Depiction of wounding from the Goliath Fechtbuch, 1510-20. Wiktenauer.
Wounding in the Kunst des Fechtens Tradition
Any student of the medieval German Kunst des Fechtens1 tradition is aware of the glossators'2 exquisitely detailed instructions on how to win a sword fight. The details of the Kunst des Fechtens glosses are one of my favorite things about studying historical fencing because they transport us into the lived experience of a medieval person in a way that no number of physical artifacts can. When we take the glossators’ advice to drive hews, thrusts, and slices in certain ways and in specific situations, and when those techniques actually work in the imperfect sparring games we are capable of playing, we manage to glimpse and re-live how centuries-old fencing masters understood the fight and won it.
Those moments of time travel are what I personally chase in my HEMA practice, but the glosses of the zettel often make it difficult. They leave out a great deal of information related to the context and conventions of their time.
One such gap is the paucity of information about wounding in the glosses, so I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to fill it in with historical examples of the effect of swords in combat.
Although the Kunst ddF purports to be a holistic treatment of combat with the sword,3 its instructions regarding actually inflicting injuries on an opponent are not satisfying from the perspective of a modern person attempting to reconstruct the lost art. Rather than describing how the fencer should wound her opponent, the zettel’s glossators tend to revert to the technical language of Kunst des Fechtens, using terms like “setting on” the point and “hewing in to” the closest opening. The glossators often seem to go silent at the moment of wounding, leaving a modern person who almost certainly has never witnessed a swordfight with little understanding of what is perhaps the point of the art – to safely inflict a fight-stopping wound on the opponent.
What was the explicit or implicit wounding objective of the glossators? Often, the assumption seems to be that a sword fight ends when one fighter is dead, so the best wound is a “knockdown” blow that kills the opponent with a single stroke. Although this assumption may be misguided—evidence indicates that historical combat very often did not involve lethal force or the intent to kill4—the accounts I have cataloged involve historical combat where the intent to kill was present in both parties. I hope that focusing narrowly on the historical effect of wounds inflicted in earnest combat will form a foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the glossators’ instructions in the fechtbücher.
Specifically, I am attempting to map out the blow-by-blow effect of wounds inflicted by weapons in historical combat in order to gain insight into the glossators’ understanding of wounding and approach to inflicting wounds.
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Transl. “Art of Combat/Fighting/Fencing.” ?
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The Kunst des Fechtens is preserved in the form of a rhyming poem or zettel that covers fencing with the sword on horseback in armor as well as in and out of armor on foot. Later Kunst des Fechtens masters took notes on or “glossed” the zettel in order to clarify it and record its meaning as they understood it. ?
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“And before any incidents and confrontations, you shall note and know that there is just one art of the sword and it may have been invented and conceived many hundred years ago.” MS 3227a at 13v, Wiktenauer.
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See Jean Chandler, 3 Acta Periodica Duellatorm p. 101; and B Ann Tlutsy, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany, Palgrave 2011. ?
Most fechtbooks stop short of depicting the infliction of a wound. Paulus Kal Fechtbuch at 68r, 1470. Wiktenauer.
Sources
If the aim is to understand the effect of historical weapons in combat, then historical accounts of swordfights are preferable over modern testing or experience. Although modern accounts and video of combat with edged weapons are valuable, any modern encounter invariably is a product of modern norms, customs, etc. Consequently, a historical fencer is better served to look first to accounts of historical combat, no matter how detailed records of modern combat may be.5
The best compilation of such accounts in English likely is D. A. Kinsley’s Swordsmen of the British Empire.6 This nearly 700-page work chronicles 300 years of combat with bladed weapons by British soldiers, sailors, and civilians, rendering blow-by-blow accounts of encounters across the former British empire. The material often is the direct recollection of a surviving combatant, making Swordsmen of the British Empire an ideal starting point for analyzing the effect of wounds in combat. It is the primary source I have used in this project.
