Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Duels - A Guide to Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Episode Date: July 13, 2019

Pretty much everything you know about duels is true - it's a challenge to violence to defend honor. But did you know the U.S. Navy used to publish detailed guidelines in its midshipmen's handbook? Learn all there is to know about dueling in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, Chuck here with a little Saturday select for ya. I challenge you to listen to this episode on duels, because the name is cool and the topic is cool. It is duels, colon, a guide to throwing down the gauntlet.

Here's a little spoiler for ya. The gauntlet was a glove. It's for March, 2012, and I hope you dig it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

And you've got Stuff You Should Know. On guard. Yeah, touche. It means touch in French. I thought this was one of the funniest openings of an article ever, by the way. Did you like it? I thought that very first part was hysterical when I read it.

Well, you know what? It just so happens. I don't have an intro for this one, so I think you might want to read it. Should we just read it? Yeah. Ed Grabbinowski never lets us down. No, he's good.

The Grabster. This is how duels work, ladies and gentlemen. Pistols at dawn, the challenge is issued. To turn it down would leave you marked as a coward for life. You meet at the chosen spot facing your opponent at a distance of 20 paces. Your dueling pistols are loaded. One or both of you could be severely wounded or killed

today. Doctors are standing by to mend the damage if possible, while your friends eye each other warily. Why is this all happening? Because you made fun of his hat. So good. That is about right, too, as we find out in the rest of the article.

Yeah, well done, Grabster. It's not much of an exaggeration. Apparently throughout the history of people, or ever since we've had swords, at least, men have challenged other men to duels, and other people have died as the result. Yeah. You know?

I thought this is a great article. I thought so, too. This is definitely something I knew virtually nothing about. Yeah, officially, me, too. But I did find out that things like Wild West duels shootouts very close to reality. Sure. They apparently happened to coincide at a time

when dueling was very popular in America. And this comment, oh, it was. It was the Old West version of Pistols at Dawn. And, as an aside, probably the best dueling movie of all time. The Quick and the Dead. The Quick and the Dead. It's exactly right. If you have not seen that, pause.

Pause this podcast. Get off your treadmill, put your ice cream down, whatever you're doing. Go watch the Quick and the Dead, and then come back and resume this podcast. Yeah, do you know what I always appreciated about that movie, was that there were how many quick draw shootouts like? 500.

Let's say there were 10 in the movie. Let's say 500. Each one of them was different. He filmed them different, had a different feel. I just thought that was so creative. Each one had its own little flavor. That's our Sam Raimi. He was so good, man.

I love that movie. He's got something new coming out, doesn't he? Mr. Hollywood guy, come on. He's got something coming. He's not doing the new Spider-Man. What's, I don't know. I think he might be working on another Evil Dead, like a modern remake-y uptake.

You might just be producing that. If he does that, that'll be the second time he's remade the Evil Dead, because the Evil Dead, too, is a remake of the Evil Dead. Yeah, pretty much. OK. So Chuck, a duel for anybody who doesn't know, is basically a one-on-one battle,

as is evidenced by the etymology. And apparently, we said entomology before. I don't know. I don't buy that. Some 11-year-old kid called us out on that. I think he might have misheard us, because I definitely know the difference between etymology and entomology.

The etymology of the word duel is, I think, Latin, right? Duelo? Yep. Oh, I'm sorry, duelum, which is a contraction of a duo, two and belem, war. Obviously, antebellum, pre-war. Oh, OK. I never realized that.

Yeah. Huh. OK. But duo, too, it's basically a war between two individuals, is a duel. Yeah. And it's been around for quite a long time. I guess we should probably just get to the meat of it first.

Let's talk about duels, and then we'll talk a little bit about the history. Yeah, let's just throw down the gauntlet. So somebody does throw down the gauntlet, and a gauntlet is a glove. And when you threw down a gauntlet at the feet of somebody, that was at the height of dueling enough to issue a challenge, saying you and I

are going to try to kill one another for a little bit. Well, we're not necessarily, we'll get to that. When you went to a duel, you had a second which basically was the guy who came along, a friend, a trusted individual. What's your wingman? It was like the best man at your death. He was there to help you prepare your firearms or your sword.

