Goats Head Historical Fencing brings HEMA demo to Wexford abbey festival

Goats Head Historical Fencing turned Selskar Square into a live HEMA stage beside Selskar Abbey, putting a longsword and an arming sword with buckler in front of festivalgoers at Wexford’s Otherworlds Sci-Fi Festival. The club braved less-than-ideal weather on Saturday, June 27, and still delivered a strong display that made the demonstration feel like more than a novelty act.

The setting did some of the heavy lifting. Otherworlds was the inaugural edition of the festival, a four-day run from Thursday to Sunday that mixed talks, workshops, screenings, panels, live performances, games and community events across Wexford. A sword demo fit cleanly into that program, but the abbey backdrop gave it extra weight: Selskar Abbey is the main Anglo-Norman foundation in Wexford town, and local heritage accounts tie the site to the first Anglo-Irish treaty signed there in 1169.

That is where Goats Head’s pitch becomes clear. The club describes HEMA as the work of interpreting historical texts and testing those interpretations in full-contact swordfights, and the Wexford appearance showed that model in public. Festivalgoers did not just see blades flash in the rain; they saw two distinct historical systems in action. The longsword pointed to the late medieval and Renaissance martial tradition, while the arming sword and buckler showed a tighter one-handed style that is easier for a casual crowd to read at first glance.

Goats Head’s broader structure also matters here. The club runs training in Wexford and Waterford, with instruction also offered in Arklow, and says beginners can move into regular classes after completing a beginner course. Its own material says members have medalled in international competition, worked as stuntmen and women, and produced more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles. HEMA Ratings lists the Wexford club with 20 named fighters in its database, another sign that this is an organized sporting community, not an isolated demo group.

That combination of a public festival, a site with documented martial history and a club with training depth is how HEMA gains legitimacy in the open. Wexford’s crowd got the spectacle, but the more important message was simpler: historical fencing is already built to move from the square into the salle, and from entertainment into a recognizable practice with rules, research and a path for new fencers.