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the twilight of Chivalry and the war of the roses Knights, Tournaments & Dynastic Battles
Types of Tournaments • The Joust and combat with longsword are the two main types of tournament competition. • The Joust involved competitors on horseback with the lance.
Typical jousts featured one individual fighting another individual onhorseback with lances • Jousts could be held privately and relatively casually between two individuals, or a series of jousts could be held together in a largescale jousting festival involving tens or even hundreds of individuals. Some formal combats were fought on foot with a variety of weapons including swords, axes and daggers.
Before the1250s • There were no certain rules about the weapons used in tournaments; many knights were killed by well sharpened weapons in early competitions. • In 13th century England, Prince Edward tried to regulate the rules on weapons to decrease the risk. After that, the weapons used in tournaments were blunted.
‘tournament’ has come to be used by historians • to indicate almost any form of formalized combat during the medieval period. Earlytournaments were large-scale, mêlée combats that involved several individualsfighting one another simultaneously. These knights and men-at-arms were oftendivided into two groups or teams, and these events commonly featured a numberof weapons including the lance and sword.
A single formal combat • could combine a mêlée tournament, joust and foot combat. One of the forms of event that could combine combat in this way were the pas d’armes, elaborate events in which an individual or group ‘held’ a place for a given length of time, combining combat with theatrical display.
Kings or judicial authorities were arbiters That closely monitored the outcome of these events and decided whether the losing party would be punished by death. • Combats fought à outrance were fought to the extreme, with the intention of doing physical harm to one’s opponent. • Other combats à outrance were fought until one of the combatants was killed or wounded so that he could not continue to fight, or until a judge intervened and stopped the combat. • Combats fought à plaisanceon the other hand, were stopped when a given number of hits had been delivered or were used as more general practices in which the intention was to overcome one’s opponent without killing or wounding him.
Real versus Imaginary tournaments • Again, actual early tournaments involved a melee fought among two teams for cavalry trainingand for sport and by the individual for gain • For Chretien de Troye’s Arthurian heroes it was a man to man sport focused on individual deeds fought for renown, honor, and to demonstrate one's prowess.
Real versus Imaginary tournaments • Influenced by romances individual feats of arms eventually replaced the melee with contests fought man-to-man. • The influence of Arthurian romance on the tournament does not stop there, however.In their imitation of the matter of Britain, the patrons and participants of the tournament even went so far as to appear in the costume of Arthurian characters and to incorporate motifs and scenes of Arthurian romance into the tournament
Henry VIII • At the beginning of his reign, Henry VIII was 6 ft 2 with a slim athletic build, fair complexion and prowess at jousting and on the tennis courts. Throughout his youth and up to 1536, Henry lived a healthy lifestyle. During his twenties, he weighed approximately 210 lbs., with a thirty-two inch wait and a thirst for jousting. • In 1536 he was injured in a tournament suffering a severe concussion and a burst varicose ulcer on his left leg, a legacy from an earlier traumatic jousting injury in 1527.
The jousting accident • prevented him from enjoying his favorite pastime and forced him to all but give up physical exercise. • Henry’s final suit of armor in 1544, three years before his death, suggests he weighed at least three hundred pounds, his waist having expanded from thirty-two inches to fifty-two inches. By 1546, Henry had become so large that he required wooden chairs to carry him around and hoists to lift him. He needed to be lifted onto his horse and his leg continued to deteriorate.
The Field of the Cloth of Gold • was a site in Balinghem – equidistant between Ardres in France and Guînes in the then-English Pale of Calais – that hosted a tournament field as part of a summit from 7 to 24 June 1520, between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France. • By the time of the Tudors tournaments had become more entertainment & spectacle than an actual way of practicing for war.
Questions • Explain why end of the War of the Roses was yet another signal of the end of feudalism. • What does the life of Henry VIII and the meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold reveal about the twilight of knighthood and Chivalry? • Discuss the different types of combat practiced at tournaments.
