INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS GILCHRIST OF THE ENGLISH QUARTERSTAFF ASSOCIATION
This interview was conducted by Sceot Acwealde in late 2008 as the central part of a 7000 word article on Staff Fighting written for THE PAGAN HERALD ISSUE THREE. The full article contains a description of the fighting experiments of BRETWALDAS OF HEATHEN DOOM members Acwealde and Wartooth, as well as information on making staffs. Our thanks go to Chris Gilchrist for his co-operation.
Hello Chris. Can you briefly describe the aims of the QuarterStaff Association?
The British Quarterstaff Association teaches men the art and technique of the quarterstaff using a form of training rooted in British traditions. In our work with the staff we seek to develop the twelve qualities of the warrior*. Working regularly with the staff develops strength. Confronting fear develops courage. Observing the effective use of techniques develops skill. The aim of the warrior is to use strength, courage and skill in all circumstances, not just when he holds a staff.
*The developed warrior:- has the stealth, control and lightning attack of the fox, has the light footwork of the stag, has the explosive power of the boar, has the grasping power of the hawk, is soft and yielding like the cat, is flexible and adaptable, has the repose of the bear, is awesome and dignified, moves like the air, has quickness in the movement of the eye, the hand and the body, has self-knowledge that enables him to judge the level of skill of another simply by watching him, knows when to fight and when to walk away, balancing his courage and prowess with discretion, has respect for the integrity of every adversary, is calm, peaceful and confident.
Do you think that there is a surmountable difference between choreographed moves and genuine combat? Does the learning of the former inform the latter?
In most forms of martial art training you learn a vocabulary of movements, largely though set sequences in which moves are combined. It's a sign of how far someone has developed their skill that they are able to be creative in using the vocabulary. Part of a warrior's training is re-conditioning the body: teaching the body how to move in non-habitual ways. This is the work of years and one way of making sure it happens is to use a set of exercises/sequences that has this as their objective.
So, the truly developed warrior is a person who has learned all the 'sentences', and then in a way unlearns the baggage these sentences come with, so as to regain the spontaneity required to fool opponents in real combat?
Yes.
With regards to the staff what are your thoughts on so called national styles of combat? Surely there is only one way to use a weapon, and that is the best way?
Maybe national styles are like dialects of the language of staff fighting.(my emphasis - ed) Temperament must play a part (Spanish and Portuguese forms are faster than British). The precise form of the weapon is also important: for example, you can only use a limited range of half-staff techniques with an 8-foot staff.
There are two questions that are related to the published context of this article that you might like to answer. You mention the ‘British’ traditions rather than ‘English’. Do you have any reasons for this? And secondly - what, if any, is your interpretation of a word such as ‘pagan?
The notion of England is late medieval and the use of the staff surely predates this. It was likely developed by natives before the arrival of the Angles or Saxons, in the previously independent territories of Wales, East Anglia, Northern England, Cornwall etc. The term pagan was used as a pejorative term by the Catholic Church. It’s imprecise. Was Mithraism ‘pagan’? If it was Mithraism, why not call it Mithraism? Maybe some people use ‘pagan’ today with a meaning closer to ‘pantheist’, but if they are pantheists I’d rather that’s what they called themselves.
Quarterstaff fighters were big in Victorian / Georgian England, when traditional martial skills ( and indeed anything that could boost nationalism in the face of an increasingly powerful Germany, such as music and art ) were being revived or reinvented. Tony Wolf suggests that many of these fighters volunteered for the trenches of World War I, only to find their warrior training almost useless, and to be killed in droves. Letters exist of both British and German soldiers’ feelings that technology such as long range artillery and tanks had rendered any spiritual aspect of the warrior obsolete, and they just felt like cogs in a machine, which leads me to my question - is there still a place for a warrior path in today’s world?
The focus on the weapon itself can be a distraction. That’s why we have placed so much emphasis on posture, stance, movement. These body skills and the ‘attention skills’ developed through combat are useful in any situation.
