Before MMA, Taekwondo etc what was there?

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  2. Unarmed, it was Queensbury Rules boxing. Armed, various kinds of sword-fighting remained popular among wealthier parts of society through to 1900. “Brawling”, or unarmed combat with no formal set of rules, moves, or restrictions, was and still is common.

  3. Milwall Bricks, Glasgow Kisses. That sort of thing.

    Didn’t you ever see Scum?

  4. Back in the day I can remember rival school gangs would turn up 2 a pre- destined location which tended 2 b a school field. So imagine these two groups all ganged on up huddled 2gether as I suppose they were representing their ends as some may say now. I used 2 enjoy watching fights when I was younger abs no style or technique just some were hardcore and u could tell the ones who felt proud 2 b called “hard” back then but that was proper fighting that was. Front page in the paper “school bloodbath” the youth these days never struggle

  7. Bareknuckle boxing was very well regarded by practitioners of those eastern martial arts

  9. Before MMA and taekwondo, karate and judo were popular. Before then it was probably just boxing.

  10. Anachronistically historians and nerds call it “historical martial arts” which lumps together things like Fencing, Classical fencing, Savate, Boxing, Catch wrestling, Wrestling, Combat Hopak, and academic fencing.

  14. Europe was historically more of the armed combat rather than unarmed persuasion. The prevalence of people carrying at least a knife if not a sword meant we didn’t invest in Asian style martial arts. There are however lots of medieval books on how to fight with stabby things.

    Look up HEMA. Historical European martial arts.

  18. Jousting on horseback fell out of fashion after Henry VIII suffered injury. Then his successors didn’t revive those tournaments, but switched to burning people alive. Then gunpowder was introduced.

  27. We just used to go windmilling in…and if you had a set of keys, make em count

  31. Chucking a Stella glass across the pub closely followed by a bar stool.

  32. Pub fighting.

    A traditional mix of poor wrestling technique, spammed overhand rights and broken glass all over the place.

  33. Lancashire, Devonshire and Cumberland wrestling come to mind, basically submission and hold based grappling, which developed into catch-as-catch-can which then developed into pro-wrestling!

  34. Fists or if it was serious anything you could lay your hands on, ash trays, chairs, tables, household pets, sex toys anything you could beat a man half to death with.

  35. I read a very interesting post on Cora just yesterday. The guys kind of a amateur expert I think. He was explaining about bare knuckle boxing etc. According to him, bare knuckle boxing with closed or open hand also including some throws was part of fencing which was all related to dueling and honor .

    It was also of course related to self-defense and physical fighting would be used in order to allow you to get to your weapons, but anyway, when fencing was taught it included swords of various types, cudgel, and fisticuffs. When duels were outlawed because too many people were dying, people went with hand-to-hand fighting instead, but traditionally, duels went from swords, first blood, then they would do cudgels which would be used to try to incapacitate the person by like a blow to the kidney or the head or something, and then they moved on to boxing. At least according to this guy.

    You could probably find it if you look. It was all explaining why boxers back in the day never broke their fingers because they held their fist vertical instead of horizontal, and then he went into a big long explanation. Very interesting

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