The London sword fighters reviving medieval combat

“Protect your sword arm.” 

Merlin swings before I have time to think. My plastic training sword catches his with a crack. Around us, people carrying long black bags laden with steel drift into All Saints Parish in Ealing, London. One by one they unzip longswords, rapiers, sabres, polearms, and other protective accoutrement pungent with hours upon hours of training – arranging all before a theatre backdrop painted with a medieval castle.

For more than 20 years, this unassuming church hall has transformed every Tuesday evening into a battleground for Schola Gladiatoria, the London club devoted to reconstructing forgotten martial arts.

Historical European martial arts (HEMA) exists somewhere between the library and the fight club. From the outside, it can look like fantasy role-play with better equipment. In reality, practitioners spend years reconstructing lost systems of combat from medieval and Renaissance manuals, testing centuries-old techniques against resisting opponents. Few people have done more to shape the revival than Matt Easton.

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Growing up in Ealing, Easton practiced kung fu, fenced at university and dabbled in historical re-enactment before hearing rumours of someone teaching historical swordsmanship in north London. There he discovered medieval treatises and, as he puts it, ​“disappeared down the rabbit hole”. Britain had almost no teachers at the time, so in 2000 he founded Schola Gladiatoria himself.

But before I meet him, I meet the people he has drawn into that mission.

“I have a very intense job during the day,” says Emmett, a 26-year-old trader. ​“This is my little lull where I can go and stab someone in the face. I think that’s a very good balance.”

Emmett arrived as an Olympic fencer hoping to reignite his childhood fantasy of sword fighting. Here, fantasy quickly becomes measurable. Rankings replace imagination. He is now ranked 23^rd in the world for sword and buckler.

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Everyone here seems to have arrived with a private mythology – history, gaming, martial arts, fantasy novels. Then the practice strips it down to footwork.

My instructor from earlier in the night, Gary, has just finished sparring a man with waist-length strawberry hair and white puffed trousers. His opponent is light on his feet; the two have contrasting techniques. For a moment it almost looks like a dance, until the clang of steel makes my ears ring. 

Every exchange is carefully controlled. Fighters wear fencing masks, padded jackets, and heavy gloves, wielding training swords with blunted edges made from flexible spring steel. They strike with control rather than brute force, aiming not simply to make contact, but to land clean, technically sound strikes that would have been effective with a sharp blade. 

Afterwards, Gary reaches into his bag and produces a battered copy of Fior di Battaglia, the fifteenth-century combat manual by Italian fencing master Fiore dei Liberi. He points to tiny illustrated figures, explaining that whoever wears the crown has won the position.

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Before studying medieval combat manuals, Gary worked with music manuscripts. By profession, he is an opera singer.

“I’m an extremely convincing mid,” he laughs with theatrical self-awareness, describing his tournament results. ​“But I’ll fence anyone, and give them a good fight.” 

Like many members, he found Schola Gladiatoria through Matt Easton’s YouTube channel during the pandemic. ​“You’ll find a lot of us came here because of Matt,” another member says from the corner of his mouth, adding, ​“But don’t tell him I told you that.”

As if summoned, the church hall doors swing open. 

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Matt Easton walks in carrying a sword bag over one shoulder – tall, watchful, commanding, with a trickster’s look in his eyes. A certain reverence enters the room before people drift towards him with questions. Within minutes he’s crouched beside a student poring over photocopies of manuals, debating the meaning of a tiny illustration before sending them back onto the floor to test it at full-speed.

Today Easton wears a bewildering number of hats: archaeologist, antique arms dealer, historical consultant, and one of the world’s best-known HEMA instructors. His YouTube has almost half a million subscribers. Before any of that, though, he spent 17 years as a British civil servant working on international aid and security.

“I wanted to work in museums,” he says. ​“Instead I accidentally ended up with a government career.”

The sword obsession happened after hours. Easton collected antique weapons, studied them to become a better buyer, then began dealing to fund the hobby. His YouTube channel started almost accidentally as an extension of the club. ​“I started getting paid for something I was going to do anyway,” he says. Eventually, it allowed him to leave government work altogether.

