Europe’s Oldest Treatise on Swordfighting

 I’m delighted to report that the new edition of my transcription and translation of Royal Armouries Manuscript I.33 has just become available. Sometimes known as the “Walpurgis Fechtbuch,” I.33 is the oldest known book on swordfighting, having been written in Germany in the early 1300s. I started transcribing and translating the crabbed Latin of this manuscript in the early 1990s, when it was still kept at the Tower of London, and it was this work that first put me on a professional career path in the world of arms and armor. I first published I.33 with the Armouries in 2003, but there’s been a lot of research on this manuscript since then, so the new edition incorporates all the latest findings.

I.33 uses words and illustrations to describe a system of swordplay using a buckler—a small round shield that was used in unarmored swordfighting. Surprisingly, the figures who demonstrate the techniques are a “priest” and a “student.” This suggests that the manuscript may have been produced by staff at a cathedral school, the forerunner of the medieval university. We do know that medieval university students liked to engage in swordfighting, a tradition that survives even today in some German universities. Even more surprisingly, at the end of the manuscript the student is replaced by a woman named Walpurgis. Her presence remains a mystery, a reminder of how much we have yet to learn about the culture of arms in medieval Europe.

—Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Curator of Arms & Armor and Medieval Art

https://shop.royalarmouries.org/books-and-dvds/royal-armouries-publications-en/the-medieval-art-of-swordsmanship-royal-armouries-ms-i.33.html