He was there to basically make sure you weren't ambushed. Yeah. He was supposedly a neutral third party, a second. Supposedly. Yeah. And supposedly, we would try to talk it down and diffuse it. That was the first role of the second. But I don't know how much I buy that.

And Ed even points out, more times than not, the second would actually fight the other second. And sometimes there was third and fourth that would fight the other third and fourth. And I looked at this as it's the same as a bar fight today. There's always usually a friend nearby that's, he's got your back, but it's really between you and that jerk.

But if things get out of hand, he gets a beer bottle all of a sudden, then you get involved, and his friend gets involved. So it's sort of like that, I think. Yeah. Or he can change that much. If he tries to get in the middle of the two things, he ends up like River Phoenix at the end of Stand

By Me and takes a knife to the neck and dies in a bar. That was so sad. Who was? Saddest ending. Or River Phoenix's character, let's say. Since he really died, then we should point that out. He had a sad ending in real life as well. Yeah.

Big time. So Chuck, when you declared duel, you could use any weapon, but for a very long time, basically all you had available to you was a heavy sword. Yes. And you had to use the same weapon. And depending on what code of dueling you were following, the challenger or challenger

would pick that weapon. Right. And you mentioned dueling codes. There were several dueling codes. And the one that became the most widespread was the dueling code of 1777, the Irish code, which is cited extensively in this article. And I believe you're prepared to give everyone a treat

and read some of the rules from the code. Yeah, the Code Duelo, it replaced the Floss Duelatorium, which was in the 1400s. The Il Duelo in 1550, apparently the Germans had their own dueling code, which was set by the Fechschulen dueling schools. Imagine theirs was just because they were German. It was probably a little more hardcore.

Sure. Although everything was pretty hardcore back then. It was, but if you look at the dueling codes, a lot of the rules appear to be set up so that you don't kill the other person. The whole point of a duel is not to kill the other person, it's to regain honor. Dueling is the result of an insult.

When somebody insults you and you challenge them to a duel, you're seeking to say, I'm going to get my satisfaction from you. Basically, you punked me out in public, and that can't happen. That's another way to put it. Because I would be looked at as a coward, and that would be a knock on my families and my ancestors

honor even. Yeah, you had to protect the honor of your ancestors backwards and forwards in space or time on either side of you. That's right. As I was saying, some of the rules are intended to prevent harm or injury. You see people facing away from each other and turning and firing.

That was designed so that when you're using a clumsy 17th century firearm, the chances of you hitting anybody, but a bystander way off in the distance is pretty low. Yeah, from what I gathered after reading a handful of these rules is that the Code Duelo encouraged injury but not death. What they didn't encourage was purposefully firing in the air as sometimes happened when neither one of them

really wanted to get hurt. They didn't really like that because that sort of takes all the chutzpah out of the duel to begin with. You're very excited to read these rules, aren't you? You're jumping ahead a little bit? No, no, no. We're not there yet. OK.

But one of the rules was that the winner could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Once you've won the duel, let's say there's an injury, you could kill them if you wanted. Yeah. You could just humiliate them if you wanted. You could be a good guy and say, you know what? My honor has been asswaged.

It's great. So let me give you a hand up, little buddy. And you were a good person for doing that. I would say so. I could see you totally doing that, Chuck. There's no way I would have been dueling to begin with. You could also cut the other person's head off after finishing them off, or maybe finish them off

by cutting his head off, and then posting it in a public place. Right. I said also that the Irish code is very widespread, so much so that this, to me, is one of the facts of the podcast. Agreed. It was reprinted in full as part of the Midshipman's handbook of the US Navy up until 1862, when the Navy outlawed or banned dueling among officers.

But up until that time, it was like, hey, you're probably going to get in a duel at some point in time, and here's what the Navy says about that, and what the Navy says is what the Irish say. Women typically did not duel. And when they did, it says in the article here, it was viewed on as an oddity and a strange, amusing spectacle, which Foxy Boxing is today.

Well, it's kind of like the first cat fights. Yeah. Is that sexist? Totally. But I mean, that's apparently what they viewed duels among women as. It was an amusement for men, because women are just so stupid. Ba, ba, ba, right?

