Using a PISTOL in a SWORD fight

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use a pistol in a sword fight?

[00:00:03]Well, it actually appears in a number of fencing manuals. So, I'm going to take you through some of the history of it, and we're going to look at some practical application during some sparring. Let's go.

[00:00:13][laughter] [music] >> Hi, I'm Nick Thomas. Welcome back to the AHF. And today we're looking at using pistols in a sword fight. And the first question is, well, why? Well, hopefully it's kind of obvious is that it increases your chances of survival is that a pistol is very very useful and compared to say using an offhand weapon such as a dagger, you can shoot somebody at slightly longer range than they can hit you with a sword or a bayut.

[00:00:49]>> Now, it's a popular idea that guns led to the decline or obsolescence of edged weapons and swords. The reality is actually quite different. So firearms became incredibly common on the battlefield and in civilian life in the 16th century. They did exist before that, but 16th century is when they became incredibly common. And the reality is swords in some regards became a little bit more useful as firearms became more common. And that's because firearms lead to a decrease in armor.

[00:01:15]And if you have a decrease in armor, swords become more useful than they were when more people were wearing armor.

[00:01:25]And so there's this kind of time period from the 16th century ranging up to the late 19th and even just into the 20th century. So several centuries where swords and pistols and musketss and rifles existed alongside one another and supported one another very very successfully. One not necessarily replacing the other.

[00:01:52]Now, pistols come in various forms. You get wheel locks early on, moving on to flint locks, percussion caps, and eventually you end up with things like cap and ball revolvers as well. So, in the mid- 19th century, you get repeating revolvers and moving on to cased ammunition revolvers. So, these were getting quite advanced then and increasingly the swords become less useful.

[00:02:14]>> [laughter] >> So during the period where swords were used with uh pistols for the most part they were singleshot throughout most of the history. So that's what we're going to assume for this video today. So we're looking at manuals such as Michael Hunt which is sort of rapier and pistol and Pringle Green which is Cutless and Pistol or Saber. Yeah.

[00:02:32][laughter] speaking.

[00:02:39][laughter] >> So, a singleshot pistol that gives you one chance to end your opponent. Or if you're in a twoon-one type situation, which we're going to cover a lot as the video goes on, it could be the great equalizer.

[00:02:57]>> Come on, Derek.

[00:02:59]>> A twoon-one situation is frankly very difficult to deal with. three-on-one even worse, your chances become increasingly dire. So, if you can take out one of your attackers instantly, that gives you a massive advantage in the fight. Now, you might think, why didn't you discharge your pistol at a greater range? Well, let's remember it is single shot. So, once you fired it, unless you've got roughly 20 to 30 seconds to go and reload it, you're not going to have a firearm available to you for the next moment. So, if you're going into a quick encounter, uh, quick battle, quick fight skirmish, bay at charge, siege combat, all these kind of things, you're going to get one chance.

[00:03:35]They're not the most accurate, and you're going to be using it in your off hand because as a swordsman, you're going to want to use your dominant hand for your sword cuz that's the one you're genuinely skilled. So, pistols in your left hand, it's non-dominant, which means you're going to be less effective with it, less accurate with it. And also, these situations are panics. This is not on a firing range where you've got time to carefully aim your shots.

[00:03:58]You're going to be under pressure. Your heart's going to be beating.

[00:04:00]Adrenaline's going to be flowing through your body. You've got opponents that are moving around and doing erratic things.

[00:04:06]So, you aren't necessarily going to be super accurate. So, if you save it to point blank range, you massively increases your chance of actually hitting your target. Let's not forget that there were pocket pistols increasingly popular in the 18th century and into the 19th which could viably be carried with something like a small sword or a hanger. So with the history covered of why we might use pistols in a sword fight the reality is because they're useful. How do we then represent it when we're actually sparring? Because that presents some issues. So the natural thing most people would look to would be something like Nerf darts which hit incredibly light and you can't feel in our sparring equipment in our protective gear. uh the sea rubber band guns which are sort of interesting but you don't see them in this country and they present some dangers to people without masks that are in the area in a small confined space. So the solution I came up with is this. So this is a Nerf product but it is designed to throw tennis balls. So it's designed to launch tennis balls for your dog and it throws these half-sized tennis balls. Beauty of these is they hit with a good thump. So even in your sparring gear, you can actually feel it, but they don't have massive distance that they endanger people or they're so small that they can endanger sort of the audience's eyes and stuff like that. So this for me is the kind of sweet spot between hitting hard enough that we know we've been hit, but safe enough for the people in the surrounding environment. Now, I had to make a few modifications to this to make it actually work because we're wearing, of course, bulky sparring gloves. So I had to increase the um the pistol grip and remove the trigger guard to make it practical for our applications. But this works well. I'm not saying it's the prettiest solution, but it is quick, dirty, safe, does the job really, really well. I think it really actually works for these games incredibly well, and it is difficult to get the right tool for this kind of job with all things considered. So, we start off our games with the Michael Hunt style rapier and pistol. So, this will be a wheel lock pistol. So, that's a different kind of lock to this flint lock, but ultimately the weapon itself will work much the same way in terms of firing a single musket or pistol ball. And this is basically used in a situation where you think you are simply not as good as your opponents. You want to get one up on them. You don't think you can beat them in a sword fight. They've got rapier and dagger. Pull out your pistol and in close combat, you just engage them and shoot them. So, we played this scenario out many, many times. And it's really quite funny. Now, throughout these games, we had a simple rule for the pistol that if you hit in the torso or the head, that was considered a kill shot. And if you hit in the arms, that arm became disabled. If you hit in the leg, you had to go down to one knee.

