The Tournament, as practised in Germany and towards the close of the sixteenth century in England, France and Italy, must have been a rather dull performance, as the minute regulations and the cumbersome equipment precluded that dash and intrepid onslaught which make the descriptions by Froissart and other writers of his time such excellent reading. Even the gorgeous displays of Henry VIII leave us rather cold when we find that the king invariably won, and that the queen could stop the tilting at her pleasure, which was presumably when her lord had had sufficient entertainment. We have only to note that the suit in the Tower made for Henry VIII to fight on foot in the lists weighs 93 lbs., to realize that no man could be strenuous or energetic in this equipment; and when we find that the horse in the sixteenth century joust had to carry a dead weight of 340 lbs., it will be manifest that he could only amble gently along the tilt, and could not dash headlong down the lists, as the artist would have us believe. The whole subject of arms and armour teems with such disillusioning; but to the earnest student these are taken with grace, because they are born of facts quarried out of masses of written and printed records with years of incessant perseverance and devotion.
After the pioneer work of Meyrick and Hewitt, the interest in arms and armour died down for over half a century, but in the last ten or fifteen years it has revived, and its resurrection may be traced to writers who, like Lord Dillon and Mr. Clephan, have striven to give us a real insight into the military life of nations, rather than highly-coloured fantasies which have no foundation in fact. If Mr. Clephan’s researches cause us to modify our views on certain aspects of the Tournament, I feel quite certain that all who have previously written on these lines will admit the new light he has brought to bear. The audience he directly appeals to is small, but they will yield to students in no other branch of history or art in their keen devotion to their subject; and I trust I may conclude, in their name, by wishing Mr. Clephan every success in the work before us, and, if I may enter into the spirit of his subject, “Good jousting.”
CHARLES FFOULKES
Office of the Armouries
H. M. Tower of London
29 August, 1917
INTRODUCTION
Most of us owe our early impressions of the tournament to the delightful account of the “Gentle and Joyous Passage of Arms” of Ashby de la Zouche, in the county of Leicester, given by Sir Walter Scott in his fine romance Ivanhoe. But that eminent novelist, in presenting to his readers the picture of a pas d’armes of the times of the lion-hearted Richard, took a poet’s licence by describing a jousting and mêlée such as belonged, in many details, to a time later than Richard’s by some two and a half centuries. The knightly armour of the reign of King Richard was of chain-mail, while that of the times of Henry VI was, of course, a complete harness of plate. The first-named equipment is thus described by Sainte-Palaye: “Une lance forte et dificile à rompre, un haubert ou haubergeon, c’est à dire, une double cotte de mailles, tissues de fer, à l’epreuve de l’épée, étoient les armes assignées aux Chevaliers.”[1]
Sir Walter’s account is thus hopelessly misleading in regard to its period, though admirably worked out in many other respects. There are ancient romances of great historic value, in that they give nearly contemporaneous details of the tournament of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and represent many features which may be regarded as correct in the light of a close comparison with other records. That of Petit Jehan de Saintré, written by Anthoine de la Sale, in 1459, is one of these, and we owe much enlightenment to it.
There is great confusion among the works of chroniclers in regard to the dates of many tournaments, and often it is impossible to reconcile their statements. The differences are, however, usually but slight.