Stab, strike, lever and throw… fun rowing through your enemies with style.

Weapon: Pollaxe (Halbard/Bill/Goedendag)

Source: Talhoffer (Falkner/Kal)

Simple but effective use of the pollaxe is not exclusive to armoured combat, let’s see how the flow of the weapon can be a fun and interesting thing to play with. With a few simple rules you can become pretty effective with a pollaxe really quickly.

Skill level of Participants: All skill levels
Needed Equipment:  Fencing mask (gloves)

About the trainer – Arne Koets

Arne Koets has been doing HEMA proper since 1998, coming from re-enactment and even LARP, but is mostly known from Harnischfechten, poleaxe and mounted fencing.

Arne has been a professional jousting competitor and organizer from 2002 until present, competing in the whole world, events that combine mounted armoured team club tourney, but also armoured foot combat, as well as jousting with full strength pine trees with sharp steel heads.

As time went by his professional life aimed more and more to historical dressage clinics, but Arne is still active in Hema.

This was following his time at court of the princes of Schaumburg-Lippe, when learning at the Hofreitschule in Bückeburg from 2010, which was a door into the focus on mounted fencing, which he had been dabbling with since 2001, but decided to try and make an established HEMA practice.

Arne has hosted yearly the Rossfechtensymposium since 2012 and the Harnischfechtensymposium since 2018 at his home, a knightly manor in Germany. Both events include workshops, lectures and sparring.

His passion about all martial art lead to the interest in and practice of dancing, fencing and riding. Due to this, Arne focusses a lot on movement patterns and biomechanical efficiency in form.