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The first document of German heritage which shows fencing techniques is the Royal Armouries Ms.I.33, which was written around 1300.The next documents date from approximately a century later, when records of the tradition attributed to the 14th-century master Johannes Liechtenauer begin to appear.
Fencing has a long history with universities and schools for at least 500 years. At least one style of fencing, Mensur in Germany, is practiced only within academic fraternities. Mensur is unique in its focus on ritualized dueling, where participants engage in controlled bouts designed to test their courage, endurance, and skill without the ...
For this reason, the focus of HEMA is de facto on the period of the half-millennium of ca. 1300 to 1800, with a German, Italian, and Spanish school flowering in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (14th to 16th centuries), followed by French, English, and Scottish schools of fencing in the modern period (17th and 18th centuries).
Roughly 300 fencing fraternities (Studentenverbindungen) still exist today and most of them are grouped into umbrella organizations such as the Corps, Landsmannschaft or the Deutsche Burschenschaft (DB) in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and several other European nations.
Academic fencing (German: akademisches Fechten) or Mensur is the traditional kind of fencing practiced by some student corporations (Studentenverbindungen) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, and, to a minor extent, in Belgium, Lithuania, and Poland.
Emergence of Corps in Europe. Corps (or Korps; "das ~" , German pronunciation: (sg.), [ˈkoːɐs] (pl.)) are the oldest still-existing kind of Studentenverbindung, Germany's traditional university corporations; their roots date back to the 15th century. The oldest corps still existing today was founded in 1789.
Later in the 15th century, parts of these verses become widely known, and by the 16th century are incorporated into the general tradition of German fencing. The term zedel is used in the manuscripts associated with the Society of Liechtenauer in the mid-15th century. Its earliest known use found in Cod. 44 A 8 (dated 1452, fol. 9v):
Joachim Meyer (ca. 1537–1571) was a self-described Freifechter (literally, Free Fencer) living in the then Free Imperial City of Strasbourg in the 16th century and the author of a fechtbuch Gründtliche Beschreibung der Kunst des Fechtens (in English, Thorough Descriptions of the Art of Fencing) first published in 1570.