Pierre Vigny became known through his involvement in Bartitsu, a short lived attempt at bringing together various martial arts in Edwardian London, and which gained later fame by being practiced by none other than Sherlock Holmes. Vigny’s art of La canne came to be through his time training as a fencing master in the French military, his possible training under Charlemont, and reportedly some combat “experimentations” in the streets of Europe. Pierre Vigny as a fencing instructor in Evian-les-bains. 1898 – La vie au grand air There are still certain mysteries regarding Vigny’s system ..read more

By Maxime Chouinard 1830s London was a dangerous place, full of ruffians, bludgers, street gangs and… apparently fencers! This article deals with a rather strange and comical event that took place in March of 1832 in London, when a group of men practicing broadsword fencing were arrested by the police. On the night of March 27th, Williamson, the superintendant of London’s T Division, reported that he had heard noise while patrolling the streets of Glasshouse Court, in Goodman’s Field. Upon approaching, he overheard a man calling “right cheek, left cheek” which he recognized as commands given w ..read more

A few months ago, a discussion on Marey-Monge’s Memoir on swords got me into researching the man and his realizations a bit more actively. If the name Marey-Monge does not ring a bell, you are not alone. The man is a fairly obscure figure in French history, perhaps better known in the anglophone sword collecting world than the francophone one, due to a memoir he authored in 1841 and which was translated by Lieut. Col. Henry Hamilton Maxwell of the Bengal artillery in 1863. Although he describes the sabre models he envisions for the cavalry, infantry and navy, he never quite illustrates them, a ..read more

By Maxime Chouinard Note: This article was first published in the Fondation Napoleon’s newsletter of March 2021. Several people asked me for a translation, and since this blog is aimed at a different crowd, I chose to expand a little bit on some of the points I am exploring. I have been researching the question of French military fencing for close to 20 years now, and only now do I feel confident enough to put down some of the things I found. Thank you to Jean-Philippe Wojas for the proof reading, as well as Philippe Aguesse, Damien Olivier, Julien Garry, Phil Crawley and everyone who helped m ..read more

Yesterday was the 205th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. I thought it would then be interesting to translate a few sword fighting anecdotes from French soldier memoirs facing British ones. It is very rare to find mentions of fights with British swordsmen in French sources, which is not that surprising when you consider that the two nations rarely fought on land; Waterloo and the Peninsular War being two exceptions. The British army was also very small compared to other continental armies numbering around 30 000 troops, compared to the hundreds of thousands fielded by the armies of Austri ..read more

  By Maxime Chouinard In the few years I spent as a medical museum curator, I was brought to read and examine many different period sources on the subject of health care. One of those is Hugues Ravaton’s Chirurgie d’armée, a seminal work in the history of European surgery and one which is also of great interest to the subject of this blog. I decided to translate and publish parts of this treatise here which I hope you will also find useful. This will be part of an upcoming book on the medical context of HEMA, or how medical knowledge was applied to martial arts as well as to the results o ..read more

I recently found this article that I had stored away on my computer a few years ago and rediscovered the remarkable account of a young California woman fighting off a wannabe burglar in her home with a sabre in hand. The woman, Nina Lemon, was apparently trained in fencing, and described by her fencing master as “Strong as an ox and quick as a cat”. The description of the encounter is extremely precise, owing perhaps to the skill of the journalist, the famous Jack London (who was probably not the original author, see the update at the end of the article).  That said, London cannot help bu ..read more

As the Bartitsu.org website seems to be currently down, I have decided to republish here this article I had found in 2013 and which was posted up on the Bartitsu website by Tony Wolf with additional research on the author. I believe this is a precious source for anyone looking into historical sources on Bowie knife. The article transcribed here was originally published in the “St.Louis Republic” of June 14th, 1890; it was evidently heavily based on an earlier article published in the San Francisco Examiner.   The subject of the article, Louis Juan Ohnimus was born in Scranton, Pennsylvan ..read more