User:Christian Trosclair/Translations/Wendunmuth

About a fencing master and their student

All of this gives me cause to think about another anecdote. About which, in the year 1547 I studied the free knightly art of fencing in all weapons (but not in rapier, which was not in fashion at the time) from one master Wolf Torentz of Ulm, a good, capable man, who was also a good scrivener of German and a professional of arithmetic and he once taught me a particularly good little play to use against someone, which he deigned to let me see. As I set myself to this, I subsequently did a small series of passes. The first pass remained without a strike, but on the second, while I warded right and left, I changed off from the right hand and fought from the left and also cranked my right thigh over my left and let it uncoil all according to his instructions and it came all together as I thought myself bound, but the master threw his sword away from himself, held his handkerchief against his right ear and turned himself away from me. I immediately became aware that his collar and neck were red and bloody. I froze in terror and said that to not take any of that as malice, I had done nothing with the intent to hit him in such a manner. But he kept turning himself away from me and said be that as it may, I will instruct my student another time for I remain a master and parted from me and he never spoke another word to me for the rest of his life. He thought to get even with me by fashioning a satirical cartoon wherein he plunged me in yellow cloth and he thought I would let it go and die off. He was placated by the master painter Micheln Müllern, who was an upstanding, pious man who was himself a famous and particularly good, halberd fencer and knew well the habits of fencers, counciling against it so as to not cause greater acrimony from it.

But after that, the good master Wolff came to a shameful end of life. At that time he gave himself the title of Captain, receiving money to take on sailors with it. Then as he was overtaken by drink in a town by the river Weser, he hired a ship, laid himself therein and slept; the ship's crew, buying into this idea that based on his gold rings he must have money on him, slew him as he slept and threw him in the water.