A class of proxy fighters, known as “champions,” emerged. It was a dangerous way to earn a living, as a losing duelist would have his right arm chopped off. The accused was kept just out of sight, a noose around his neck; if his champion lost, he would immediately be hanged or burned to death. As trial by battle spread, commoners were restricted by circumstance or by law to fighting on foot with wooden staves, while mounted combat and swordplay became the preserve of the nobility. Combats never started before noon, the accuser entering from one direction, the defendant from the other. The litigants would swear that they had no magic charms or potions about them (a primitive form of drug testing). Then, at the marshal’s command, the challenger would fling down the “feuding glove” before his opponent, who would accept the challenge by picking it up.
If the accused could keep the fight going until the stars came out, he would win his suit. Spectators were commanded to be silent, on penalty of losing a limb. When a combatant was wounded or thrown, his opponent would usually kneel on his chest and, unless asked for mercy, drive his sword through a joint in the armor. Those last moments, waiting for the sword to slide through one’s visor, must have been terrifying. The victorious knight would rarely raise his opponent’s visor, as it would have meant looking into his victim’s eyes. The impersonality of armor had its advantages.
Early on the Church took a stand against judicial combat: Stephen IV condemned all duels, and the Council of Valencia, in 855, threatened combatants with excommunication. But within three years Nicholas I pronounced dueling “just and legitimate” and abbots and priors began taking their share of the confiscated goods of a defeated combatant, sometimes even fighting themselves. Their weapon of choice was the mace, on the false premise that it did not shed blood (it is difficult to crush an opponent’s skull cleanly). In 967 the Council of Ravenna declared judicial combat acceptable, citing David’s triumph over Goliath as evidence of divine sanction. A century and a half later, there were even formulas for Church blessings of duels,5 and a handful of saints were thought to be particularly effective if prayed to over a duel’s outcome. Bishop Liutprand of Cremona was said to maintain a duelist whose function was to corroborate the truth of the bishop’s statements. Certain monasteries, such as some around Paris in the fourteenth century, maintained special fields equipped with walls and viewing stalls expressly for staging judicial duels, with the monks renting out facilities as required.
The end of a trial by combat. Outside the enclosure lies the armor of earlier contestants. (illustration credit 3.1)
However, the practice continued to worry the Church’s conscience, and vacillation gradually resolved into outright condemnation. Further councils—from Limoges in 994 up to Trent in 1563—reemphasized the Church’s abhorrence of dueling, and a series of early-Renaissance popes—Alexander III, Celestine III, Julius II—declared that they would excommunicate any sovereign allowing it. Similar pronouncements were made by Gregory XIII (1582), Clement VIII (1592), Alexander VII (1655), Benedict XIV (1752), Pius IX (1869), and Leo XIII (1891). None worked; as one writer put it, the warlike spirit took to the duel just as the carcasses of horses produce worms. Dueling evidently appealed to something in man that could not be reined in, even by the threat of losing his immortal soul.
Such a threat was a real one. A notable “champion for hire” was the Chevalier d’Andrieux, who by the time he was thirty had killed seventy-one men. His next opponent boasted, “Chevalier, you will be the thirteenth I have killed.” D’Andrieux replied, “And you my seventy-second”—and suited his action to the word. D’Andrieux added to his reputation by regularly disarming his rivals and forcing them to forswear God, at the point of his sword and on the promise of their lives. On hearing their enforced blasphemy he would then run them through—in order, he said, to have the pleasure of dispatching body and soul in one.† The judicial duel continued to be practiced, until in 1386 a duel was fought that had such an appalling outcome that even the most unquestioning began to lose faith. Jacques LeGris was accused by his old friend Jean Carrouges of raping Jean’s young and beautiful wife, Marguerite, while Carrouges was away in Paris. LeGris protested his innocence, and after an inconclusive trial lasting several months the Parlement de Paris decreed that a duel be fought—in the presence of Charles VI. The two men met on December 29 a quarter of a mile north of Paris, on grounds owned by a Benedictine priory, watched by a crowd of around ten thousand. Marguerite, dressed in a long black robe, stood nearby on a scaffold, knowing that should her husband lose she would be burnt at the stake as a “false accuser.” After a fierce fight, first on horseback then on foot, Carrouges thrust a dagger through a gap in LeGris’s armor and mortally wounded him. The dead man’s body was dragged off by the executioner, to be hanged in chains from a nearby gibbet. Not long after, a man arrested on other charges admitted to the rape, and rumors spread that Carrouges had forced his wife to accuse the wrong man to avenge an old quarrel. This was the last duel to be officially sanctioned by the Parlement de Paris, and, in France at least, such encounters lost divine authority.
