Jason Barrons began training in historical fencing in 2014 at the New York Historical Fencing Association. He later found himself in Denver, Colorado with Aaron Karnuta and Sam Ross where the three of them founded the Denver Historical Fencing Academy. Since then, Barrons remains as the sole founder of the school but is joined by Melissa Newman Evans as co-leader of the academy. Today, Barrons took some time to talk about his time in HEMA, serving as the president of the HEMA Alliance, and creating an open and diverse environment for everyone who is interested in sword fighting.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Hello and welcome Jason! Thank you for joining us to talk about historical fencing!
Jason Barrons: I am excited to be here.
MAYTT: When and where did you first begin practicing historical fencing? What is it about historical fencing that continues to motivate you to train today?
JB: I started in 2014 when I lived in New York City, when the New York Historical Fencing Association had a presence in the city. As for what motivates me, it’s a mix of the people I get to spend time with, and the personal growth it brings. I don’t believe that the masters I studied wanted me to merely mimic them, but to develop my own art based on the principles they espouse.
MAYTT: How would you describe the training you experienced when you first started? How have you seen the training evolve or change since you began?
JB: When I started, a lot of people who were instructing HEMA came from other martial arts or no background at all. There was a lot of frog DNA and bullshido, not to mention a lot of gun culture ideals crept their way in (“stopping power”). Drilling, oftentimes, involved simply doing the plays in the manuscripts over and over again, devoid of any stimulus or decision making. This is to say nothing of the power levels that worked perfectly fine for middle-aged cis white males but kept nearly everyone else out of the community.
We’ve finally seen people taking instruction and training seriously, and not being afraid to look at the science behind them. At the end of the day, the historical masters had the benefit of living within an athletic fencing culture – even children learned fencing and physical literacy from an early age. The only way to get close to that level of experience and motor skill development is that we’ve had to leverage what other sports and martial arts have learned. While I think it’s being extrapolated a bit too far, there’s a lot of exciting stuff being done with the constraints-led approach (CLA) of teaching motor skills, for instance.
And we’ve thankfully started to see clubs understand that in order to have a diverse group of folks train, in order to make their clubs welcoming, that we need to scale back on the power and not try to kill one another. Just because a 240-plus pound man can eat a full force longsword strike doesn’t mean that a 110-pound woman should just “deal with it,” because they won’t – they’ll just leave.
MAYTT: I see. Tell us about the history of Denver Historical Fencing Academy? How did it come about and how have you seen it grow since its inception?
JB: DHFA was an experiment when we first started – we wanted to explore everything from training paradigms to branding to inclusivity and to share that information with the community. A lot of clubs are so busy performing admin or teaching that they don’t have time to learn how to improve – we wanted to provide that.
So three of us (Aaron Karnuta, Sam Ross, and myself) started DHFA with that in mind. Over time, Aaron and Sam moved out of the area, and I’ve been the remaining founder ever since. Our first beginners class sold out, and it hasn’t stopped since then.
We have 1,300 people on our waitlist and our classes were literally selling out within five minutes of opening registration, so now we have people apply to join. We have over 100 students, classes four nights a week, and a crack crew of instructors, including Melissa who is our other head instructor.
MAYTT: You served as the HEMA Alliance president for four years. How did you come to assume that position and what was that experience like for you? How do you feel the Alliance grew or solidified during your tenure?
JB: I was on the Governing Council (GC) of the HEMA Alliance (HEMAA) for a year, and after that Richard Marsden asked if I was considering running for president. The HEMAA has had a streak of non-impactful presidents and GC’s that never did very much, and Richard understood that I was a “doer.” Despite me asking people to consider running for president, I ran unopposed every term.
When I took over the Alliance, it was in dire straits. Memberships were done through PayPal and weren’t properly recorded. The HEMAA literally had tens of people paying for memberships, despite having hundreds of people thinking they were active. The website was a nightmare and confusing for anyone who was curious about HEMA. For a service organization, it was barely keeping the lights on.
After I took over, we revamped the website to focus on people new to HEMA, rebranded to a professional look, implemented a membership system, reworked the entire safety policy, and more. We went from tens of people paying for memberships, to thousands. I was lucky to have a lot of people on the governing council at the same time who were willing to put in the work.
MAYTT: Being part of the HEMA Alliance, both as a member and president, how have you seen the organization bring the HEMA community together more than previous organizations?
JB: For what it’s worth, I’m no longer a member of the HEMA Alliance. I think the organization was hamstrung from the start out of a fear that it would become a governing body, and that meant that it didn’t benefit me or my own club any longer. There’s a strong libertarian streak that still lives deep within US HEMA, and it makes progress very difficult. We’ve seen a lot of advancement in the European HEMA community, but the states are still stuck in regional fiefdoms.
I don’t think community organization is a current priority of the folks who currently run the HEMAA – that’s not a slight, I just think they have different priorities than I did when I was running things.
