3. hut
Setting aside from 3. guard

Inner Schwertnehmen
An inner disarm

Schopfgriff
A throw from horse with the Tuftgrip

Images are from
the Solothurner Fechtbuch,
ca 1470. Reproduced with the kind permission of Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Switzerland.

If you stumbled upon these pages by accident...

What's Rossfechten?

Rossfechten is - simply put - fighting from horse, as taught by german masters of the 14th to 16th century. It's an old german word which translates to "fighting on horseback". This martial art was a part of a complete training for the knight. A knight could be taught to fight on foot and on horseback, with lance, sword, dagger and more, in armour and without. It was a thorough martial art, of which Rossfechten was just a "small" part.

All these medieval and renaissance martial arts were lost for centuries, but thanks to a load of old manuscripts left by those who mastered these arts - and the invaluable effort of many enthusiasts today - the art is now being reconstructed.

Lots of people throughout the world have been working on reconstruction of fighting with the longsword, fighting with the poleaxe, etc. Few have made a serious effort at reconstructing the mounted part of the art however. No wonder, since it requires horses...

Frilansene has been working with Rossfechten - that is, to reconstruct the art of fighting on horseback - since 2003.

Who's Frilansene?

Frilansene is a reenactment group that reenacts a medevial "free company", that is, an independent military unit. We strive to get as close to our selected period (1397-1434) as possible. This goes beyond "cool stash" and also includes riding styles and the fighting arts.

You can learn more about Frilansene at www.frilansene.no

Why this website?

We decided it was time to write a book about Rossfechten. The book is now almost finnished, but we need to work through the stuff in the book. Thus a project team was set down...

What's on this site?

For the public, not much... This is a private workspace for our project team, and most of the stuff here is hidden from public view. However, we've left some contactinfo etc if someone should share our interest in Rossfechten.

Hmm, there are some Norwegians words here and there...?

Yup. Frilansene is a Norwegian group, and since our website-engine defaults to Norwegian unless we set it up for multi-language, it thinks it's running in "norwegian" mode. We could set it up for multi-language, but then we would have to write everything in both Norwegian and English, which is a little overkill for an "internal blogg"... We apologize for our lazyness....