Technical Groupings

Four texts, one system:

1. Preface [P 1]-[P 2] — program (long sword → mounted → shortened sword), secrecy claim, knightly ethic, "length and measure."
2. Long sword [LS 1]-[LS 23] (+ colophon row [LS 24]) — the complete unarmored art.
3. Mounted figures [F 1]-[F 29] — 26 command-taglines digesting the mounted verses.
4. Mounted and dismounted dueling [D 1]-[D 13] — Roßfechten ([D 1]-[D 8]) and Kampffechten with the shortened sword ([D 9]-[D 13]).

The long-sword part is itself architected: frame ([LS 1]-[LS 3]: general teaching, five hews, table of contents), body ([LS 4]-[LS 22]: the pieces), keystone ([LS 23]: the count of windings). [LS 3] is a literal index — every noun in it becomes a section.

The gloss tradition counts seventeen from [LS 3]; the verse supports the count exactly:

The four-openings pair [LS 5]-[LS 6] is not a "piece" but the targeting layer all pieces serve — which is why it sits between the first hew and the rest.

Each hew is simultaneously an attack and a breaker of something specific:

• Zornhau [LS 4] — breaks the Oberhau: rides over the descending blow on the same diagonal and converts to the point (ort) the instant it wins the crossing. Mechanically: long-edge diagonal, full body ("with the whole body fence," [LS 1]), threat carried in the point, not the edge.
• Krumphau [LS 7] — breaks Ochs and the parry-fencer: crossed-hands strike off-line onto hands or flat; the step ("with stepping") buys the angle; shown-not-thrown it becomes the Durchwechsel feint.
• Twerhau [LS 8] — breaks vom Tag: horizontal blade, hilt high, thumb under (gloss reading); the spring takes the head off-line while the blade takes the descending line; cycles Ochs↔Pflug both sides as a continuous mill.
• Schielhau [LS 9] — breaks the buffalo and the changer-through: short-edge blow down the centerline with averted gaze; wins the crossing against force because the short edge crosses his blade while the point stays on him.
• Scheitelhau [LS 10] — breaks Alber: pure length on the vertical, "danger to the face… to the breast with its turn"; met by the Kron, which the cut then unlocks.

The gloss tradition's mapping of the Vier Versetzen [LS 12] onto the guards (Krump→Ochs, Twer→vom Tag, Schiel→Pflug, Scheitel→Alber) is stated there, not in the verse — but [LS 12]'s "four are the settings-aside that sorely hurt the four guards" invites exactly it. The full who-beats-whom map — guards, hews, answers, and vices — is drawn out in Counter network.

[LS 11] admits four leger and scorns the rest. Structurally they are two pairs:

• Threat pair (point on him): Ochs above, Pflug below — identical to the two hangings of [LS 21] held as positions. From them winding is immediate; they are "guards" only in the sense that a drawn bow is at rest.
• Potential pair (point off him): vom Tag (stored Oberhau) and Alber (stored rising work / bait).

This is why the system needs no more guards: every meaningful sword-position is either a hanging (threat) or a wind-up (potential), on one of two sides. Compare Fiore's twelve poste built on the same two axes but individually named — the Zettel compresses the taxonomy to its generators. (Cross-tradition note in Manuscript comparison §7.)

[LS 23] gives the system's only explicit arithmetic:

• 2 hangings (over/under) × 2 sides = 4 entries;
• each entry winds to either of 2 lines (his left/right opening) = 8 windings ("learn eight windings with stepping");
• each winding carries the 3 wounders (hew, thrust, cut — [LS 4] "in all winding learn to find hew, thrust, cut") = 24 ("so they are twenty and four; count them singly").

Inputs to navigate the tree: the soft/hard binary of Fühlen, nothing else ("test the actions for no more than soft or hard"). Converters inside the tree: Duplieren (hard bind → strike behind his blade, same quarter-side, above) and Mutieren (hard bind → wind over, point to the low quarter, other side) [LS 6]. Exit from the tree: Zucken [LS 17] (leave the bind he trusts), or the Sprechfenster [LS 22] (stay and let him exit first, to his cost). The full enumeration — the eight windings, the three wounders from each, and the 24-cell matrix — is laid out in Windings.

Four cuts [LS 19]: two from below, two from above, all living on his arms. Functions:

• Stopper: "cut off the hard ones" — the under-cut meets the strong man's onset mid-stroke, arms before blade.
• Counter-counter: the alter Schnitt [LS 13] against the man who counters your Nachreisen.
• Converter: Hendtrucken [LS 20] — the under-slice turns over the wrists into the pressing of hands ("turn your edge; to the flats press the hands"), from which winding on the arms follows (the Copenhagen already adds the hilt-shove continuation).
• Kron-breaker: [LS 10] "cut through the Kron… press the strokes; with cuts pull them away."

The cut is the system's close-range brake: where hew and thrust need distance or time, the slice needs only contact — which is why it is the third "wounder" and the last resort of every winding.

