About Us

Masterless Fencing is a HEMA club dedicated to giving fencers from all backgrounds a space for both sharing knowledge and sparring.

Our club is primarily focused on studying and practicing longsword, but our members enjoy fencing with a variety of weapons, including messer, sidesword, and more.

We welcome experienced fencers and novices alike.

If you are an experienced fencer, you will find yourself surrounded by friendly faces and curious minds with a love and a passion for fencing. If you’re looking for better rivals to square off against and a chance to expand your skill set, you’ll be well served with us.

For new fencers and folks merely curious about historical fencing, we offer an introduction to the fundamentals and an opportunity to learn and condition. It is our privilege and honor to help you get started and to welcome you to this exciting sport.

Our goal at Masterless Fencing is to eliminate any difficulties in approaching and interpreting HEMA sources to get a sword in your hand, so you can fence with your peers safely, learn alongside them, and be part of the great HEMA community.

Our club offers a curriculum that focuses on the universal principles of fencing, rather than focusing solely on any one historical Master’s teachings.

Our club pedagogy follows the Evolutionary Approach (EA) to training, using evidence-based fencing games and drills aimed at improving our skills in intuitive ways. We also explore the differences in techniques taught by different sources. For all new members, we start our instruction with the fundamentals: footwork, measure, guards, thrusts, and cuts. These concepts will form the foundation from which we can move on to studying the various treatises of historical fencing.

Many of the words and terms we use are drawn directly from the German sources, as they form the lingua franca of HEMA. See the Core Concepts page for a glossary of key terms and a summary of what we study.

Structure:

We follow the Ecological Approach (EA) to training HEMA. As none of our members are masters, we use modern exercise science, HEMA games, and full-gear sparring to develop our skills.

Many of our core members initially learned the Italian Armizare system from the Fiore manuscripts. However, the mission of our club is to be system-agnostic and to study weapons and sources from RDL to Leckuchner to Marrozzo to George Silver.