Except, except if you were dumb enough to make that kind of judgment about lamo pen. Yeah. You probably would have had your head cut clean off of your body. She was a genuine, dueler, swordswoman. And depending on who you talk to, it's either her father who trained her or a lover who

was a great fincer. And however, I think she liked the ladies as well. Yeah. Because later in her life, after performing in bars and dressed as a man, but not to like say, hey, I am a man, I think it was just like, hey, I'm more comfortable in these clothes. It's easier to move in these clothes. Exactly.

She dug up the corpse of a dead nun, put it in a dorm room, set that room on fire to fake her own death so she could escape the convent with her female lover. Yeah, lamo pen. So she was a pretty progressive rockin' chick back then. Yeah, she was pretty cool. And that was after she retired from the opera. Early 1700s.

Yeah. Yeah. So she was pretty cool. No foxy boxing there. No, I don't even know what that is. I haven't seen that. It's exactly what it sounds like. All right.

Yeah, it was kind of big in the, I think, the 80s? Maybe the 70s of just women boxing one another, but not really. And then like, it's incredibly sexist. There were a lot of fights at my school, my high school. I mean, not like a lot, like it was the roughest school, but it always struck me, even as a youngster, that when guys would get in a fight, it was always horrific. And then when girls would get in a fight,

the dudes would be sitting around laughing at it. I saw a girl fight in high school once that was really disturbing. It was more disturbing than any guy fight I've ever seen. Well, because girls fight dirty. Yeah, both of these girls were fighting very dirty. It was really horrible. One of the, I think, like the assistant principal jumped in and got like smacked around and ended up backing off.

Wow. Yeah, it was a bad fight. So there was nothing funny about that one? No, not at all. You and I would be. I mean, really, is there anything funny about anybody fighting? No, I don't think so, unless it's like, I don't know. Clowns?

Yeah, clowns fighting. Yeah, that'd be funny. Clown fight, that's hilarious. Unless one of them dies. That's right. Chuck, so we mentioned that seconds are in charge of issuing apologies. Yeah.

And you can't just go over and say, hey, man, guys, sorry, he'll never do it again. Can he have his gauntlet back? That just doesn't work. There's standards. There's rules to issuing an apology. And as I understand, you're prepared to explain the rule from the Coduello for issuing apology.

I think even it's rule number one. Very first rule, as it should be. Let's hear it. The first offence requires the first apology. Though the retort may have been more offensive than the insult. Example, A tells B he is impertinent, et cetera. B retorts that he lies, yet A must make the first apology because he gave the first offence.

And then after one fire, B may explain away the retort by a subsequent apology. Very nice. Thank you. Thank you very much. So basically, no matter how bad the retort is from the first insult, whoever insults the other person first has to apologize first.

Then they shoot at one another. And then the second person can apologize. You also have rules to whether or not or how an apology can be accepted, or if an apology, a verbal one, is even worth anything at all. What situation that is, won't you? I point you to rule number five, Josh. As a blow is strictly prohibited under any circumstances

among gentlemen, so no hitting, evidently. Yeah, no. Or if you do, that's it. Yeah, there's no going back. No verbal apology can be received for such an insult. The alternatives, therefore, the offender handing a cane to the injured party to be used on his own back at the same time begging pardon and firing on until one,

or both, are disabled or exchanging three shots and then asking pardon without proper of the cane. Right, so if you wanted apology after smacking someone in the face, but you didn't want the cane, you guys had to shoot at each other three times. Or I imagine maybe deal three blows with a sword. Right. But by this time, 1777 firearms were all the rage for dueling.

Sure, which we'll get to. So you've got a duel. All the apologies have been either not offered or rejected. Yeah. And it's time for the duel. There's a certain etiquette, right? Yeah. You mentioned that there's rules against not really

doing this wholeheartedly. Like if you're going to get into a duel, you have to do it wholeheartedly as far as the Code duelo is concerned. But this is also one of the more frequently broken rules, because most people who are in duels didn't really want to die. And they probably didn't want to kill the other person either.

Because I imagine when you're in a duel with somebody, and that's your reality at that moment. And it's not just some guys and powdered wigs out in an apple tree, and it's a wood engraving or wood carving. But it's really what's going on in your world right then. I'm sure you are acutely interested in not killing and not dying at that moment. Yeah, I would have applied them with alcohol.

I would have been the guy being like, come on, man. You would have made a great second. Can we just have this ale here and talk it over and laugh about it? Yeah. Right? It's funny, right? Yeah, yeah.

