Meet Bartitsu, created by William Barton-Wright, whose railroad work took him to Japan for 3 years, where he studied at the school of Jigoro Kano. Once make in the land of limies, he quit being a railroad engineer and took up his new calling.

In 1899, Barton wrote an article in the London based publication, Pearson’s Magazine, entitled “A New Art of Self Defense.” In it he set out his system of self defense that he called “bartitsu,” an obvious melding of his name and jujitsu. While bartitsu was based mainly on jujitsu, Barton explained in his article that the system included boxing, kickboxing, and stick fighting.

Barton opened a school called the Bartitsu Club. He brought in some of the best martial arts teachers from around the world to teach at his new school. Via correspondence with Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of Kodokan Judo, and other contacts in Japan, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners K. Tani, S. Yamamoto and the nineteen year old Yukio Tani to travel to London and serve as instructors at the Bartitsu Club. K. Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was shortly joined by another young jujutsuka, Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod were also employed as teachers at the Club. As well as teaching well-to-do Londoners, their duties included performing demonstrations and competing in challenge matches against fighters representing other combat styles. In addition, the Club became the headquarters for a group of fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton and it served as their base for experimenting with historical fencing techniques, which they taught to members of London’s acting elite for use in stage combat.

One journalist described the Bartitsu Club as “… a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with ‘champions’ prowling around it like tigers.” Unfortunately by March of 1902 the club was no longer active.

Bartitsu might have been completely forgotten if not for a cryptic reference by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. In 1901 Conan Doyle had revived Holmes for a further story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes explained his victory over Professor Moriarty in their struggle at Reichenbach Falls by the use of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me”.
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I teased the old Englishness of Sir Barton but his mixing of all sorts of physical arts and physical treatments in a freeform manner is fantastic (though anyone who cares about actually practicing or recreating this in historical verisimilitude is being Anglophilistically arrogant). Its interesting what would have happened to it if he named it not after himself but after a method or principle, like Form Will Fist, 8 Changes, etc.

I have no experience with either so if anyone has I’d love to hear about it.

As a note about Shaolin, that is really just a place – what the monks “were” were Ch’an Buddhists, and Ch’an Buddhism is more commonly known as Zen Buddhism. All of the stories in the Rinzai Zen Mumonkan (http://c-pan.net/zen-mumonkan.html) are in China. This too little known connection enriches both Zen and Shaolin and their current.

Achilles glared at him and answered, “Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life’s blood. Put forth all your strength; you have need now to prove yourself indeed a bold soldier and man of war. You have no more chance, and Pallas Minerva will forthwith vanquish you by my spear: you shall now pay me in full for the grief you have caused me on account of my comrades whom you have killed in battle.”

http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.22.xxii.html
An interesting note is that Achilles is helped (cheats? no such thing) by Minerva who gives him a second spear, with which he overcomes the swordbearing Hector.

At 23 he left his apprenticeship as a tobacco spinner for the army and adventure. After a few years another soldier started appropriating McBane’s pay whereupon McBane challenged him for redress. After an initial rout where his broadsword wielding opponent knocked McBane’s sword from his hand, beat him and pawned his sword, McBane took additional lessons on the smallsword versus the broadsword. Next time McBane skewered him through and kept studying until he was his master’s top student.

More battles, injuries, and duels over trifles continued. McBane continied studying the swordin Dublin under a French master. Laster in Belgium he was forced to fight and win 24 bouts with the locale’s establishd master’s to teach in peace.

Soon enough McBane discovered some of his fellow swordsmen were sidelining in prositution and gambling and he

resolved to have a share of that Gain, or at least to have a fair Tryall for it. I Fought all the four, one by one: the last of them was Left-handed; he and I went to the Rampart where we searched one another for Fire Arms. Finding none, we drew and had two or three clean Turns: at last he put up his Hand and took a Pistol from the Cock of his Hat; he cocked it against his shoulder and presented it to me, upon which I asked Quarters, but he refused, calling me an “English Bouger,” and Fired at me and run for it. One of the balls Went through my Cravat. I thinking I was shot did not Run as I was wont to do, but run as I could after him, crying for the Guard … at last I overtook him…and gave him a thrust in the buttocks …. [I] call’d for his Commerads that same Night, who agreed to give me a Brace of Whoors, and Two Petty Couns a Week. With this and my School I lived very well for that Winter.

