Rough-and-Tumble Fighting
An extinct American no-rules duel of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century backcountry. Its signature move was eye-gouging.
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About Rough-and-Tumble Fighting
Rough-and-tumble was an American fight without rules, current in the rural interior, above all in the southern colonies and later on the frontier of Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. It has no founder and no year of origin, because it was not a system but a custom. What is documented is its spread from the 1730s and its decline by the 1840s. There were two ways to fight. Men could agree to a fair contest under Broughton's rules, that is with fists, or choose rough-and-tumble, where nothing applied. The signature of the second was eye-gouging — contemporary sources describe it as the thing without which rough-and-tumble would not be itself. With it went biting, hair-pulling and scratching, and attacks on ears, noses, lips, fingers and genitals; some fighters were said to file their teeth to bite off an appendage more easily. The point lay in honour and standing. These were the duels of the lower orders, in which the winner gained the reputation of a local hero and the loser carried away a permanent disfigurement that served as a publicly legible mark of defeat. It was precisely that visibility which made rough-and-tumble more than a brawl. The authorities tried to suppress it. The Virginia Assembly declared eye-gouging and similar injuries a felony in 1752, and an amendment of 1772 named the plucking or putting out of an eye explicitly. The principal scholarly treatment remains the 1985 study by the historian Elliott Gorn in the American Historical Review.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.