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Notes -
Not pre-firearm, and I'll try to dig up a primary source later, but I've read in several books and heard from numerous Civil War Reenactor lectures when I was a kid, that American Civil war soldiers often refused to use Bayonets, preferring to club each other with the butt ends of their rifles, so as to avoid conscious guilt for having killed another human. A reenactor would frequently quote a letter to us that went something like "I hit them with the butt of the gun, so if I have to answer to the Lord I can say I just knocked him out."
We do have evidence of Pre-Modern armies engaging in warfare that relied on non-violent shows of skill and ability. And one must keep in mind that before the gunpowder era armies were rarely, if ever, made up of peasantry. They were typically an upper or upper-middle class endeavor. Even Rome and Sparta, famed for their citizen armies, were societies in which citizens were nearer the top of the pyramid than they were to the slaves at the bottom.
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