White Lion HEMA pauses training, returns June 10 in Northampton

White Lion HEMA pressed pause on its Northampton training week, but the break was built around continuity, not interruption. The club said on June 2 that there would be no training that week and that members would be back to the usual schedule on June 10, keeping the next step in view for anyone planning around a midweek class.

That matters because White Lion’s regular slot is a narrow one: Wednesday evenings from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Main Hall of St Luke’s Community Centre, Main Road, Duston, Northampton NN5 6JB. For a club where students are arranging masks, gloves, longswords, transport and training partners around limited weekly availability, even a one-week gap changes the rhythm.

The pause also says something about how White Lion teaches. The club, listed as a historical European martial arts group based in Northampton, describes its main areas of study as the longsword of the 15th-century Germanic tradition, sword and buckler, pollaxe and spear. Rather than treating training as a string of open sparring nights, the group has been working through source material in sequence, and its June 2 reminder noted that members had recently continued an in-depth look at various plays of Ringeck’s streichen.

That focus places White Lion squarely in one of HEMA’s best-known source traditions. Sigmund ain Ringeck is identified by Wiktenauer as a 15th-century German fencing master, and Johannes Liechtenauer’s tradition survives across many manuscripts and books spanning nearly three centuries. In that lineage, Stuck im aufstreichen, meaning “Pieces in the sweeping-upon,” is a brief German fencing manual from the early 16th century, part of the same technical world that still shapes modern club work.

White Lion’s affiliation with the Academy of Historical Arts, listed there since 2025, adds another layer of context. HEMA is a modern reconstruction and practice movement built around European martial traditions that largely disappeared or changed form over time, and clubs like White Lion are judged as much by their teaching structure as by their turnout. A week off, in that frame, is less a missed session than a reset point: time for the material to settle, time for members to catch up, and time for the club to return on June 10 with the next stage of the Ringeck study still intact.