MS I.33 (Walpurgis Fechtbuch, c. 1300)

MS I.33 is the oldest surviving European fencing manual, and it is a record about which one must say at once that it is not a martial art but a manuscript. It was made around the 1320s in Franconia, is written in medieval Latin and is called the Liber de Arte Dimicatoria. Thirty-two parchment leaves survive, roughly 230 by 300 millimetres, with two illustrations and accompanying text on each side; at least eight leaves are missing. The content is fighting with the one-handed sword and buckler, the small round shield held in the fist. The teaching is built on seven guards called custodiae and on how to defeat them; in the pictures a priest instructs, a scholar answers him, and at the end a female figure named Walpurgis appears, from whom the manuscript is also called the Walpurgis Fechtbuch. Authorship is ascribed to one Clericus Lutegerus, but three scribes and perhaps as many as seventeen illustrators worked on it. Its travels were eventful: around 1552 Johannes Herbart of Würzburg took it from a monastery, it then passed to the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, was sold at Sotheby's in 1950, and since 1996 it has been held at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.