Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Middle Ages

Re-created is every aspect of a picturesque martial art that originated as a violent, no-holds-barred melee in a field and evolved over 500 years into a carefully regulated ritual whose splendor and extravagance eventually overwhelmed all but the richest of European monarchs. The tournament is the first sport for which detailed rules and regulations survive from its history emerges the concept of 'fair play', and the word itself survives as a description of many of today's sporting events. There are unexpected parallels with modern sport - the problems of public order, with entire towns on full police alert for tournaments, and the emergence of sporting heroes whose prowess has little practical application. The tournament reflects, as might be expected, the history of warfare; but many aspects of theatre are also first found in the tournament. Indeed, every theatre censor in Europe until the last few decades would have banned the occasion in 1428 when the Spanish king and his knights jousted on Sunday dressed as God and the Twelve Apostles. The details of tournaments yield unexpected and lively vignettes of medieval life a father’s proud record of his son’s first tournament, an 80-year- old knight jousting with his grandson, a knight begging for advice on magic arts', knights practising in the streets of Venice with bells on their trappings to warn bystanders to get out of the way. The visual aspects of the tournament are shown in a series of full-color illustrations which bring the text vividly to life, and which include some of the finest surviving medieval manuscripts.