fbhjr

Saturday morning,

morgan_lafaye met us early at our place and we headed out to western MA for the 10th annual Sword Symposium at the Renaissance Center.

Normally I do a presentation for this. In fact, this is the first year I didn’t. And, I feel bad about that. But, I did the whole Wales thing and I really didn’t have it in me to do a research project at the same time. (I told Jeff I was willing to talk about making a sword in Wales, but I guess that isn’t renaissance enough.)

No one is sure how long these events will go on. Or, the show we’re doing there next week that has also been going on for years.
We’re told that as long as the current director remains there, these events will happen.
The problem is, Arthur has been a professor there since I was 3 years old. And, I’m now 50.

I’m in no way knocking his being a professor there for 47+ years. It is very impressive. I’m just saying once he decides to retire these shows will end.
I hope he goes another 47 years…

The first presentation was by Dr. Green and was on the fight guilds in England in the 1500’s.

I’m going to have to look up some of these sources as I found it very interesting.

And, not just because someone with my family name was a sword master listed there.

(And, I know the family still lived in that area at the time…)

Of course a lot of them came to bad ends, so maybe it isn’t my family…

The problem with the event was after every talk, everyone got up and milled around. For up to half an hour. The first talk ran 10 minutes into the time of the next one, and then the next one didn’t start for another 30 minutes.

I’m a big "keep to the schedule" kind of guy, so this bugged me. But, I was just in the audience this year, right?

The second talk was also very interesting, but covered material I was much more familiar with.

He tried to find the, possible, links between all the German sword masters. And, this is just one school.

But, at least he gives where to learn more.

Too bad most are in German and I don’t read German…

Of course, more milling occurred.

Even Jeff seemed to get annoyed at it.

Next was Mark and Kendra’s presentation.

This was the same presentation we saw them give a month ago at Smith.
http://fbhjr.livejournal.com/869788.html
But, some time over the last month they seemed to forget most of it as they did a MUCH better job of it last time.
But, to give them credit, of all the people there they were the only ones that actually picked up things and demonstrated the art.

When this started 10 years ago, everyone did demos. Now just them.
And, it was not an ideal day for it either.

In the afternoon we had a presentation on the craft guilds of the free cities.

That title card is an outright lie. It was not a "brief examination". The guy ran for more than his allotted time before he came to his "intermission" slide.
Jeff talked with him and he cut the second half down to 10 minutes. The first half was 90.
I guess someone has also promised him it would be videoed.
Jeff came to us as my wife usually videos my presentations there. But, we didn’t bring the equipment as I wasn’t doing anything.
iPads to the rescue.

But, the information was very cool.

His presentation didn’t end until the whole symposium was supposed to end. And, there was still supposed to be a question and answer panel.
We didn’t wait.
We left and headed up to New Hampshire for our Sunday show.

evrgreen and his wife had offered to let us stay at their house, only an hour away from the show. The problem was we were on the diagonal opposite side of the state and there were no highways across.