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“I sometimes think, if I won the lottery and had £100 million in the bank, would I still do YouTube videos? And the answer is yes, I would.” He chuckles.

These days, his expertise reaches well beyond YouTube. Increasingly, police officers and lawyers contact him to untangle Britain’s notoriously complex sword legislation. He recommends transporting swords in repurposed instrument cases.

“Our government traditionally likes to ban and regulate things a lot more than others, which has made it a minefield to navigate when you’re someone who deals in antiques or runs a fencing club,” he says. ​“I’ve accidentally become an expert on the laws. 99% of lawyers and police don’t understand them.” 

Easton doesn’t see HEMA as nostalgia. He views it as part of a broader revival of historic music, dance, pottery and textiles. 

“People like to physically connect with the past rather than just reading about it,” he says. ​“It’s easy to read about kings and queens, invasions and big things. But the way people really connect with history is understanding how ordinary people actually did things.”

Around him, I watch students transform medieval illustrations into practical experiments.

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Mary Jane attended her first class last May. ​“I just giggled the whole time,” she laughs. She’s barely missed a Tuesday since.

I first visited Schola Gladiatoria in April 2024, during a period when the room was overwhelmingly male. Jack, who has been fencing for more than two decades, tells me that women’s participation has always come in waves. ​“Once there’s a critical mass, more people feel comfortable walking through the door.”

30 years ago, when Easton’s club kicked off, enthusiasm outstripped equipment. Few manufacturers produced proper, historically accurate protective gear, forcing early participants to improvise. Today dozens of specialist companies have emerged, supplying clubs around the world with masks making HEMA safer – and allowing it to grow.

The club’s numbers ebb and flow with the tides of popular culture, too. Each time a major fight-featuring film lands in cinemas – like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings – another influx of curious beginners erupts. Fantasy lingers at HEMA’s edges. While the community is quick to insist it isn’t role-play, fantasy is often a gateway. The discipline of the footwork, biomechanics, and hours spent mulling over interpretations of medieval combat manuals transforms fantasy into technique.

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After the last sparring rounds, we all decamp to a pub around the corner, where debates break out over the line between HEMA and LARP (live action role playing).

“We’re all just nerds with swords at the end of the day,” Jack laughs, while others wax more poetic.

“Fencing systems were designed for honour,” Emmett says. ​“As a society, we’ve become very civil – and perhaps we should because we don’t want violence on the streets. But we’ve lost the martial skills that every culture had. There’s a romance to duelling.”

Easton underscores the historic element. ​“We’re not just hitting each other with swords,” he says. ​“We’re trying to recreate lost martial arts, bringing forgotten systems back to life. At its foundation, HEMA is the use of accurate replicas of period weapons in the way they were used according to the historical sources available.”

The revival stretches beyond Europe. Across China and Japan, others are reconstructing their own forgotten martial traditions from surviving manuals, discovering that centuries-old techniques often bear little resemblance to the arts practiced today.

“It feels a bit like being Indiana Jones,” Easton says. ​“You’re trying to uncover forgotten knowledge of the past that’s been hiding in plain sight. That’s what motivates me.”

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Easton notes his childhood idols were not superheroes, but fantasy imaginings of historical people like Robin Hood or Spartacus. He dreamt of shooting bows, riding horses, and fighting as they did.

Some members come for competition. Others are captivated by the history. Easton believes the two are inseparable.

“It’s no good trying to understand a 15^th century fencer if you can’t fence. It’s good to mix the two – the yin and the yang – they inform the understanding of the other.”

Beyond the aesthetic and the technical, HEMA is about recovering forms of discipline, ritual, and shared purpose that have been outlived by the world that created them.

By 11pm, the painted castle backdrop has disappeared into darkness. Swords slide back into black nylon bags. The trader heads home. The opera singer catches the tube. Outside, commuters hurry past the church without a second glance. 

Behind an ordinary door, a unique cross-section of Londoners has spent the evening testing forgotten ideas against living bodies, connected by a practice that barely existed in Britain a generation ago. They fight to keep a lost martial art alive, one bout at a time.

Mads Jensen is a freelance writer and singer. Follow her on Instagram.

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