The Rapier

Fleuret: French, a little flower or bud, after the button on the point of a practice sword; in English, the foil. London, autumn 1595: a young law student walks to an Italian fencing school in Blackfriars, and we follow the sword of the robe from Spain to Bologna, Rome, Madrid and Paris... Inside: officers at the city gate breaking off over-long rapiers, guards numbered one to four, the lunge, measure and time, an Englishman's challenge on a scaffold, the seven degrees of the lie, a geometry circle painted on a fencing floor, a duel in the most fashionable square in Paris, the real d'Artagnan, and an opera singer who beat three noblemen in a garden. Vincentio Saviolo and George Silver will be there too. Chapters: The sword of the robe · The hilt · The blade · A yard and half a quarter · The Italians · The lunge · The school at Blackfriars · Measure and time · The Englishman who disagreed · On the stage · The blade makers · Spain · The duels · The musketeers · The smallsword · The singer · Evening · The point. Sources: Marozzo (1536), Agrippa (1553), Carranza (1582), Saviolo (1595), Silver (1599), Fabris (1606), Capo Ferro (1610), Shakespeare, Cervantes, Richelieu's edict (1626). Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

The rapier was never meant for a battlefield.

It was made for a city street, for a gentleman's belt, and for a quarrel that would not wait. It was long, slender, beautiful, and deadly, and for about a hundred and fifty years, it was the most fashionable object a man could wear.

It also changed the way people fought with swords more than anything since the bronze age. Because the rapier taught Europe to fight with the point.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode six... the rapier.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is the year fifteen ninety-five, an autumn afternoon, in London.

You are twenty, the second son of a family of country gentlemen, and you have come to London to study law at one of the Inns of Court, near the river. That is what your father thinks you are doing. And you are, some of the time.

But today, after a morning of dusty lectures on land law, you are walking east along Fleet Street, through the crowds and the mud, past the shops and the taverns and the bookstalls, toward a district called Blackfriars. There is an Italian there, who teaches the art of the rapier to young gentlemen. And every young gentleman in London, it seems, wants to learn it.

Before you get there, let us go back a little, to where this sword came from.

Chapter one. The sword of the robe.

At the end of the fourteen hundreds, in Spain, people began to speak of a new kind of sword. They called it the espada ropera... the sword of the robe, or of the clothes. It was not a sword for war, worn with armour. It was a sword to wear with ordinary dress, every day, in the town.

That was something new. For most of the Middle Ages, in most places, ordinary men did not walk about the streets with swords. Knights wore them. Soldiers wore them. But in the fifteen hundreds, more and more men who were neither... merchants, courtiers, students, gentlemen of every kind... began to wear a sword at the hip as part of their clothes, as a mark of their rank, and for their own defence.

What kind of sword do you want, if you wear no armour, and carry no shield, and might have to defend yourself suddenly, against one man, in a narrow street, at night?

You want reach. A long blade, so that you can keep an attacker away from you. You want a sharp point, because the point reaches further and faster than any cut. You want the blade light enough to move quickly, but stiff enough to thrust. And above all, since you have no shield and no gauntlet, you want something to protect your hand.

That is exactly what the rapier became.

Chapter two. The hilt.

The first thing anyone notices about a rapier is the hilt.

On a medieval sword, the hilt is a simple cross. On a rapier, it is a cage. From the crossguard, curving bars of steel sweep up and around the hand, one after another, joining and branching, linked by rings, making a kind of basket of loops around the fingers. Collectors call it the swept hilt.

At first, it grew out of a habit. Fencers learned that if they hooked a finger over the crossguard, in front of it, they could control the point far better. But then the finger was exposed. So smiths added a ring to protect it. Then another ring on the other side. Then a bar to protect the knuckles. Then more bars, more rings... until the whole hand was enclosed in a cage of steel.

And then the cage became an art.

