Reviving a British martial art

“It is to my eyes a far more rounded, dynamic and interesting sport than the modern fencing that still exists today.”

The event of two people hitting each other with sticks is a very common occurrence and I find it hard to believe that at no point in anyone's childhood did they not pick up some kind of sword like object and with some gusto proceed to try and whack a sibling with it. Single stick is when this instinct was captured by swordmasters, and turned into an art; a distinctly British art and our ancestors' answer to kendo and the asian martial arts that have captured attention of the mainstream consciousness.

Singlestick used to be the most popular sport in the United Kingdom before even wrestling and boxing and remained so for a good few hundred years.

Also used to teach sailors the use of the cutlass, it is to my eyes a far more rounded, dynamic and interesting sport than the modern fencing that still exists today.

Fast, elegant and sometimes brutally savage, it captures, like boxing, far more of what our ancestors were actually attempting to achieve and what they went through when they used weapons in anger.

That more brutal aspect of two practitioners really trying to take the other out inevitably makes it far less boring than a more controlled and restricted environment where both movement and techniques are heavily limited to a very narrow range. Single stick, like all martial arts and sports, also has great benefits for the practitioner both mentally and physically.

In my opinion, we should all accumulate as much skill as possible, especially things like resilience and discipline and at a time where we are struggling to get children to be active, maybe appealing to a more directly competitive instinct would help. Historical European martial arts have been seeing something of a revival in recent times, and myself being a sucker for tradition see no reason why we shouldn’t revive singlestick as a British sport. It's also a very cheap sport requiring only two people, two sticks and possibly a book or some youtube videos making it far more accessible than most other sports and opening it up to the less fortunate in our society.