[00:06:30]What that's simulating is there are a lot of accounts where people were hit by musk balls that in the moment in the adrenaline they don't necessarily notice in just in a short distance that they might get into a sword fight and that's what it's representing. So it's kind of a way to do it in a simple way. Oh, shoot him.

[00:06:47]Yeah.

[00:06:50]Get him. [laughter] [laughter] Oh, too slow.

[00:07:24]>> [music] >> Hallelujah.

[00:07:35][laughter] [music] [screaming] [laughter] >> [music] >> So, is the pistol an advantage over the dagger in this fight? Well, so long as you're accurate with that single shot you've got, absolutely. And in terms of those wounding shots, you could obviously viably think you won't necessarily want to kill your opponent because if you actually, you know, kill somebody you put put on charge for murder, you know, that's not exactly ideal. So, you might want to try and take someone down with a leg shot, for example, so you remove the threat without actually killing your opponent.

[00:08:18]And there's a really nice example of that here.

[00:08:26]>> Finish him.

[00:08:29]>> YEAH. MOVING ON TO the Pringle Green section. So, this is using sort of cutless or sabers with the pistol exactly as I'm showing here. There's actually a lot in this manual about using pistols in terms of which between the two cutless and pistol you should have on you when you board a ship and when you should draw the pistol, how you should use it, how you should then use it as a parrying device after you've fired. He talks about it an awful lot, but the basic use of it in terms of shooting is he actually shows a plate from a hanging guard taking on a musket and bayonet and firing underneath the hanging guard. And you can see, you know, up against a musket which has, you know, musket and bayonet has significant range advantage in close combat. This could absolutely be the equalizer.

[00:09:13]Let's go.

[00:09:42]Oh, >> now we moved on to some two ones and that's a really interesting scenario where we see again can it be the equalizer when you're up against it, when you're really up against the odds.

[00:10:14]So, we did it against swords. We went against musket and bayut. So, imagine you're an officer or a sailor with your cutless or saber and a pistol and you're having to fight an infantryman with his musket and bayut and maybe a sergeant or officer that's with him with a sword.

[00:10:32]Nice.

[00:10:47]Nice.

[00:11:05]Come on.

[00:11:16]Steven.

[00:11:17]Oh no.

[00:11:50]Nice.

[00:12:05]Come on, Sam.

[00:12:10]Oh, Sam.

[00:12:21]Heat.

[00:12:45]Heat.

[00:13:15]Yeah.

[00:13:41]Now, this is a chaotic scenario, and of course, we can't necessarily represent the fear of going up against pistol because assuming the muskets's already fired, so they're just in basically close combat mode and they know that your pistol is loaded, they might be very, very fearful to get close.

[00:13:55]Remembering that the closer that you get, the more dangerous this becomes because the closer you are, the less the accuracy is an issue. And when you shoot these kind of muzzle loaders, they project a massive amount of flame from the barrel. It's another reason that muzzle loaders are extremely dangerous, even when basically fireing dry, fireing blank. So, I've got a lot of experience firing muzzle loaders and they jet several feet of flame and burn in embers from the wadin as out of the barrel. So, you would not want to get anywhere near close to this. Now, in the two-on-one situations, of course, you're more likely to panic cuz you can't calmly deal with a single opponent. You're having to go back and forth. They've got different weapon combinations. You're trying to assess which is the more dangerous of them, which you'd rather take out of the fight. And you can see some really chaotic stuff going on here where the pistol user just simply misses their target or maybe they strike an arm or a leg when they could have actually got a, you know, a more severe blow. And you'll notice in some of the exchanges, the uh the person going up against the pistol does actually panic cuz they see the pistol aimed at them and they back away. There is actually that fear factor. And this is actually quite nice is that people are actually getting it into their mindset that they really don't want to be shot.

[00:15:06]>> [laughter] >> And so there you have it. Using swords along with pistols in a sword fight.

[00:15:12]It's recorded in fencing treaties. It's recorded in many firsthand accounts of combat. If you look at Kinsley's swordsman of the British Empire, you'll find accounts of pistol and sword being used. Even double barrel pistol and sword being used, which is rather snazzy. I think it's quite a fascinating topic and it's an extra element that you rarely ever see introduced into hea.

[00:15:30]It's like bayets, for example. So many saber practitioners only ever fight saber versus saber. If you're a saber practitioner trying to do military saber, you should have some fairly regular experience against the musket and bayock. It's the thing you'd actually expect to have to face more often than a matched weapon. So using pistols in a sword fight, yes, introduces a whole new mechanic, a whole new fear factor, a whole different aspect of the timing and distance work.

[00:15:55]It actually is really, really fascinating. And you absolutely could simulate this in all sorts of ways. You could use a Nerf dart gun for example, as long as you aren't wearing too much protective gear. So if you wanted to repeat this experiment on a cheaper, simpler, easier level, just get a Nerf um dart gun and use, you know, go now um foam type sabers or similar and you'll be able to repeat something similar quite successfully. I hope you enjoyed the video. This was some really fun shenanigans for our bank holiday Monday of just having a good bit of fun with something that is actually in the sources and a bit of a blast. Thanks for watching. Please like and subscribe if you haven't already. And remember, we have channel memberships if you'd like to support our channel, but there's no pressure to do so. I really hope you enjoyed this video. I'll see you in another one.

[00:16:38][music] >> [music]