From James Buchan’s Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (as nice an example of limpid prose as you could ask for, by the way) comes the following.
Sir William Petty, when challenged to a duel in Ireland by Sir Aleyn Brodrick, readily accepted, though he was so short-sighted as to be purblind. He merely asked for choice of weapons and selected, according to Evelyn and Aubrey, ‘an hatchet or Axe in a darke cellar.’
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I thought that in general, duelling tradition grants the recipient of a challenge the privilege of selecting location and weapons….
I heard once that Ben Franklin responded to a duel challenge by selecting “buckets of shit at dawn.” I hope this is true.
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