For Practitioners

You are thinking about joining. Here is what to expect, what is asked of you, and what you will learn.

What You Will Do

Each session runs about eighty minutes: opening prayer, warmup, two activities, water break, closing prayer. The two activities change with the liturgical season: a drill and a game in Time after Pentecost; calisthenics and a drill in Lent; outdoor play in Christmastide and Easter. After the formal session ends, sparring runs another twenty or thirty minutes for whoever wants to keep fighting.

You will fight with boffer weapons: foam swords, spears, and shields. Injury risk is negligible. The point is not lethality. The point is that you have held a weapon, faced another person, and made decisions about when and how hard to strike, and felt those decisions in your body.

What You Will Read

The training floor and the seminar table are two modes of the same formation. You will read texts about courage and combat from the classical and Catholic tradition: Homer, Malory, Aquinas, scripture, the lives of the saints. The reading is not a separate academic exercise. The drill teaches the virtue with your body; the text names the virtue and lets you think about what you just did.

Conduct

This is a sport of honor. You call your hits. It is always "you got me," never "I got you," including when no one else saw. You control your temper. You treat your partner as a brother, not an opponent. You step away before the instructor has to ask.

A practitioner who cannot control himself is asked to step away. The door is open when he is ready to return. There is no other policy. Boys know the standard and they know the cost.

What This Asks of You

The first qualification is showing up, including when you do not feel like it, including when you are losing, including when the boy across from you is bigger and better. You do not have to be athletic. You do not have to have done a martial sport before. Every boy starts as Percival, the fool who begins in ignorance and learns through persistence.

What this asks is honesty: about your hits, about your conduct, about your effort. Everything else can be trained.

Ranks

The program uses a four-rank progression: Page (entry), Squire, Bachelor Knight, Knight Banneret (senior). Rank reflects skill, conduct, and willingness to teach. Senior students learn to teach juniors as part of their own training. By the time you are a Knight Banneret, you can run a session.

What This Is Not

For what this program is not, see the homepage. In short: it is not combat training, not a fitness program, not a competition against other schools, not a martial art in the Eastern sense. It is moral formation that uses the body as the site of the lesson.