Next he participated in the War of Spanish Succession, the first real pan-Euro war. More misadventures and brawls following. At the Battlen of Blenheim on August 13, 1704 McBane was show 4 times, received 5 bayonet wounds and was left for dead on the fiel. At night plundering Dutch (allied) troops clubbed him for his clothes and left him “expecting Death every minute, not only by reason of Wounds, but by reason of the old and the great Thirst that I had, I drank several handfuls of the Dead Mens Blood I lay beside, the more I Drank the worse I was.”

He recovered.

In 1707, he fought a man over a woman and

He challenged me immediately to Answer him, so we went out to the back of an old Trench where he shewed me Five Graves which
he had filled, and told me I should be the Sixth, (we had a great many Spectators both Dutch and English) if I would not yield him the Lady, for shame I could not but Fight him, he drew his Sword, and with it drew a Line,saying, that should be my Grave; I told him it was too short for me, likewise I did not love to ly wet at Night,
but said it would fit him better; we fell to it, he advanced upon me so I was obliged to give Way a little, I bound his Sword and made a half Thrust at his Breast, he Timed” me and wounded me in the Mouth; we took another turn, I took a little better care, and gave him a Thrust in the body, which made him very angry; he came upon me very boldly, some of the Spectators cryed stand your Ground, I wished them in my Place, then I gave him a Thrust in the Belly, he then darted [threw] his Sword at me, I Parried it, he went and lay down on his Coat and spake none…. His Commerads were glad he was off the Stage, for he was very troublesome.

Later when a quartermaster took 10 crowns and some earrings off of one of McBane’s girls, McBane challenged from to battle, but could not avail, as he recounted

Then we took a Turn … but I could make nothing of him, so we took Breath a little, and fell to it again and Closed one another, and secured one another’s Swords, but none of us
could get Advantage of another; we had Five such Turns, but could make nothing of it, we were Four or Five Times through [each] others Shirts, but could not draw Blood.

The quartermaster was an Irish fencing master who then returned the earrings and “As for the Money we agreed to Drink it and let the Whore work for more.”

At the siege of a citadel near Tournai, McBane was put in charge of 6 cannon and 16 men. When the French fired their own cannon and

With one Shot they Killed Forty-eight Men, I Escaped the Shot, but one of the Heads of the Men that was Shot, knocked me down, and all his Brains came round my Head, I being half Senseless put up my Hand to my Head, and finding the Brains, cryed to my Neighbour that all my Brains were knock’d out; he said were your Brains out you could not speak.

At the end of his career in the military, he returned to England, took up a new wife and ran a school and alehouse in London. Debuting at 50, he fought 37 times at the Bear Garden with the backsword.

The last notable battle was in 1726 in Edinburgh when an Irish swordsman, Andrew O’Byran arrived in town and challenging all comers. The Duke of Hamilton and Duke of Argyle sent for McBane and asked him to take it up if he thought himself able. McBane responded by taking up a claymore and swinging it whistling through the air.

The bout was staged in St. Anne’s Yards at the back of the palace with McBane as the victor, who “gave him Seven Wounds, and broke his Arm with the Falchion, this I did at the Request of several Noblemen and Gentlemen. But not being Sixty-three Years of Age, resolves never to Fight any more, but to Repent for my Wickedness.”

From McBane’s book:

“‘Tis less Dangerous to Retire, than to Advance upon your Adversary, and not at all Scandalous, for you may Time him every time he advances, and so get the better, by Disabling his Sword Arm, Hand or Wrist.”

