On a grey November afternoon, clad in a borrowed—and somewhat smelly—fencing outfit, I spent two hours going through the basics of the aspiring duellist: saluting before putting on the protective mask, pinching the grip of the sword with the thumb and index finger, gliding back and forth while keeping the feet planted. But this wasn’t the kind of fencing you see at the Olympics—the dazzling speed of the athletes, electronic scoring, and seemingly nonsensical rules. The instructions came with a twist: our back hand, we learned, could be used to grab the opponent’s sword and disarm them, or even to wield a second weapon. We could move in whatever direction we chose. We could aim for pretty much any part of the body.
This was historical fencing, an approach that seeks to recreate the way people fought centuries ago by interpreting ancient documents. Also known as Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA, it simulates the life-or-death feel of combat that would have been commonplace in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and up to the early modern era.
I had been cast in an amateur theatre production of The Three Musketeers, playing a guard of the scheming Cardinal de Richelieu. To make our stage fighting look convincing, the actors had committed to training weekly for the next four months. Understanding the strange blend of decorum and brutality that defined historical duels was exactly what we needed.
Teaching us that day was David Farley Chevrier, a medical librarian with degrees in medieval and classical studies and a passion for Scottish dress. In his free time, he oversees a small historical section at a Montreal fencing club, Escrime Mont-Royal, specializing in the smallsword, a weapon introduced in the seventeenth century.
Things got stressful when Farley Chevrier demonstrated basic attacks, parries (for defence), and ripostes (for striking back). Before I was able to absorb them, it was time to spar. I saluted my opponent, put my mask on, and found myself en garde, a weapon pointed at me. Mildly panicked, I clumsily went after them, figuring the best defence was offence. Which was, I later learned, the surest way to lose.
Originally, swordplay was “an art that taught you how to use weapons that can do real harm in an efficient way,” says Orlando Di Ciccio, who owns and teaches at a historical fencing school in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawà:ke. HEMA is more rigorous than live-action role playing, or LARP, whose aficionados can occasionally be spotted in parks, engaging in foam-sword duels. It’s also not always as geared to education as historical re-enactment. Since the goal is to save yourself from a fatal blow, HEMA fighting can look slow and messy.
“It’s a game of chess with swords,” says Véronique Meunier, who practises HEMA at two clubs. “You’re trying to analyze your opponent, trying to find out how he’s going to react to something.” Meunier started out learning Olympic fencing as a child. “I liked it, I liked the sport of it, I liked the rush of adrenaline, but I hated the rules,” she recalls. “Here comes historical fencing: you don’t have [the same] rules, it’s fun, it’s more wild, it’s more to the core.”
It was a James Bond scene that sparked Meunier’s interest. Die Another Day (2002) features a breathless duel between Bond and villain Gustav Graves. The fight starts as a conventional match at a London fencing club but builds up into spectacular, over-the-top combat as the opponents leap through the building, swapping their modern épées for older, heavier swords on display. “I was like: ‘Okay, I’d really like to do that,’” Meunier says.
When Die Another Day came out, the historical fencing community was still small and relatively obscure, and Meunier wouldn’t have known where to look for teachers. Years later, she wound up connecting with a club and buying her first rapier, at the Salon de la Passion Médiévale, a three-day fair in Quebec with exhibition fights, concerts, and plenty of merchandise. (She has since acquired seven small swords, three more rapiers, one sabre, and more.)
In the spirit of historical accuracy, HEMA weapons are generally steel replicas of what fighters would have used in the past. Popular ones include the longsword, a heavy weapon with a cruciform hilt permitting a two-hand grip; the long and thin rapier, a civilians’ favourite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its nimbler version, the smallsword; and the sabre, typically a single-edged curved sword often used by the cavalry and tracing its origins to West Asia. Modern fencing swords—foils, épées, and sabres—descend from some of these weapons, but they were developed for competing, not killing, and tend to be lighter.
