Thinking about duels and violent gentlemen

My archival research this summer has (at last) begun to develop some sense of direction, and one of the themes is masquerading under the working title of ‘Gentlemen Behaving Badly’. And I may well be writing a lot more about this, because it encompasses a lot of tasty topics: masculinity, ‘class’ or social rank, politics, litigation, violence, rioting, drinking… [Indeed, it looks like this is going to turn into a proper little series of posts: see here and here, and this earlier post as well. Not to mention this, too. Exciting eh?]

(I suspect that I shall not, however, be taking my cue from this book.)

And right now it has me thinking about the subject of the duel, on which there’s been a good deal of research since the late 1980s (perhaps especially in the mid-90s). I realised that I have quite a bit of catching up to do, in fact. So what follows here is very provisional. I’m just thinking my way around it, but I have some issues about the ways in which ‘the duel’ seems to be discussed in the work that I’ve read so far. Key problems: the research seems to me to tend to decontextualise the practice and not really think much about the relationship between theory and practice.

Often, duelling and the concern with ‘honour’ that gives rise to duels is seen as something very specifically related to social and political elites. (Ute Frevert: duelling is “a phenomenon that sheds light on how Central European societies dealt with male violence and how and why they accepted it as long as it was practiced by the social elites according to certain rules”, in Spierenburg, ed, Men of Violence.){1} But although it has some distinctive features, just as honour for upper-class males contained particular elements, my argument would be that duelling was just one aspect of a broader context of confrontational masculine violence that was all about defending manhood, status, authority, reputation, maintaining ‘face’ and personal honour. (And was, as such, semi-tolerated by communities and authorities alike.)

It should be said that much of the work on duelling predates important recent publications on early modern masculinities and violence, such as the books by Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker and even the 1990s articles on violence of Susan Amussen. Even 1998 (the date of the Men and Violence book noted) is a long time ago in the historiography of early modern masculinity… So at the very least there seems to be a need to review duelling in the light of this research; Robert Shoemaker has done some good work for the eighteenth century (note especially an important argument about the taming of the duel which is placed in a broader context of changing attitudes to violence), but I haven’t yet found anything similar for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (let alone a more long-term analysis).

Then, a good deal of published research on duelling – including the latest article and book by Markku Peltonen – is cultural (or intellectual) history, and it’s fair enough that it would focus on ideas and debates about duelling and honour. This is important. But the question of how duelling in practice related to what was written about it – in polemics, royal proclamations, in a ‘code duello‘ such as the famous late 18th-century one from Clonmel Assizes, etc – is less often addressed.

Even when you have a social history, such as James Kelly’s book on duelling in Ireland, it seems to start with the theory and tries to fit what men did into it and judge according to how it did or didn’t match up. No, rephrase that: it might be better to say that this work tries to fit responses and attitudes to ‘actual’ duelling – including what happened when duellists were put on trial – into that theory. (Shoemaker is, again, an exception, I think.) In particular, it seems to me that there is a tendency to regard the highly ritualised and formalised duel with pistols that became common in the eighteenth century as the archetypal duel. But sword duelling was around for two centuries before pistol duelling became the more usual method, and sword duels could be very different, much less disciplined affairs.{2} Does that mean they weren’t ‘real’ duels? Contemporaries wouldn’t have agreed with that, I suspect.

So, what I’m thinking of doing is to explore interpersonal violence (not always fatal) involving men described as gentlemen (or of higher status). Examining duels will be one aspect of that. There are a few court cases that might be interpreted as duels, and I need to pull together some other records. (If I can decipher it – the handwriting is awful – there is a late-16th-century personal account by John Salusbury of his duel with a rival. A first scan didn’t look as exciting as it might sound.) But there are also plenty of fights that probably aren’t duels (even when they use swords), as well as cases of gentlemen using violence to chastise social inferiors. (And I’d want to at least mention the plebeian fights that resemble duels between non-gentlemen, for comparison.)

Among other things, I think I can suggest that during the 17th century these gentry did start to become more ‘civilised’. But not by that much. At the end of the century, ‘gentleman’ still referred essentially to social rank and not to character. Does anyone know, by the way, of any good studies of the development and changing meaning of the concept ‘gentleman’?{3}

Notes

1. Other examples: VG Kiernan, The duel in European history: honour and the reign of the aristocracy (1988). (I haven’t yet read Frevert’s book on duelling.) Spierenburg’s own chapter in Men and violence, on knife fighting in early modern Amsterdam, is interesting but a bit peculiar; it presents the idea of ‘popular duels’, but only considers knife fights. This looks to me to be a slightly simplistic demarcation based purely on the weapon being used (i.e., knife = plebeian version of sword ?), because I can’t see anything particularly distinctive about the contexts or dynamics of the fights themselves. Hmm.

2. Interesting reading, related to this point: Jeremy Horder, ‘The duel and the English law of homicide’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 12 (1992).

3. I should probably re-read some of Anna Bryson’s work on courtesy and civility, come to think of it. Must dig out this one: ‘The rhetoric of status: gesture, demeanour and the image of the gentleman in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’, in L Gent and N Llewellyn, Renaissance bodies: the human figure in English culture, c.1540-1660 (London, 1990)

Online samples of referenced books

Shepard, Meanings of manhood

Walker, Crime, gender and social order

Peltonen, Duel in early modern England: Google Print; publisher’s sample chapter.

Kelly, ‘That damn’d thing called honour’: Google Print)

Next stuff to read

Jeremy Horder, Provocation and responsibility (legal-historical studies)
Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (anthropology)

Maybe this: Roger Manning, Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms (also viewable at Google Print)