Do you feel that you are keeping alive a tradition that has been on the decline, and if so, do you use any specific period or place in history, or any particular philosophy on which to base your teachings, and the twelve qualities you mention?
Several of the people involved with the BQA are Buddhists. There’s a long tradition of involvement of Buddhists in eastern martial art traditions. We don’t take Buddhism as a philosophical base, but certainly draw on that as well as on the British magical tradition. Would it be fair to say that your teaching centres on a spiritual warrior path for the individual? How do you think your approach to teaching compares to the groups who mostly fight in organized military fashion? Is there a marked difference in training style, do you think, between one on one and military combat, or again, can one lead to the other? A soldier’s path may be a collective one, a warrior’s path is always individual. I would say the paths are complementary. The warrior starts out with personal skill and has to learn to coordinate with a group, the soldier vice versa.
‘Develops courage and skill in all circumstances, not just when he holds a staff’ is a good statement. Does the staff lend itself to such a result more than, say, a sword, or a spear discipline?
Maybe… I’d certainly argue it against a revolver! And perhaps against any weapon that operates at a distance, like the bow or the spear, because of the hand-to-hand element.
The sword duel has a long history in England, and men sometimes lost their lives for petty reasons. Quite rightly it was outlawed. Do you think that perhaps the quarterstaff was encouraged or revived as a weapon that was potentially less lethal? I’m specifically thinking about the theory that one might ‘give quarter’ to their foe, hence its name?
There are also references to killings with the staff in sudden (maybe drunken) quarrels in 16C and later. I speculate that before the sword became common (when only the rich/chieftains had swords) there would have been a lot more fighting with the staff. European travellers in the 16C and 17C remarked on how the English went around armed to the teeth. The ‘all-in-wrestling’ style revival of quarterstaff probably had more to do with its commercial attractions for sponsors.
Some people think that there is value in the theory of the old stratification of European Association into three hierarchical layers – that of the farmer / peasant, that of the warrior, and that of the priest / wizard. Given what you may have said about the spiritual aspect of the staff tradition, would you put the staff in any one of these layers?
Actually, the real difference in medieval Europe is the power of the fourth class, the merchants, who created capitalism. Of course they weren’t present in archaic Association, but we’re going back a long way. The Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma, who took Buddhism from India to China in the 6C, is always depicted holding a staff. As, often, are druids. I think the crossover between the warrior’s and the wizard’s uses of the staff is one of the things that makes it so attractive.
What is the reason ( historically perhaps ) for choosing a Staff over a Spear?
In the ancient world (let's say up until the 16th century in Europe) most people lived in rural settlements surrounded by wilderness/forest in which there were wild boars, wolves and bears. The forest was a dangerous place. The staff is the natural weapon of self-defence that you would carry with you. You might sharpen one end of it into a point and harden it with fire. In some respects this makes it less useful, since one of the main advantages of the 6-7 foot staff is the ability to use both ends in the same way. This is the 'everyman' use of the staff out of which we can speculate about the arising of spears, longer staffs and techniques of use. A longer staff can't really be used in the 'everyman' way as it's too cumbersome. We don't have much evidence of the staff being designed and used for battlefield combat. The short Irish club is a more versatile weapon for a chaotic crowded battlefield and the spear better for disciplined troops. But the staff would surely have been used (as it was in English folk/festival traditions) in hand-to-hand fighting. The use of a spear probably habituates the user to looking for the opportunity to thrust as this is the lethal blow. A quarterstaffer will use a wider variety of blows any of which can disable a man.
I notice in your videos that your fighters often hold the staff in the middle and strike with the ends, and this is what is perhaps most indicative, to the layman, of the English style. So far in my experiments I have found that using the hanging guard as depicted in Terry Brown’s book ‘English Martial Arts’ seems more logical as you are further away from trouble! To make a strike I would step forwards, and back again to defend myself. Using the central grip seems good for hitting aside thrusts to the head or body, but doesn’t it place you too close to each other when duelling? For instance, my instinct would be to slam the staff along my opponents to break his hands, and the finish him off with a kick in the coddles! Isn’t the grip then just fanciful Robin Hood romanticism, or am I somewhat underestimating its effectiveness?
