Web Video / Schola Gladiatoria

"Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Schola Gladiatoria!"

Schola Gladiatoria is the YouTube channel of Matt Easton, who makes videos utilizing his experience as a martial arts and fencing instructor, TV and film consultant, dealer of antique arms, and historical researcher. His videos cover topics including historical fencing, military history, antique arms and armour, and busting myths and misconceptions. Matt often examines the accuracy of films and television shows, which makes him a fount of commentary on various Weapons and Wielding Tropes.

The channel can be found here.

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Tropes that appear on Schola Gladiatoria include:

• Bayonet Ya:
  • In "Bayonets and Blobsticks by Aaron Taylor Miedema", Matt uses this book on the Canadian experience of close combat in World War I to push back against the popular misconception that the bayonet was an obsolete weapon which foolish, out-of-touch generals clung to at the cost of many lives. The book refers to many firsthand accounts and Victoria Cross citations that describe incidents in which the bayonet was used effectively, and Matt suggests that he may read some passages from it in future videos. He also shows off an antique blobstick, which is a kind of bayonet training simulator that was used at the time.
  • In "Cuirassier Sword compared to Estoc", while comparing the French Model 1816 Line Cavalry Sabre and an example of a "Preval blade" sword with a light cavalry hilt, mentions that one point against the Preval blade is that such a hollow-ground triangular blade might have gotten stuck in a person more easily than an edged blade. This, he notes, may be part of the reason that spike bayonets were replaced in popularity by sword- and knife-style bayonets during the 19th century.
• Berserk Button: Suggesting that the French military has historically been cowardly or incompetent does not go down well with Matt.
• Catchphrase: Begins each video with, "Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Schola Gladiatoria!" Also, when comparing different weapons or fighting styles, he leans heavily on the word "context", a tendency he started to lampshade after a while.
• The Coconut Effect: From time to time, Matt discusses how Hollywood presents weapons and combat in unrealistic ways simply because they're more spectacular or easier to film, leading the people who grow up on those movies to assume that's how things would have been done historically. Over time, even when it becomes possible to replace the hollywood method with something more realistic, movie makers will often continue doing it the old way because they know their audience has been conditioned to expect it.
  • For example, when cannon fire is depicted in films like The Patriot (2000), they will show the cannons firing, and then have an explosive charge buried in the ground shoot up a cloud of smoke and dirt. The thing is, regular 18th century cannon balls were not explosive shells, and rather than explode on impact they tended to bounce and roll until they either spent all their energy or hit something large.
  • In his review of Brienne of Tarth vs the Hound in Game of Thrones, he notes that friends of his who were involved with the show said the weapons used in filming were reasonably light. Nevertheless, the actors tend to make a show of grunting and straining as if their swords were really heavy.
• Cunning Linguist: While discussing Sir Richard Francis Burton, Matt acknowledges that Burton was a "cunning linguist" who published an English translation of the Kama Sutra, among other things. Matt makes this a Lampshaded Double Entendre by showing the phrase "cunning linguist" over a kama sutra illustration.
• Dented Iron: In "Older Warriors: Injuries & Ailments in Ageing Martial Artists", Matt points out that the popular notion that experience and training in martial arts helps you avoid injury actually isn't true. The more you train, the more chances for injury you take, making it inevitable over time. Just doing normal training exercises puts wear and tear on your body, most commonly your knees and elbows. Also, as you get older, old injuries will bother you more, and it will take longer to recover from new injuries than when you were young. Matt, 41 as of this video, can testify to the difference. His suggestion for RPG games is that older characters' stats should reflect their accumulated wear and tear as well as their experience.
• Double Entendre: It just so happens that a lot of weapon and combat terminology sounds rather naughty, and Matt is definitely aware that his viewers' minds are in the gutter. For example, one of his bayonett videos is titled "Bayonet combat - the butt, penetration and swinging".
• Epic Flail:
  • In response to popular demand, Matt produced "Medieval flails! An introduction". One of the most frequent questions people ask him is, "were they actually used?" The answer is yes. Matt recounts that maybe fifteen years before he made the video, there was a pervasive belief among medieval enthusiasts on the internet that the flail was a kind of "fantasy weapon" invented by Hollywood, based on the fact that they weren't seeing them in the artistic sources they were looking at, and yet they appeared frequently in Medieval movies since at least The '40s. Thankfully there are a lot more artistic sources known and digitized, and the current consensus is that yes, flails existed, yes all kinds of flail are depicted in art (i.e. long- or short-handled, longer or shorter chains, one or multiple heads, and with or without spikes), but it's also clear that they were generally not very common, with a few interesting exceptions such as 15th century Central Europe. A general rule is that the chain should be shorter than the handle so the head doesn't crack you in the hand, but—having said that—there are Indian and Indo-Persian flails where the chain is considerably longer than the handle. Also, he's learned from experience that the ball doesn't hit you as long as you keep it moving around, using continuous circle and figure-eight movements.