Five pieces are one mechanical idea — govern whose point stays on-line:

• Absetzen [LS 15]: his thrust off, yours on, one wind.
• Durchwechseln [LS 16]: your point dives under his seeking blade; line regained on the far side.
• Zucken [LS 17]: your point leaves and re-enters; his parry spends itself on nothing.
• Ansetzen [LS 12]: the point planted on an opening as the finishing act.
• Überlaufen [LS 14]: the vertical case — length itself as displacement.

In armor the family is the fencing: Vorstich [D 9], the wind to the eye [D 3], "turn the point to the eyes" and the Schiessen [D 13], "in every teaching turn your point against the openings" [D 12].

• One parry: the Schütten — "precedes all meetings, hews and thrusts" ([F 7], [F 22]; [D 3], [D 5], [D 13]). Mechanically a strong sweeping shake of the blade across the engagement line — in the saddle there is no footwork to parry with, so the blade must clear everything.
• One geometry: the chase to his right hand ([D 5]-[D 6]; [F 3], [F 20]); wrong-side remedies pre-packaged ([D 5]; [F 19], [F 26]).
• One ideal: "grip his right — so you catch him without fencing" ([D 2]; [F 2], [F 11]) — the arm-catch as the null-exchange victory.
• Escalation stack when the ideal fails: lance work ([D 2]; 3227a's fuller couplets add girth, bridle-length, side-choice, and the lance-vs-lance Absetzen) → sword: strong-grasp, Taschenhau, Ansetzen, wind-to-eye, bridle-seizure ([D 3]) → wrestling: sheep-grip, sun-showing, over-grip, fore-grip, capture ([D 4], [D 8]).

The 26 figures ([F 3]-[F 28]) are not new material: each compresses a mounted verse to an imperative (mapping given per-row in Mounted Figures translation). Technically they function as:

1. Recall keys — one phrase per action, ordinally numbered, alternating red/black in the Rome: a memory palace on parchment;
2. A curriculum order — approach ([F 3]-[F 6]), the universal parry and strong-work ([F 7]-[F 8]), sword targets ([F 9]-[F 14]), wrestling ([F 15]-[F 17]), chase cases ([F 18]-[F 20], [F 24], [F 26]), finishing and disarms ([F 21]-[F 23], [F 25], [F 27]-[F 28]);
3. A dating probe — MS 3227a carries only four ([F 4], [F 6], [F 13], [F 15]): the figure-layer visibly grew during the fifteenth century (see Manuscript comparison §5).

[D 9]-[D 13], plus the armored passages of the mounted rows:

• Grip: the "shortened sword" ([P 1], [D 9]) — left hand on the blade (half-sword), trading edge for a spear-precise point. The verse never describes the grip; it assumes it (a marker of the oral substrate).
• Phases: spear (two stances; Vorstich; Zucken against the ward) → sword vs spear ([D 11]) → both swords ([D 13]) → wrestling ([D 10], [D 12]).
• Targets: leather, gauntlet, under the eyes ([D 3], [D 11]; [F 12]) — plus the two standing targets of the endgame, eyes and fore-set foot ([D 13]).
• Force answer: the Schiessen [D 13] — sliding the blade through the lead hand to shoot the point home when he grabs for strength; leverage against grip, §3's doctrine in harness.
• Wrestling: spring-behind-the-leg and Rigel fore-leg lock, both hands, both sides ([D 10]); the forbidden wrestlings unlocked for the earnest duel ([D 12]).

The Zettel's form is itself a technique, and a dated one — fifteenth-century memory culture in working order:

• Couplet atoms: each teaching is a rhyme-pair; rhyme polices transmission (when Gotha corrupts [LS 18] to "durch wechslñ," the rhyme survives but the doctrine breaks — error made visible).
• Catch-word indexing: [LS 3] is a table of contents in verse; the figures quote the dueling verses' catch-words ([F 2] "Your spear ready etc."); the 3227a preface stops at "etc. — as above" because its user already holds the text in memory.
• Red-letter structure: the Rome rubricates headers and the acrostic initial of each couplet; the Copenhagen makes the aid explicit — five hews, "five vowels" (funff focal).
• Deliberate obscurity: "hidden and disguised words" ([P 1]) is access control: the verse is a key to instruction, unusable without the teacher — which is exactly why the fifteenth century then produced glosses (3227a, Ringeck, pseudo-Danzig) and why the sixteenth closes it as a finished monument ([LS 24] colophons).

Instructive silences, all confirmed across every witness in the corpus:

• No mechanics: no grip, stance-width, edge-alignment, or footwork descriptions — the oral teacher owns those.
• No parry-riposte doctrine: displacement exists only fused to attack ([LS 12], [LS 15]).
• No unarmored dagger, messer, or buckler: the preface's weapons list ([P 2]) names them as knightly formation, but this Zettel teaches only the three arts of [P 1] — the rest of the tradition (Talhoffer's messer, the Kal dagger, etc.) grows around the poem, not inside it.
• No named wrestling curriculum on foot beyond the duel rows: "forbidden wrestlings" is a category with its contents withheld — secrecy applied even inside the secret text.