Be that as it may, there is no doubt that towards the end of the 16th century there were many free-lances in the field of arms who professed to teach, in exchange for much gold, strokes that were not to be parried. From one truculent personage, whom Brantôme mentions, Tappa the Milanese, you could learn how to cut (if it so took your fancy) both eyes out of your adversary’s face with a rinverso tondo, or circular “reverse of the point.” From Caizo, another Italian teacher, at one time much favoured by the French court, lessons were to be had in the special art of ham-stringing. Caizo’s botte secrète seems to have been nothing more nor less than a falso manco, that is, a left-handed drawing cut, at the inside of the knee. But, as practised and taught by him, it was infallible. This stroke has come down to us as le coup de Jarnac—a stroke, be it said, which, notwithstanding its bad name, was quite as fair as any in rapier fence. One Le Flamand, a French master in Paris, was reputed the inventor of a jerky time-thrust at the adversary’s brows, which was a certainty. This special foyne, which was merely an imbrocata at the head, has become legendary in the fencing world as la botte de Nevers. English fencers have their own legends about “the very butcher of a silk button,” and this brings us to the first writer on the rapier in England, Vincenzio Saviolo, the great expounder of that Italianated fence which was so obnoxious to the old masters, withal so much admired of Elizabethan courtiers; the man, in short, who—there seems to be much internal evidence to show it—was Shakespeare’s fencing master.
Vincenzio was not the only foreign master of note established in London during the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. One, Signor Rocco, had, we hear, a very gorgeously appointed academy in Warwick Lane, near St Paul’s, where he coined money rapidly at the expense of gulls and gallants alike. But this man came to grief ultimately in an encounter with the long-sword with an old-fashioned English master of defence. Another popular teacher was a certain “Geronimo”; but he also met with a melancholy and premature end by the hands of one Cheefe, “a tall man in his fight and natural English,” says George Silver, the champion of the Corporation of Masters of Defence. Saviolo, however, seems to have remained unconquered. In his work (Vincentio Saviolo, his practise, in two bookes, the first intreating of the use of the Rapier and Dagger, the second of Honor and honorable quarrels. London. Printed by John Wolfe, 1595) are expounded in a most typical manner the principles of rapier play.
The fencing phraseology of Elizabethan times is highly picturesque, but with difficulty intelligible in the absence of practical demonstration. Without going into technical details it may be pointed out that the long Elizabethan rapier, however admirably balanced it might otherwise be, was still too heavy to admit of quick parries with the blade itself. Thrusts, as a rule, had to be avoided by body movements, by ducking, or by a vault aside (incartata), or beaten away with the left hand, the hand being protected with a gauntlet or armed with a dagger. In fact, one may say that the chief characteristic of Elizabethan sword-play was the concerted action of the left hand parrying while the right delivered the attack. Benvolio’s description of Tybalt’s fight is graphic:—
| “With piercing steel he tilts at bold Mercutio’s breast, Who, all as hot, turns deadly point to point, And with a martial scorn, with one hand beats Cold death aside, and with the other Sends it back to Tybalt, whose dexterity Retorts it....” |
Of these body movements, in Saviolo’s days, the most approved were: the incartata, just mentioned; the pass (the “passado,” in the ruffling Anglo-Italian jargon), that is, passing of one foot in front of the other whilst delivering the attack; the botta lunga, or lunge; and the caricado, which was a far-reaching combination of the two. Of systematic sword movements there were six: stocata, a thrust delivered with nails upwards; imbrocata, with nails down; punta-reversa, any thrust delivered from the left side of the body; mandritto, a cut from the right; rinverso, one from the left; stramazone, a right-down blow with the point of the sword.
The new art of fence, as systematized by the principles of rapier play, was on the whole already accepted in England during the last decade of the 16th century, and was, as we know, destined to endure. Nevertheless, there were still many partisans of the older school: lovers of the national short-sword and the buckler. Their tenets are to be found embodied, in very strenuous language, by the George Silver mentioned above, a member, it would seem, of the now dwindling company of Masters of Defence, in his small work: Paradoxe of Defence, wherein is proved the true ground of fight to be in the short ancient weapons, etc. Printed in London, 1599. (The work has been reprinted by Messrs George Bell & Sons.)
The Italians were undoubtedly the leaders in sword-play; but, towards the beginning of the 17th century, the Spaniards developed a peculiar school of their own, which for a short while was all the mode in England as well as in France. The last trace, be it stated, of that school is now extinct. Yet the Spaniard of cavalier days was undoubtedly a formidable duellist; that was no doubt owing to the quality of the man, not of his art. The Italian’s fence was artistic; the Spaniard’s dexterity was essentially scientific. In Spain were to be found typically those “Captains of Complements,” who not only understood in their most intricate mazes the proper “dependencies” for the cartel, but also the mathematical certainties for the “reason demonstrative.” These Spanish books are marvellously pedantic; one may as well say it, frankly ridiculous. Spanish masters instructed their scholars on mathematical lines, with the help of diagrams drawn on the floor within a circle, the radius of which bore certain cryptic proportions to length of human arms and Spanish swords. The circle was inscribed in squares and intersected by sundry chords bearing occult but, it was held, incontrovertible relations to probabilities of strokes and parries. The scholar was to step from certain intersections to certain others. If this stepping was correctly done the result was a foregone victory. “A villain,” exclaims Mercutio, indignantly, “who fights by the book of arithmetic.” Elizabethan comedies bring us many an echo of its great expounder of mathematical swordsmanship, the magnificent Carranza, the primer inventor de la Ciencia de las Armas, the writer of treatises so abstruse on “the first and second cause,” in questions of honour and swording, that they have never been quite understood to this day.
Perhaps the most curious matter in connexion with the Spanish fence is that the most splendid treatise of the sword published in the French language is in reality purely Spanish (we have seen that the first was German, and the second an adaptation of Italian treatises). This third work, Académie de l’épée de Girard Thibault, d’Anvers, etc., is indeed a monument; one of the biggest books ever printed, and beyond compare the biggest book of fence. It was issued in 1628 by the Leiden Elzevirs, and took fifteen years to complete. Nine reigning princes and a vast number of private gentlemen subscribed to meet its stupendous expenses.
This work was spoken of as a “monument.” It may, in some respects, be looked upon as the funeral monument of the old rapier fence; for soon after that period rose an entirely new school, one adapted to the use of a less portentous weapon, the small-sword of French pattern; a school destined to endure, and to lead to the perfection of our modern escrime.