The History Of Fencing： From Duelling to the Olympics

One of the common complaints about fencing is this perceived lack of historical grounding in the sport. When you think about swords and fencing you probably picture some big moustached European swinging around a heavy sword. So when you see a modern fencer holding a lighter weapon and wearing shiny metallic gear, I wouldn't really blame you in thinking The people who tend to be more interested in the historical side of fencing normally gravitate towards HEMA which is great but paradoxically HEMA is something that is actually quite new and modern fencing actually has a much longer history which is something that us fencers too often ignore. Now I'm definitely not an expert in history or the history of fencing so to help me with this video I spoke to John Jakielski an American fencing coach who also has a keen interest in the history of fencing. I don't know where that's gonna go but I do know that we need to look more at our history because as I studied history at university and people who don't know their history don't really know where they're going. So how did it all start? We could be here for several podcasts I'll sum up basically I mean we'll start we'll start we'll deal with the three weapons because obviously that you know your channel is focused more for people who are interested in sport fencing and I think a good general history would be to start sometime late medieval period in Spain where they start wearing swords around and it becomes fashionable to wear basically what we would call nowadays an arming sword so like a late medieval sword around town and the trouble is you're not going to be wearing a lot of armor while you're walking around you're not wearing shields or anything like this it's just cool to wear a sword and so right away they figure out that you don't need such powerful blows to end the fight they start attacking the hand and with that we have the development of bars and rings to protect our hand and that's the development of the rapier and so the rapier lasts for about 150 years. Eventually it became less fashionable to carry around a big heavy rapier and so the small sword was developed. Yeah so they developed a small sword and the small sword is like as its name implies it's or a court sword sometimes called it's a lot smaller it's got a triangular blade the focus becomes on thrusting you can see that also in rapier a few centimeters of steel going into the into the trunk body area it's going to be lethal and so there's a big focus on the use of the point. In order to train for using the small sword the lighter foil was then developed. So as I was saying about the sword basically they're using the foil to train for this and we're talking about 1700s okay late late 1600s all throughout the 1700s they're using foils and this is when the right-of-way rules come into development the idea being that you don't you don't want to get killed it's not a good idea to just stab each other at the same time and then this is where we also get the development of the foil target area a lot of people don't know that why don't we attack the head and foil well because masks didn't exist uh somebody had to invent masks in the late 18 or late 1700s and uh so the foil continues to be the you know the foundation of western swordsmanship. So for those of you who are less familiar with it I should probably explain the concept of right-of-way this is a system of rules which gives priority to the The idea is that if you are under attack you should prioritize defending yourself either by getting out of a way or parrying i.e blocking the opponent's attack before you try to hit the opponent as opposed to just standing there and spitefully hitting your opponent whilst getting hit in the process. It kind of creates a back and forth a game of turns in a sense where attacks are traded back and forth until a hit lands. How much of the development of this rule set was about creating you know good dueling practices as opposed to creating a game that is safe and that is you know predictable in that I'm not going to accidentally hit you in the face? That is a very good question I think there's got to be definitely a bit of both in there I study more saber and so you know saber kind of copies the right-of-way that's already existed when saber becomes more sportified but there is a tendency even you know well into the 20th century to mention that this is the correct fencing. So I think the rules could have been that to make it a game that's fun not just to whack at each other or poke at each other without any reason but I think there's more of a dueling aspect and I think there's still time to provoke correct behavioural duels so that you don't just die. So funnily enough the foil the most sporty of the three weapons actually has the longest history and parallelly at the same time is the introduction of the saber into European militaries and that becomes a principal weapon for the side weapon. I mean obviously the they're using lances and other things they might be using pistols but your go-to weapon for a cavalryman is a saber and then people start using these to fight on foot. There's a lot of back sword traditions that come from a lot of different countries a lot of broadsword what we would call broadsword and this kind of evolves all throughout the 1800s and then towards the end of the 1800s we get the evolution of lighter sabers used more for a dueling context and that's when we start getting into our era. Saber it has a very fast evolution so if we look at sabers from the Napoleonic era they're quite different from sabers at the end of the 19th century. So if we look at a saber from like 1890 it's actually pretty close to some of the stuff we're using nowadays in the sport and where we can see there hasn't really been any evolution in saber technology. We're using the same sabers the sabers we used did the same for a long long time