Of the several medieval definitions of the tournament given
by Du Cange (Glossarium, s.v. "Tourneamentum"),
the best is that of Roger of Hoveden, who described tournaments
as "military exercises carried out, not in the spirit
of hostility (nullo interveniente odio), but solely for practice
and the display of prowess (pro solo exercitio, atque ostentatione
virium)." Men who carry weapons have in all ages played
at the game of war in time of peace. But the tournament, properly
so called, does not appear in Europe before the 11th century,
in spite of those elaborate fictions of Ruexner's Thurnierbuch
which detail the tournament laws of Henry the Fowler. More
than one chronicler records the violent death, in 1066, of
a French baron named Geoffroi de Preulli, who, according to
the testimony of his contemporaries, "invented tournaments."
In England, at least, the tournament was counted a French
fashion, Matthew Paris calling it conflictus gallicus.
Popularity
Assorted macesBy the 12th century the tournament had grown
so popular in England that King Henry II found it necessary
to forbid the sport which gathered in one place so many barons
and knights in arms. In that age we have the famous description
by William FitzStephen of the martial games of the Londoners
in Smithfield. He tells how on Sundays in Lent a noble train
of young men would take the field well mounted, rushing out
of the city with spear and shield to ape the feats of war.
Divided into parties, one body would retreat, while another
pursued striving to unhorse them. The younger lads, he says,
bore javelins disarmed of their steel, by which we may know
that the weapon of the elders was the headed lance. William
of Newbury tells us how the young knights, balked of their
favourite sport by the royal mandate, would pass over sea
to win glory in foreign lists. Richard I relaxed his father's
order, granting licences for tournaments, and Jocelin of Brakelond
has a long story of the great company of Cavaliers who held
a tournament between Thetford and Bury St Edmunds in defiance
of the abbot. From that time onward unlicensed tourneying
was treated as an offence against the Crown, which exacted
heavy fees from all taking part in them even when a licence
had been obtained. Often the licence was withheld, as in 1255,
when the king's son's grave peril in Gascony is alleged as
a reason for forbidding a meeting. In 1299 life and limb were
declared to be forfeit in the case of those who should arrange
a tourney without the royal licence, and offenders were to
be seized with horse and harness. As the tournament became
an occasion for pageantry and feasting, new reason was given
for restraint: a simple knight might beggar himself over a
sport which risked costly horses and carried him far afield.
Jousters
Jousting is a staple entertainment at renaissance fairs.Main
article Jousting
Jousters travelled from land to land, like modern cricketers
on their tours, offering and accepting challenges. Thus Edward
I, before coming to the throne, led eighty knights to a tournament
on the Continent. Before the jousts at Windsor on St George's
Day in 1344 heralds published in France, Scotland, Burgundy,
Hainault, Flanders, Brabant and the domains of the emperor
the king's offer of safe conduct for competitors. At the weddings
of princes and magnates and at the crowning of kings the knights
gathered to the joustings, which had become as much a part
of such high ceremonies as the banquet and the minstrelsy.
The fabled glories of the Round Table were revived by princely
hosts, who would assemble a gallant company to keep open house
and hold the field against all comers, as did Mortimer, the
queen's lover, when, on the eve of his fall, he brought all
the chivalry of the land to the place where he held his Round
Table. About 1292 the "Statute of Arms for Tournaments"
laid down, "at the request of the earls and barons and
of the knighthood of England," new laws for the game.
Swords with points were not to be used, nor pointed daggers,
nor club nor mace. None was to raise up a fallen knight but
his own appointed squires, clad in his device. The squire
who offended was to lose horse and arms and lie three years
in gaol. Spectators were forbidden to arm themselves. Disputes
were to be settled by a court of honour of princes and earls.
That such rules were needful had been shown at Rochester in
1251, where the foreign knights were beaten by the English
and so roughly handled that they fled to the city for refuge.
On their way the strangers were faced by another company of
knights who handled them roughly and spoiled them, thrashing
them with staves in revenge for the doings at a Brackley tournament.
