Feuding was a custom in many German-speaking lands well into the seventeenth century. Though the legal Fehde was criminalized in 1495, the practice continued to be widespread at the end the sixteenth century. I suggest five broad chronological patterns governing interpersonal violence. First, we see a continuation of the legal institution of the Fehde in the first half of the sixteenth century. Matters were considerably worsened by the Reformation. This was followed by a period of peace following the Religious Peace of Augsburg. But an explosion of elite violence in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, which peaked only in the 1610s, points to a third phase. There are grounds for thinking that the adoption of duelling by the elite formed part of a general pattern of rising violence in this period. The boom in litigation after 1555 is therefore indicative less of a decline than of growing social strains and conflict. The upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War altered the emotional field and privatised violence. The final phase suggests that the civil war had long-term effects and that elite violence, in particular, was only gradually brought under control during the early decades of the eighteenth century.