Now that we've gone through all the rules for the single rapier in book two, I wanted to kick some thoughts around them in general. I had intended this entry to be something along the lines of "what principles do they illustrate and have in common and what can we learn from them all and how are they useful to us in what we do."
I meant to do that. I really, really did.
But see, I started by kicking around the thought of "look, how useful is it for me to just do the implacable walk of death towards someone if they can back up into infinite space because we don't have static rapier list boundaries." Because we don't, right? One of the discussions about major tournaments that comes up regularly enough that I can set my watch by it is what to do if someone backs into the ropes. Responses usually vary between "call a hold to make sure nobody goes outside of them and continue, repeating as needed" and "call a hold and recenter them before continuing." Neither of these offer a particularly realistic take on how personal combat happened in period, where that level of retreating could be seen as cowardly.
That's where this all started.
Anyone who has taken a class with Tom Leoni has heard about how renaissance Italian dueling custom held that if a duelist backed up out of the circle or other bounds, they forfeited the match. The closest I've found to a clear citation in writing on this is in Saviolo's "Of Honor and Honorable Quarrels." (Jared Kirby edited and presented an edition under the title "A Gentleman's Guide to Duelling" which I think is still readily available.) In the section entitled "In How Many Cases A Man May Overcome In The Lists" Saviolo writes, "Last of all is the running out of the lists. Of this sort of losing the field everyone is so much the more shameful by how much the more I have placed and set him down in his lowest place or room. To be slain in the field is less shameful, though it is far more dangerous and hurtful."
Additionally, Silver (I know, I know) wrote about an incident involving Saviolo, his friend (possibly employee or co-teacher?) Jeronimo, and Silver himself in "Paradoxes of Defense." As Silver described it: "Then came Vincentio and Jeronimo, they taught Rapier-fight at the Court, at London, and in the countrey, by the space of seaven or eight yeares or thereabouts. These two Italian Fencers, especially Vincentio, said that Englishment were strong men, but had no cunning, and they would go backe too much in their fight, which was great disgrace unto them. Upon these words of disgrace against Englishmen, my brother Toby Silver and my selfe, made challenge against them both, to play with them at the single Rapier, Rapier and Dagger, the single Dagger, the single Sword, the Sword and Target, the Sword and Buckler, & two hand Sword, the Staffe, battel Axe, and Morris Pike, to be played at the Bell Savage upon the Scaffold, where he that went in his fight faster backe than he ought, of Englishmen or Italian, should be in danger to breake his necke off the Scaffold."
It was fairly common for the London Masters of Defense to conduct prize fights on raised stages (what Silver terms a scaffold), usually set up in the yard of an inn or playhouse so that an audience could gather and watch. Covering the neighborhood in flyers, which George and Toby Silver did as well, was also a pretty common thing to do based on this story as well as how prize fights would be announced as well.
Anyway! All of this fun rabbithole diving is what causes me to keep thinking, "we should come up with a compromise there somehow" and I keep wondering how I'd go about building a list with sturdy railings so that when a fencer hits the edge of the lists no hold is called and everything just goes on. I don't know how practical it is to do that for the many lists that a major tournament has - the usual solution of list poles and rope is just a whole lot more space efficient for storage, as well as being adjustable when setting up. But maybe doing something for a single list for cool prize fights done in a period style or a display or something like that?
I'd love to be able to do something like that on a raised platform, and definitely that should have railings. A more immersive event would be awesome for this, or at least a thematically cool site for it. I guess what I'm saying is that I need to see about setting up a raised stage or at least a fenced in list for the town square at Beltaines and then posting flyers some weeks beforehand about a prize fight or something. See? Super period!
Then I went down the related dive of remembering that the London Masters were a business. (One article about them refers to them accurately as a "corporation.") This means that when you played your prize for promotion from scholar to free scholar, free scholar to provost or provost to master, you had to do things like notify members of the appropriate rank within a certain radius that the contest was happening so they could come and fight. If you failed to inform someone, you had to pay a penalty. If someone traveled more than twenty miles to get there, you paid half their traveling expenses. When you got your signed and sealed letter of rank, you had to pay duties and such for that as well. It's pretty bonkers.
Point is though, raised stage with railings for cool period prize fights in a really cool town setting.
This is what happens when I start to look into something and then just keep going and going. Next time we'll talk about things like technique and underlying principles and such. This time it was cool history stuff and that's just fine.
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