MAYTT: You also act as the Editor in Chief of Measure & Weigh, a HEMA product review website. What inspired you to begin a site dedicated to product reviews? How do you feel that has helped others in the community?
JB: There weren’t a lot of reviews done at the time, and most of them were YouTube reaction videos that people would release five minutes after they unboxed the new kit. Nobody was going in depth in terms of customer service, build quality, safety, and durability.
For folks who appreciated a detailed review, it helped them make smarter choices about their gear purchases. While HEMA isn’t expensive compared to many other hobbies, it’s still not cheap.
However, I was relentlessly contacted by people who wanted to know when a given review would be done, sometimes the same day the product began shipping. People would get angry at me for not having something out right away, despite my policy of purchasing my own review samples and being at the same shipping gnomes as them. Combine that with the fact that the community never grew past the five-minute reviews, and I struggled to get consistent contributors to Measure & Weigh, I decided to end it.
I’ve since retired Measure & Weigh and all of the reviews are now being hosted at https://HEMA.rocks/.
MAYTT: That is awesome! Recently, many historical fencers that we talked with mentioned the creation of a living lineage or a living tradition in HEMA. In your opinion, is having a living tradition in HEMA a benefit or a hindrance to the movement?
JB: I think wondering if it’s a hindrance or a benefit is a red herring – there is simply no way to stop change from happening, and it’s better for everyone if people work towards accepting that rather than railing against it. Any human activity is a living lineage – things will be lost every time there is a transfer of knowledge or the context changes.
What we can do as members of this community is to try to build cultures that care about the source material – they may care about it in a different way than I do, they may have different interpretations than I do, but caring about the sources is really the only thing we can impart to future generations to keep them roughly on the same path.
But the idea that we’re going to statically capture these slices of time from 500-600 years ago and preserve them in a modern culture with very different relationships with violence is naive at best. At the end of the day, people being interested in ancient martial arts and enjoying the learning experience of a physical activity is all that really should matter, not if they do X technique the same way I think it should be done.
MAYTT: What place do the manuals and fight books have in HEMA if the movement is moving towards being a living tradition? Will the books and manuscripts become irrelevant?
JB: First, martial arts by definition are living traditions – we forget that just because a book is a slice of time that we treat it as if the arts were static. Second, the texts will never be irrelevant, even in a living tradition. They’ll act as a lodestar, provided you build a culture that wants that.
At DHFA, we have a modern approach to instructing and drilling. But every class still has quotes from the old masters, and we occasionally hold manuscript nights where we teach students how to break down plays for their own interpretations – we’re teaching them how to fish for themselves.
As long as the historical context is the thread that everything else hangs off of, that’s all you can really ask for when time stops for no one.
MAYTT: Within the competitive arena, you have placed in the Top 100 of fencers both nationally and internationally. With this in mind, how important is competition to historical fencers and to the overall movement?
JB: I think competition is very personal and can act as a great training goal for people who want that. We used to recommend to our students that they compete so, that way, they can better understand and manage the adrenaline response that comes in high stress fight situations, but we had some backlash against it and have since pulled back.
Having said that, competition has been vital to the understanding of HEMA, despite there being many detractors out there. To date, nothing has offered the pressure context that is so close to the “real fight” pressures one might face like competition has, and we’ve seen a lot of interpretations of techniques really tighten up because of it. I don’t think HEMA would understand HEMA nearly as well today if it weren’t for a vibrant competitive scene. You can tell in someone’s fencing if they’ve never competed before.
However, there’s still a lot of toxicity in the competitive scene that acts as a gatekeeper to anyone who doesn’t fit a certain mold. For instance, there’s a lot of people who think we need to be throwing wounding strikes in competition, that attacks should hurt or even kill someone if they weren’t wearing protection. Can we take a moment to appreciate how messed up that is?
Going back to my earlier point, to a cis male who has the girth to take a strong strike with a longsword, this isn’t that big of a deal. But to people who don’t have the same size, real damage, and trauma can occur. It’s really easy for me to dismiss smaller people and say, “If you can’t handle it, don’t compete,” but that’s a pretty fucked up thing for me to tell someone. I’d rather make a little room for them. Just because I sat on the couch first doesn’t mean I can’t scootch over a bit to make space for you.
One thing a lot of events have started to do is remove power requirements from strikes. Some people might whine that this removes the “martiality” from competition, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth in my experience. As a fairly strong person with good mechanics, it’s forced me to be even more in control and aware of what I’m doing. And any contact with an opponent’s weapon adds an extra level of stress that requires “martial power” simply doesn’t. I’m more aware of my opponent’s weapons than ever before. I’m terrified of that ninety-pound person now, because any touch from their weapon is something I have to pay attention to.
What makes HEMA different from modern fencing isn’t the power you can deliver in a strike, but the weaponry, target availability, grappling at the sword, and even bouting arenas. We don’t need to keep trying to hurt each other to maintain a martial culture.
