Reviewing all that has gone before, it is clear that notwithstanding its emblematic importance, duelling as mode of settling differences between gentlemen was not a particularly common phenomenon. At best it was located within very specific sections of gentlemanly society. Certainly, this was so by the later eighteenth century. In London duelling found a place among the troublesome, and to a degree antipatriarchal, young metro politan elite and for a short time was adopted by a rather limited number of aspiring men of the legal and then medical professionals. The duel followed such men out to the places of their rural recreation, to the sporting venues and the hunting grounds. There they quarrelled with each other or occasionally with the small numbers of like-minded gentlemen at the very top of rural society; men with intimate connections to London and to the militia.

However, the duel did not succeed in recommending itself to those who were prosperous and yet below the level of these county leaders and it did not succeed in establishing itself in the older market towns or in the expanding centres of manufacture. The natural home of the duel lay in the military. Outside of London then, it was the dispersal of military officers which in great measure determined both the frequency and the geographic distribution of duelling. However, as the Chapter 10 suggests, even within the military there was always an important constituency opposed to duelling. Although the sensibilities of the mess sometimes cajoled men into combat habitual duellists were deeply unpopular. There were many officers who were never challenged and who never duelled, and others who when challenged resorted to military tribunal. There were others who did duel, despite their personal judgement, because they felt impelled to do so.

Yet despite both the danger and the manifest illegality of duelling, it endured; in doing so, it served, for a time, to legitimate social difference. The possibility of being called to the field, the privileges and hazards of honour, justified claims to a bodily autonomy that was denied to other members of society.