Although the earliest accounts in Kinsley’s work postdate the zettel’s glossators by centuries, Kinsley nevertheless is very useful for ascertaining the effects of swords in the context of Kunst des Fechtens longsword blossfechten.7 The British experience of combat in the 17th-19th centuries predominantly involved combatants wearing little to no armor, so wounds described in Kinsley probably are similar to wounds that would have been sustained by unarmored combatants of the glossators’ time. Although the social contexts differ dramatically – medieval judicial dueling is much different than the saber-centric combat of the British experience – for the purpose of evaluating the effect of wounds on unarmored combatants, Kinsley is ideal.
Kinsley forms the core of this project, but his work also is a useful foundation from which to analyze other historical evidence of the effect of historical weapons in combat. Other accounts of wounding in various contexts not limited to earnest fencing include Joinville's memoirs in The Chronicles of the Crusades,8 Larissa Tracy’s Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture,9 and Ambroise Paré’s Journeys in Diverse Places.10 Another very bountiful source is the English coroner’s rolls dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries.11 Taken together, all these accounts can provide a useful insight into the nature of historical combat with edged weapons.
Mike Edelson’s excellent HEMA as a Martial Art lecture at Longpoint 2017 is a great place to start for those interested in modern combat with edged weapons. Content advisory: includes extremely graphic and disturbing footage of fights with machetes. ?
Available at Lulu.com in ebook and print. ?
Viz., unarmored fencing with the long sword. ?
Available at Amazon.com. Containing accounts by Jean de Joinville of 13th century combat as part of the Second Crusade. ?
Available from Brill or your local interlibrary loan program. An amazing source for much more than accounts of combat, Larissa Tracy of Richmond Kunst Des Fechtens and Longwood University has compiled into a single volume numerous academic papers on the nature of wounding in the medieval world, wound treatment, the spiritual ramifications of wounds, and more. ?
Available online. Ambroise Paré was a very famous French surgeon active in the middle 16th century. His accounts include a notable fatality as a result of foul play during a gouren grappling tournament in 1543. ?
Oxford Coroners' Rolls available online. Perhaps the liveliest coroners’ inquests are those of Oxford, where students battled townspeople with billhooks, staffs, sword and buckler, and more. A great number of coroners’ rolls of other jurisdictions have been compiled by R F Hunnisett, such as those of Nottinghamshire, Sussex, and others. The medieval and early modern coroner was called to convene an investigation into any suspicious death in a jurisdiction, so accounts of murder are abundant. Especially detailed is the measurement of wounds – depth, length, width, and location on the body are commonly included in detail to the quarter inch. Although records like this almost certainly exist online in languages other than English, I sadly cannot decipher them. ?
Even Talhoffer, not one to shy away from depicting wounds, rarely does so in his long sword blossfechten illustrations. “Württemberg” Manual, Cod. icon. 394a at 11v, 1467. Wiktenauer.
Methodology – A Framework for Cataloging Wounds
Because the zettel's glossators instruct us to take specific actions in order to wound the opponent in particular ways and locations, I have tried to describe the effect of each wounding action found in the accounts of historical combat I have cataloged. For example, the first Pseudo Peter von Danzig (PPvD) zornhau play instructs us to "shoot in the long point straight before you and stab him to the face or the breast."12 The glosses are replete with this blow-by-blow style of instruction, so it makes sense to analyze each cut, thrust, slice, or strike in historical accounts of swordfights to determine each blow’s effect on the victim.
But what effects are important for our purposes? As mentioned above, we are assuming that the combatants’ shared primary objective in these accounts of combat was to deliver a blow that rendered the opponent unable or unwilling to continue the fight – I term this result incapacitation. It follows that the only alternative to an incapacitating blow is a blow which connected but did not end the fight – I term this result ineffective.
To be clear, in this framework, a blow that kills the opponent is merely a subtype of incapacitation because death is one of several results that prevents an opponent from continuing the fight. Similarly, other blows classed as incapacitation include those that resulted exsanguination, dismemberment, and “morale kills” that ended the fight, such as running away in horror at wounds sustained.13 For our purposes—that is, whether the effect of the blow stopped the fight—physiological and psychological incapacitation are no different.
The framework also differentiates between the acute and latent effects of a wound in order to account for a blow that connects but takes effect only later, such as a thrust that the recipient may not even have noticed but which caused hemorrhaging so severe that the recipient was soon rendered unable to continue fighting. Latent effects of wounds seem to have been the most common cause of incapacitation, but because multiple wounds often were sustained before incapacitation occurred, it is usually difficult or impossible to determine which individual wound was to blame. Nevertheless, I believe this simple incapacitation/ineffective and acute/latent framework is broadly suitable for describing the effect of wounds in historical combat.
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e.g. decapitation |
e.g. exsanguin-ation |
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e.g. minor laceration |
e.g. recovery of will to fight |
Importantly, this framework does not consider any effect that a wound may have had after the conclusion of the fight in which the wound was sustained. Specifically, it does not consider whether either combatant later died as a result of wounds sustained in the fight, only whether any wounds sustained in the fight caused the fight to end. This is why “death” is a subset of “incapacitation” in this framework.14
Additionally, for each blow I have also tracked the target of the blow (head, torso, etc.), the type of blow (cut/thrust/strike), and have grouped blows into “encounters” to make sense of accounts where multiple blows landed in a single fight. Furthermore, I’ve kept notes on the weapon used to deliver the blow, who used it, the context (foot/horseback/asymmetric), the location of the encounter, date, citation including text from the source, and miscellaneous notes that defy these categories (dismemberment, armor failure, etc.).
The result is a spreadsheet that organizes and categorizes approximately 1500 individual blows across all sources cataloged so far and makes quantitative research feasible within the framework described above. Moreover, I have found that the spreadsheet serves as a readily-searchable record of historical combat and allows for easy reference when discussing wounding.15 In this way, I hope it may also provide some qualitative value as a reference or index of historical violence.
Cod. 44.A.8 (1452) at 13r-13v, Wiktenauer at 27. ?
For example, historical accounts involving cuts through the mouth all caused the injured combatant to immediately flee, apparently due to the horrific nature of such an injury. The glossators repeatedly advise cutting the opponent's mouth perhaps for this reason. ?
For this reason, the detailed and abundant 19th century army surgeons’ reports have been of very limited use in this project. Surgeon’s reports may describe in great detail the injury, but they do not describe the victim’s ability or willingness to continue fighting upon sustaining the injury. The exception is when a surgeon’s report can be connected to an account of the fight in which the injury was sustained, but that is rare indeed. ?
I.e. it’s possible now to point to specific examples when discussing the effects of swords on an opponent instead of relying on conjecture, etc. ?
Kinsley, Swordsmen of the British Empire at 399.
Cataloging Historical Combat
Making sense of accounts of historical combat is tricky. See if you can keep track of the various blows and their effects in this account of the battle of Abu Klea, Sudan, in 1885:
"As the [British] skirmishers came running in, the last couple of them were hard pressed by the pursuing Arabs; and two of them were killed. Burnaby16 rode out a little way to the assistance of the in-running skirmishers, his only arm being his sword. He rode straight at a mounted Sheikh chasing a skirmisher with leveled spear. At sight of him, the Arab changed direction and made for Burnaby. Just as they were closing, a young soldier named Laporte sent a bullet through the Arab, who fell with a crash. A foot spearsman promptly darted on Burnaby, pointing at his throat the broad, sharp blade of his eight-foot-long spear. Burnaby parried, and wounded the Moslem. The duel between them continued for above a minute—Burnaby cutting, pointing, and parrying; the supple Arab lunging vicious thrusts at the big British officer, fast in the saddle. A second Arab, darting by in pursuit of a skirmisher, with a sudden turn, ran his spear into Burnaby’s right shoulder from behind. A soldier darted out and bayoneted this man. Burnaby glanced over his shoulder for a second at the transaction, and in that second his first antagonist dashed his spear full into Burnaby’s throat. He fell from the saddle, the blood spurting from the jugular. As he sank, the Arab stabbed him a second time; and he lay prone. A rush of Arabs were upon him. He had strength enough to struggle to his feet; and with the blood pouring from his gashed throat, he whirled his sword around him till he fell dead."17 Account of war correspondent Archibald Forbes.