  • In "Short medieval flails - some observations", Matt discusses the fact that although most medieval flails seem to have had a long shaft, they did exist and he's learned certain things about them.
• Flynning:
  • In "Screen combat/stage fencing vs real swordsmanship", Matt talks about the differences between what he does and what stage fight directors do. Matt teaches people how to hit each other, but stage fighting is all about how not to hit the other person while they're putting on a show. Matt can give advice about realism, and sometimes he's agreed to do this, but knowing how to set up a fight that can be filmed is an entirely different skill set that he doesn't have. What Matt will say is that if you want to ruin movie fights for yourself, the one thing that's always a dead giveaway is actors staying out of distance. You may see two guys swinging and grunting as if they were fighting ferociously, but if you pay attention you'll notice that they're just close enough to hit each other's swords, without being close enough to reach each other's bodies. You even see it in fisticuffs sometimes, where even forced perspective can't always conceal the fact that the punches and blocks they're trying to sell as real are way off target.
  • In the Die Another Day review, besides slice-and-dice swordsmanship and unnecessary spinning, Matt points out the under-use of the lunge and recovery. In a real fight with the kind of military sword that Graves and Bond are using, you wouldn’t want to stay within easy reach of your opponent’s weapon for any length of time. As George Silver described, the hand by itself moves so quickly that it’s difficult to react to a blow from your enemy at close distance, compared to wider distance where he needs to step in first and you have time to see it coming. The purpose of the lunge is to quickly get in distance to attack, and if your attack doesn’t stop him you can quickly recover to reestablish safe distance. The difference is that movie choreographers want to minimize the delay between blows so the exchange will look more fast and exciting, and they don’t want fighters constantly stepping in and out of frame while the camera’s zoomed in on them. The solution is to have the actors shuffle about within fairly close distance as they Flynn at each other, and they have no trouble defending themselves because they’ve spent hours rehearsing the sequence, and know every time what their adversary is about to throw at them.
• Gentleman Adventurer: Sir Richard Francis Burton—according to The Other Wiki, an "explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat", certainly cultivated an image as a great adventurer, scholar, fighter, and lover. Matt points out that he's been quite romanticized in the 20th and 21st centuries despite the fact that he had some beliefs that would be subject to Values Dissonance today, as well as various scandals that made him controversial during his lifetime and tend to get brushed under the rug when talking about him, but more particularly he thinks we shouldn't let this glamor distract us from some questionable or even ridiculous things he wrote about swordsmanship.
• Hard Head: In Hard Heads & Broken Swords: An Indian Mutiny Victoria Cross, Matt reads from the Victoria Cross citation of James Blair: On the 23rd of October, 1857, in fighting his way through a body of rebels who'd literally surrounded him, he broke the end of his sword on one of their heads and recieved a severe sword cut on his right arm. He then rejoined his troop in his wounded condition, and—with no other weapon than the hilt of his broken sword—he put himself at the head of his men and charged the rebels most effectively, dispersing them. The first point that Matt wants to make in the video is that while you may assume it must have been a piece-of-crap sword to break against somebody's head, he's actually read numerous accounts like this from the 19th century. Evolution has provided humans with a very hard bony covering around the brain, and there is always a risk of breaking your blade against your opponent's cranium, particularly when using less robust blades like rapiers or some of the lighter sabers. In fact, John Musgrave Waite's fencing treatise of 1880 specifically advises that when chopping into someone's head, you should aim at the level of the eye or below where the thinner bones and squishier parts of the head are located, or target the neck. This can incapacitate someone just as effectively as a cut into the brain, and at less risk of wrecking your blade.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Averted when he discusses the katana in relation to the longsword, making some particular points but generally deflating the hype to show that the katana is a sword with advantages and disadvantages that depend on context.
