If Simpson's ‘dandelion’ hypothesis is to be discarded, as I am afraid it must be, then a contrary hypothesis suggests itself: that duelling disappeared not because the middle were adopting it to the alarm of the elite, but because the middle were resolutely opposed to it and imposed their will upon their betters. The belief that the demise of duelling can be ascribed to the rise of a new commercial middle class, whose values were (allegedly) necessarily antithetical to the culture of honour, has gained broad acceptance. Donna Andrew has suggested that:

According to Andrew, it was the onset of Christian commerce in place of the code of honour that served to displace the duel and the middle classes that struggled the hardest to suppress duelling, ‘thus the debate about duelling was an important element in the formation of the middle class, and the gestation of middle class culture’. Kiernan seemed to accept Andrew's argument when he declared that the abandonment of the duel was an important symptom of the decline of aristocratic hegemony. James Kelly again reiterated the argument in his work on the duel in Ireland. According to him the demise of the duel was: