What a HEMA club expects of you

HEMA reconstructed itself from manuscripts over about thirty years, largely in small clubs founded by people who had trained together for a long time. That history shows in the etiquette: it is dense, it is consistent between clubs, and almost none of it appears on a club website, because the people who wrote the website learned it by osmosis and no longer notice it.

The result is a newcomer arriving with the ordinary assumptions of a gym or a martial arts class and finding that several of them are wrong in ways that matter. Some of the differences are cultural. Several are about not injuring anybody, and those are the ones worth learning before rather than during.

Everything below describes common practice. Where a club says something different, the club is right — this is a sport whose safety conventions are set locally because the equipment, the weapons and the intensity vary so much between groups.

• Do not bring a weapon — Clubs supply steel and synthetic weapons for beginners, and arriving with something bought online is the single most reliable way to identify yourself as somebody who has not done this before. It may also be unsuitable or unsafe for club use, and a club that has to tell you so is in an awkward position.
• You will not spar, and that is not a slight — Most clubs put newcomers through a term or more of footwork, drills and paired exercises before free play. This is not gatekeeping. Sparring with somebody who cannot yet control distance is how people get hurt, and the person most likely to be hurt is the beginner.
• Wear what you would wear to train, and bring a mask if you own one — Ordinary sports clothing, indoor shoes, and gloves if you have any. Nothing else is expected. Clubs generally lend protective equipment for the first weeks and expect you to buy your own once you have decided to stay.
• Ask before touching anybody else’s kit — Feders, longswords and masks are expensive, personal and frequently modified, and picking one up off a bench to look at it is a bigger breach than it feels. The answer is nearly always yes; the asking is the point.

These are the ones that separate a good training partner from a difficult one:

• Agree the intensity before you start — The single most important sentence in the sport is some version of "how hard do you want to go?" Intensity is negotiated between two people every time, and a pair who have not agreed it will find out the hard way. Nobody thinks less of anybody for saying light.
• Calling your own hits is the norm — In most club free play there is no judge, and the convention is that you acknowledge what lands on you. It feels strange at first because it means volunteering that you lost an exchange. It is what makes unrefereed play possible at all, and a person who does not do it quickly runs out of partners.
• Match your partner, do not exceed them — Escalation is the commonest social failure in the sport: one person goes slightly harder, the other matches it, and two people who agreed to spar light are now going full speed with no discussion. Whoever notices first should say so.
• Stop means stop, immediately, from anybody — Not just from your partner. Anybody in the room calling a halt stops everything, because they can usually see something you cannot — a loose mask strap, somebody about to back into you, a broken weapon on the floor.
• Check your own kit, every time — Mask straps, glove closures, the tip of the weapon. This is presented as courtesy and it is a safety rule: the person your equipment fails on is your partner.
• Do not coach unless you are asked or you are the instructor — Unsolicited advice after every exchange is the most common complaint in the sport. If somebody asks, help generously; if they do not, spar.
• Thank your partner at the end of a bout — Universal, and it is the mechanism by which the previous few minutes are agreed to have been training rather than a fight.

HEMA is a reconstruction, which means every technique in the room is somebody’s reading of a manuscript. That produces a second and quite separate set of conventions, about how disagreement is handled.

The strong norm is that interpretations are argued from the source. "My instructor says" carries much less weight than "the manuscript says, and here is the plate", and a club that cannot point at where a technique comes from is regarded with mild suspicion by the rest of the sport. This is unusual among martial arts and it is one of the things that attracts people to this one.

The corollary is that disagreement is normal and is not personal. Two clubs can hold different readings of the same passage and both be respectable; the sport has no governing body that resolves such things and does not want one. What is not acceptable is claiming an unbroken living tradition, or presenting an invention as a source reading. That is the one thing that will genuinely damage a reputation.

For a beginner the practical version is short: ask which source a technique comes from, expect a real answer, and do not be surprised when the answer includes an honest "we are not sure".