Getting to the Point:
The European Art of Fencing

 

As with most things in the martial arts, the story of fencing is not a simple one. If you ask one person to tell you what "fencing" is, he might tell you that it's a modern sport. Ask a second, and she might describe fencing as a five-hundred-year-old martial tradition. Yet a third might mention Zorro, Cyrano de Bergerac, and other fictional heroes. All of these explanations are, in their own ways, correct. Therefore, the question becomes which fencing we are speaking of? In his article, we will seek to tell the story of the Western European tradition of swordsmanship, from its beginnings to how it is practiced today.

History

Swordsmanship, of course, has existed for thousands of years. Egyptian wall reliefs from about 1190 BCE illustrate bouts using protective equipment, and the cultures of the ancient world, such as the Greeks and Romans, set up systematic schools of instruction for their youth. Likewise, medieval warriors, from Charlemagne's paladins of the eighth century to the Crusaders of the eleventh century, no doubt learned their martial skills from their elders, and passed them on, in turn, to their juniors. However, specific techniques can only be traced back to the late Middle Ages, for this is when the first surviving book on the subject was written. This manuscript, catalogued in the British Library as I-33, was written in about 1300 by a churchman in southern Germany. The text is in Latin, with illustrations depicting a priest and his student performing various techniques with sword and buckler (a type of small shield). It seems that the monks of the Shaolin monastery in China were certainly not unique in pursuing matters both spiritual and martial.