But they took it way more seriously than I did. So there's this rule that says, man, if you're going to get in a duel, you have to do it all the way. It's called Rule 13. No dumb shooting or fighting in the air is admissible in any case. The challenger ought not to have challenge

without receiving offense. And the challenged ought, if he gave offense, to have made an apology before he came on the ground. Therefore, children's play must be dishonorable on one side or the other end is accordingly prohibited. Very nice. So you've got all these, we need Strickland, huh? No, no, I think that's great.

OK. Sherry's loving it. So you've got this rule that says you do this all the way, but that's not necessarily how a lot of duels worked. Guys would agree ahead of time, like, hey, we're actually going to do the duel, but we'll both shoot into the air. Yeah, like you don't want to die, do you?

Which, by the way, is what happened is how Alexander Hamilton died at the hands of the treacherous Aaron Burr. Let's go ahead and talk about it. Well, they were political rivals. They were both, they were in a law firm together, and that's where they first learned to hate one another. And then they were in a very small country at the time.

They were very big fish in the same small pond. And things got out of hand. And I can't remember who challenged you to a duel, do you? Yes, it was a series of insults. And this was at a time where the losing presidential candidate would become vice president, which could you imagine that these days?

Yeah, that'd be pretty awesome. I think it'd be nice, it would temper things. Well, I guess it was for balance of power. Sure. I don't know if it would work this way. Or it was a consolation prize. That's true. So they disliked each other.

There were a bunch of insults, and Burr challenged Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey. And their varying accounts on what happened, but what we do know that happened, Hamilton got shot. Burr didn't. Whether or not Hamilton fired in the air is a good guy. That's what I heard. Or got hit and was like, ooh, and fired up in the air.

Never. Is debatable. Alexander Hamilton was a crack shot. He had great timing. He had cat-like reflexes. Aaron Burr shot Hamilton. Hamilton fired into the air. Aaron Burr was actually, I think, arrested for murder,

wasn't he? He was charged with murder and basically acquitted in the end. But this is a time when it was kind of on the outs. They were beginning to outlaw dueling anyway. And it ruined his career, basically. It ruined his political career from that point. People were like, dude. Who's on the 20?

And by 20, of course, I mean, who's on the 10? Yeah, the $10 bill. Jackson's on the 20. Alexander Hamilton's on the 10. Stop emailing. You got nothing but 20s, though, in your role. I can't even tell you who's on the 10. And did they even make dollar bills?

So Chuck, let's get to seconds, which, again, I want to say that, oh, I got ahead of ourselves. I'm sorry. Also, you should never duel at night. The only time when you can legitimately hold a duel at night, meaning that the same night of the offense was when the person was going to be leaving town before daybreak. No need to even read that one.

That speaks for itself. And that makes good sense. Basically, their cooler heads prevail generally the next day, which is a great rule in marriage and life. I'm always a big fan of sleep on it. Why don't we sleep on it? Yep, you're absolutely right, buddy. But sometimes the wife will still

wake up just as angry the next day. It happens, but most times the worst is waking up in the middle of the night angry. Yeah, that's pretty bad. When the rage is seething. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. No. On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor

Stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, ample podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

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And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. S, Y, Y, Y, S, K, S, K, K, K, K, K, K, K, K. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. So Chuck, do you want to talk about seconds?

Yes, seconds, they had very specific rules for the role of the second. They had to take care of the guns in the same way and load in the presence of one another. I can't shake the feeling that we're both in trouble. I know. They would have to, like I said, load the guns together and in front of each other, and the gun was already agreed upon.

They have a smooth bore. Yeah, and I think the rifle bore would be a more accurate, longer distance shot, so they said we can't use that. Yeah, it's like shot-putting a football or throwing it in a tight spiral. Which one's going to get further with more accuracy? Exactly, that makes sense. So you want to load in the presence of one another. Saying, look, see the bore?

Smooth. And we're doing it right here, so everyone can see it. Third, sports, everyone pay attention. And we also mentioned how they are bound to offer or to try to get an apology generated to avoid a duel. They're supposed to, according to the code. And then rule 25, if they can't come to any kind of resolution in the seconds, clearly, or eyeballing one another, like, oh dude, you're going down too. It's on between us.