One of the last judicial duels in England took place in 1571, under Queen Elizabeth I. A man named Paramour applied for trial by combat over certain disputed manorial rights, and his opponent accepted the challenge. The Court of Common Pleas had no choice but to process the application. The queen, anxious to avoid bloodshed, ruled that the suit be settled, but the duel had to proceed, as required by law. On the morning in question, officers assembled at Tothill Fields in London before a crowd of more than four thousand. Each side had a champion, the petitioner fielding a well-known fencing master named Henry Nailer. When the plaintiff failed to show up, his absence was declared an abandonment of claim, but Nailer suggested that he and the opposing champion, to “show some pastime” to the gathering, should fight each other anyway. His invitation left his adversary unimpressed, and the disappointed crowd dispersed. However, the law remained on the statute book until it was cynically employed one last time, in 1817, by a man accused of murdering a girl by her younger brother. The boy was too young to fight a duel, and as no one else could be found to take his place the charges were dropped. Finally, on March 22, 1819, the judicial duel was abolished by Parliament. The accused man, shunned by the public, emigrated to America, where he soon died. The last recorded duel fought in England was in 1845, between a lieutenant Marine and an army captain, James Seton, who was killed.
DESPITE THESE EXCEPTIONS, BY THE END OF THE THIRTEENTH century the duel of law had given way to the duel of chivalry. Initially this was a public encounter between two knights, usually on horseback, to settle a disputed possession or a point of honor. A code of chivalry was drawn up by Philip the Fair of France in 1306, and his precepts were further elaborated by Richard II and James I.
Generally, kings ignored the claims of chivalry at their peril. During the Third Crusade, Richard I (r. 1189–99) allied himself with his brother-in-law, Henry the Lion of Brunswick, and trampled on the banner of his fellow crusader Leopold of Austria. The German Emperor Henry VI commanded Richard to meet Leopold in single combat, but Richard declined, saying that Henry had no authority over him. Within months, Richard was shipwrecked off the coast of Aquileia and delivered into Leopold’s hands. The emperor ruled that because Richard had failed to give satisfaction he should be kept in prison. He was released only after he had paid a heavy ransom and done public homage. This account has not yet found its way into Robin Hood mythology.
A similar violation of knightliness and judgment was made by the French king Francis I. In 1527 Francis reneged on a treaty with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles responded by sending back a message that he would henceforth consider Francis a base violator of public faith and a stranger to the honor and integrity befitting a knight. Francis immediately challenged Charles to a duel, which the emperor readily accepted, only to find the French king frantically backpedaling: Francis’s challenge had been mere “gasconade,” as windy threats were known. After th
at, kings and other rulers learned to leave their quarrels to diplomats and soldiers.
When people wanted to fight but had no legal case to settle, they appealed to the chivalric code, which, with its strict rules, made dueling respectable. Once the formalities of chivalric dueling grew irksome, the “duel of honor,” most often private, even secret, and held at some out-of-the-way spot, without rules or umpires, became chivalry’s awkward child. At first, “duels of honor” were anything but—they were free-for-alls, known as “killing affrays” or “duelli alla macchia.” Books on fencing warned of men carrying sand in their pockets to throw into their opponents’ faces and advised against shaking hands with anyone whose sword was already drawn, lest it immediately be used against them. But over time successful duelists gained something of a reputation, and the ability to vanquish numerous opponents became a mark of honor.