This account is typical in that it refers to numerous wounds of variable effect by multiple parties in a single encounter. However, most of the blows mentioned in the account are described in enough detail to catalog in the wounding framework.
Blow 0: Unknown. The account begins by referencing two skirmishers that "were killed" by pursuers. This is an excellent example of an account of historical wounding that does not warrant cataloging. Although the account implies that the pursuers inflicted wounds that killed the skirmishers, there is no mention of the weapon used, the type of attack, or where the wound was inflicted, much less whether the wound caused acute or latent incapacitation for the purposes of our framework. Consequently, we have to discard these first two references as insufficiently detailed.
Blow #1: Acute & Latent Incapacitation. The first catalogable wound occurred when a British soldier named “Laporte sent a bullet through the [spear-wielding horseman], who fell with a crash.” Although I’ve made the decision not to catalog projectile wounds in Kinsley’s work, instead opting to focus on hand to hand fighting, this is an excellent example of a wound that caused acute incapacitation. Furthermore, because that wound seemed to have ended the horseman’s resistance for the purposes of this account, its effect was also latent incapacitation.18
Blow #2: Ineffective. Burnaby inflicted a wound on the spearman that did not end the fight: "A foot spearsman promptly darted on Burnaby, pointing at his throat the broad, sharp blade of his eight-foot-long spear. Burnaby parried, and wounded the Moslem. The duel between them continued for above a minute." The account gives us little information except that this wound was acutely ineffective, neglecting to mention where the spearman sustained the wound or whether Burnaby thrust or cut with his saber. However, because the account gives us enough information to determine that the wound did not stop the fight, we can at least catalog it as acutely ineffective.
Blow #3: Ineffective. The third catalogable wound occurred when a spear-wielding footman “darting by in pursuit of a skirmisher, with a sudden turn, ran his spear into Burnaby’s right shoulder from behind. A soldier darted out and bayoneted this man. Burnaby glanced over his shoulder for a second at the transaction, and in that second his first antagonist dashed his spear full into Burnaby’s throat.” The spear thrust into Burnaby’s shoulder did not end the fight, only causing him to "glanc[e] over his shoulder"; at the attacker. Therefore, although it led to his other adversary stabbing him in the throat, the shoulder wound was acutely ineffective because it did not end the fight.
Blow #4, Etc.: Not Catalogable. The account references a solider that "darted out and bayoneted" the footman who wounded Burnaby in the neck. Unfortunately, this account of wounding ultimately is too marginal to catalog. Although "bayoneting" a man likely means thrusting with the bayonet, it could mean a single thrust or multiple. Moreover, because there are no details about the effect of the wound(s) or location(s) on the recipient, there just is not quite enough information to warrant cataloging.19
Blow #5: Acute Incapacitation, Latent Ineffective. The fourth catalogable wound is the most interesting for our purposes. It came when "Burnaby glanced over his shoulder for a second at the [footman who wounded his shoulder], and in that second his first antagonist dashed his spear full into Burnaby's throat. He fell from the saddle, the blood spurting from the jugular. As he sank, the Arab stabbed him a second time; and he lay prone. A rush of Arabs were upon him. He had strength enough to struggle to his feet; and with the blood pouring from his gashed throat, he whirled his sword around him till he fell dead.” The wound to the neck caused Burnaby to fall from his saddle, rendering him incapable of fighting. Therefore, it falls under acute incapacitation in our framework. However, because Burnaby continued fighting after sustaining the wound, the wound was latently ineffective despite its initial incapacitation effect.
Blow #6: Latent Ineffective. Burnaby received a second wound in the process of being dehorsed: “[a]s he sank, the Arab stabbed him a second time; and he lay prone.” Although the account does not give the location of this wound, we still can make inferences as to its effect and can ultimately deduce enough to catalog it. We know nothing of the wound’s acute effect because Burnaby was already falling off his horse due to his neck wound when he received this one – although it likely helped incapacitate him, there’s not enough evidence to be conclusive. However, because Burnaby got up and kept fighting after receiving this wound, the wound certainly did not end the fight. Therefore, it is cataloged as latent ineffective.
