Stick-fighting

Stick-fighting, stickfighting, or stick fighting, is a variety of martial arts which use blunt, hand-held "sticks" for fighting, most typically a simple, non-lethal, wooden staff or baton. Schools of stick-fighting exist for a variety of weapons, including gun staffs, bō, jō, bastons, and arnis sticks, among others. Cane-fighting is the use of walking sticks as improvised weapons. Some techniques can also be used with a sturdy umbrella or even with a sword or dagger still in its scabbard.

Thicker and/or heavier blunt weapons such as clubs or the mace are outside the scope of stick-fighting (since they cannot be wielded with the necessary precision, relying on the sheer force of impact for stopping power instead), as are more distinctly-shaped weapons such as the taiaha^{[citation needed]} used by the Māori people of New Zealand, and the macuahuitl used by the Aztec people of Mesoamerica in warfare.

Although many systems are defensive combat techniques intended for use if attacked while lightly armed, others such as kendo, arnis, and gatka were developed as safe training methods for dangerous weapons. Whatever their history, many stick-fighting techniques lend themselves to being treated as sports.

In addition to systems specifically devoted to stick-fighting, certain other disciplines include it, either in its own right, as in the Tamil martial art silambam, or merely as part of a polyvalent training including other weapons and/or bare handed fighting, as in Kerala's kalaripayattu tradition, where these wooden weapons serve as preliminary training before practice of the more dangerous metal weapons.

Traditional European systems of stick-fighting included a wide variety of methods of quarterstaff combat, which were detailed in numerous manuscripts written by masters-at-arms. Many of these methods became extinct but others adapted and survived as folk-sports and self-defence systems. Examples include France's canne de combat or la canne, England's single stick, Portugal's jogo do pau, Poland's palcat, the juego del palo of the Canary Islands, Ireland's shillelagh, Italy's scherma di bastone. Giuseppe Cerri's 1854 manual Trattato teorico e pratico della scherma di bastone is influenced by masters of the Italian school of swordsmanship, Achille Marozzo and perhaps Francesco Alfieri.

Walking sticks feature heavily in non-lethal self-defense from the beginning of the modern era onward, being a hardy and lightweight stick-fighting option the user is already expected to carry around on a daily basis. A stick is preferable to unarmed combat for all but the most skilled civilians, and the techniques necessary for cane-fighting can frequently carry over wholesale from one's experience with European schools of sword fencing.

The period of 1604 to 1904 can be considered the heyday of cane-fighting in Britain, stretching from the recognition of self defense in English law through to the publishing of the first work on jujitsu, marking a paradigm shift toward hand-to-hand techniques. In addition to the practicality of defending oneself in cramped, urban conditions, the walking stick's wide fashionability in the 19th century also established stick-fighting as the gentleman's choice of martial art. Derivative inventions like the swordstick attempted to capitalize on this, but could be seen as a cowardly concealment of one's true weapon while simultaneously compromising the existing non-lethal uses of the cane.

The French system of la canne ("the cane") was developed to meet similar non-lethal needs, and is still practiced as a competitive sport. A self-defense adaptation of la canne developed by Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny in the early 1900s has been revived as part of the curriculum of contemporary bartitsu.