While most of our blog has been about Fiore dei Liberi and the Italian longsword tradition, the larger HEMA world contains many other treasures. At HEMA Penzance several of our members (George and Andy in particular) have a long-standing love of a much older manuscript, one that predates Fiore by nearly a century and takes us deep into the 13th-century origins of European fencing scholarship.

Royal Armouries MS I.33. The oldest surviving European fencing manual. Held today at the Royal Armouries museum in Leeds. Small, strange, beautifully illustrated, and occasionally baffling. If Fiore's Fior di Battaglia is the Renaissance of European martial arts scholarship, I.33 is its early medieval prologue.

The Manuscript Itself

I.33 is a slim codex of 32 vellum folia (64 pages), written in a clerical Latin hand with German fencing terms sprinkled throughout. It dates to approximately 1300 AD, making it the oldest known European fencing manuscript by a substantial margin, over a century before Fiore's early-1400s work.

It was produced in Franconia (central Germany, roughly the Würzburg region) by a possibly-clerical author. Scholars have tentatively identified the author as "Lutegerus" or "Liutger," a Latinised form of a German name. The manuscript almost certainly came from a Franconian monastery.

Its survival is precarious and remarkable. First mentioned in print in 1579 by a German scholar who had heard of it from a friend who had acquired it during the 1552-3 campaigns of Albert Alcibiades, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. It passed through the ducal library of Gotha from the 1600s until World War II, when it disappeared. It resurfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1950, where it was purchased by the Royal Armouries. From 1950 to 1996 it was stored in the Tower of London (hence one of its nicknames, "the Tower manuscript"), before transferring to the current Royal Armouries museum in Leeds.

Several other names float around in the literature:

  • Royal Armouries MS I.33: the primary modern designation.
  • The Walpurgis manuscript: after a female figure named Walpurgis who appears in the final sequence.
  • The Tower Fechtbuch: after its long residence in the Tower of London.
  • British Museum No. 14 E iii: an older archival designation.

Most modern HEMA practitioners just say "I.33".

What It Teaches

I.33 is a sword-and-buckler manual. The weapons are single-handed swords (arming swords, in the classification we used in our medieval sword types post) and small round shields (bucklers) held by a central grip.

The teaching is organised around seven wards (in the Latin, custodie), numbered positions from which attacks and defences flow. The seven are:

  1. Sub brach (under the arm): sword held under the armpit.
  2. Humero dextrali (right shoulder): sword held at the right shoulder.
  3. Humero sinistro (left shoulder): sword held at the left shoulder.
  4. Capiti (head): sword held above the head.
  5. Latere dextro (right side): sword held at the right side.
  6. Pectori (breast): sword held at the breast.
  7. Langort (long-point): sword extended forward, point threatening.

Against each ward, the manuscript teaches specific counters called obsessiones ("besiegings" or "attacking positions"), the responses that threaten or defeat the guard. The whole system is essentially a flowchart of ward-and-counter relationships, tested and explained through sequential plates.

Various German terms appear throughout the Latin text:

  • halpschilt ("half-shield"): a key obsessio / defensive position.
  • krucke ("crutch"): a defensive position with the sword crossed over the buckler arm.
  • langort ("long-point"): the seventh ward, also appearing as an obsessio.
  • schutzen ("protect"): another defensive position.
  • schiltslac ("shield-blow"): a strike with the buckler.
  • stich ("stab"): a thrust.
  • nucken ("nudge"): a specific type of attack.
  • vidilpoge ("fiddle-bow"): a specific ward.

The language mixing (Latin framework, German technical terms) is characteristic of the period. It was the normal scholarly pattern for a cleric writing about a practical subject in a specifically German context.

The Priest and the Scholar

What makes I.33 immediately distinctive in illustration terms is its characters. The two main figures throughout the manuscript are labelled sacerdos (priest) and scolaris (student or scholar). A tonsured clergyman and his pupil demonstrate the plays.

This is strange. Most medieval fencing manuals of later periods depict knights, soldiers, or secular fencers. A priest teaching sword-and-buckler to a pupil in the same manuscript is unusual.

There are several possible explanations. The manuscript may come from a monastic context where martial arts were practised and documented by clerics (the medieval Church had complex relationships with martial training; some orders were explicitly military). The priest character may be a stylised teacher-figure rather than a literal clergyman. The clerical hand of the text and the monastic provenance support some version of a church-affiliated origin.

Whatever the explanation, the figures bring a strange charm to the manuscript. You read about medieval sword fighting and the illustrations show you a tonsured priest calmly demonstrating a halpschilt against his earnest student. It is not what you expect, and it is one of the reasons I.33 is beloved in the HEMA community.