People who complain about the new culture being developed around power are mostly angry that they can’t hit as hard as they want – they don’t realize that if defense is the ultimate goal, treating swords like the danger they are is the better approach.
And it makes for tournaments that are more fun for everyone involved.
MAYTT: You bring up making room for everyone that wants to participate in sword fighting. Your school and many other historical fencing schools stress this culture of inclusion, more so than other martial arts. How do you go about creating and sustaining this culture of inclusivity? Have you experienced any pushback from some members regarding the culture you have established and how were those incidents handled?
JB: For What it’s worth, I think other martial arts are failing in this regard, and they’re limiting their “customer” base by not being more inclusive. Women and other gendered folks are just as interested in martial arts as men are. Most pushback we get are actually from potential students who think our code of conduct is stupid and we should get rid of it. Thankfully, we don’t need those people in the club, so their applications are rejected.
Here are the things we’ve found that work for this:
1. Show people images that they can see themselves in. The number one thing we were told by women before we started the club was to have women and other underrepresented groups in the photos we present to the public. People need to be able to imagine themselves doing the activity, and they can’t do that if they don’t see someone that looks like them. We now have regular photoshoots and we’ve even commissioned art to communicate that fencing is an activity for everyone.
2. Bring underrepresented groups into leadership, don’t wait for them to ask. We had a problem for a while where we had a good mix of genders in the club, but it was only men expressing interest in teaching. I had to identify potential instructors and tell them straight up that they had the ability and the skill to be a good instructor. Melissa is an incredible instructor, a mentor, and someone for everyone to look up to.
3. Commit to diversity, don’t just perform it. We made it clear from the start that Melissa had the same authority that I did, and that I’m not the real head instructor, we both are. Since then, we’ve had way more interest from others in leadership positions.
4. A code of conduct that you follow through on. We have a robust code of conduct that spells out behavior in sparring, how to treat one another, and expectations on behaviors outside of the school. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t enforce it. Sadly, it has meant that we’ve had to let students go, reject transfers from certain other clubs outright, and there are occasional times where folks want to split hairs with the code of conduct to fit their goals, but showing that we take our code seriously shows that the students need to as well.
5. Be okay with giving up some authority and be humble enough to listen. Without those two, the others don’t matter.
MAYTT: Final question; where do you think HEMA will go in the next ten or fifteen years in the United States? How do you think the movement will grow and evolve in that time span?
JB: I wish I had a read on where the community is going. With it lacking any kind of real organization, it means that little fiefdoms pop up where rockstars are treated like kings in their local fencing communities. Our current ratings system also reinforces that, making it where top fencers don’t want to fence other top fencers, because fencing a bunch of locals will boost their ratings more.
But if I have to theorize for a bit, I do think HEMA is going to go through what almost every sport and martial arts goes through when you look at the historical record – a lot of small communities bump into each other more and more, until at some point all of their idiosyncrasies and differences make it too hard to do anything but organize.
People fear organization because they think modern fencing was some bastardization of HEMA (even though most of those people don’t realize just how close HEMA and Modern Olympic Fencing are to one another already). They think “sportification” is something to avoid at all costs (ignoring that sport and play have been at the heart of HEMA and all martial arts ever since our monkey ancestors hit each other with sticks).
But you can choose to either help develop that organization in a way that preserves a culture of respecting the masters and the contexts for their weaponry, or you can choose to sit on the sidelines and complain on Facebook about how HEMA used to be.
MAYTT: Thank you again for taking the time to join us for this interesting conversation about HEMA!
JB: It was my pleasure.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 
In any martial tradition, one must remember, control of oneself is key. You start injuring ones opponent in training and soon no one will want to spar with you. The dojo, salle, training hall is a place of learning, therefore respect should be given to all who enter and seriously seek to learn the regimen. Unimpeded, unguarded full strikes have never been justified in the training hall, these would be considered killing strokes, and reserved for battlefields, and real life situations. In the training hall, the cost to students is soon that individual will become a bully and tyrant. Unrestrained and undisciplined, raising the cost of insurance with each injury. I found that through learning accuracy in striking (and thus precision) speed and power will come. So when I have to strike it is with that power and I can power it up or down as the situation demands. Unrestrained power is a good way to get someone killed while learning, and it is not something I want on my conscience. As well as not something that has a place in the training hall. For your information, I have trained in Arni’s, fencing both sport, and shlager fencing as follows by the SCA, as well as other martial traditions. In all of them your opponent is also your training partner and is also learning and a friend, and brother or sister in that tradition, this builds respect for others, and conscience would dictate the treatment given to that individual, there will always be someone stronger, more resilientnt than others, there will always be those that want to go full bore all or nothing. They can do that outside the training hall as additional training. But inside the hall restraint, and control, and respect must be followed or training becomes a free for all to sooth these Savage egos. Thank you for your time.
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