Fun to the hilt: Swordplay club in Northampton creates community through ancient weaponry

Twice weekly, First Churches of Northampton is filled with the sounds of clanging swords.

Massachusetts Historical Swordsmanship (MHS), a swordplay club that teaches Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), meets in the church’s Lyman Parish Hall every Monday and Wednesday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. to learn to use centuries-old weaponry. (The group also hosts classes in Worcester on Tuesdays and Sundays.)

Its leader is Dr. Ken Mondschein, a historian, fencing instructor, writer, and jouster who has been fencing for 30 years. Mondschein has authored and translated a number of books about swords and fencing.

The evening of Monday, Sept. 29, Mondschein sported a salt-and-pepper goatee, a black and white bandana, and a black MHS t-shirt. On its front was the group’s logo, featuring a crossed rapier, longsword, and saber. On its back was a Latin translation of Luke 22:36: “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.”

Though the group is all about hitting people with weapons, Mondschein still takes measures to ensure participants’ safety: all participants train on the French bâton before being allowed to use swords, they must wear thick protective gear while fighting with swords, and all of the swords themselves are flexible and blunt. (“I mean, if they weren’t, I’d have fewer students and a lot of liability,” Mondschein joked dryly.) Plus, he noted, the human element is key: participants are reasonable about their fighting and hesitant to hit others until they feel comfortable doing so within the context. 

“We’re consenting to a certain level of force; we’re not consenting to have our heads knocked off,” Mondschein said.

Beyond that, Mondschein is also eager to make sure that the space remains open and welcoming to everyone, no matter their race, gender, age, or even physical ability; the MHS website says, “We are actively anti-sexist, anti-racist, and LGTBQ-affirming, and do not tolerate hate in any form.” (That said, the Northampton group that night appeared to skew largely white and male, but Mondschein said that the Worcester group, ironically, has far more LGBTQ representation than the Northampton one.)

“As you can imagine with something called ‘Historical European Martial Arts’ and the whole idea of ‘reclaiming European martial heritage,’ you can get some questionable types,” Mondschein said, “so we feel like we should really signal purposely that we are inclusive and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.”

Group member Cyrus Yau is the director of the hospitalist program at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. For him, swordplay is an escape from a demanding job – “The worse day I have here at work, the more I want to be with the club, fencing with my teammates,” he said – and it’s also been a way to find community and get in shape while learning a new, complex skill.

“It seems like a very violent sport, but, in actuality, it is very intellectual in many ways,” Yau said. “It’s sort of like playing chess with swords.”

That night, 12 participants joined Mondschein at the church. The session officially began, as it always does when someone new shows up, with a “circle of love,” in which each person shared their name, pronouns, how long they’ve been involved with swordplay, and their favorite type of sword. After that came a period of intense warm-ups as a collection of ’80s hits curated by longsword coach Bryan Larkin played in the background.

From there, the group broke off into smaller groups. On one side of the room, Mondschein helped new member Jessica Gee play a glove-tossing game (for “retraining how to use the brain” for fencing) as group members Menachem Echols and Vigdís Nobel played the same game nearby; later, Larkin took Mondschein’s place, helping Gee run coordination drills with the French bâton. 

On the opposite side of the room was the main event: the swordplay. The remaining group members paired off, practicing feints with sabers, rapiers, and longswords. Mondschein floated between the two sides, observing the action and offering feedback.

Later that night, Larkin and Sean Hayes demonstrated their agility with Italian longswords called “spadone.” As the swords hit over and over again, the noise rang through the space like something out of a medieval movie, enhanced by the Neo-Gothic architecture.

For Mondschein, swordplay is a longtime passion that inspires both serious philosophizing and lighthearted humor. In one conversation, he compared learning swordplay to learning jazz and learning Romance languages, calling it “an acculturation into a certain bodily habitus, but also a cultural habitus – a way of thinking, moving, being, that comes down to us” through history.

A few days prior, Mondschein, who likes to attribute his love of swordplay to his autism, sent this reporter a meme one of his students made, in which a pregnant woman takes Tylenol and says, “This won’t hurt my baby.” Underneath it, with the caption “25 years later,” is an image of two people fencing.

“We’re nerds,” Mondschein said. “It is very important to write down that we’re nerds.”

Still, Mondschein knows that the notion of using big weapons – some of which are the same height as a person – can be intimidating. To someone who’s hesitant to try out swordplay because of that, “Being brave about something that might be intimidating or something that might be a little scary is itself its own reward,” he said.

“It’s not scary at all because we’re actually a very fun, welcoming, goofy bunch of people,” he added. “The main danger in class isn’t actually getting hurt. It’s bad puns.”

Massachusetts Historical Swordsmanship classes are $10 to $25 per class, sliding scale. For more information about Massachusetts Historical Swordsmanship, visit mhswords.com.

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