On 21 March, 2010, The Hammertetz Open International Tournament was battled out in Houston Texas, USA. The competition consisted of two separate torunaments, fought directly after each other. The first - possibly the first dussack tournament in several hundred years - followed historical Belgian fencing rules. The second - a longsword tournament - was fought with synthetic wasters according to WMAC and HEMAA rules.

Both tournaments were won by Axel Pettersson of Gothenburg Historical Fencing School, GHFS. Not a small achievment considering some of the world's best HEMAists participated and that the fighting went on for the most part of the day.

A big congratulations to Axel!

Hanwei released a steel longsword trainer a few years back based on original training swords. Many HEMA practitioners complained they were too whippy, and hanwei seems to have corrected this in the new version. The new swords (called "Federschwerts in the HEMA community, though this is a modern term) functions as a cheap trainer for drilling and sparring.

 from Blackbelt website:

The Return of Western Sword Fighting

Few realize that modern boxing has its roots in the fighting systems of medieval Europe. In fact, the tradition of holding matches on a raised, roped-off platform evolved from the medieval method for publicly testing fencing students, an event known as “playing one’s prize.” A reminder of this ancient rite still survives in the term “prize fighter.”

Of course, medieval fencing bore little resemblance to the modern sport. Students trained in a variety of weapons, including the sword, spear, polearm, dagger and mace, along with a form of unarmed combat called ringen. The medieval warrior practiced a system of combat that took into account all the ranges, weapons and armor styles he was likely to encounter.

No unbroken medieval fighting tradition exists today, but many organizations are painstakingly reconstructing these arts from historical combat manuals written by the great “Masters of Defence,” such as Fiore dei Liberi, Johannes Liechtenauer and Hans Talhoffer. In the historical European martial arts community, these manuscripts are signposts to recovering the lost skills of the western warrior...

 The whole documentary can be found here:

part1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpEC38sL3iU&feature=related

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hy_A9vjp_s&feature=related

The documentary is in German but is well worth watching even for non German speakers.

 Dom Diogo Gomes de Figueyredo's work on the use of the Montante, the two-handed sword native to Spain and Portugal, is now available in English translation. This is a relatively short work dated to the 1650's, but represents almost half of the currently known material for this weapon from these two countries.