For transcriptions and more detailed shownotes, please go to https://swordschool.com/podcast/teaching-horses-martial-arts-with-the-horsemen-of-eire/ 

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Alessia Pagani and Jack Gassman run Horsemen of Eire, an equestrian training school and medieval combat academy outside Wexford in Ireland. Alessia specialises in natural horsemanship and Jack takes care of the swords.

In this episode we talk about what’s natural about ‘natural horsemanship’, and its origins in American cowboys and medieval training techniques. There is a blog post here with pictures of the single and double pillar training techniques we discuss: https://dariocaballeros.blogspot.com/2013/09/antoine-de-pluvinel-images-from.html 

Alessia spent time living and working as a cowgirl in Arizona and she explains how Rossfechten (swordfighting on horseback) is similar to herding cattle. Teaching horses to fight is not dissimilar to teaching humans to fight, when you understand their motivations and characters. As Jack says, horses intimately understand violence and will beat the shit out of each other over “you looked at me funny”.

We also find out why there is so much unarmoured longsword in Liechtenauer, why it helps to be a dancer, and how many plates you have to spin to run a business involving horses.

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