now it's probably because of the rules we can't really do anything with the guards or anything but it was a massive evolution in a very short amount of time and the saber kind of goes from being a you know a practice weapon you've got a military tradition you know maybe some of your officers need to use a saber and then it goes to being And then the other big myth we hear all the time why don't we hit the legs in saber can you talk a bit about this? Yeah that's a great one everybody's told this I don't you know that's that's always like the kids first question like why can't I hit him in the legs and no because a long time ago we're riding horses and you wouldn't hit a horse that's actually a bunch of rubbish you would hit the horse there's actually a lot of manuals out there that teach to protect your horse so yeah they hit the horses and then why don't they hit the legs okay well that's a little bit of the evolution if we look at the two different kind of ancestors of modern saber we look at the military infantry saber which is lighter okay shorter blade lighter blade sometimes they can they can hit with a lot you can cut you can do some serious damage and with all those systems late 19th century there's all of them have leg attacks it's quite easy to defend the leg you slip the leg there's also some low parries for defending the leg but it's a little risky to attack the leg because if you hit the guy in the leg and he just hits you in the head at the same time well he gets the limp home you don't get to go home so they they kind of wanted to you know get rid of this I think because of a gentleman's agreement in here you know in Europe there's some places where they talk about not hitting the legs it's uh what's called uh salah fencing or uh fencing in the south okay where it was a gentleman's agreement to not hit below the belt and I think it also has something to do with the lightness of the blades this is my own personal theory uh blades get lighter and uh I mean some of the late dueling sabers are actually the same weight as our modern saber and that's amazing that's amazingly light they're amazingly thin blades and these guys aren't dueling with they're not doing naked uh they're wearing wool pants something like this and uh I don't think a cut would be very effective at that point in time because the blade just doesn't have the mass to do damage now some of the infantry sabers from the same time yeah you got hit in the knee or on the inside of the thigh it definitely opened something up but uh I think the late dueling sabers become so that it's just uh kind of stupid to attack the legs because uh they're so fast that uh the other guy is going to hit you the head the head the same time and it's going to be a bad outcome for you so that's how the foil and the saber developed what about the epi I haven't mentioned epi yet because epi of the three weapons is actually the youngest weapon in modern fencing epi is basically a protest it's a protest against the over refined foil because people are still doing and they've found out that all of these complicated foil techniques following a very long uh phrase of arms is difficult in wooing scenario and so what they do is they start taking the small swords that are still around uh the blade gets a little bit longer and as you can see a modern epi has a triangular blade just like a small sword would very similar blades just a little bit longer we don't really know when a small sword becomes what the french call excuse my french pronunciation if they do combat did I say that correctly yeah so this there's a transition there okay and uh the epi is basically a protest uh against the over refined foil and then that some starts predominantly in france coaches just start taking the uh direct dueling weapon and putting a leather tip on it blunting it and using that as the training weapon so that's kind of the history of epi and they have a pretty quick evolution there they go from using smaller guards and then they get the bigger guard to protect the hand and uh in the beginning they were using something called a uh point and this is basically a three-pronged point to catch onto the jacket to catch like that and then eventually we have electric epi in the 1930s of the three weapons epi has probably changed the least over the years it was the first weapon to use electrical scoring and has the simplest rules designed to best replicate a real duel if you hit you get a point if you both hit you both get a point whilst fencing did develop into some sort of a sport probably much earlier than you might think dueling still played an important part in european culture and uh but there's still this kind of running theme throughout the history of modern fencing is that the uh the rules and the way we're using this so i'm gonna i'm gonna just step back a little bit because um i think one of the misconceptions we have in fencing is that there was this old-fashioned medieval renaissance time where people were dueling and fighting with sharp swords and then sometime in the middle of the you know 20th century it magically became a sport and you know it was a very immediate thing whereas what you're saying here is it's actually a very long period with a big overlap between between dueling and yeah definitely because we have to you know there is we have to define also what kind of rules uh obviously if we go back to the renaissance and we're talking about people walking around town telling with rapiers and stuff that's more like a self-defense kind of situation you can be jumped in the you know renaissance streets of milan or something like this and you need to pull out your rapier and you never know what's going to happen there whereas the actual dueling aspect even there becomes rules even if we look within saber itself uh if we look at spain's spanish uh duels they had different types of duels with sabers uh italy had different types hungry types it depended