Finally, the study is also of interest to historians of science, since classical fencing was, and is, reckoned to be not just a physical activity, contingent upon reflexes and brawn, but a science-an aesthetic science, subject to eternal and universal rules, as if the same Platonic truths embrace geometry, fencing, and art. The better we understand the clockwork of the universe, the better we can make it work for us. The attitudes towards fencing will, therefore, also reflect attitudes towards science and scientific progress.

The three primary English-language historians of fencing in the nineteenth century were Edgerton Castle, Captain Alfred Hutton, and the famous adventurer and explorer Sir Richard Burton, whose major contributions, respectively, are Schools and Masters of Fence, Old Sword Play, and The Book of the Sword (all published in 1892). Castle deals with the history of the art itself, Hutton with the practical points of Renaissance swordsmanship, reconstructing technique from an antiquarian point of view, and Burton with the archaeology and development of the sword itself.

The most significant of these writers is Castle, who is still widely quoted as a historical authority in works on fencing. Burton, though a colorful character, is not as useful, since The Book of the Sword mainly deals with the evolution of the weapon itself, and thus is not of as much interest to the historian who wishes to deal with social conceptions of it use. Finally, though the bulk of Hutton's work deals with the actual technical aspects of the use of "old" weapons, the introductory portions are very revealing.

The primary assumption underlying the writings of these men is that human history since the Renaissance has, under the aegis of reason, been a continuing march towards greater and greater "perfection." Like the Swiss historian Jacob Bruckhardt's view of the Renaissance, Hutton, Castle, and Burton display a strong moral and historical positivism. To them, the invention of fencing, begun in the glorious days of the Italian Renaissance, paralleled the progress of the scientific revolution and the evolution of the "modern" age towards greater moral, intellectual, and physical enlightenment and refinement, to a point, in fact, where dueling had vanished, and the study of the sword was wholly an academic, leisure-time activity. (At the time of writing, no Englishman had engaged in a sword duel for years.)^[5] As Castle says in his introduction to Schools and Masters:

"The author does not profess... to analyze closely the contents of all the books written on the imperfect play of our ancestors, nor to trace every link in the chain of [fencing's] development, from the "pancratium" of the fifteenth century, in which leaping and wrestling were of more avail than aught else, to the courteous and academic 'assault' of modern days, where elegance and precision of movement are more highly considered-or ought to be-than mere superiority in the number of hits."^[6]

As part and parcel of this bias, we see a strong tendency that, the later and further north one looks, the more "perfect" the development of the art is accounted to have been. Hutton, trying to say in a few paragraphs what Castle said in a book, is even more revealing. For instance, in his introduction to Old Sword-Play, he makes blanket statements such as:

"From this point on we deal with the French system alone, and we find that as the short, light swords improved in their form, the art of wielding them advanced in precision and grace, which latter quality may be said to have attained its perfection about the middle of the eighteenth century."^[7]

Hutton summarily drops his discussion of the Italian school as soon as it cedes to the French-the students have surpassed the masters.