Blow #7, Etc.: Unknown. The account ends with multiple adversaries surrounding and overpowering the hemorrhaging Burnaby who continued to resist until succumbing to the onslaught, ostensibly from numerous blows and the effects of exsanguination. This situation is frustratingly common in accounts of combat because catalogable wounds almost never can be extracted from a melee.20 Because the framework is built upon the notion that a single blow can be reasonably traced to observed effects of the resultant wound, a swarm of attackers landing multiple blows has no way of being cataloged. This is a clear limitation of the framework, but fortunately the accounts are replete with catalogable blows to make up for it.
"One of the foremost swordsmen of the Victorian Empire was Col. Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards." – Kinsley at 405. ?
Kinsley at 405. ?
A simpler way of expressing this notion is that the wound not only put the horseman down, it kept him down. ?
We're left only with the notion that bayoneting was effective on this occasion. ?
viz., a confused fight, skirmish, or scuffle. From English “medley” and French mêlée. ?
The British did lots of foightin’ round the world, writing down much of how it turned out. Kinsley at 663.
Wounds by the Numbers
Caveat: The easiest thing to do with a spreadsheet is to use it to count up things, but the numbers presented below should not be taken as statistically significant or otherwise sound for any purpose except to represent the subjective categorization of wounds within this framework. I am no statistician or otherwise trained in numbers of any kind, but I am presenting this analysis with the hope that some quantitative insight is possible.
Number of Blows by Type
Effect of Landed Blows
Focusing on just Kinsley’s Swordsmen of the British Empire, there are 1092 total documentable blows of all weapons, whether cut, thrust, or strike.21 Barely half (50.5%, or 552) immediately incapacitated or killed the victim. The rest of the documented blows were ineffective at immediately stopping the fight – 47.3% failed to render the victim unable or unwilling to continue.22 However, a significant percentage (11%) of those acutely ineffective blows inflicted wounds that would end the fight by latently incapacitating or killing the recipient.
Cuts accounted for 63% of documented blows, thrusts for 31%, and strikes for 6%.23 Of those documented blows, 56% of cuts immediately killed or incapacitated the recipient; 40% of thrusts did the same, as did 72% of strikes.24 However, not all incapacitating blows actually kept the recipient down – 11% (24) of documented cuts, 4% (4) of thrusts, and 4% (2) of strikes that immediately incapacitated the recipient failed to stop the fight because the recipient recovered and continued fighting. Conversely, some blows that failed to immediately incapacitate the recipient succeeded in stopping the fight through their latent effects—6% (18) of documented cuts and 22% (42) of thrusts failed to immediately kill or incapacitate the recipient but succeeded in stopping the fight due to the effects of the wound.
“Strike” here refers to any impact not with a sharp weapon, whether hilt or open hand strikes (I have one documented face punch by a Marine NCO during a boarding action—it incapacitated its victim.) ?
The accounts of the remaining few percent of blows documented were not clear or did not specify the effect of the wound. ?
Total documented blows by type—Cuts: 644; Thrusts: 319; Strikes: 62. ?
Total instances of acute death/incapacitation by blow type—Cuts: 361; Thrusts: 130; Strikes: 45. ?
Acute Incapacitation by Target and Blow Type
The data clearly illustrate the utility of attacking the head to end a fight quickly: nearly two thirds of documented cuts (65%) and somewhat less than two-thirds of thrusts (63%) resulted in immediate death or incapacitation when the head was the target, as did 73% of documented strikes. Cuts to the torso resulted in immediate death or incapacitation in 39% of cases, but thrusts to the torso immediately killed or incapacitated in 46% of cases.25 Cuts to the arm or hand immediately incapacitated or killed in 58% of cases, but thrusts only in 7%.
Limitations, Biases, Disclaimer, &c.
These data are taken from Kinsley’s magnificent work that aggregates accounts of combat from memoirs, newspaper accounts, and other primary and secondary sources. Therefore, the specific biases and other limitations of Kinsley’s accounts may vary depending on the original source of the account.
For example, often, a survivor bias influences the accounts we are left with – only a survivor of a fight lives to give an account of it. However, as demonstrated in the account above in which the principal combatant perished, the survivor bias is not present in all accounts because other witnesses may have recorded the encounter.
