masters began an effort to explore earlier fighting methods, which they recognized as having been abandoned. But even then they had to struggle to rebuild and recover what little remained from those styles within their modern fencing as they knew no Medieval and Renaissance teachings still existed among masters or within schools. However, despite much pioneering experiment their respectable efforts resulted in an understanding that is now viewed as incomplete and flawed. There are no "living traditions" or "living lineages" of Medieval and Renaissance fencing. There is no method of combat-effective teachings (i.e., devised for and intended for use in real combat) from these eras that has survived as a martial down to even the 18th century, let alone later times. What little that has survived of earlierpreferred means of settling fights in the Renaissance. False. The term "duel" can apply to a wide range of ritualized and formal fighting from judicial combats to street fights to formal duels of honor in the Medieval and Renaissance eras. The history of duelling in the Renaissance period has however tended to focus upon those accounts by a few chroniclers of the aristocracy who recorded the duels of nobles for their audiences of upper class peers; the ones with the leisure time to concern themselves with codes of honor and formal challenges to their reputation, character, and social status. These works have tended to focus upon formal duel and challenges and not on the more common everyday scuffles, street-fights, rencounters, affrays, ambushes, brawls, drunken violence, and assassinations, which