• Miles Gloriosus: Sir Richard Francis Burton may have done some pretty cool things, but he was probably also a braggart. There are some things he claimed to have done—such as smuggling himself into Mecca—for which there were no independent Western witnesses, and which he might have just made up.
• Moral Luck. He discusses this in his "Strategy versus Results" video and is critical of the simplistic misunderstanding usually put out by fans of shows like Game of Thrones, where they assume that if one side wins using a certain plan that means it was a good plan, and if they lost that means their plan was stupid. As he points out, a number of people who were famously defeated in history had very sound strategies based on the information they had, yet things didn't work out for them because battles are extremely complex situations and they Didn't See That Coming. He says for instance that the strategy that led to French defeats at Crecy ultimately bore fruit in the later stages of the war.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Demonstrates in his "Can the two-handed greatsword be used one handed?" video that a lot of the moves done with a two handed sword are at least possible one handed, but also extremely exhausting (and doing them two handed's no mean feat in the first place using the somewhat overbuilt Del Tin Spadone). He also shows the single-handed thrust mentioned in the Giacomo di Grassi manual.
• Plunder: In "Medieval Soldier Pay & Skirmishing vs Battles", he talks about how the wages of English soldiers in The Hundred Years War were not particularly good compared to civilian occupations, especially since they needed to spend most of it on their food, weapons, horse fodder, and any retainers or hangers-on they might be responsible for. He thinks the real enticement of being a soldier was probably that they were entitled to a share of whatever loot they could pillage from the French, which could amount to a considerable windfall.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: This short video features Matt telling off Ridley Scott for blaming the youth for The Last Duel being a commercial flop, citing that those very youth are the people who would have watched the movie if Hollywood didn't stubbornly cling to the Dung Ages trope.
• Shields Are Useless: Discussed in his video "Too Many Two Handed Weapons in Movies/TV", where he notes that main characters often throw away their shield or don't bring one in the first place despite it being unrealistic in many cases. He suspects one reason for this shield contempt is the trouble of training actors to use them and their tendency to interfere with line of sight during filming.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: Ends each video with some variation on "Cheers!"
• Southpaw Advantage: In general you are encouraged to fight from your good side for the obvious advantages in free fights (but also because it is a pain to fight from your weak side - or to re-train your good side when you started learning on the wrong side). Once you get used to how to attack a right handed opponent on his left (vulnerable) shoulder when your opening position has the sword on your left shoulder it is no big deal anymore. (However most lefties also learn to do at least the basic moves also from the right side. Which is of high advantage when your opponent finally got used to you being a leftie and adjusts his attacks so you can attack him from the right. The other main advantage in general is that due to most people being right-handed, both lefties and righties primarily train to fight against righties. Matt, who is right handed, actually turns this to his advantage in this video.
• Sticks to the Back: Has a video about how sick he is that this trope's still around, especially when soldiers are depicted with long polearms stuck to their back because it's completely ahistorical and it looks ridiculous. People didn't stick spears and pikes to their backs; if they needed to free their hands they would just drop the polearm, and if possible come back for it later.
• Verbal Tic: Habitually sprinkles his speech with "okay?" and "isn't it?", as if he wants to make sure that viewers are following his train of thought.
• Wall of Weapons: Records videos in the room where he keeps his collection, including all kinds of swords mounted on the wall.
• Wrecked Weapon: The second point in Matt's video about James Blair's Victoria Cross citation is that Blair led a successful charge against the Indian mutineers he was fighting despite the tip of his sword being broken off, which goes against the assumption that a man is rendered useless just because his sword's snapped in half. Matt points out that the blades of British sabers such as the pattern 1827 tended to have distal taper all the way down, but they become particularly thin from about the center of percussion to the point, which makes the blade lighter and more effective at both thrusting and cutting, but also makes it more prone to breaking off from the thicker lower part. His guess is that Blair's sword would have broke around the C.O.P. and he would have lost about 8 to 10 inches of reach, but he would have still been left with a length of blade similar to a cutlass or hanger. Even with its trusting ability foiled by the break it could have remained a useful weapon, especially on the defensive since the intact part was that used most often for parrying.

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"Cheers, guys!"