Once in a while, we get the question from different people about the reason why we use rattan for sparring in Antrim Bata instead of blackthorn or any other type of wood. It’s a good question, and one that may not be as evident from the outside. Rattan is certainly not indigenous to Ireland, and was not used in the past for training, so why should we adopt it?
Of course, there exists other safe simulators, and other types of woods may have interesting properties, but I wanted to really focus on rattan and blackthorn, since those are the ones that are the most discussed. I will try to explain my point here and look at the pros and cons of using rattan vs hardwood for training.
Cons of rattan and pros of hardwood
Right off the bat, I would mention that we do use blackthorn for non contact drilling. Rattan has a lot going for it, as you will see in a minute, but one of its biggest advantages is also one of its biggest issues. It has a lot of give. It’s a material that has little in the way of density, in fact you can pretty much see through the pores of a cut down piece of rattan. Parries in Antrim are all done as a beat, meaning that they must intercept and hit with some energy the incoming strike to be effective.
With woods like blackthorn, the stick bounces back from a parry -or « rises against the hand » as faction fighters would have said- with a lot less effort. The energy from that bounce can be recycled on recovering from a strike, or sending a riposte. Rattan doesn’t really react that way. It will tend to absorb the shock instead of sending it back, and so certain actions demand a lot more energy to do successfully than they normally would. I had the same criticism of the polypropylene sticks in my previous review of them.
Smaller diameter sticks will also tend to « wiggle » somewhat on strikes and parries. This can also affect the ease of a technique, but these would be too small for most people, and so shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Finally, rattan does not really have any knuckles, horns, feathers, stumps, however you want to call them. These little bumps where a thorn formerly sat on a piece of blackthorn. Those tend to somewhat help deviate a strike when parrying, helping to protect the hand from a stick sliding down.
Those are really the main cons of rattan when compared to blackthorn, as far as a sparring tool goes. In my opinion, none of them are really major. The worse they will do is to force you to use better technique, and they are not forgiving at all of a weak parry, or an uncontrolled strike.
Pros of rattan and cons of hardwood
As I said earlier, one of the main advantages of rattan is its relative flexibility. It’s not much really, and nowhere close to plastic or rubber, or even a thin piece of steel, but more than that would become a problem, as the stick would now behave completely unlike a real one.
It mostly shines through comparaison, because while hardwoods like blackthorn have more flexibility than many others, they behave like a crowbar when compared to a rattan stick. How is this a problem? In two ways. First, rattan will flex on a strike, and will flex even more so the more force it encounters. This is a good thing to prevent serious injuries in training.
More importantly, and this is the reason we do not allow hardwood in full contact sparring: rattan will bend on a thrust. Again, not enormously so, but a lot more than blackthorn ever would.
Here you see one of our most photographed technique, the bayonet. This is a very powerful two handed thrust with the bar or thin end of the stick. While fencing helmets can protect your face, what they won’t do very well is protect your head from violently jerking back on a frontal hit. This movement can be enough to cause micro or even full on concussions, or even worse. A hit on the throat of even the plexus can lead to other serious injuries, and this is why we normally ask people to pull their thrusts when sparring. But, thankfully rattan will be more forgiving if a hard impact does happen.
Blackthorn will not. The bend will be virtually imperceptible, and in the right conditions it might even snap. It may even snap into a fairly sharp stake and turn into a spear.
Imagine this scenario. You are sparring with your training partner using a blackthorn stick. You decide to crash in, blocking a head strike with two hands, and entering in with a bayonet strike that hits them straight in the face, sending their head backward. In the heat of the moment, you instantly attempt to repeat your strike and accidentally hit their now exposed throat.
Only, you never realized that the very tip of your stick split off after the impact, and is now a very sharp point. I will let you imagine the consequences.
If you think: I would never miss that, I would react in time! Ask yourself: have you ever been told by someone watching you spar that you lost a piece of equipment? That you were about to step on something or hit the wall? If you sparred for enough time I can guarantee it has happened to you, and you would probably not realize that your stick broke in that very intense and fast moment, especially at close quarters.
Now, there are ways to protect oneself against such perforative damage. Most HEMA equipment is newton rated, so they could probably stop a sharp piece of wood from piercing the skin. What it won’t do though is protect you against the concussive force of that thrust. The mask may even snag onto the stick and increase the push into your head. A full piece of jousting or bohurt armor may protect from that, but then we are not really doing bataireacht anymore at that point, and wearing too heavy a mask without proper support can lead to different problems, especially where wrestling is involved.
There are always concessions to be made in sparring between artifacts created by the training medium and the protection worn. A training weapon that is flexible and soft to the point of allowing you to train without equipment will not behave anything like a stick, and protection allowing you to fight with hardwood sticks without the risk of severe injury will greatly affect the way you move and the time you can spend training. There needs to be a middle ground, and so far rattan has been the best training tool for that reason.
Rattan will not break in a spear shape. The fact it is a plant made of very big and relatively loose fibres means that it will fray into something resembling a brush. the worst that may happen is to get some dust in your eyes as it happens, which is usually quickly gone.
Other pros of rattan include its ease of customization. I can use tape to change its shape, create a balance akin to a real shillelagh, and even mimic knuckles to some extent. I can put padding on it, or tips to make it safer on certain actions. I can then easily end up with a stick that is the same weight and balance as a real shillelagh, but much safer to fight with.
It is also fairly affordable in most countries, and so is the equipment to protect against it, which is very important for a martial art to develop. I have been teaching both HEMA fencing and Antrim Bata for more than a decade and a half now, and my Bata students can rapidly gather the equipment for sparring at a relatively low cost, while my HEMA students may need to loan it much longer before they can afford to buy a proper full kit.
Also, a very important point is the fact that rattan is already a common training tool in many stick fighting arts that already do spar. Rattan does not support getting hit with hardwood, and it is best used against another piece of rattan. The fact that it asks for lighter protective gear also means that it is relatively easy to spar with other styles, making everyone’s training that much richer in the process. This is really not a negligible advantage.
I get that the idea of using hardwood comes from a certain HEMA way of approaching freeplay, that the simulator used should be as close as possible to the real thing. We tend to downplay wood as it is not seen as being quite as dangerous as a sharp sword. The problem is that it is not just close to the real thing, it is the real thing! The overwhelming majority of people do not fence with sharp swords in HEMA, they fight with steel swords that are somewhat lighter, blunt, and bend considerably more than the real swords they represent, all this for safety reasons, because a real sword forces one to spar at such reduced intensity to be safe that it becomes unrealistic, the same is true of a real shillelagh.
The current stick fighting equivalent to the steel training sword is then a rattan stick. It has more give, making certain actions more difficult, but it allows for safe full contact sparring. The difference in handling between blackthorn and rattan, especially if the latter is modified the right way, are so small as to be of little consequence in training. At worse, they will force you to build better parrying skills!
Irish Stick Fighting 