Some of you may recall in one of my articles I pointed out how the rapier --originally a common street fighting weapon yet supposedly a weapon associated with the upper classes, was used in the Master's Prize Playing by a London guild member as early as 1568. Well, I have found another interesting account even earlier of its use by another commoner, that again predates prior beliefs the weapon was introduced to England in 1570 by Italian teachers.
In 1567, the seventeen-year-old Edward de Vere, the future 17th Earl of Oxford, while practicing fencing with Edward Baynam, a tailor, in the backyard of his guardian's mansion in the Strand, accidentally wounded an unarmed undercook named Thomas Brincknell with a rapier thrust to the thigh. Brincknell died the next day.
A crooked jury later determined Brincknell who was drunk had caused his own death and had committed "suicide" by "wilfully hurling himself on de Vere's rapier."
So, interestingly, besides Henry VIII's armory inventory from 1547 that mentions "Raperes of sondrie sorts" (and excluding a 1549 Sussex homicide with a rapier by a Dutch sailor), this is the earliest reference so far to the rapier's actual use in England. A young nobleman apparently being taught rapier by a common tailor? It certainly fits in with our knwoledge that the London Company of Masters was already using it for Prizings by the late 1560s.
Details will be in my new book next year. (don't ask when, I don't know)
JC
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