[Bryn-gwlad] championships

[Chris Zakes]

At 11:47 PM 8/1/2007, you wrote:
>I remember being quite astonished recently when I was talking to 
>someone in the rapier community (might have been Dona Gwenneth, who 
>keeps an amazing amount of statistics in her head) and found out 
>about the number of folks competing in Queen's Champion was 
>dropping.  Since I was mostly inactive for a few years at one point, 
>I lost touch with a lot of the rapier folk.  Just before I stopped 
>paying attention we had more and more fighters appearing at 
>Queen's.  If I remember correctly, Tessa's Queen's (in which I made 
>my first tournament kill) was the first Queen's to meet or exceed 
>100 fighters and there were subsequent tourneys that had more than 
>100 entrants.  I believe there were still fewer than 30 dons/donas 
>at that time with correspondingly fewer cadets than today.  Despite 
>the fact that we have more than 80 white scarves now (again, my 
>rusty memory, and some of those folk are no longer active) there 
>were a lot fewer people in the latest Queen's.

Last Queen's was a bit odd: we only had 30-40 fighters. Typically 
these days we have 60-80.


>Again, this is all off the top of my head and it's not working to 
>full capacity.  Any errors are mine.  I think Tivar's suggestion of 
>looking at percentages is a good idea.  If I weren't putting in 
>10+hour days, I'd volunteer for the project.  It would be 
>interesting to find out (though goodness knows how we'd get the 
>numbers) the per capita numbers for white scarves, cadets, laurels, 
>pelicans, knights, squires, and Lions (and tigers and bears?) 
>currently active, both on a per local group basis and Kingdom wide, 
>especially if we can compare them to any previous year(s).

Most of the raw data wouldn't be *that* hard to acquire. The Order of 
Precedence would give us a count for the various awards, and the 
Kingdom Seneschal probably has population numbers. The Marshal's 
Office should have numbers on how many authorized fighters we have. 
The tricky part might be deciding what constitutes "active."


>Back to championships, from someone who is not quite the master-don 
>fossil some others are, when the BG Baronial Champion was chosen 
>when I first joined (and three years later first moved to BG), our 
>championship involved two lists:  one chivalric and one rapier.  The 
>winner of each met on the chivalric field and fought the final round 
>with halberds.  I believe (and Don Tivar will know) that BG was the 
>first group to use rapier in any championship.

Actually, Stargate included rapier in their championship a year or 
two before Bryn Gwlad did. The original Stargate championship was 
single-elimination, best two out of three; the first bout was fought 
armored, the second bout was rapier and the third bout (if necessary) 
was gaming. Bryn Gwlad's championship was similar, but the bouts were 
armored, rapier and archery. You're correct that the final bout was 
fought with halberds.

This style of tournament was *intended* to encourage more crossover 
fighters. It was discontinued because what tended to happen was that 
most fighters would stick with their preferred style and borrow some 
gear to learn just enough of the other style to get authorized (and 
remember that our authorization process was *much* less strict in 
those days) then drop it as soon as the tournament was over.

         -Tivar Moondragon