[316] Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. i. p. 346.
[317] A tournament of this three-fold description took place at St. Denys, in the year 1389.
[318] The love of our ancestors for tournaments is evident in a curious passage of an ancient satirical poem, which Strutt has thus rendered:
“If wealth, Sir Knight, perchance be thine,
In tournaments you’re bound to shine;
Refuse—and all the world will swear,
You die not worth a rotten pear.”
[319] Mr. Sharon Turner (History of England, vol. i. p. 144. 4to. edit.) says, that nothing could break the custom (of holding tournaments) but the increased civilisation of the age. This is a mistake, for tournaments increased in number as the world became more civilised. There were more tournaments in the fourteenth century than in the thirteenth, and even so late as the reign of Henry VIII. the whole of England seems to have been parcelled out into tilting grounds.
[320] “De his vero qui in torneamentis cadunt, nulla quæstio est, quin vadant ad inferos, si non fuerint adjuti beneficio contritionis.” Du Cange on Joinville, Dissert. 6.
[321] Still more absurd is the story of Matthew Paris, that Roger de Toeny, a valiant knight, appeared after death to his brother Raoul, and thus addressed him: “Jam et pænas vidi malorum, et gaudio beatorum; nec non supplicia magna, quibus miser deputatus sum, oculis meis conspexi. Væ, væ mihi, quare unquam torneamenta exercui, et ea tanto studio dilexi?”
[322] Thus Lambert d’Ardres writes: “Cum omnino tunc temporis propter Dominici sepulchri peregrinationem in toto orbe, interdicta fuissent torneamenta.” Du Cange, Diss. 6. on Joinville.
[323] Du Cange calls any combat between two knights preliminary to a general battle, a joust to the utterance. He might as well have called the battle itself a joust.
[324] The agreement was made in legal form, as we learn from Wyntown. Sir David de Lindsay had a safe-conduct for his purpose, and came to London with a retinue of twenty-eight persons,—