While it remains a niche hobby, HEMA is attracting more fans through dedicated social media accounts, blogs, and podcasts. In 2020, a UNESCO-commissioned report estimated the number of practitioners to be at least 16,000 globally, an 85 percent increase over the previous five years. Survey responses from twenty-eight countries showed most practitioners are male, with a high proportion of adults between twenty-five and forty. Most HEMA organizations—from informal groups to for-profit schools—were created after 2010.
There is no international federation today that can claim to represent everyone, nor a standardized list of approved weapons (though, according to the survey, the longsword is the most popular). But regional umbrella bodies, tournament circuits, and rankings have emerged in recent years, a shift that’s not welcomed by all. Farley Chevrier, for one, is not a fan. “In order to have a competition, you need rules. So you’re getting further and further from a true martial art, and you’re getting into a sport,” he says.
A big part of the fun for Farley Chevrier is what he calls “social archaeology”—digging into old books to figure out how people used to fight hundreds of years ago. According to the 2020 report, efforts to study older swordplay techniques have been documented in Europe since the mid-1500s. (The earliest known depiction of a fencing match was found in Egypt, in a temple built by Ramses III around 1200 BC.) In the late nineteenth century, a new-found enthusiasm for everything medieval inspired some fencers to resurrect old fight books and put them into practice. That push ended with the world wars, and only decades later was the hobby revived.
Farley Chevrier owns about three dozen modern editions of fencing manuals that he studies to inform his teaching methods. “It’s not just looking at pictures and going, ‘Oh, that looks good, let’s try to do that,’” he says. “It’s really reading the manuals and understanding how you translate eighteenth-century writings into an actual lesson.”
That takes patience. The way he describes it, many authors (fencing masters, retired army men) seem to have just jotted down whatever came to mind. One of Farley Chevrier’s go-to books is a 1736 treatise by Pierre Jacques François Girard, a former French navy officer, which includes twelve essential tips on how to save one’s life. The book is part of seventy documents that were digitized and shared online by the French HEMA federation. On a global scale, scholars and practitioners collaborate on an online library, called Wiktenauer, that features books, manuscripts, and translations, a testament to the central role of historical documents in the practice.
In Kahnawà:ke, Di Ciccio also relies on old manuals to teach his students how to fight with the longsword, one period and one style at a time. “We’re learning the terminology, we’re learning the context, we’re learning the history, we’re learning the movement,” he says.
Recently, he’s been showing them the techniques of Fiore de’i Liberi and Philippo di Vadi, Italian masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose approach involves trying to throw adversaries off balance in close-quarter combat. That technique was handy for skirmishes, where you had to be ready for the next person coming at you.
Specializing in one style may result in messy fights when students of different masters meet up at tournaments, Di Ciccio says. But then, that is exactly what would have happened in Europe in those days, when wars brought to the battlefield enemies with different techniques and weapons that they could learn from—if they survived.
I never cared much about swords, but the first time I held one in class, it felt thrilling, empowering—until I had to fight with it, that is. Still, that first impression left me wondering: Why does a weapon that has long ceased being useful on the battlefield or the street still hold such sway?
Di Ciccio, who grew up in Italy, believes it’s the symbol. The sword conjures the hero figure in children’s stories, values of bravery and honour that are steeped in knighthood, he says. In an era of fast consumption, it’s reassuring to connect with something that’s timeless. “It makes you feel like something you’re doing is not going to go to waste in time and just be replaced by something new,” he says. “That value stays, it’s part of the cultural heritage.”
Duels once served a practical purpose: in the sixth century, they started being recognized in Europe as a judicial proceeding, known as trial by combat, to settle disputes, retired Olympic fencer Richard Cohen writes in his book By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions. The outcome was in the hands of God: winning a duel, even by proxy, was proof of integrity. While judicial duels were abandoned or abolished, duels continued among knights as a way to resolve grievances. Eventually, they gave way to a frenzy of private, and illegal, honour duels that swept through Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The chivalric ideal (or myth, critics would say), promoted in medieval literature, fuelled the popularity of honour duels in European culture. Chivalry was a code of conduct that emerged between the late eleventh and the twelfth century to rein in knights, the horse-bound, armoured warriors who fought for noblemen. Pledges such as loyalty, courtesy, or protecting the weak came to define how the warrior elite should behave but also had a broader influence on society.