upon the level of salt the other person so if it was a light insult they would probably use sabers without points no thrusting just cutting and they might be not so sharp sabers and that would be like the lightest form of tool and in some parts of europe uh especially hungry they would cover parts of the body because they didn't want the duel to be too lethal now if it was a serious insult then they would maybe use a point maybe they'd have the saber a lot sharper than what it normally is and so it just depend on you know the level of insult and so it becomes ritualized and so there is a big difference we look at dueling there's also a whole history of of that kind of dueling but it i think it really does kind of die out with the dueling culture it is amazing that the sport has survived so long because a long time ago people didn't learn fencing just because they wanted to go to the olympics even though the olympic games might have existed you know since 1896 the modern games they're learning fencing because maybe at some point in in their life somebody's going to challenge them and they need this as a skill this is you know it's like you have to learn maths i'm sorry kid you know you got to learn how to read right you got to learn fencing maybe you make somebody angry someday maybe you bump into somebody at the at the feeder and he gives you his business card that means that his friends are going to talk to your friends and the next day you're going to have to you know go out there and and in the arm with an epee or something like this and so people learn fencing because of that was a necessity and uh it's really amazing that the sport well it's a cool sport that's why it survived but it's uh it's really amazing that it has survived uh detached from this kind of dueling culture that really gives birth to fencing i mean it we can't avoid this fencing comes from dueling okay so uh anyway going from uh the dueling to the sport a parallel thing that happens you've got the olympic movement it starts in 1896 the first world war is a big factor too the dueling culture in europe actually dies out okay so believe it or not we actually had pistol dueling in the olympics at some point like literally people were putting on leather aprons and sort of metal protectors and shooting wax bullets at each other because the whole day there was basically three accepted weapons all across europe for duels and this was an epee saber or a pistol and uh you could refuse a duel by an unauthorized weapon there are some texts that talk about people you know fighting duels on horseback with uh winchester rifles and things like this is a bit crazy but the three accepted weapons were uh the epee saber and pistol and so these become spring weapons and uh that's kind of a little bit of a history therefore you know the dueling part and with the the first world war this whole dueling idea sort of dies out there are duels that continue uh we even have a saber duel i think on one of your videos a few years back uh from some guys from argentina in the 1960s if you want to see what a duel actually looked like there's actually quite a few on youtube but gradually duels became less and less common and eventually fencing became more competition orientated than duel orientated the olympics and emergence of international competitions eventually replaced dueling now instead of representing their own individual honors fencers would represent their entire country for most of the 20th century the sport was dominated by european countries especially from the eastern bloc like the soviet union hungary and poland in the late 90s and 2000s the sport began to grow worldwide especially in asia this international growth continued throughout the 2010s and 2020s at the most recent olympics in paris the medal table was topped by four non-european countries a sign of a global growth of fencing the introduction of electric scoring also had a pretty huge impact on the sport prior to this at competitions judges were relied upon to spot who had landed a hit which wasn't a particularly reliable system some people refer to this as a period of four blind men and a liar cheating was very easy and very common so the electrical scoring system was really a necessity to provide some level of objectivity within the sport it also had a significant impact on the way the game was played in foil and to a lesser extent in epee we saw the development of the flick which is an alternative way of activating the sensors on the end of the weapons rather than simply thrusting in a conventional manner in saber it also meant that you could score a point by landing a much lighter hit and now you can also use any part of a saber blade to land a hit rather than just the point of a blade or the cutting edge so that's kind of how we got here now i do think that fencing has probably preserved more of its martial validity than a lot of people might think but at this point most people in the sport at least in the competitive part of the sport really don't care about the what if they most people are just happy to enjoy it as a sport in the same way you might with badminton or tennis for example now don't get me wrong i don't actually think that fencing needs to accurately represent any real dueling practice whatever your conception of that might be for that there is hemo which i'm sure does a much better job of it but isn't it kind of a shame to have such a long and rich history only to pretty much completely ignore it fencing is in desperate need of reform i've done a full video all about it i'll put a link just here and i think looking back to our past could provide some valuable inspiration if such reforms were actually to happen thanks for watching guys if you want to see the whole discussion i had with john i'll put that on the slicer saber podcast which is on spotify on apple podcasts and on amazon i'll put a link in the comments thanks for watching guys see you bye