Dusack, Chapter 7: The Guards and Their Techniques

[1] The stances now follow, including the sequences

Chapter 7

Since I have now taught all necessary material associated with this weapon, I will continue onward to explain the stances, including their sequences. You should note well that the stances ought not be understood as a guard in which you tarry, awaiting your opponent’s fencing, but instead as a beginning or end of the cuts and counterposture (as already mentioned previously).

Look at it like this: when you stand in Arch, if you now want to cut out of Arch then you will arrive into Watchtower or Bull (in a recovery for [executing] an upward cut), and in that moment in which you pull your dusack around your head to strike, you move through the Wrath Guard (during that pull around) and only from there does the first cut completely take place. When you have completed the High Cut, you will arrive at the end of the same in the Change [Guard] (if you don’t move through with a cut to the side). If you want to counteract upward from there, you will arrive in Arch or Longpoint.

[2] Therefore, take note how the body language is displayed in the pull around into a cut or recovery from a cut, which is thus named after the same configuration (like the Wrath Cut from its wrathful body language, the Bull from its thrust, and the Boar because it cuts from the side like a boar). This is now the most acknowledged reason for the invention of these stances, because when you pull a cut up into a stance, you can still change the same while in the air and turn or move to another opening. Thus, when you pull up to a cut, at the outermost point at which you arrive with your draw upward, you can tarry a bit to see whether they want to cut at the opening in your cut, so that you can observe [while] in the air whether you can arrive over their in-flying cut by simultaneously cutting over [their cut]. However, you should not tarry longer in any stance (only remaining as a recovery from a strike) and instead always change out of one stance into another until you observe an opportunity to cut. You should also well imagine the sequences that are assigned to each stance, practice them, and make them known to yourself, so that if you arrive in a stance in the middle of fencing, you are prepared and are ready with counter sequences.

Furthermore, you should also know that even if I have assigned a specific sequence to one of the stances, this does not mean that one should not also fence these sequences from other stances, or that it cannot happen. The most common reason that I have assigned one sequence to one stance and another [sequence] to another [stance] is so that they would be dealt with in order. These sequences are not set in this way so that they cannot be changed in fencing, but instead are only an example from which one can learn to seek and take their opportunity (according to the sequences) and may prepare and change them to be useful to themselves. Because, as we cannot have one single nature, we also cannot have one single type of fencing; however, everything must flow together and be taken from one common foundation.