The finest rapier hilts are among the most beautiful metalwork of their time. The steel is chiselled, pierced, gilded, inlaid with silver, blued, engraved with tiny figures, leaves, masks, and battles. A rich man's rapier hilt might be made to match his dagger, his spurs, the buckles of his belt, and the clasps of his cloak, all in the same pattern, by the same goldsmith.

In Germany and the north, in the early sixteen hundreds, another kind of hilt appeared, with two broad shells of steel, pierced with little holes like lace, closing the cage on either side of the blade. It is often named after a famous cavalry general of the Thirty Years' War, Count Pappenheim, though nobody is sure he had anything to do with it. Collectors simply needed a name, and his was handy.

Later, in Spain and Italy, in the sixteen hundreds, the cage of bars gave way to a deep round cup of steel, like a small bowl, around the hand, with long straight crossbars on either side. The cup-hilt rapier is the sword of the paintings of Velázquez, and of every swashbuckling film ever made about a Spanish swordsman.

Chapter three. The blade.

The rapier's blade is long. Often more than a metre on its own... longer than the whole of a Viking sword. It is narrow, stiff, and tapers to a sharp point. Most early rapiers could still cut, a little. Later ones were made almost entirely to thrust.

Look along the blade from the point, and you see its shape in section. Some are flat, with a shallow groove. Many are diamond-shaped, with a ridge down each side, for stiffness. Some are hexagonal. Near the hilt, there is often a short section that is not sharpened at all, thick and square, where the finger can rest over the guard. It is called the ricasso. Along it, the smith usually stamped his mark, or his town, or a name, or a motto... sometimes in Latin, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes, one suspects, in a language that the smith did not speak.

And a rapier is not light. That surprises people, who imagine something like a modern fencing foil, flicking about like a whip. A real rapier usually weighs about the same as a medieval sword, one kilogram or a little more. But its weight sits close to the hand, in that heavy hilt, so that the long blade feels balanced and quick at the point.

In the street, a gentleman often carried a dagger too, on his right hip, behind him, to be drawn with the left hand. The parrying dagger. With it, he could push aside the other man's blade, while his rapier went in.

Or, if he had no dagger, he used his cloak. The fencing books show it clearly... the cloak wrapped twice around the left arm, its loose end hanging, used to catch, to beat aside, or to throw over the other man's sword, or over his head. Some masters taught it as a whole art in itself.

Chapter four. A yard and half a quarter.

On your way along Fleet Street, you pass the gate of the city, at Ludgate. And there, as there sometimes is, an officer stands with a staff, looking at the swords at people's hips.

The rapiers of London have been getting longer and longer. Young men compete to wear the longest, the way they compete over the size of their ruffs. And the Queen's government does not like it. Too long a sword is a danger in a crowd, and a sign of showing off.

So the government has issued proclamations, again and again, that no man shall wear a rapier with a blade longer than a yard and half a quarter... a little more than a metre. And at the gates of the city, officers have been told to measure. If a gentleman's blade is longer than the law allows, they may break it off, there and then, at the proper length, and hand it back to him.

It is said that some young men, knowing this, simply avoid the gates. Your own rapier, which your father bought you in a hurry, is quite short enough, and you walk past the officer without a glance. You are a little disappointed.

Chapter five. The Italians.

You turn down a narrow lane, toward the river. The fencing school is in an old building that was once part of a monastery, before the monasteries of England were closed. Now it is rented out in pieces, as halls, workshops and lodgings.

Why an Italian?

Because, in the fifteen hundreds, Italy was where the new art of the sword was being worked out.

In Bologna, in the year fifteen thirty-six, a master named Achille Marozzo printed a large book of fencing... with the sword alone, sword and dagger, sword and buckler, sword and cloak, and the two-handed sword. His sword was still a cutting and thrusting sword, which modern scholars call a side-sword, the ancestor of the rapier.

Then, in Rome, in fifteen fifty-three, a man named Camillo Agrippa printed a very different kind of book.

Agrippa was not a fencing master by trade. He was an engineer, a mathematician and an architect, who also wrote about how to move a great Egyptian obelisk across Rome. And he looked at fencing the way an engineer would. He used geometry. He drew men with lines and circles around them, measuring angles and distances.

