finally the inner one. Sean Franklin (Sword STEM) reads a formula of sixteen cuts from it. All this is practised with the long edge, then the half edge, and finally the flat of the blade. The name Meyer's square is modern: per Franklin, Meyer named neither the figure nor the exercise, and Keith Farrell calls it the exercise of the four openings. We have not found a fixed sequence in the sources; Meyer writes of an exercise for directing cuts to all four openings.

The kata in different styles

Meaning of the name

The four openings (vier Blössen) come from Meyer's division of the body into four quarters – upper, lower, right and left (Ober, Under, Recht, Linck). In the third chapter of the book on the longsword, Meyer also assigns to them the four main guards from which the rest derive: Ochs, Pflug, Tag and Olber. In his analysis of the figure, Sean Franklin calls each set of four cuts a frame: every frame contains all four cuts, no frame repeats, and two cuts always run along the same line there and back. Of the 24 possible orders of four cuts, he says Meyer gives only four. The names frame and pair are Franklin's own; they are not in Meyer.

Creator and history

According to Wiktenauer, Meyer finished the book Gründtliche Beschreibung, der freyen Ritterlichen unnd Adelichen kunst des Fechtens on 24 February 1570 and dedicated it to Johann Casimir, Count Palatine of Simmern; the illustrations were made in the workshop of Hans Christoff Stimmer. The English Wikipedia states that it was printed in Strasbourg by Thiebolt Berger and that Meyer's widow reissued it in Augsburg in 1600. In 2017 Keith Farrell wrote that both the exercise and the figure had become very widespread in today's longsword community. The drawing now circulating among clubs is, in his view, a modern redrawing supplied to the community by Ilkka Hartikainen.

Bunkai – applications

After the cuts, Meyer gives a second main part: knowing how to protect the four openings against such cuts, either by catching the blade or – better still – with counter-cuts. He calls the third part Practick: when the fencer sees that a cut will not land in one place, he pulls it back before it lands, or lets it fly past and directs it to another opening until it hits. Meyer shows this directly on this series: let the first and second cut land hard, pull the third back in one swing so the fourth lands faster; or, after the first hits, pull back the second and third and strike with the fourth. The first and second can also just threaten, the cut then directed to the nearest opening.