Victorian HEMA pioneers staged historical fencing in London and Brussels

The Kernoozers Club began in London in 1881 with a very modern-seeming premise: study old weapons, then turn that research into public fighting. The group lasted until 1922, and its roll call reads like an early HEMA hall of fame, with Egerton Castle, Sir Richard Burton, Walter Pollock and Frederick Pollock among its prominent members, while Alfred Hutton moved in the same circle. Baron de Cosson, the club’s first president, owned antique fechtschwerter that Hutton copied for public displays, a detail that still looks familiar to anyone who has watched scholarship turn into stage combat and then into a live demonstration.

That sequence matters because the Kernoozers were not simply collectors posing with relics. HROARR’s account shows a club that started with arms and armour, then widened its lens to the combat of earlier eras, turning private study into a public-facing martial identity. The same pattern still drives HEMA clubs today: research in one room, drills in another, and a crowd-pleasing show or bout table somewhere else. The late-Victorian version was already doing all three.

Hutton took that mix to Brussels in a production he described as Fencing through the Ages. The event ran at the Theatre de la Monnaie on 21 May 1894 and was presented by the Cercle d’Escrime of Brussels. It was built as ten short scenes, moving from the Middle Ages to near the present day, and the program was broad enough to feel like a compressed survey of European martial culture. Audiences got judicial duels, a medieval tournament, a fifteenth-century Venetian market fight, the Duel of the Mignons, Musketeers versus Cardinal Richelieu’s guard, and an eighteenth-century smallsword scene featuring the Knight of Eon and Angelo.

Hutton’s London Rifle Brigade fencers were part of the cast, but they were not the whole act. The show drew on an earlier Paris production that had already made a splash, which is another detail modern practitioners will recognize: the successful historical fencing event is rarely just a competition or just a reenactment. It is a hybrid, and by 1894 the formula was already set. Research supplied the material, performers supplied the physical proof, and the audience got a clear narrative of how one era’s swordplay became the next era’s spectacle.