This chapter presents a short introduction to different types of written sources referring to the fighting practices of the medieval period: Geoffroi de Charny’s and Hans Talhoffer’s discussions of laws and conventions relating to fighting, accounts of judicial duels between a man and a woman and two men-at-arms, and descriptions of fighting technique in the manuals or “fight books” of Hans Talhoffer and Paulus Kal. The examples offered, all concerned with conventionally recognised forms of combat, are discussed in terms of what they may reveal of the actual practices or the technical knowledge governing such practice, and of the significance of the fighting activities they describe to the people writing about them.