They had rules for that as well, like rule 25. Where seconds disagree and resolve to exchange shots themselves, it must be at the same time and at right angles with their principles. I don't get the right angles thing. How is that physically possible? I don't know. I've took that to mean they shoot from the same angle. That would be parallel, not right angle.

Well, I don't think it meant right angle in the geometric sense. I think it meant the correct angle as in the same angle. Maybe I'm wrong. You think it meant, like, geometry? I think the authors had put in a full day by the time they got to this rule. Or maybe at right angles it meant if these two are shooting here, and they have to shoot there so there's no crossfire coming at them. Okay, yeah.

So they make a square. I don't know. We'll have to look into that. And then how do you know when a duel's over, especially when it doesn't necessarily result in the decapitation of one? When you cut somebody's head off and post it on a pike in the town square, the duel's over. It's over.

But there's also more nuanced endings possible, right? Rule number five, if Schwartz are used, Mr. Trebek, the parties engage until one is well-blooded, disabled or disarmed, or until after receiving a wound and blood being drawn, the aggressor begs pardon. Right. Unless the person who's disabled insists that it's only a flesh wound. Right. He does have a...

Did you notice his Monty Python reference in here? No. That's definitely not the only article with a Monty Python reference from him. What is it? Well, later on, he's talking about how nobles weren't allowed to work and they made money off of rent from their huge tracts of land. That's from Monty Python. I don't remember that part.

You don't remember that? She's got huge tracts of land. I don't remember. Yeah, that's a good part. Good for you for noticing that one. Sure. With the grabster, he's always sneaking them in. And also, any wound sufficient to agitate the nerves?

Yeah. Or make the handshake? Must end the business of the day. I mean, that would be... That's kind of a loose, if you ask me. Yeah. But that does mean that the duel is over. So that's...

If you want to know more, if you want to know all the rules, you can get your hands on a pre-1862 U.S. Navy Midshipments Handbook. Yeah. Apparently, PBS has all of them as well on a frontline site. We don't. I'm sorry. But Chuck, dueling was, for a very long time, the pursuit of nobles, right? Yeah.

As a matter of fact, it was used to differentiate nobles from common people. Like in a lot of medieval European countries, commoners weren't allowed to duel. It was illegal. Yeah. And before guns, a lot of commoners couldn't even afford swords, because swords are expensive to make and even more expensive than firearms once they came around. So a lot of them couldn't duel in the traditional sense, although the Grabster points out that there were plenty of duel-like circumstances among commoners, too.

Right. It was probably just the bar fight. You just can't let the local fuzz find out what you're doing. Yes. And noblemen were expected to duel. Right. And the whole point of dueling was the protection of honor. And honor as a concept, as the Grabster points out, is not what we think of it today.

I didn't know this. Honor is basically like, if you are rich, if you have a title, if you are a member of an important family, you have honor automatically. It's attached to you. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you were a good, upstanding guy. It just means like, this is your station in life. You're blessed basically by being born rich and white.

Exactly. It's like the 1%. And you have honor, and it's fragile, extremely, at all times. It's prone to be insulted at the drop of a glove, especially. Very nice. But even the drop of a hat. And not only is your honor at stake, but the honor of your family for generations forward, generations backward, and any schmo of noble rank.

Yeah. I imagine if a commoner came up and insulted your family, you just cut their head off right there, and there's no duel. It's just death for the commoner, right? Yeah. If another person of nobility comes up and insults your family honor, then you say, it's on. I challenge you to a duel.

At this point, and you've mentioned cowardice already, but at this point, the other person has a choice. Very socially speaking, they don't really have a choice, but they do have a choice. Sure. They can either accept the duel, or they can be a coward. And in the same vein, the person whose honor is insulted has a choice. They can either issue a challenge to a duel, or they can let it slide.

Either way, if you let it slide or you shirk a duel, you're a coward. And that was a big deal back then. Yeah. It wasn't just like Jimmy's a sissy because he wouldn't fight me at school. Which haunts you for the rest of your life. You know what I'm saying? That's true. But your family was insulted.