He simplified the guards to four, and gave them numbers: first, second, third and fourth... prima, seconda, terza, quarta. Each one a position of the hand, turned a little more than the last. Fencers still use those numbers, today, in every fencing hall in the world.

And he argued that the thrust was better than the cut. Shorter. Faster. Harder to see. The shortest way between two points, he argued in effect, is a straight line, and the point travels along it.

Others followed. In the early sixteen hundreds, an Italian master named Salvator Fabris, who had travelled across Europe, wrote a great book of the rapier at the court of the King of Denmark. And in Siena, in sixteen ten, a master named Ridolfo Capo Ferro published a beautiful book with engraved plates of fencers, lean and graceful, in tight clothes, whose lines are still studied by fencers today.

Capo Ferro's book shows, more clearly than any before it, a movement that would change fencing for ever.

Chapter six. The lunge.

The fencer stands sideways to his opponent, his right foot forward, his sword arm extended, his point toward the other man's face. Then, suddenly, without warning, he throws his right foot far forward, bends his right knee deeply, straightens his left leg behind him, and his whole body flies forward along the line of the sword. The point travels much further, much faster, than the other man thought possible.

That is the lunge.

It is a simple idea, but it changes everything. It gives the rapier a reach that seems almost unfair. A good lunge covers the distance between two men in a fraction of a second, and the fencer can return to his guard just as quickly. Every fencer today, in every fencing hall, learns it in the first week.

You will learn it too, this afternoon. And it will hurt. The muscles at the top of the left leg, which you have never noticed before, will remind you of the lunge every time you climb the stairs to your lodgings for a week.

Chapter seven. The school at Blackfriars.

The hall is long, with a high timber ceiling, and windows along one side looking down toward the river. The floor is bare boards. On the walls hang rapiers, daggers and practice weapons in racks, and a painted board with the names of the gentlemen who have studied here.

The master is an Italian named Vincentio Saviolo. He is elegant, patient, softly spoken, and very good. He came to London some years ago, and he has taught many young gentlemen... some of them very great ones. And this very year, he has published a book in English, called, rather simply, His Practise, in Two Books... the first treating of the use of the rapier and dagger, the second of honour and honourable quarrels.

He teaches slowly. You stand in a guard, the rapier held out before you, the dagger held back. He stands opposite, and moves his point a little, and watches what you do. He shows you how to find the other man's blade, how to close the line, so that his point can never reach you without first passing yours. He shows you how a small turn of the wrist, from one numbered guard to the next, can carry his sword aside.

He does not shout. He corrects with one word, or a touch on the elbow. And now and then, very rarely, he smiles.

Chapter eight. Measure and time.

After the lunge, Signor Saviolo teaches you two words. The Italians use them all the time, and they are the heart of the art. Misura, and tempo. Measure, and time.

Measure is distance. At every moment, there is a distance between you and your opponent, and that distance decides everything. Too far, and neither of you can reach the other. Close enough that one lunge will reach, and you are both in danger. So the art is to stand just outside his reach... and then, in one step, to be just inside it, when he is not ready.

Time is the moment. Every movement takes time. When your opponent moves... lifts his blade, shifts his foot, draws a breath to attack... there is an instant when he cannot do anything else. That instant is a tempo. If you move in it, he cannot stop you.

You practise this for the rest of the hour. Saviolo stands just out of measure, and moves his blade slowly. You must step in exactly as he moves, not before, not after. You are always late. He smiles, and says, again. You are late again. And then, just once, toward the end, you are not.

He nods. One word. Bene.

Chapter nine. The Englishman who disagreed.

Not everyone in London approves of the Italians.

There is a gentleman named George Silver, who will publish a book in a few years' time, called Paradoxes of Defence. It will be, from beginning to end, a furious attack on the rapier, and on the Italian masters who teach it.

