Meet Jo,
the toughest knight
in the UK

When I was a kid, my favourite toy to play with was a wooden sword that my dad made for me. It was basically just two pieces of wood nailed together and painted. My brother had one as well and every time we played our fights always escalated in a competition for who could hurt the other more. He was older and his sword was longer, so it always ended with me starting to cry and pleading for mercy. If I had kept going, today I might be where Jo is standing.

Joana Booth, also known as Jo in the armoured combat scene, has spent the better part of the last two years training in a full contact fighting sport called Historical Medieval Battles (HMB). There are multiple disciplines in the sport, varying on equipment, number of fighters and length of the rounds. But they all essentially work in the same way: opponents fight with blunted swords and score points when sparring. 

Yet, the sport can be brutal, with bruises and broken bones being commonplace both in training and in the competition. Which isn’t surprising as the contenders loose most of their agility under the 30 kilos of armour. 

I met Jo in March in Sheffield during the UK qualifiers for the Battle of Nations, the World Championship for this sport if you will, which will be held in Serbia next May. The Steel City is the only place in the UK with a dedicated arena for HMB. And surprisingly enough, neither the church, nor the nursing home, nor the cemetery that they neighbour with have yet complained about the clang of swords coming from the building. 

Before the Northern Lists Armoured Arena opened, knights all around the country had to train in school gyms and halls, but since David Murray created this space just a couple of years ago, it has become a hub for fighters from around the country. Yet participants are still quite sparse and for many it is a long commute to come and train. 

Until recently Jo was one of them. She used to live in Blackpool and would drive three hours each way to come to the Sheffield arena and train. But she wasn’t able to afford the commute more than a couple of times a month. All the other fighters she was training with were improving so much quicker than she was, and so she decided to move to Sheffield to be able to train twice a week like everyone else. 

It feels almost superfluous to say that HMB is a male-dominated sport. During the tournament, all referees (or better “Knight Marshals”) were men, even in the women’s events. And it was quite disheartening to hear one of them complain about “when you send women to the garage” after getting off the phone with his wife. Yet none of the ladies took their swords to his neck – they are all very classy knights. 

In Jo’s words “there is quite a burly side to this sport, you are going to get dirty, you can’t have fancy nails, it’s not very glamorous, and you have to embrace that, otherwise you are not going to enjoy it.”

Within the women themselves you can see how much they respect and care about one another. They are a very tightly-knit group of friends: at each other’s throats one moment and laughing all together the next. The girls very much cherish each other’s presence as they are their only chance of a fair opponent. 

It is almost necessary for them to be this close to accept the fact that they will cause each other a lot of pain. Often times Jo has injured her best friends, caused them massive bruises and in the last tournament, even broke the wrist of one of her teammates. But there are no hard feelings within the girls, no resentment whatsoever. She knows soon it will he her turn at the hospital. 

When I followed Jo to a training session, I saw that none of the girls she competed against trained with her in Sheffield. 

While the men were comparing the rainbow-coloured bruises the size of their heads that they got during the tournament the previous weekend and decided which one of them was the most beautiful one, Jo was alone in corner, putting on her gear. 

But while it might have looked like she was isolating herself from the men, she was actually getting in the mental state to take them on. “A lot of this sport and what we do is psychological: it is a fight, it is a battle, there are risks, and there are dangers, and women react quite differently to that then men,” says Jo. 

During the two-hour training, Jo took on all of the men present in both sword fighting and wrestling. She beat them, schooled them, and showed off her technique. She led the cardio session and had all eyes and ears on her. 

Although she can withstand training with men and she personally always felt welcome by her male teammates, she realises how it can be quite an intimidating situation to be in as a woman: “What we are trying to so in the UK to get more women into the sport is to have women-only training, so that they can come, do as much or as little as they want, and I guarantee them that they are only going to be fighting against other women.”

Seeing the strength that Jo demonstrated taking on men twice her size, and the respect that the men had for her once she stepped into the area, I would trust her when she says she feels completely welcomed in this environment. 

Yet her big and bright smile did not come out in the training the same way it did when she was amongst her girl-friends.