You could lose your honor. They would take it away legally sometimes. They could publish an account of it to the church, and you know, in the church, they're going to tell everybody that you're a coward. Church, guys. It was not an abstract thing. Kings who would not uphold their honor could lose their noble ranking. They would just take it away, and you could actually be punished and excommunicated,

and your voting rights revoked for cowardice. Serious stuff back then. You could also be imprisoned. And killed. And just generally bad things, fed to dragons probably. I don't know if you could be killed. I just said that. Well, if a dragon's eating you, you wish someone would kill you.

Good point. So I think probably this whole code, this whole dueling code, and how refined it became, was out of the frequency of dueling, right? Yeah. Apparently, like you said, these people sat around with their huge tracts of land. Well, they couldn't work. No, like you couldn't work. If you wanted to work, you couldn't if you were of noble blood.

Yeah. I mean, you literally could not hold a job, even if you're like, if you found you were really good at something, but I really like blacksmithing, making these shoes, these horseshoes. You're a nobleman. You have to make your money off of rent. So the end result of that is, after a lot of sitting around and fox hunting and mead drinking, you get a little bored, and so dueling kind of became a sport for a bored nobleman. Yeah.

These young guys that were like, well, got nothing better to do. So let me go down to the pub and throw down the gauntlet on someone or just be really easily irritable to where anything that happens to me. You bump me in the bar and like, all right, it's on. Or you looked at my lady. That was a big one. Yeah. The other aspect of it wasn't just boredom.

It was also that you were the better person. Yeah. So in a field where there is a definite set hierarchy, earls are equal to earls and dukes equal to dukes and viscants equal to viscants, right? Viceroy is equal to viceroy is that whole kind of thing. I could continue. Please do. I can't continue.

You called my bluff, but this is a way to differentiate yourself among your rank. Yeah. I challenge you to duel and I won and the reason that differentiates me is not only am I the winner, but that means that God favors me. Yeah. And apparently that was used that was the predecessor to the legal systems we had today. Well, yeah, let's get to this. This is the commoners would duel early on in the 11th and 12th centuries.

You would have trial by combat sometimes. It was like dunking a witch. Like if the witch floated, she was a witch and then she got burned at the stake. If she drowned, then she wasn't really a witch and she was pure of heart. So if you win the duel, then you're in fact innocent of your crime. Yes, because God favored the winner of the duel. And more importantly, the guy who accused you is now dead, so you must be innocent. Although you may also fight a court appointed professional duelist.

That's awesome. And I can't imagine beating that guy. Yeah. What was the most guy in the Mad Max 3? Master Blaster. Yeah, Master Blaster. You would fight Master Blaster. Yeah.

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Josh. Uh, a lot of times, if you were good at dueling, you would just use it to get out of stuff. Like, hey, I don't want to pay this bill. So let's duel about it and that'll settle it. And I know I'm really good with the sword. So you don't stand a chance. Yeah. It's all over.

just debts, but also like if you had a political rival, that later became really big in Missouri. Yes. If you wanted somebody's land, anything, anybody who had something you wanted or who you owed something to, you could just challenge them to a duel, kill them and they're problem solved. This is one of the reasons why I think that noble classes were eventually removed from the face of the earth. You mentioned Missouri between 1816 and 1824, the elect territorial elections became so fraught with dueling to get rid of your rival that the first governor of California, Peter

Burnett, said, Peter Berg, no, Peter Burnett, said it became desirable to kill off certain aspirants to get them out of the way. In Missouri, you would just kill the dude before election day and you're all set. Yes. Can you imagine Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney dueling one another? No. I couldn't. You've got dueling, evolving from an early legal system to the board noble classes to

the elimination of political rivals. It comes from even further back than that though, like the duel, the idea of one person battling another person in some sort of combat. In a formal rule-driven way. Grabster goes back to jousting competitions in the Middle Ages. I think go back to gladiatorial combat, further back than that, but in Europe, in Western Europe, Northwestern Europe, it came from jousting, right? Yes.

It makes sense to me. Like you said, the joust is pretty much a duel on horseback and then you had the chivalric code, which sort of lines up with the code of the duel. And also, you skipped right past what, to me, is one of the facts of the podcast. Oh, no, I didn't. That was coming. Go ahead. You go ahead.

Well, when knights, only noblemen were allowed to be knights into joust against one another, so they would raise their visor at the beginning to say, hey, look at me. I'm not descending along my assistant who's a lot better at this than I am. As Heath Ledger did. As Heath Ledger did. What was that, first night? No, that was a good movie. That was all right.

