A British officer was once cashiered for refusing to duel
Duelling was illegal across Europe, yet in 1814 a British officer was court-martialled and thrown out of the army for failing to challenge a man who had publicly insulted him. Killing in a duel counted as murder in England, but courts rarely punished it, and honour often mattered more than law.
The point of a duel was not necessarily to kill but to obtain satisfaction, proving one would risk death for one's honour. The formal duel grew out of the medieval judicial duel, when knights settled disputes by combat before a judge, and from older customs such as the Viking holmgang. The Church frowned on both kinds, and the Fourth Lateran Council condemned judicial duels in 1215, though German lands of the Holy Roman Empire still held them as late as the 15th century.
Renaissance Italy produced the first published duelling code, and France the first national one. Between the late 1580s and the 1620s roughly 10,000 French people, mostly nobles, died in duels. Louis XIII banned the practice in 1626 and Louis XIV pressed harder, yet French officers still fought about 10,000 duels between 1685 and 1716, with over 400 deaths. In 1777 Irish gentlemen meeting at Clonmel drew up twenty-six rules meant to be kept inside a pistol case for settling disputes over procedure.
English duellists switched from swords to pistols around 1770, while continental rivals kept fencing longer. Seconds, chosen friends, tried to negotiate a settlement and, failing that, organised the encounter. In America, Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804, and between 1798 and the Civil War the US Navy lost two-thirds as many officers to duels as to combat at sea, among them the naval hero Stephen Decatur. Fear of ridicule for refusing a challenge kept the custom alive, especially in the South.
What finally ended it was public opinion rather than statutes. Enlightenment manners prized restraint, better policing calmed street violence, and a rising middle class defended its reputation through libel suits and newspaper letters. Utilitarians and evangelical campaigners, including anti-slavery activists of the Clapham Sect, condemned duelling as vain and ungodly. English duels had largely vanished by the 1850s, and those on the Continent had dwindled by about 1900, a decline researchers link to stronger states.
Source: Duel