Additionally, Kinsley's sources can suffer from editorialization. Again, the account above is a good example – it was lifted from a war correspondent’s report written for commercial publication. Consequently, it likely is embellished to some degree for consumption by the contemporary British newspaper-reading public eager for accounts of heroics in defense of empire, etc. Even if embellishments seem to be more stylistic than substantive, it’s important to acknowledge the bias when applicable.
Kinsley also is biased in favor of British accounts, often omitting accounts from other perspectives and sources.26 This bias is important for our purposes because British fencing historically favored cutting over thrusting, so we should expect to have somewhat fewer examples of thrusting with swords than otherwise.27 In fact, Kinsley devotes a chapter to capturing the historical British "cut vs. thrust" debate in Swordsmen of the British Empire at p. 481.
Perhaps the biggest limitation is the subjectivity of my categorization of accounts into the wound framework. Accounts that often are vague or ambiguous required my personal interpretation to fit into the framework, so I have made assumptions and read between the lines of the written source throughout this project. Nevertheless, I think that this research is useful for better understanding historical combat despite my own amateurish inadequacy.
There was a single case of a strike to the torso immediately incapacitating its victim. ?
But Kinsely’s book is nearly 700 pages and growing, so we can forgive him. ?
Matt Easton discusses this topic in a video. ?
Some sources seem more comfortable depicting wounds, perhaps excessively so. Cod.Guelf.83.4 Aug.8º, 1591. Wiktenauer.
TAKEAWAYS – QUALITATIVE, NOT QUANTITATIVE
I do not claim that any conclusions or takeaways are possible from this research. Perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that targeting the head is the most efficient way to immediately incapacitate an opponent, but I am not comfortable reading further into these data than that. Instead, I prefer to use these accounts as a reference for the lived experience of using swords in combat in order to build a better picture of what participants in such encounters may have understood about sword fighting.
This qualitative application I feel is more useful than applying analytics to an intrinsically subjective data set. For that purpose, the wound spreadsheet is an excellent index of historical combat, allowing a reader to locate and compare disparate accounts of sword fighting across centuries. Instead of speculating about the effects of swords in combat or whether a play from a fechtbook would be “effective,” the wound spreadsheet enables comparison of actual examples of similar wounds and techniques. Additionally, the spreadsheet makes it easier to build a general understanding of the nature of a sword fight based on actual examples instead of hearsay or supposition.
Using the Spreadsheet
(download link at top of this post)
The spreadsheet organizes combat by encounter, assigning a unique Encounter Number to each fight. Encounters often involve numerous blows, so the Encounter # column is critical for coherently grouping blows. For example, the account of Col. Burnaby’s death at Abu Klea, discussed above, is Encounter # 92. Generally speaking, each separate instance of combat gets its own encounter number.
The most important columns for making sense of an encounter are F, G, H, and I: Attack Type, Target, Acute Effect, and Latent Effect, respectively. Reading this information gives a good snapshot of the course of the encounter and allows you to determine whether you’d like to read the Text column where the text of the account is reproduced.
Make sure to turn on the Filter function in Excel’s Data tab! That unlocks the magic that allows you to sort by weapon, attack type, etc.
Also collected on the spreadsheet are other miscellaneous data:
Location: Approximately where the encounter took place.
Weapon: The weapon used to make the attack. I have consolidated the disparate words used for various weapons into general types. E.g., “saber” generally includes any one-handed sword used like a saber.
Wielder: An identifier for the combatant whose blow is being cataloged. Important for making sense of each encounter.
Context: Whether the combatants were on foot, horseback, or asymmetric.
Notes: Other interesting information that defies these categories. E.g., dismemberment, armor effectiveness, sword break, etc.
Citation: Page number where the account can be found in Kinsley.
In future posts, I hope to further explore how the qualitative aspects of this wound index I’ve created can inform Kunst des Fechtens practice. I am always looking for more first-hand accounts of historical combat, especially translations of non-English sources. If you have any leads, please reach out to federandpell@gmail.com.