So they would reveal their identities and that, Josh, as you know, was evolved into the military salute years later. Yeah, the lift of the visor. Evolved into the hand, I guess. Yeah. Pretty cool. Very cool. Eventually, though, firearms came around and they found that, yeah, these incredibly heavy

suits of armor that can protect you even from a joust, generally, are no match for this musket, the smooth board musket with terrible aim and accuracy. Which covered. If it hit you, it'll kill you. Yeah. In our knights podcast, that was kind of the end of the night. Exactly. It was also, what, the end of Samurai?

I think so. It had to do with the demigod Samurai as well. Yeah. Guns ruined everything. Yeah. Well, they changed everything for the worse. And then you have, as a result, no more need for a heavy sword because there's no need for armor.

Our armor doesn't work. No heavy swords. It's only doing evolution and sword making. And you have, at least in Europe, I think Japan already had far lighter, more better swords. Right. But in the West, the evolution of swords led to the sport of fencing as a direct result of dueling and the loss of armor.

And it became more contest, especially after the Italians said, I don't want to die. Let's put a little rubber tip on the inet. Yeah. My sister was in fencing in college, yeah. Interesting. My older sister. I've always wanted to try that. Well, I think you should go to town.

You could take classes, right? Totally. I think it's a kind of expensive start-up. Oh, sure. Like the whole get-up and the decent sword and all that, but a foil in the vernacular. But I'm sure once you got all that stuff, you're fine. Yeah. That would end up being like my venture into ice hockey though.

I just end up having a closet full of gear that never gets used. I didn't know you were into hockey. I was at one point. When? Mid-20s. Oh, okay. So it's old gear, huh? Yeah.

I learned how to ice skate pretty well. And then me and all my friends got hockey gear and we were like, hey, let's play. Nice. And that was pretty much where it ended. There you go. Yeah. Pistols, though, Josh. When did you get into pistols?

Well, no, no, no. I didn't get into pistols ever. But when pistols came along, basically it leveled the playing field because pistols were actually cheaper than swords and cheaper than getting trained in fencing. You could just practice shooting, you know, coke cans in the backyard. So all of a sudden it democratized it. It was no longer the sport of noblemen because anyone could do it. Right.

And this is a time when the word cocktail was invented to describe the strong drink you had in the morning, like an old fashioned. So America was super drunk, so dueling seemed like a really good idea and it took off as a sport. Well, not as a sport, but basically as a socially accepted pastime because America doesn't have Kings or Dukes or anything and there were a lot of guns at the time and everybody started shooting one another in duels. Well, which is one of the big reasons dueling began to die.

I thought, and Ed pointed out that I was wrong, I thought it may be because people called for the end of it and said, you know, this is wrong, we shouldn't be doing this. But since dueling began, the church and other legal bodies had said, we don't like this because it kind of cripples a legal system because you're taking it into your own hands and the church didn't like it. They were like, we want to judge these people on their crimes. And it also kind of violates one of the bigger commandments. Absolutely.

Forget about the crusades for that one, but sure. Right, exactly. Military leaders didn't like it because it was killing off able young bodied men. And then later on, war itself, like the Civil War and the First World War, really were like, hey, there's more serious things going on and people really die in battle. It sort of became a bit of fool's undertaking for what I understand. I think it also hit home to the horrors of combat, made people not want to kill one another as much.

Yeah, like real deal combat. Yeah, and the Civil War and the First World War, like you said, were linked to declines in the U.S. and Europe respectively of dueling. And there is, I guess also one of the other reasons dueling declined was because when it was exposed to the middle classes, it wasn't just super rich people killing each other anymore. Which was the original purpose. Which is why the lower classes were like, who cares?

Dueling's fine. That's fine. We're doing our own thing. Once it, like you said, democratized and spread to the middle and lower classes, it became a problem. And then eventually it was, we were left with dueling banjos and that was about as serious as it got. I think that that is an excellent way to end this podcast, dude.

Great. You got, you can't, I'm not even going to ask if you have anything more. If you want to learn more about dueling and you want to see some of these cool rules, you can type dual into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast, that's our Twitter handle. You can also reach us on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuffyshnow. You can send us an email with stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyshnow.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye.

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