This was going to be a post about HEMA as a form of re-enactment until I realised that the whole debate is old and irrelevant. Why an individual chooses to spend their time practising HEMA is for them, it's got absolutely nothing to do with me or anyone else.
For me personally they are intertwined.
I was born in '76 and by 1980 my parents where ferrying me across the UK Folk scene doing "Medieval Street Theatre" and mumming plays. They were pretty good and were billed names at big festivals like Kendal and Edinburgh, and they had swords. Lots of swords, and axes and spears and shields. They'd even tried using historical techniques from Harley and Silver, though I doubt any of the modern HEMAists would recognise what they were doing.
As time went on they moved away from street theatre and started doing more combat based presentations; Tournaments of Foot and battle re-enactment. It was all still very theatrical but, it's what got me into swords. There were wall hangers based on historical pieces, machetes and a lot of stuff they made themselves. We're still talking the mid 80's so there weren't many medieval sword makers out there, and the big iron bars with gaffa tape handles they made were better than nothing.
My Dad made me wooden wasters and started teaching me what he could at home. When my friends went off to their judo classes I spent hours in the garden swinging a sword and learning the 'clock' system used by most re-enactors. At 15 I started to train with steel with the rest of the group, 3 hours every Sunday, mainly fighting Chris McReynolds, a few months older than me he is now a fully qualified instructor in some form of Eastern Martial Arts.
It was at about the same time that Dick Featherstone returned to the group after leaving to join the English Civil War Society where he had studied historical rapier techniques. I took what I could from his experiences and incorporated them into my fight. In all honesty there's not a lot one can take from historical Rapier and apply to theatrical fighting with the clumsy weapons we used, but I learnt a lot about point work, and those of us who were free-fighting regularly started to develop a less theatrical, more competitive, style.
At the same time my group moved away from tournaments and started doing 'living history'. In 1990 we started working for English Heritage and attended more and more battle re-enactments. Many of the older members stopped fighting at displays and so our fighting moved further away from telegraphed crowed pleasing demos. At the time we thought we were being realistic, and we'd certainly developed some techniques that can be seen in historical manuals, but we lacked the finesse and understanding of a martial art.
When I was 18 I was given a Baliff Forge longsword, a beast of weapon way too heavy for my slender 9 1/2 stone, so I used it with two hands. I got a fare amount of ribbing for it and our lack of footwork meant I was restricted when using it. I muddled on as best I could until Dick turned up one week with some photocopies of an original fencing manual, and they showed guys fighting with true longswords. At the time we didn't have a clue as to what the manual was called, and a lot of the pictures showed techniques we thought would never work. I now know it was Hans Talhoffer's 1467 manual, and they guy did actually know what he was talking about. Again I picked what I liked from the illustrations and added it to my fighting, but I didn't really 'study' the MS.
Despite the lack of study it had sparked an interest, not just with me but with others in the group, and some went off and found other sources, written in proper English, to learn from. The most significant person for me was Martin 'Oz' Austwick. Oz had found Silver's work and while he studied these obscure ramblings he encouraged me to pursue my interest in Talhoffer.
Not speaking medieval Swabian I was very limited in my interpretation, basically looking at the pictures and trying to understand them from my own experiences of swordplay. Looking back, I didn't do too badly. Oz was more up on the whole HEMA community thing, but there were so few people practising at the time that OZ and I had to test our theories out on each other. Silver v's Talhoffer provides a unique learning environment, and Oz was far more studious than myself and became a more active member of the community. He introduced me to Rob Lovett from the Exiles at The Battle Tewksbury one year, which may even have been where I first met Dave Rawlings and Matt Easton.
In 2000 I started reading Archaeology at the University of Bradford and lodged with Oz. I started to study Silver under Oz's instruction and became truly baptised into the world of HEMA.
I still do re-enactment and HEMA is another thread in the tapestry I create, and although all the members of my club have an interest in history, for the most part they are not re-enactors. I do my best to run my class as a "Martial Arts" class and when at re-enactments I explain that there is a community who study HEMA as a Martial Art.
I believe in some ways HEMA is re-enactment as much of what we do in HEMA is no longer "martial" as it is no longer pertains to war, or any realistic combat situation. If what we are doing is re-creating an out-moded way of behaving in combat I struggle to see how it's significantly different to re-enactment and 'living history'.
However, langauge is fluid and 'Martial Arts' as a term no longer means "arts of war" but seems to refer to the art of one-to-one fighting, in both civilian and martial settings. It's relevance to war, or fighting for ones life, is no longer it's primary focus. It's seems that today it's more about fitness and a healthy way to express a competitive nature, and I'm happy with that, it's probably my main driver in studying what I do.
So, while they are not the same, they're not mutally exclusive either and it seems rather sad that some feel the need to constantly distance themselves from others who have similar interests.
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