The rapier, Silver says, is too long to be drawn quickly, too thin to defend with, and too slow to recover after a thrust. A good English short sword, used with the old English skill of cut and thrust, will beat it, he says, every time. The Italians, he says, teach young Englishmen to fight like fools and to die young. He is not shy.

And Silver tells a story about it. He says that he and his brother once challenged the Italian masters of London to a public trial of skill, on a scaffold, with every weapon they could name. The challenge was printed on posters around the city. The day came, the crowd gathered, the Silvers waited on the scaffold... and the Italians did not come.

The Italians, if they had written a book about it, might have told the story differently. They did not. So Silver's version is the one we have.

Historians who have studied both men's books mostly agree on one thing. They were both very good. They simply believed in different swords.

Chapter ten. On the stage.

Across the river, and north of the city wall, there are playhouses. And this year, one of them is showing a new tragedy, about two young people in Verona, from two families that hate each other.

It has a great deal of fencing in it.

In one scene, a young man named Mercutio makes fun of his enemy, Tybalt, the best swordsman in the play. He calls him the prince of cats, and mocks the way he fights... by the book, by the numbers, with all the new Italian words: the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hay. The audience laughs, because they know those words. Many of them have heard them in fencing schools like yours.

And then, of course, they fight. And Mercutio is killed, under his friend's arm, and dies with a joke.

The man who wrote it knew the fencing schools of London very well. And so did his audience.

Some years later, the same playwright will write another play, about a prince of Denmark, which ends with a fencing match. A friendly match, with blunt swords... except that one of the swords is sharp, and its point is poisoned. Rapier and dagger. In front of the whole court. It is one of the most famous fencing scenes ever written, and stage fighters have been arguing about how to perform it ever since.

Saviolo's own book, the second part of it, is about honour... about when a quarrel is worth fighting, and when it is not, and above all about the lie. In the language of the duel, to give a man the lie... to say, you lie... was the gravest insult of all, the one that made a fight unavoidable. So the books of honour spent many pages on the different kinds of lie, and which of them required a duel.

A few years later, the playwright will make fun of exactly this, in a comedy. A clown explains, very seriously, the seven degrees of the lie: the Retort Courteous, the Quip Modest, the Reply Churlish, the Reproof Valiant, the Countercheck Quarrelsome, the Lie with Circumstance, and the Lie Direct. All of these, he says, you may avoid, except the Lie Direct... and you may avoid that too, with an if.

Your if, he says, is the only peacemaker. Much virtue in if.

Chapter eleven. The blade makers.

Where did a rapier blade come from?

The best blades of the time came from two places above all. Toledo, in Spain, whose smiths stamped their blades with the marks of their workshops and were famous across Europe. And Solingen, in Germany, which made blades in enormous numbers for every country that would buy them... and sometimes stamped them with Spanish-sounding names, because Spanish blades sold better.

There is one name that appears on more old sword blades than almost any other: Andrea Ferara, or Ferrara. It is found on Scottish broadswords, English swords, German swords, in countless spellings, over two centuries. Was there ever a real smith called Andrea Ferrara? Perhaps. There are stories of a smith of that name in northern Italy. But most of those blades were certainly not made by him. Like Ulfberht, long before, the name had simply become a promise... and promises are easy to stamp.

Chapter twelve. Spain.

Meanwhile, in Spain, the art of the rapier had gone in another direction entirely.

In fifteen eighty-two, a Spanish nobleman named Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza published a book that founded what the Spaniards called the true skill... la verdadera destreza. It was not like the Italian books at all. It was a work of philosophy, mathematics and geometry, full of references to the ancient writers, about the nature of movement, angles and proportion.

The Spanish fencer did not lunge. He stood upright, the arm held straight, the rapier pointing at the opponent's face, and moved around him in measured steps... along the lines and around the circumference of an imaginary circle drawn on the floor between them. The circle's size was set by the length of the arm and the sword. Its chords and diameters were the paths of the feet.