The quarter-staff style works best with a long staff of about 8 feet. The half-staff style works best with a length no greater than 7 feet, probably optimal 6-7 feet. But I would rather have a 6.5 foot staff and be up against an 8-foot staff than vice versa. The 8-footer is slower and less flexible/adaptable. In practice, you’ll tend to use elements of both styles, and a 6.5 foot staff we reckon gives the best of both.
I can see your point when looking at European martial styles. How might we explain though such a variation in styles of the quarterstaff fighter compared with that of the African stick fighting tribe featured recently on the BBC documentary of the same name? They used long thin sticks which they held at one end, stood well away from each other, and literally whipped the sticks around their heads. My instinct when using a staff is to do something similar. Clearly they had no formal training. Those who were hit were often scarred or maimed for life. Given this, do you think that instinctive, and let’s say ‘crude’ fighting skills can generally be beaten by the disciplined and methodical learning experience the group advocates?
One of our lot learnt one of those very fast, light cane fighting styles in Southern India. Some of the techniques were good but they wouldn’t stand a chance against someone trained to use a 6-foot piece of oak.
With a six feet long, and 1 ¾ inch thick piece of seasoned hazel, I successfully held back two Viking reenactors wearing helmets, and armed with sword and shield, for nearly ten ( very long ) minutes. However I was getting pretty tired by then, and they only really had to just circle around me taunting me a bit longer before I was getting tired with swinging and jabbing at them. And a swordsman is just waiting for that one opening after all. Have you ever tried using the staff against other weapons and if so with what result?
Haven’t tried this, but Silver and Swetnam advocate manouevring to attack the sword arm.
They say youth is wasted on the young. What is the age range of the people in your group? Do you come across youngsters trying to karate-kick you in combat?
Mid-20s to mid-60s. I think a kick is valid if you can get away with it, likewise grabbing your opponent’s staff, using elbows etc once you are inside their guard. Most of the guys who’ve come from other martial arts have been very respectful of the staff, probably because they clearly understand how much damage it can inflict.
I’m particularly amused by your comments on the bow staff. I was in hospital recently, and to pass the time bought a ‘light reading’ book by Dave Courtney the English gangland villain. In it he describes a fight against a Chinese gang, where he claims that his side won merely by brute aggression and force, despite the opposing side's ‘martial art’ techniques. We have already discussed that you favour a heavy and thick piece of wood in the Quarterstaff Association and this would surely knock an opponent out cold, or possibly kill them, if a blow to the head was realised. Yet you clearly also advocate skill and discipline. Where does the Quarterstaff technique sit on a scale between the fast and light Oriental bow staff on one hand, and the analogy of the almost ‘bezerker’ style aggression of a knuckleduster-wearing skinhead gang on the other? How much does strength become a factor in success?
I’d go back further and say we use this kind of staff because that’s what our ancestors used in the ancient forest. Maybe if bamboo had grown here we’d be using bamboo staffs. But use of a heavy staff and brute force don’t have to go together. Indeed one reason for the way we train is that unless you learn to move this heavy staff without relying on shoulders and arms, you’ll never be an effective warrior.
Of interest to me is the whole process of choosing and cutting the staff in a responsible fashion, and eventually using it. You mention oak and thorn as the best woods. I live in the Midlands and I only really see ash and hazel suitable for the cutting. The longest piece of thorn I have ever found was five foot, and that was still too bent to be of any use. I never see any suitable oak. Do you have any advice? Do you cut saplings or do you cut branches? Do you use any other woods?
The benighted midlands. In Wales and SW England there is plenty of public access woodland with masses of saplings. I won’t cut a perfect sapling growing all by itself. I look for thickets of saplings where I am doing the woodland a favour by thinning it out a bit. Saplings only; branches warp and don’t have as much strength. Ash is Ok for beginners, likewise hazel. Hunting for a staff brings out the warrior qualities, especially the focusing of intention.
Thanks to Chris Gilchrist.
The full article is in Pagan Herald issue Three which can be bought here
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