One such celebrated duelist was James Crichton (c. 1560–c. 1583), a noble-born Scot who was so prodigious in body and mind that by the age of twenty he could speak eleven languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldaic [the Babylonian tongue], Italian, Spanish, French, Flemish, German, Gaelic, and English). He could also dance, sing, and play “all sorts of instruments,” according to Sir Thomas Urquhart, his first and most likely unreliable biographer.6 Contemporary portraits depict Crichton as a handsome man, despite a red birthmark on his right cheek. He had a passionate attachment to tilting, concerts, cards, dice, and tennis, and “his memory was such that anything that he heard or read he could reproduce without an error.… Nor were his accomplishments as a fencer and as a horseman … less remarkable.” In 1577 he set out on a tour of Europe.
At the University of Paris, his fellow students pinned a notice on the main gate at the College of Navarre announcing, “If you would meet with this Monster of Perfection, to make search for him either in the tavern or bawdy-house, is the readiest way to find him.” Crichton parried this friendly thrust by announcing that in six weeks he would present himself to respond, in public examination, in any one of his languages, to whatever question put to him, “in any science, liberal art, discipline, or faculty, whether practical or theoretic.” On the day appointed, he was examined from 9 A.M. till 6 P.M. before a large audience and performed with such brilliance that he was dubbed “the Admirable Crichton” ever after. The next day he carried all before him in a tilting competition at the Louvre.7
He served for two years with the French army and traveled to Genoa, where he built on his reputation as a brilliant orator; then, in 1582, he moved to Mantua. That city hosted a much-feared Italian bullyboy—in Urquhart’s words, “of a mighty, able, strong, nimble and vigorous body; by nature fierce, cruel, warlike and audacious, and in the gladiatory art … superlatively expert and dangerous.” He would travel Europe challenging all comers for a stake of 500 gold pistoles—about £400 then, a startling figure: the equivalent of about £150,000 ($250,000) today. (Some seventy years before, Henry VII had offered a prize of just £10 to any Englishman who “discovered land to the West.”)
By the time Crichton arrived in Mantua, this champion had taken on three local opponents over three days, killing the first with a thrust to the throat, the second by a lunge through the heart, and the third by running him through the belly. The Duke of Mantua was “much grieved” that he had granted his protection to such a brute, and Crichton, learning of the duke’s alarm, offered to fight the self-proclaimed champion in the presence of the Mantuan court. The duke gave his consent, rapiers of equal length and temper were selected, and the start of the duel was signaled by the firing of a sixty-four-pound cannonball. Both men fenced in shirts and drawers and in their bare feet.
Crichton immediately settled on defense, while his adversary—unusually, we have no record of his name—went through his entire repertoire: “he changed guard from tierce to quarte, he tried prime and seconde, he tried in high line and low line, and twisted his body into all the shapes he could to break through the Scot’s defense, but to no avail.”8 Amid it all, the “sweetness of Crichton’s countenance,” in stark contrast to his opponent’s enraged panting, charmed the court and had the ladies in a flutter (two are said to have swooned).
The watchers sensed that the Italian was tiring. Only at this point did Crichton go on to the attack, striking his opponent deliberately in the throat, heart, and belly so that, Urquhart wrote, “If lines were imagined drawn from the hand that delivered them to the places marked by them, they would represent a perfect isosceles triangle, with a perpendicular from the top angle cutting the basis in the middle.” Each thrust mimicked one of the fatal thrusts against the three men who had last fought the Italian champion, and each brought him closer to death. When all was done, Crichton gave his adversary’s sword to the duke and the purse to the three widows. The duke rewarded Crichton by making him tutor and companion to his dissolute son Vincenzo, “a youth of ungovernable temper.”
