For the last few centuries, combat in pre-firearms plate armor has been somewhat disparaged. Recent beliefs about what it actually might have looked like are derived from a combination of romantic notions of chivalry, tainted with the moves found in highly stylized fencing, coupled with the nonsense produced by gibberish produced by fiction writers from the Victorians to Hollywood. Plate armor took centuries to develop but fell out of favor remarkably fast once guns came on the scene; the last few decades were a race to develop armor that could withstand bullets, and in the end *that* armor was ridiculously heavy, immobile, inexpensive and impractical. Armor essentially vanished until WWI with the return of the helmet.

Combat in plate armor would not have been a slower form of fencing. It would have been a display of a couple guys trying. to murder each other, aided and hampered by top-of-the-line armor. But popular culture is loaded with notions about it that are silly and wrong, not least being that a knight in armor would have been as helpless as a turtle on its back if he fell down. In recent years a new understanding of the techniques, capabilities and limitations of plate armor combat has been produced due to a combination of actually reading the medieval manuscripts on combat, and actually trying it. Use the techniques described, ignore the pop culture, and see what actually works. With the rise in popularity of fantasy works like “Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones,” inter4est has been increased to the point that western plate armor combat seems to be rising as a valid sport, and not just by some chuckleheads at the ren fest. Behold:

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Well, there’s no sneaking up on the enemy, anyway…