Even as early as the 13th century some of these tournaments
were mere pageants of horsemen. For the Jousts of Peace held
at Windsor Park in 1278 the sword-blades are of whalebone
and parchment, silvered; the helms are of boiled leather and
the shields of light timber. No other event lists these types
of weapons and most were fought with rebated (blunted) swords
and some with stylised wooden maces. But the game could make
rough sport. Many a tournament had its tale of killed and
wounded in the chronicle books. We read how Roger of Lemburn
struck Arnold de Montigny dead with a lance thrust under the
helm. The first of the Montagu earls of Salisbury died of
hurts taken at a Windsor jousting, and in those same lists
at Windsor the earl's grandson Sir William Montagu was killed
by his own father. William Longéspee in 1256 was so
bruised that he never recovered his strength, and he is among
many of whom the like is written.
Equipment
 Blunted
or "rebated" lance-points came early into use, and
by the 14th century the coronall or cronell head was often
fitted in place of the point. After 1400 the armourers began
to devise harness with defences specially wrought for service
in the lists. But the joust lost its chief perils with the
invention of the tilt, which, as its name imports, was at
first a cloth stretched along the length of the lists. The
cloth became a stout barrier of timber, and in the early 16th
century the knight ran his course at little risk. Locked up
in steel harness, reinforced with the grand-guard and the
other jousting pieces, he charged along one side of this barrier,
seeing little more through the pierced sight-holes of the
helm than the head and shoulders of his adversary. His bridle
arm was on the tilt-side, and thus the blunted lance struck
at an angle upon the polished plates. Mishaps might befall
Henry II of France died from the stroke of Gabriel de Montgomeri,
who failed to cast up in time the truncheon of his splintered
lance. But the 16th-century tournament was, in the main, a
bloodless meeting.
Pageantry
The Earl of Cumberland as Queen Elizabeth I's Champion, c.
1590The 15th century had seen the mingling of the tournament
and the pageant. Adventurous knights would travel far afield
in time of peace to gain worship in conflicts that perilled
life and limb, as when the Bastard of Burgundy met the Lord
Scales in 1466 in West Smithfield under the fair and costly
galleries crowded with English dames. On the first day the
two ran courses with sharp spears; on the second day they
tourneyed on horseback, sword in hand; on the third day they
met on foot with heavy pole-axes. But the great tournament
held in the market-place of Bruges, when the jousting of the
Knights of the Fleece was part of the pageant of the Golden
Tree, the Giant and the Dwarf, may stand as a magnificent
example of many such gay gatherings. When Henry VIII was scattering
his father's treasure the pageant had become an elaborate
masque. For two days after the crowning of the king at Westminster,
Henry and his queen viewed from the galleries of a fantastic
palace set up beside the tilt-yard a play in which deer were
pulled down by greyhounds in a paled park, in which the Lady
Diana and the Lady Pallas came forward, embowered in moving
castles, to present the champions. Such costly shows fell
out of fashion after the death of Henry VIII; and in England
the tournament remained, until the end, a martial sport. Sir
Henry Lee rode as Queen Elizabeth's champion in the tilt-yard
of Whitehall until his years forced him to surrender the gallant
office to that earl of Cumberland who wore the Queen's glove
pinned to the flap of his hat. But in France the tournament
lingered on until it degenerated to the carrousel, which,
originally a horseman's game in which cavaliers pelted each
other with balls, became an unmartial display when the French
king and his courtiers pranced in such array as the wardrobe-master
of the court ballets would devise for the lords of Ind and
Africk.
Nobility
The tournament was, from the first, held to be a sport for
men of noble birth, and on the Continent, where nobility was
more exactly defined than in England, the lists were jealously
closed to all combatants but those of the privileged class.
In the German lands, questions as to the purity of the strain
of a candidate for admission to a noble chapter are often
settled by appeal to the fact that this or that ancestor had
taken part in a tournament. Konrad Grunenberg's famous heraldic
manuscript shows us the Helmschau that came before the German
tournament of the 15th century--the squires carrying each
his master's crested helm, and a little scutcheon of arms
hanging from it, to the hall where the king of arms stands
among the ladies and, wand in hand, judges each blazon. In
England several of those few rolls of arms which have come
down to us from the Middle Ages record the shields displayed
at certain tournaments.
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