It was a Catholic priest – Dom Philip Jebb, the ‘fighting monk’ and later headmaster of Downside School – who introduced Richard Cohen (alongside, as it happens, your reviewer) to fencing in the 1960s – just one of the many ironies which this new and full history of the ancient art and modern sport of swordplay delights in.
There can be few activities as old or varied as the disciplined exchange of two foes bearing sticks of steel trying to hit or kill each other. Depending on your era or intentions, fencing is an act of war, a mediaeval spectacle, a judicial device to establish guilt or innocence, a defence of honour, the murdering of your enemy and, of course, a way to woo women (those sexy German sabre scars). For some writers, swordplay is the perfect simile for life. For the German Goebbels it was ‘the only instrument with which one can conduct foreign policy’. The more philosophically minded Orientals see fencing as the instrument of self-perfection.
The sword itself oscillated between being a soldier’s weapon, the staff of the brigand, a gentleman’s fashion accessory and, in the words of the Japanese writer, Eiji Yoshikawa, ‘an answer to life’s questions’. It finally settled (oriental martial arts weaponry excepted) on being a flexible piece of electrified steel, the ‘equipment’ of a modern Olympic sport whose antiquity is equalled only by field athletics: we are reminded that the oldest depiction of a fencing match is an Egyptian relief dating from around 1190 BC.
Richard Cohen, who fenced for Britain in the Olympic Games, has produced not just a history of swordplay but a vivid account of its development over three millennia, full of fact and anecdote interspersed with a regular flow of personal reminiscences, some more relevant to his story than others.
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