How to arrange one's students for drills and other instruction is a significant portion of a trainer's duties. Classical period fencing manuals tend to address these formations in three contexts: (1) a purely military one for instruction of military personnel (see, for example Corbesier 1869 Principals of Squad Instruction for the Broadsword), (2) a civilian adaptation of military formation and commands (Manrique's 1920 Fencing Foil Class Work Illustrated is an example), or (3) the theatrical for stage or exhibitions (see Cass's 1930 The Book of Fencing). But there are unusual exceptions …
The British Pathe film collection includes a 1937 film of Miss Eleanor McDonald, the "foremost professional fencing instructor," teaching a class (https://youtube.com/watch?v=qK0uvn-BrCs). Leaving aside the issue of Miss McDonald's preeminence as a fencing instructor, she employs an interesting cross shaped formation for groups of four students.
In this formation the fencers are positioned at right angles to each other, and engage in the drill with the fencer directly opposite. The distance chosen is easy lunge distance. The formation requires each pair's blade action to occur at right angles to and across the action of the other pair. Theoretically this might allow a greater number of drilling pairs to be fitted into a limited space, but it would seem to make supervision and correction more difficult. Correction of one fencer would seem to bring activity by all four to a standstill, and demonstrations could be difficult for all participants to see.
The exercise McDonald has her fencers demonstrate appears to be intended for use in an exhibition, as opposed to being instructional. The exercise is conducted by command:
(1) the fencers start on guard,
(2) the fencers engage,
(3) fencer A beats the fencer B's blade, and drops their own blade out of line,
(4) fencer B swings the blade back over the arm and lunges,
(5) both fencers recover and engage, and repeat,
(6) the fencers recover backwards to attention with the arm and blade raised straight up,
(7) the fencers resume guard,
(8) the fencers recover, and salute the three opposite sides,
(9) the fencers step to guard,
(10) the fencers recover forward, and salute,
(11) and shake hands across the cross.
Copyright 2019 by Walter G. Green III
Miss McDonald's Cross Formation by Walter G. Green III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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