In France, noblemen jumped at the opportunity to defend their honour, however benign the offence, as a way to distinguish themselves as a class and display their ancestral values, says Julien Perrier-Chartrand, a French studies professor at Concordia University. After the late-eighteenth-century French Revolution decimated the monarchy and diminished aristocrats’ clout, intellectuals and politicians took up the mantle.
Over time, duelling became more codified. The practice divided writers and philosophers from England to Russia, who passionately wrote about either its merits or its silliness. Though pistols became the more common weapon of choice, the allure of the swordfight endured in literature, especially in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism and the invention of cheap paper ushered in the era of historical novels—action-packed books full of musketeers, crusaders, and outlaws, Cohen writes.
The movie industry joined right in. From the first swashbucklers of the 1910s to Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, onscreen duels never get old. They might not be authentic, but they are fun to watch. US Olympic fencers credit movies such as the Star Wars franchise and The Princess Bride for attracting them to the sport. Di Ciccio has a fondness for The Legend of Zorro.
Realistic fights usually make for bad entertainment, but there are exceptions. A favourite among historical fencers is The Duellists, a 1977 movie by Ridley Scott where fighting takes centre stage. Two rival Napoleonic officers feud for years. There is a rawness to their duels—agonizing waits that make the scenes uncomfortable to watch. And that’s the point.
“That’s how it should be done,” says Farley Chevrier. “There’s no stage flair. It’s dirty. And they’re not rushing. You see they’re scared.”
The fighting spirit is something Iokennoron McComber is aiming to reignite in Kahnawà:ke. Ardimento (which means “boldness” in Italian), the school founded by DiCiccio that McComber helped bring to the community, offers longsword and broadsword programs; one day, McComber hopes to add Mohawk weapons, such as the tomahawk, to the curriculum.
As the Mohawk community reconnects with its language, songs, and other traditions that colonial influences suppressed, McComber wants to remind his people they are warriors too, who helped defend against invading American forces in the War of 1812. “We’ve adapted. I live in a house with all the modern amenities like anybody else,” he says. “But my spirit and the spirit of my people is not crushed. So I just want to bring it back.”
McComber’s attraction to swords goes back to childhood, when he watched He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and he and his friends would try to forge their own swords from fence posts. It was decades later, in 2021, that he attended Di Ciccio’s outdoor fencing classes in a nearby town. He and another Kahnawà:ke resident liked them so much they bought longswords after the second session. When the weather turned cold, they invited Di Ciccio to teach in a gymnasium in their community. Now, more than half of the dozen or so of the school’s regulars (including McComber himself) take part in competitions.
McComber, who is forty-five, worries younger generations may have grown too soft from having everything—food, ad-free entertainment—at their fingertips. Fencing, he’s observed, can restore a sense of pride. “There’s a lot of change in some of the personalities,” he says. “We had one student come in who was very shy, couldn’t make eye contact. Now he holds his head high, and he has a swagger when he walks.”
A few weeks after that first workshop and before we choreographed our fights, my acting troupe worked on honing our reflexes, occasionally practising with regulars at the school. One evening, I found myself at a loss, almost frozen, as a much bigger opponent moved decidedly in my direction, his sword pointed at me.
No matter that the danger wasn’t real. I called off the fight, shaken and upset. I was angry too. As a woman, I’ll spend my whole life looking over my shoulder when walking alone at night. There is something empowering facing off an attacker, even if only at swordfighting practice. But I wasn’t there yet.
The Three Musketeers opened on March 27 last year. By then, I, too, had a swagger as I strode onstage holding my rapier, swinging it toward D’Artagnan’s head, or fencing off Athos while backing down a set of stairs. Even though I was acting, it mattered to me that the fighting looked real, that the audience got a feel of what duels are about: a brutal landing in the here and now, looking another human in the eye and summoning survival instincts you didn’t know you had.