Some Spanish schools painted the circle on the floor of the hall. Students walked its lines like a dance. Foreigners who saw it thought it ridiculous. Then they fenced against a master of it, and stopped laughing.

The Spaniards were famous for being formidable, calm, and almost impossible to hit. One of Carranza's followers, Luis Pacheco de Narváez, wrote many more books on the destreza, and became the fencing master of the King of Spain. He also, it is said, fought a famous quarrel with a writer of plays and poems named Francisco de Quevedo... who knocked off his hat with a touch of the sword, and then wrote mocking verses about him for the rest of his life.

In Spain, too, the destreza found its way into literature. In the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes tells of a quarrel on the road between a young graduate, who has studied the new fencing, and a strong, burly farmer, who thinks it is all nonsense. They fight with blunted swords. The farmer rushes at the graduate like an angry bull. The graduate, standing upright and calm, touches him again and again, and cuts away the little tassels of his coat with the point, one by one... until the farmer, exhausted and covered in dust, throws his sword away, and admits that skill has beaten strength.

Cervantes was a soldier himself, and had been wounded at sea. He seems to have known exactly what he was describing.

Chapter thirteen. The duels.

There is a darker side to all this, and every fencing master of the time knew it.

The rapier was a weapon of honour. And honour, in the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, could be very touchy indeed. An insult, a look, a word about a lady, an argument over who should go first through a doorway, could end in a challenge. And a challenge ended, at dawn, in a quiet field, with two men in their shirts, a rapier each, and seconds watching.

In France, especially, it became an epidemic. Under the French kings of the late fifteen hundreds and early sixteen hundreds, many hundreds of noblemen died in duels... some writers of the time said thousands, and though they probably exaggerated, not by as much as one would hope. The seconds, who were only supposed to watch, began to fight too, so that a quarrel between two men could kill six.

The kings tried to stop it. They made edicts. They threatened. They forgave. Nothing worked.

Then, in sixteen twenty-six, the king's great minister, Cardinal Richelieu, published a new edict against duelling, and meant it. The next year, a famous young nobleman, the Count of Montmorency-Bouteville, who had already fought more than twenty duels, fought another one, deliberately, in broad daylight, in the most fashionable square in Paris... to show that he did not care.

He was arrested. He was tried. And in spite of his great family, and the pleas of half the court, he was beheaded.

Duelling did not stop. But after that, in France, a nobleman thought harder before he drew.

Chapter fourteen. The musketeers.

In Paris, in the sixteen twenties, the king of France formed a new company for his guard: the Musketeers of the King. Young gentlemen, many of them younger sons from the poorer provinces of the south, mounted, wearing blue cloaks with a silver cross, carrying muskets... and, of course, rapiers.

One of them was a real Gascon named Charles de Batz de Castelmore, who called himself d'Artagnan. He came to Paris as a young man, served the king for thirty years, became captain of the musketeers in all but name, carried out the arrest of the king's own finance minister, and was killed by a musket ball at the siege of Maastricht, in sixteen seventy-three.

A generation after his death, a writer published a book of his memoirs, which d'Artagnan never wrote. It was half invented. And a century and a half after that, a French novelist named Alexandre Dumas found that book in a library, borrowed the name and a few of the adventures, invented three friends, Athos, Porthos and Aramis... whose names he took from real musketeers... and wrote The Three Musketeers.

The novel is full of duels, almost all of them against the Cardinal's guards, in defiance of the Cardinal's edict. The real musketeers did fight duels. But they spent rather more of their time on guard duty, in barracks, and at sieges, carrying their very heavy muskets.

Chapter fifteen. The smallsword.

By the late sixteen hundreds, the rapier was changing again, getting shorter and lighter.

The long, heavy street rapier gave way to the smallsword... a slim, short, elegant sword, with a light triangular blade, stiff and sharp-pointed, made only for thrusting, and a small, delicate hilt with a little shell-shaped guard. It weighed perhaps half a kilogram. It was worn with silk coats and powdered wigs and buckled shoes, through the seventeen hundreds, by every gentleman of fashion in Europe.

