Cheyenne Medieval Weapons Club Trains With Swords

CHEYENNE — Ringing out over the din of clashing swords and boastful threats after hours in a local CrossFit gym, one hearty voice rose above the rest in a crazy-mad, but friendly, greeting.

“Welcome,” said the man wearing medieval clothing and black-and-white-striped tights. “Don’t worry. We don’t actually want to hurt our friends. We’ll just leave a couple of welts and bruises, while we pretend to kill them.”

The would-be knight — or knave as the case might be — is Michael Binsse. The Happy Valley resident is a Historical European Martial Arts instructor, leading a class of would-be knights, knaves and sword maidens on a romp through medieval weaponry at CrossFit Frontier in Cheyenne. 

He’s just started a new class on longswords, but he had examples of all kinds of swords casually leaning against the wall Thursday night. It didn’t take long for him to offer the nearest — a big two-hander — to this reporter, along with some cajoling to go ahead and give it a swing. 

Long Isn’t Always Better

“There is an advantage to having a longer sword,” Binsse said jovially. 

But it’s not as much of an advantage as one might think, particularly when facing an experienced sword fighter.

“This is the Montante, and it’s obviously the biggest sword we have,” Binsse said, swinging the gigantic, 5.5-foot long two-hander overhead toward an all-too-willing student.

“Like obviously, from here, I can easily reach forever,” Binsse said. “And he can just barely start to reach me. But that’s where the breakdown is, right? Because if he was, like, trying to cut my head with like a deep cut —“

The student obligingly stepped inside, right under the giant sword, to demonstrate just such a swing and reveal the giant sword’s major weakness.

“Now he’s like way too shallow on my sword,” Binsse said, showing how difficult it has become to now reach his shorter-sword opponent. “For me, in order to do anything about this, I have to make a huge dramatic motion.”

That kind of mismatch on a real battlefield could be deadly, Binsse added. And that’s where shields, or sometimes even short daggers, come into play. They can help restore the balance, if one’s weapon fails to carve out a safe enough space. 

In Binsse’s classroom, nothing is deadly and all is in good fun. Mismatches and mistakes lead to bouts that look more like Richard Simmons dancing. 

It’s Cool To Be Comfortable

Binsse’s class has attracted an eclectic group of people, girlfriend Taylor “Max” Menor told Cowboy State Daily. 

“It’s something different,” she said. “Because in the greatest sense, we’re not normal. We’re comfortable. It’s comfortable to find things that are cool, no matter how old you are.”

Ages have ranged from 16 to 66 so far in the Cheyenne Chapter of Historical European Martial Arts Club, all of whom have their own reasons for being interested in learning to swing a medieval sword like a knight or sword maiden of old.

“If I’m being like totally honest, just myself, that whole Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance period was a beautiful time period,” Menor said. “There were a lot of hardships. 

“But if you take a lot of what happened there, and you can just kind of see the history does kind of repeat itself. We go through tyranny, we go through a lot of depressions, and hardships.”

At that time period, swords were a weapon of protection, to get through all that, Menor said. But they’re still helping people get through things, even in the modern age.

“It’s like a stress reliever thing,” Menor said. “It’s a health thing. You get your body moving, and you’re with like-minded people who have been through things, too, whatever they are.”

One Guy And His Swords

Binsse has a dozen or so people these days interested in this style of medieval sport, which is one-part athletics, one part history, and three parts pure fun and silliness, because life is already serious enough.

But he started out as just one guy sitting around at the Lions Park Amphitheater all by himself, with both medieval gear and garb — a trap, just waiting for a little spark of curiosity to spring. 

“I would just go sit on the amphitheater with my equipment and see if anyone would come up and ask, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ Or ‘Hey, do you want to learn to sword fight,’” Binsse said.

That was the cue to challenge them to a good-natured fight if they were willing. Or to teach them something about medieval weapons and history if they weren’t. 

That lonely vigil in the park looking for birds of a feather is how Brock Bacon found out about Binsse. 

“My sister actually sent me a link through Facebook of him sitting there with a bunch of gear and swords,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And I was like, ‘Wait for me! I’m on my way!’”

At that time, there was no scheduled official class. Bacon and Binsse would meet up in the park whenever they could during the summer, often battling until the sun went down.

Bacon admits he went home with grapefruit-sized bruises on his body quite often. But he always came back for more because it was not just challenging, but great fun.

It didn’t take long for other people to notice this sword fighting in the park. Some were just “Looky Lous,” but others, like Brock, stuck with it, until there were enough for a formal, full-on class in the medieval art of combat.

Forget ‘The Art Of War,’ Try The ‘Art Of Combat’

Bacon still goes home with bruises on his body, but he loves the class for its blend of athleticism and history. 

Binsse actually uses a copy of the medieval text called “Art of Combat” to teach his classes. It was written by a German man named Joachim Meyer in 1570.

“Joachim actually went bankrupt making this, and then he died of the plague,” Binsse said. “So he suffered a terrible fate, but he wanted this book to be the best, so he went bankrupt paying artists for these wood carvings.”

The illustrations are all fabulously elaborate drawings, printed off of wood carvings, which show various sword fighting maneuvers of the time, along with “shadow steps”  that illustrate where fighters had put their feet just moments before executing the depicted move. 

“A lot of the other stuff we find, historically, looks like a fifth grader drew it,” Binsse said. “What he did was super detailed, and he was even trying to show the footwork.”

It caused a stir when the book was finally discovered. It’s details have made it a book for the ages, though, giving Meyer a bit of immortality — even if he died not knowing that at the time. 

Binsse loves to flip through the book, finding new gems hidden in the illustrations, and little secrets he hadn’t noticed before. He has brightly colored sticky notes attached to many of the pages. 

“There’s so much that we learn by studying these books, like honestly, I think the most fascinating one to me is their knowledge of biomechanics, which we have lost today,” Binsse said. “You know, everyone hears the common one — lift with your knees and your legs, don’t twist your back and stuff.”

But “Art of Combat” goes in-depth into the structure of the body, and how to position for maximum impact. It was physics for humans, before humans knew much about physics.

“You like get a grasp of how to align your bone structure,” Binsse said. “And it’s exactly like physics. We’re taking kinetic energy that someone is applying to my body, and I’m transferring it through my bone structure down into the ground to help absorb that impact, so I don’t get hurt.”

Those fascinating lessons from the past keep people coming back for more, Binsse believes. 

But so does the camaraderie, Menor added. 

“It’s about more than just sword fighting and being a nerd,” she said. “It’s being yourself, and being OK with that, and being accepted for that.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.