Tournaments: Sport, Status, and Sudden Death
Tournaments are one of those things everyone assumes they understand from films — knights, lances, “hurrah” — and almost none of that popular picture survives contact with the actual sources.
Early tournaments, which became popular around 1170, were barely distinguishable from actual warfare: sharpened weapons, no “foul” strokes, no forbidden tactics, and groups of knights quite happily ganging up to waylay a single opponent. The only rules that existed were about honouring refuges where a knight could rest and rearm, and capturing an opponent for ransom rather than simply killing him. Fatal accidents happened anyway — in 1095, Count Henri III of Louvain invited his own vassal Jocelyn of Vorst to joust against him, Jocelyn reluctantly agreed, and the resulting blow to the chest killed the Count outright. Awkward for everyone involved.
Over the following centuries, tournaments professionalised. Mêlée combats involving twenty to two hundred and fifty contestants gradually gave way to the individual joust; armour and weapons for the tournament field began to diverge sharply from what was actually useful in real combat, becoming heavier and more specialised; and by the 15th century, tournament armour had become so expensive that some wealthy knights had to have “loaner” armour made up for their guests. The English crown eventually tried hard to regulate the whole business — Edward I limited each competitor to three armed esquires in 1292, after decades of tournaments repeatedly collapsing into actual riots (the Boston fair of 1288 famously turned into one that burned down part of the marketplace).
Financially, it was a genuine gamble: winners could claim an opponent’s horse and armour, or a ransom, while an ageing knight who could no longer win found himself sliding, quite literally, into poverty. One surviving fabliau describes a knight who lived entirely off ransom money and fell into destitution the moment he got too old to keep winning — the medieval equivalent of a sportsman who never planned for retirement.
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