Medieval tournaments – Jousting Knights

Medieval Tournaments

A style of staged combat in the Middle Ages is typically referred to as a tournament, or tourney. Roger of Hoveden gave the most definitive description of tournaments, as a way to carry out military exercises in order to sharpen one’s game and show off their skills to one another, instead of as a hostile act; it is practiced throughout the history of war. However, before the 11th century, Europe did not know the properly dictated style of tournament. A French baron called Geoffroi de Preulli seemingly invented tournaments – according to his peers’ testimonials – in 1066; multiple sources have his rather gruesome killing on record.

Henry II, in the 12th century, saw the tournament become so often practiced that he deemed it necessary to put a stop to it, sa it assembled too many knights in arms and barons in the same place. He decreed in 1299 that those who arranged tournaments without express license from the royal king would be put to death, horse and harness seized from them as well as that final punishment. Restraint became even more necessary with the fear that knights would barter their skills, their integral steeds, and their duties to go to a far off place that simply offered food, since the tournament was becoming known for feasting. Not unlike modern sportsmen, jousters went on tour to other lands, challenging and being challenged.

Joustings became commonplace at certain royal ceremonies like royal weddings and coronations almost as often as the peasant banquet and the mintrelsy, fixing intself firmly as a stable in most Middle Ages celebrations. Princely hosts would gather together brave company to maintain an open house and defend their castle’s honor in these ceremonies, bringing back the glories of the Round Table. Brand new statues for the sport were released in the form of the Statute of Arms for Tournaments in 1292, by request of England’s earls and barons. It became forbidden to use pointed swords or daggers, clubs, or maces. Only squires appointed to a knight could raise him if he were fallen. Princes and earls would form a court of honor that would be the only forum for settling disputes.

These new rules were deemed necessary after the events of Rochester in 1251; there, English knights beat the foreign knights so badly that they sought refuge in the nearby city instead. While en route, they were harassed by another group of knights for actions taken at a previous tournament, being beaten and thrashed; these unsportsmanlike actions had to be stopped. Many tournaments were merely avenues for horsemen to show off their skills as far back as the 13th century. 1278’s Jousts of Peace at Windsor Park saw whalebone and paper sword blades instead of traditional steel. The knights wore boiled leather helmets and bore wooden shields. Even with these changes, tournaments were rough. There have been tales of many noble knights wounded and killed at these tournaments.

People began to use blunt lance points, and those were soon replaced by the coronall head by the beginning of the 14th century. Starting in 1400, armor began to be developed specifically for the tournament, carrying defenses created just for the games. Jousts, however, became a lot less dangerous and lost the sense of danger once the tilt was developed; the tilt was initially just a stretched cloth over the lists. Soon that cloth evolved into hardy wood, and by the 16th century, a knight’s game was fairly clear of danger. A knight became an invincible tub of metal who could barely see more than a small bit of his opponent, much less anything else in front of him, while the riders rode past each other with a thick barrier between them. Since the blunted lance was carried on the far side of the tilt, it hit at an angle on thick, polished metal plates. There was the occasional bad accident, but bloodshed quickly became a rare thing in 16th century tournaments.

From the very beginning, a tournament was meant to extoll the virtues of noblemen, and on the European continent those qualifications were held more strictly than in England, and no one but the noble class could participate in the joust. German tournaments had problems frequently with the validity of a candidate for admission’s claim to nobility, which would get settled with some sort of loose declaration that some ancestor of theirs had participated in a tournament before.