Old Sword-Play by Alfred Hutton

Review by Steven Reich

Paperback: 112 pages Publisher: Dover Publications (January 4, 2002) ISBN: 0486419517 List Price: $9.95

In 1892, Alfred Hutton published a book that was the result of his fascination and investigation of old styles of swordsmanship. He amassed a collection of historic manuals, and this book is a set of drills and exercises distilled from some of those manuals. Given the current revival of interest in the sword arts of Europe, it is interesting to see that we are repeating something that happened in Victorian England.

Hutton’s book is not particularly long, only 93 pages of text and plates. The plates are reproductions from existing historic manuals, almost entirely from the works of Marozzo, Alfieri, Liancour and Angelo, a handful from De la Touche and Weischner. However, he only reproduced a subset of the plates from each master-enough to get a fair sampling of techniques, but not enough to fully illustrate any of the systems (although there are nearly all of the plates of Marozzo’s guards for sword and buckler). With the general availability of scanned or copied versions of period texts, this book is merely a small teaser to what is currently available for students of historic fencing. However, it is likely that many of his Victorian audience would be seeing these prints for the first time.

The text generally consists of sections by weapon, each with a very short summary of the weapon, followed by a set of drills for it. Hutton gives a reasonable sampling of weapons from the mid-16th century to the 18th century including Two-Handed Sword, Sword and Buckler, Rapier and Dagger, Rapier and Cloak, Case of Rapiers, Dagger and Cloak, and Smallsword. The major flaw to these drills is the fact that everything was presented from the point of view of his contemporary swordsmanship: all techniques are described using classical French terminology. As such, his descriptions of the actions in the drills read almost as if they were modern fencing actions. Hutton also does not discuss some of the underlying principles of the systems (for example, there is not discussion of the stesso-tempo parry-counter in any of the rapier sections). However, he seems to eliminate some of this purposefully as he hints that he is only attempting an incomplete revival of these lost arts.

Overall, Hutton’s book is interesting from an historical standpoint, and the plates are of high enough quality that they alone are worth the low cost of the book (although a little searching online will produce a free digitized version). While Hutton’s interpretations are not particularly accurate, I don’t view this as a how-to book or a technical fencing resource. Forgiving his Victorian point of view (i.e. that the development of fencing was a linear progression towards perfection), I instead enjoy it at as a piece of fencing history from a kindred spirit who lived over a century ago.