It was a jewel, as much as a weapon. Its hilts were made of silver, of gilt bronze, of cut steel that sparkled like diamonds, sometimes of porcelain. Gentlemen owned several, to match their clothes.

With the smallsword came the French school of fencing, and with it, a training weapon with a little button on the tip, so that a thrust would not wound. The French called it a fleuret... a little flower, or a bud... because the button on its point looked like a flower bud. In English, that word became foil.

From the foil, from the smallsword, from the rapier, and, distantly, from Agrippa's four numbered guards, comes modern sport fencing... with its lunge, its numbered guards, its right of way, and its electric lights.

Chapter sixteen. The singer.

In the age of the smallsword, there is one duellist who deserves a story of her own.

Her name was Julie d'Aubigny. She was born in France around the year sixteen seventy, the daughter of a man who trained the pages of the king's household, and he taught her to fence along with the boys. Later, after a wild youth, she became a singer... a contralto, at the Paris Opéra, where she sang leading roles under the stage name of Mademoiselle Maupin.

The stories about her are extraordinary, and some of them are surely exaggerated. She is said to have earned her living, for a while, by giving fencing displays in taverns. She is said to have dressed in men's clothes when she pleased, and to have fought several duels. And the most famous story of all says that at a ball in Paris, she kissed a young lady in front of everyone, and was challenged by three noblemen at once... and that she went out into the garden with them, one after another, and defeated all three.

Duelling was a crime that could cost a man his head. She is said to have been pardoned by the king himself, more than once, perhaps because the opera could not do without her.

How much of it is true, historians argue. But she was a real singer, at the real Opéra, with a real sword, and people were telling stories about her while she was still alive.

Chapter seventeen. Evening.

The lesson is over. Your shirt is damp, your arm aches, and your left leg is shaking slightly from the lunges. Signor Saviolo bows, and you bow back, and pay him, and put on your doublet and your cloak and your sword, and go out.

The light is going. The river is grey and gold. The boatmen are calling for passengers at the stairs below Blackfriars. You decide to walk instead.

Fleet Street is quieter now. The shops are closing their shutters. Somewhere a bell rings for evensong. Lanterns are being lit in the doorways, and a watchman with a lantern and a staff walks past, looking at everyone's faces.

At your hip, the rapier swings against your leg as you walk, in its long scabbard, the hilt shining dully under your cloak. You keep your left hand on it, the way gentlemen do, to stop it knocking against people in the crowd... and, a little, because you like the feel of it.

Near the Temple, a group of young men from your Inn comes out of a tavern, laughing, and one of them calls your name. They want to know where you have been. You tell them. One of them, who has studied with a different master, the Englishman's sort, immediately stands in the street with his walking stick and shows you why your Italian is wrong. Another stands opposite him with his own stick and shows him why he is wrong. Passers-by step around them. A dog barks. Eventually, someone suggests supper, and the argument moves indoors, where it will continue, cheerfully, until late.

You do not go. You are tired, and your leg hurts. You walk on toward your lodgings, alone, along the dark street.

You have no intention of ever using it. Almost nobody who wears one does. But you are glad, walking home through London at dusk, that you know how.

Chapter eighteen. The point.

From the espada ropera of Spain, to the side-swords of Bologna, to Agrippa's geometry, to the lunge, to the Spanish circle, to the duels at dawn, to the smallsword at the ball, and the foil in the fencing hall... the whole story of the rapier is the story of one idea: that the point is faster than the edge.

It was a weapon for one man against one man, without armour, at the length of an arm and a blade. It was beautiful, dangerous, and it lasted as long as the age that made it.

The rapier was never meant for a battlefield.

Its own name in English came, like so many fashions of that time, from France... from rapière, which seems to have begun as a scornful word for a long, foreign, showy blade. The people who wore it did not mind. They took the word, and kept it.

Rapier. The sword of the robe... and of the quarrel that would not wait.

Also from the late hours: Embers of History · Slow Orbit · Myth and Score