Locke / The origins of duelling

My last entry had a very cross tone to it, which can attributed in equal parts to stress and Dryden himself. I wasn't making very good progress with anything he had written so I switched to reading John Locke. I am reading his Essay concerning Human Understanding and it is still challenging yet more enjoyable than Dryden. It's only partly a thesis-related text: it isn't directly related to my subject but his discussion of personal identity may yield some material that can be of use. At the very least, it will provide some perspective on the sort of things that people in the late seventeenth century were thinking about. I haven't read very far into the Essay yet; the abridged version is over four hundred pages long and I started right from the beginning by reading the OWC introduction by Pauline Phemister. I shall report anything of relevance to my research when I come to it.

I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.


If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.

We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.

My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!