Cudgeling, or European stick fighting, is an umbrella term that covers various similar practices around the world.

Fencing with sticks for sport is probably as old as warfare.The Egyptians have the oldest known record of a fencing match in the form of a temple relief from 1200 B.C.E. It depicts two fencers with blunted sticks and masks, one of whom says: “On guard, and admire, what my valiant hands shall do!”—an old but always popular way of boasting.

History

Asia

The Indian art of silambam emphasizes the use of a 1.2-meter (4-foot) staff. After seven years’ training, practitioners advance to other weapons and may use their bare hands. Gatka is a stick- and knife-based martial art from India and Pakistan. Gatka is the traditional fighting art of the Sikhs, a religious group in the Punjab,neither Muslim nor Hindu. It is practiced today by members of the 3H Foundation, the followers of Yogi Bhajan, a Sikh leader and teacher. Sikhs have traditionally filled rolls of military and police in India. British influence is seen in the use of a singlestick (a meterlong piece of bamboo with a leather handle) in place of the sword for the lower levels of training. The techniques are practiced to drumbeats and performed with a high stepping movement that is taught with a chanted mantra.Horseback techniques are still taught. Kalaripayattu, based in the southern Indian state of Kerala, is a composite martial art. After two phases of weaponless training, the third phase of Kalaripayattu training is training in the use of various weapons, which begins with the short staff and quarterstaff and progresses to weapons such as the spear and shield, sword and shield,daggers,knives,battle axes, and so on. In the Philippines, when Fernando Magellan was killed by the sharpened stick of a local chief during a failed landing attempt on his round-the-world voyage in 1521, the Spaniards had made their first bloody experience with “arnis.” Arnis, kali, and escrima are the national weapon arts of the Philippines. All three have in common the use of the stick in combat, either as itself or as a replacement for or representative of the sword or knife. They have had full contact events with stick that is much like old cudgeling or backswording in 18^th-century Europe. After conquering the island group, the Spanish tried to root out this art. It was passed on for centuries only in secrecy or family circles. But with Philippine independence after World War II arnis appeared in public again, now as a stick fencing sport with 0.76-meter (30-inch) long rattan sticks.

Europe

The cudgel or singlestick was the practice weapon for military sword, broadsword, or saber. The earliest known manual of European fencing delineates techniques that are illustrated in other medieval documents depicting the training of knights or squires and entertainments conducted with stick or sword indiscriminately.

In England, from the Middle Ages, the common man had to train at cudgel and buckler. Singlestick and cudgel play was a bulwark of rugged English manliness in the 19^th century, according to Tom Brown’s School Days, in which a backswording event that involves two men trying to draw blood from each others’ scalps with cudgels is recounted with relish. As recently as 1886, the British army used singlestick drill to train recruits for combat.

The quarterstaff, a stick 1.8 meters by 3 centimeters (6 feet by 11/4 inches),was also a medieval weapon that survived to modern times. Developed from a common peasant weapon, it was mentioned in the training manuals of many countries. It formed the basis of training with two-handed weapons. The pugil stick fights that the U.S. Marines were force to drop from training in 1985 for reasons of safety appear to be from the same set of techniques.

Stick fighting remained popular until Italian masters formalized saber fencing into a nonfatal sporting/ training form with metal weapons in the late 19^th century. Few of these “extinct” fencing styles remain from a long tradition of European fencing. Those that survive in the main are subsumed with the styles studied in association with savate, a French form of unarmed combat.

Modern Sport and Combat

The survival of European stick fighting is associated with savate—French footfighting. Savate may have originated in pancration, a sport in the original Olympics that combined wrestling, boxing, and other techniques.Roman legions carried it and cestus, an armored glove for punching, along with them.Many local styles existed; and some, like Cornish wrestling and lutte breton, survive.

The link between the French stic and foot fighting systems began in the early 1700s with chausaun (from the name of the deck shoe worn by sailors), a combat system that includes the use of the belaying pin (a shipboard tool shaped something like a bowling pin and used to manage the rigging), along with kicks and hand strikes practiced by sailors on ships. In other parts of France foot fighting systems were called savate, for shoe.

Savate itself was established in the 1800s. It started as a unification of many of the different foot fighting styles across the various provinces of France, along with various hand defense techniques.Canne is the use of one or more short sticks, each held in one hand. Many of these stick fighting arts did not survive the transition to the saber foil and the end of carrying canes in public and the sword in war.

La canne de combat is still practiced by about

10,000 people in France as well as a few hundred in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and the United States. The Association Française de Boxe Française, Savate et Disciplines Assimilés has a committee dealing with the sport. World championships are held yearly and attract players from all over Europe. La canne de combat is basically fencing using a small (tapered) stick handled with one hand.

Baton is taught as an exercise and timing drill. This uses an opposing hand grip about a foot wide. The stance and grip is very similar to the greatsword stances illustrated in German woodcuts and to the halberd guard position of Swiss woodcuts. It is slower than la canne but the strikes are very powerful. The current French association has attempted to suppress or limit the influence of the combative lines to make savate popular as a sport and reduce the danger of training. This involved limiting both kicks and strikes, separating la canne, and dropping the study of lutte parisienne, baton, fouette, knife, and panache. These changes came at the cost of much of the old tradition, although a few enthusiasts still teach the combative form. In the 1980s several of these formed a group dedicated to preserving combative style of savate, which they called Savate Danse Du Rue. In Marseilles a school of chaussoun preserves the art as a cultural activity and a rough sport called chaussoun Marseilles rather than as a functional fighting system. The Academy of French Martial Arts in Dallas continues the French fighting tradition in the United States.That cudgeling will pass into history, however, seems a distinct possibility.