Some weeks later, Crichton was returning from an evening visit to a lady friend when he was waylaid by masked brawlers. He fought back so effectively that he managed to disarm the ringleader, who was forced to pull off his mask and beg for his life. It was Vincenzo. Crichton fell to his knees, expressing his sorrow and explaining that he had been acting in self-defense. He handed his pupil his sword, hilt forward. Vincenzo seized it and, feeling humiliated in front of his attendants, plunged it home. So died the Admirable Crichton, not yet twenty-four, giving a phrase to the English language and a play title to J. M. Barrie.
The convergence of warriorlike behavior and civilian logic telescoped quarrels so that they were likely to become murderous with great speed; even to put one’s hand on one’s sword was an inflammatory act. Duels were often fought over trivial matters: in the late seventeenth century two French noblemen came to formal blows over an argument their grandfathers had had more than seventy years before. The fight extended to their seconds, then their thirds, and finally to the king’s messenger, who had been sent to stop the duel but who didn’t wish to miss out. In Naples, a nobleman fought some twenty duels to prove Dante a greater poet than Ariosto; mortally wounded, he admitted that he had read the works of neither.
During the reigns of François II (1559–60), Charles IX (1560–74), and Henri III (1574–89), dueling in France was so popular that historians have dubbed the era “l’époque de la fureur des duels.” Even though the Parlement of Paris outlawed the practice in 1559, within five years Charles IX was forced to put out an edict saying it was up to him when duels could take place. Thirty years later, Henri IV forbade dueling yet again, although in 1605 “Le Bon Henri” allowed a duel to be fought on his behalf, and on another occasion, when a subject asked permission to fight, replied, “Go, and if I were not your king, I would be your second.” Contradictions between the law and actual practice reached the level of absurdity.‡ Between Henri’s accession in 1589 and 1607, four thousand French gentlemen lost their lives dueling a rate of four or five a week, or eighteen a month while the king granted fourteen thousand pardons. Given the population of France at the time, with only about half a million people “of quality,” this was a fatality rate befitting a world war.
There had to be new rules, and all over Europe, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, treatises outlined what such regulations should be, from the cause of a quarrel to the challenge, the choice of weapons, and on to the fight itself. Could seconds take on a principal? Should handicapping be introduced, to make the encounter as balanced as possible? Much debated was the question of who had the advantage (presuming fighters of equal skill): the man who struck first or the one who received the first attack and launched a counterstroke.§
Some of the most vicious duels of the sixteenth century took place in Italy, where innumerable “disreputable tricks and abuses” originated. There were professors everywhere of what was called the scienza cavalleresia (“the gentleman’s craft”); the Constable of Naples even instituted a military order, under the patronage of Saint George, to protect and maintain “this
honorable pursuit.” By the mid–sixteenth century a flood of treatises, emphasizing that honor was personal, led directly to the decline of the use of substitutes. In England, Queen Mary I (r. 1553–58) denounced “divers naughty and insolent persons” who had been fighting using rapiers up to five feet long and wearing armor underneath their clothing, but she could not stop the gentlemen of England from talking about duels, reading voraciously about them, and training for them.
Strangely, dueling in any formal sense did not begin in England until about a hundred years after it had taken root in France and Italy. There were full-scale private battles between grandee factions but no instance of a private duel fought in England before the sixteenth century, and very few before the reign of James I. However, in 1579 Sir Philip Sidney quarreled with the Earl of Oxford over the use of a tennis court and called him out. Queen Elizabeth intervened, reminding Sidney of “the difference between earls and gentlemen.” Sidney retorted “that place was never intended to privilege to wrong”—but he still had to yield to the queen’s authority. By 1650 Thomas Hobbes was writing that duels “always will be honourable, though unlawful, until such time as there should be honour ordained for them that refuse, and ignominy for them that make the challenge.” The demands of “honor” were in effect setting up an alternative system to the rule of law, and the English nobility, like their brethren on the Continent, proved impervious to their various sovereigns’ attempts to contain it. In the first two decades of the seventeenth century one in every four peers was in danger of losing his life in a duel.
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