“Command your Temper and you will do much better, than if you give way to your Passion; and if you do Command it, and are Engaged with a Person who can not, you will have very much the Advantage of him, for his Passion will make him Play wild and wide, and consequently exposes himself to be Hit very often, wheras your thoughts not being in Hurry and Confusion, you may Defend your self with ease and judgement, and take an Advantage readily when ever you have a mind, you are the more capable of doing this, because your Strength, Mind and Spirit are not Spent or Exhausted.”

Info from Kircher’s very good The Deadliest Men.

Born in 1815 near Port Mehon on Menorca in Spain’s Balearic he sailed to the Artic and Africa until settling in New Orleans as a bouncer.

The New Orleans of the 1830s-1840s saw an average of a duel a day, sometimes up to ten, to the point where spectators commented that the grass under the Oaks should be stained red.

Many attended salles d’armes to better their chances on those streets of honor and violence and Llulla’s master, L’Alouette soon appointed Llulla as his assistant. Llulla was impeccable with the rapier, saber, broadsword, bowie knife, pistol or rifle, with his friends letting him shoot pipes out of their mouths.

Llulla (who succeeded L’Alouette in the school after publically beat him with wooden Bowie knives) took up a variety of business pursuits – a bar, grocery, slaughterhouses, cattle, real estate, flatboats, a sawmill, etc., until he built a fortune and bough the island of Grand Terre.

He engaged in duel some 20 to 30 times and acted as a second in more than 100 duels and generally met every other challenge perfectly, taking on European fencing masters, to assassins, sailors, mobs, foreign champions, etc., all without defeat. However, by the end of his life, he claimed only two men had died at his hands.

He died of natural causes on March 6, 1888. His grave is in St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery.

She was born in 1670, in the gay and vicious France of the ancien regime, and her given name is not known. Her father, Monsieur d’Aubigny, secretary to the Comte d’Armagnae, was a dashing fellow, known to be “as brave as steel” – it was said he feared neither God, man, nor the devil, and was equally adept with cards, women, and the sword.

She was described as tall and athletic, with blue eyes, dark auburn hair, very white skin, and “perfect” breasts, and had a beautiful singing voice. At 14 or 15 she seduced her father’s employer, the count, and through him was introduced to Paris society and the royal court.

Later she ran off with a fencing master, Serranes, whose swordplay was more to her liking. She then became a professional contralto singer at the music academy of Pierre Gaultier.

At the Opera she noticed a pretty blonde and seduced her. When her parents shipped the girl off to a convert, La Maupin joined the convent herself to continue the relationship. After an older nun died, La Maupin set her room on fire and escaped with the girl. A few months later she sent the girl home. For this, the Parliament of Aix published an edict condemning her to be burnt at the stake. This was later commuted by the king, who said he could not see turning someone so talented, lovely and wanton to ashes.

Soon thereafter she had a duel with D’Albert, whom she stabbed through. She took a liking to him however, and they began a long-term, off-and-on relationship.

Next she took up with singer Gabriel-Vincent Thevenard. She debuted in the Paris Opera in 1691 as Pallas Athena in Cadmus et Hermione and was lauded as the most beautiful woman in the company.

La Maupin frequently dressed as a man (to better woo the ladies). While attended a ball at the Palais Royal hosted by the king’s brother, she took it upon herself to kiss and attractive marquise, whereupon the ladies 3 suitors demanded she leave. She agreed, as long as they all faced her on the street outside. She defeated them all easily.

Her affairs next too her to Brussels where she became the pampered mistress of Maximilian Emanuel, the Elector of Bavaria. After a year, he switched his affections to a countess and tried to pay Maupin off with 40,000 francs, which she threw in the count’s face. After travels in Spain, where she worked as a chambermaid, she returned to the Paris Opera in 1698 and was reunited with d’Albert.

There are different versions of the rest of her life. One is that she settled down with d’Albert and lived happily ever after. Another is that d’Albert went to prison for killing a man in a duel, got out and married the Mademoiselle de Montigny, leaving La Maupin to swear off men and enter a convent where she soon (presumably bored) died at 37.