The Schools of Defense in Elizabethan London
ccssible to a twentieth-century audience. Shakespeare's patrons at thc Globe, however, would surely have distinguished in minute detail the differences between foreign and domestic codes of swordsmanship, might well have traced the actors' skills to the pedagogical efforts of one or another master of defense then plying his talents in London, and, yeomen and aristocrats alike, would undoubtedly have felt themselves expert critics of an athletic ritual rich in historical association and accumulated lore. Today, however, the cultural context within which they reacted is difficult indeed to recover, for the history of the arts of defense remains a neglected area in Renaissance studies. 1 We know that Castiglione and English pedagogists deemed training in the martial arts essential to the education of a gentleman, but little is known of the practitioners of those arts, of the formal structure under which they operated, of the "fencing" schools which they conducted, or of the relationships between English practitioners and their continental contemporaries, whose weapons and methods differed considerably.' By considering the formal manuscript records of the society of the "Maisters of the Noble Science of Defense" (British Library Sloan MS 2530) and by a study of its members, this essay attempts to treat these neglected areas and to augment the late-