From May 29, 2015

MS I.33 time again.

So, something that everyone assumes/takes for granted, and then has endless debate about.

“Dum ducitur halpschilt cade sub gladium quoque scutum”

As I understand it, it roughly translates to “If Halbschild is adopted, fall Below both sword and shield.” (Dieter Bachmann, Wiktenauer)

Now, people debate what the “fall under sword and shield” part means. Some say it means the action is a descending cut, since it must “fall”. Others say it must end up being underneath your opponent’s sword and shield, since you are falling “under” or “below”.

But does “cade sub” really mean “fall under” in the sense that say, if you dropped something, it might fall under your desk? Does it really mean “fall” in the same way as “drop, topple, sink, plummet, etc”?

In MS I.33, any time we see this play, where you “cade sub gladium quoque scutum” against someone besetting you with halfshield, it looks like the distance widens. I believe I first heard this from Roland Warzecha (don’t want to be taking credit for ideas that weren’t mine), although it’s possible others have said it. And some might dismiss it is just a mistake or weird thing with the artwork. But I don’t think it is. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be due to a lack of space on the page or anything like that. And it’s pretty consistent. Every time we see “cade sub gladium quoque scutum”, the guy who does it seems to end up further from the opponent using halfshield than the previous illustration showing a ward being displaced by halfshield. Dismissing it as artistic error without any solid proof seems insufficient to me. It could just be artistic convention, but it’s still interesting.

My idea is that maybe “cade” shouldn’t be translated as “fall” with the meaning of something plummeting, or descending. Maybe there are better ways to translate it that would be revealed by this interpretation that when you “cade sub gladium quoque scutum” you’re supposed to step back slightly and widen distance.

So I decided to look up on some online latin language references, and found the following:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cado#Latin

http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/7249/cado-cadere-cecidi-casus

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0060%3Aentry%3Dcado

Possible meanings for the word “cade” or “cado” in latin are:

fall/topple/sink/plummet, come under, be subject to, to die or be slain, to end/cease/abate, and several others.

Is it possible that when we’re being told to “cade sub gladium quoque scutum”, we are being told to “come under/be subject to” their sword and shield because we concede the bind and allow them to achieve an overbind? That we are supposed to cease and abate (abate: something perceived as hostile become less intense) and widen distance a bit, conceding the bind and center, de-escalating the fight in a way, in order to gain distance and time to defend ourselves and regain the bind and center?

Is it possible that the line “Dum ducitur halpschilt cade sub gladium quoque scutum” should maybe instead be translated as “if halfshield is adopted, come under and be subject to the sword and shield”?

Is it possible that it means “fall” in metaphorical terms, like being subject to (“the city fell to the invaders”) or coming under (“I am falling ill”) or cease/abate (“I abated his anger”), rather than “fall” in physical terms (“my sandwich fell on the floor”)? I think it’s possible. The goal of this was simply to look into whether the word used for “fall” had other possible meanings, or if maybe in Latin the ambiguity wasn’t there and it obviously only ever meant something dropping/plummeting/descending. It seems like this isn’t the case, and it’s quite possible that it is not referring to the blade dropping.

Just to note, this interpretation does not rely on the widening of distance. An important thing I found in the manual is on Folio 23v. In a play showing Halfshield Obsessio against Priest’s Special Langort, it says this:

“Hic ponit se sacerdos sub gladium scolaris quod sepius prius tactum est unde Versus Dum ducitur halpschilt cade sub gladium quoque scutum”

This translates roughly as “Here the Priest puts himself under the sword of the Student, as was often treated, whence the verse ‘if halfshield is adopted, fall under sword and shield’ ” (Dieter Bachmann)

The word “ponit” or “pono” means “to place, to put, to lay, to set up”. This section is telling us that here the Priest is placing his sword under the sword of the Student, in the same way we have seen many times when we saw the verse “if halfshield is adopted, fall under sword and shield”. So after seeing this technique many times throughout the manual, and only ever being given that verse, we are finally, on Folio 23v, given an explanation as to what the verse means, and we are told that it means we are placing our sword under our opponent’s sword. So it’s not a strike or a cut, we’re not attacking their arm or their hand, etc. MS I.33 describes strikes and cuts, and it uses specific terminology when it does (like the word “plaga” or ‘strike”). If this was supposed to be a strike, I see no reason why the author wouldn’t call it a strike when he is perfectly capable of doing so in other sections. Whenever I.33 talks about swords being over or under each other, it is talking about the bind. I believe this paragraph of the manual gives us a clear explanation of what Falling Under Sword and Shield is. It is an action that we do when we are in 1st Ward and our opponent does the Halfshield Obsessio. We then “place our sword under our opponent’s sword”, in other words, we place our sword into an underbind.