The Mystery of Walpurgis

At the very end of the manuscript, on the last two pages, something extraordinary happens. The student is replaced by a woman, named Walpurgis, who appears fighting the priest with sword and buckler.

This is one of the earliest known illustrations of a woman fencing in a technical sword manual. Walpurgis holds the weapons competently, stands in specific wards, and exchanges techniques with the priest on equal terms. She has given her name to one of the manuscript's common nicknames.

Who was she? Nobody knows. Theories range from:

  • A historical female fencer known to the author.
  • A saint (Saint Walpurga, the 8th-century English-born abbess, was associated with Franconia; the manuscript was produced in Franconia).
  • A literary/mythic figure representing Christian virtue triumphing over demonic attack (her sword-and-buckler work might be allegorical).
  • Simply a generic woman-figure used to show that the techniques transfer across fighters.

Modern HEMA scholarship has not reached consensus, but the presence of Walpurgis makes I.33 a document of interest far beyond martial arts historians. Women in medieval manuscripts are common; women fencing in technical manuals, depicted as equals, are vanishingly rare.

Why I.33 Matters to the Modern Practitioner

I.33 sits in an interesting place in the HEMA canon. It is older than the great 14th- and 15th-century treatises (Fiore, Liechtenauer, Talhoffer) by a substantial margin. Its system (sword and buckler) is distinct from the longsword-focused arts that dominate modern HEMA tournaments. And its techniques are often less developed (or at least less elaborately described) than the later material.

But I.33 teaches things the later manuscripts do not.

Sword and buckler specifically. Modern HEMA has a small but devoted sword-and-buckler community, and I.33 is its primary source. Clubs that study I.33 often also study Bolognese single-sword work and other later sword-and-buckler traditions, treating I.33 as the ancestor.

Ward-and-obsessio thinking. I.33's systematic approach to naming each ward and documenting its counter is an early example of the fencing-school tradition that later manuscripts elaborate. Reading I.33 alongside Fiore shows you how European fencing scholarship developed its methodology over a century.

Medieval monastic martial culture. The priest-and-scholar framing gives historians a glimpse into a world that otherwise is rarely documented: martial training happening inside religious contexts.

The feel of early Gothic illustration. The I.33 plates are drawn in a specifically 13th-14th-century style, different from Fiore's Renaissance-influenced illumination. For anyone who loves the visual culture of the period, the manuscript is a treasure.

Studying I.33 Today

Several modern English-language editions of I.33 exist, with translations and commentaries. Roland Warzecha, Jeffrey Forgeng (formerly Jeffrey Singman), and Andrew Kenner have all produced significant scholarship. Online, the Wiktenauer wiki hosts scans and translations.

Active I.33 study groups exist internationally. In the UK specifically, sword-and-buckler enthusiasts can find both dedicated I.33 clubs and broader HEMA clubs that include I.33 material in their curriculum.

At HEMA Penzance, our primary focus is Fiore dei Liberi and his Italian armizare. But some of our members love the earlier I.33 material and occasionally bring it into training. The whole HEMA community is richer for the fact that multiple manuscripts are being studied in parallel, each preserving a different slice of medieval fencing knowledge.

A Century Before Fiore

One last thought. When Fiore was writing Fior di Battaglia in the early 1400s, I.33 had already been sitting in a Franconian monastery for roughly a hundred years. The priest and the scholar and Walpurgis had been demonstrating their wards and their halpschilt and their langort to no one in particular for a century.

We do not know if Fiore ever saw I.33 or any of its contemporaries. The lineage of European fencing teaching is mostly lost to us; individual manuscripts survived, but the connections between them did not. But we can say that Fiore wrote in a culture where treatises like I.33 had already existed for generations. European fencing scholarship was not born with Fiore. It was already old when he took up his pen.

I.33 is the quiet opening chapter of a tradition that stretches from around 1300 through to the end of the seventeenth century and beyond. Starting your reading there, even briefly, gives you a sense of the full historical depth of the art modern HEMA is reconstructing.

Come and Train

Fiore is our primary tradition, but the wider HEMA world is full of treasures. We train every Tuesday evening at HEMA Penzance, 7pm to 9pm at Penzance Leisure Centre. Your first lesson is free, all equipment is provided, and no experience is necessary. Come along and see for yourself.

Historical details drawn from Royal Armouries scholarship, Jeffrey Forgeng's translations, and the Wiktenauer entry on MS I.33.