When a knight knocked merry hell out of a competitor in the fight, he could capture the fellow, drag him off the field, and then ransom him. This was how our betters used to behave and was presumably the foundation of the fortunes of several of our leading families. Not only could the knight take a ransom, he could keep his victim’s armour and horse. This at a time when a good warhorse could cost as much as £150. To put this into perspective, the salary of a skilled worker was 3d per day, an unskilled worker 1½d per day; thus the horse was worth 12,000 man-days – well over thirty years – for a skilled worker. It’s no wonder people have estimated the expense of a warhorse to have been roughly the equivalent of a modern battle-tank.
Naturally, capable knights could make themselves large fortunes. One prime example was William the Marshall, who tended to win rather regularly. He and another enterprising young knight formed an alliance in 1177, travelling across Europe from one tournament to another for ten months, sharing their profits equally. They successfully ransomed over 100 knights in that time. Of course such men didn’t only win short-term money, either. Often they would catch the eye of a wealthy patron, someone who could give them a more secure future.
This form of limited warfare was conducted under the rules of battle then in force – which more or less suggested it was bad form to execute a prisoner because he was worth more alive – and combatants used real weapons of war. No weapon was banned. Swords and axes were sharpened; maces and clubs, lances and bills were all wielded. Not surprisingly, this resulted in severe injuries and, commonly, death. One of the better-known tournaments was between the British and French at Châlons-sur-Saône in 1273, during which the Count of Châlons caught Edward I about the neck in an attempt to pull him from his horse. Edward apparently deprecated such treatment and lost his temper. So did others. Before long the competitors were joined by their foot-soldiers, and a pitched fight was carried on in earnest. As a result of the deaths and injuries that ensued, this has gone down in history as ‘The Little Battle of Châlons’.
Bloodshed was no doubt one of the reasons why the Church set its face against all forms of tournament, but other objections weighed heavily too. The Church disliked the fact that tournaments encouraged dangerous knightly passions: lust and greed. Still, the idea of condoning deaths in the field was not a happy one for bishops or popes. They banned tournaments.
The ban was extensive: no participant could be buried in consecrated ground if he died in the lists. However, this prohibition cannot have succeeded because the Church had to keep repeating the message regularly. We know that knights who died in tournaments were routinely buried within churches, cathedrals, graveyards and elsewhere – with supportive churchmen holding the services. Eventually the Church had to give up and permit tournaments once more.
There were, in fact, good reasons why the Church rescinded the ban in 1316. Acre had fallen, meaning that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was lost. It was essential, in the minds of many of the Christians of this time, that a strong force of knights and men-at-arms should be trained for war in order that they could participate in a new Crusade.
The same opinion did not strike so much of a chord with kings throughout Europe. When great lords declared themselves keen to hold tournaments, gathering together all their adherents and peers, trouble could soon follow. For instance, after he had signed Magna Carta, King John’s nobles got together and began plotting against him during a tournament.
It is noticeable that strong kings supported tournaments, no doubt seeing in them a means of keeping warlike lords occupied and training up youngsters, while weaker monarchs tended to ban them, fearing, like King John, that the motivation for holding them was more to hatch plots and treason than for the delight of getting beaten about the head by an axe-wielding lunatic on a heavy horse.
British kings, in turn disliking and then promoting tournaments, were far too worldly to think that the Church’s prohibition could succeed, so monarchs from Richard I onwards began a tradition followed by successive governments: when in doubt, tax it. A fee was charged to hold a tournament, and all those attending must also pay on a scale according to rank.
There were attempts to prevent injuries; Richard I’s ordinance was itself partly intended to reduce the butcher’s bill. Edward I improved on the safety aspect by requiring participants to swear to keep the peace – and pay for their licence up front! He also restricted the number of followers that men could bring with them, insisting that grooms and footmen should be unarmed, that squires alone should be allowed to join their lords for feasts, and that all weapons should be bated, or blunt. This was known as fighting with arms à plaisance, rather than weapons of war, which was called à outrance. Béhourds, in which men fought with padded leather armour and non-metallic weapons, were popular with the knights; the garments, one imagines, being a great deal lighter and cooler than full armour.
It was at this time that the social aspect of tournaments developed: they became pageants, with market stalls, feasting, dancing and acting on offer for the elite. Expectations of the sports altered and new methods of running tournaments had to be thought up.
Just as today people turn up in their thousands to watch a boxing match or motor race, in the medieval period people wanted to go and watch their heroes battle it out. When the course could be anything up to some ten miles long and wide, when all the fighting could take place anywhere within those hundred square miles, it was hard for spectators to see the action – and possibly hazardous too. Far better that the action should be contained in a smaller area, that fighters should be roped off, or stands built for fans, with all the business being presented before them.
To do this, the old system of mêlée had to change. Fights started being contained within a ‘ring’ of sorts, with stands all about. But this was not all. Now, with the growth of chivalrous stories such as those of King Arthur, men wanted to have an opportunity of showing their personal courage and skill. That was impossible in a seething mass of fighting bodies, so the individual tilts began to develop – and as they developed, so rules were designed for them. There was a gradual move away from the massed battle towards the more civilised joust. Only gradually, of course, because in this bloodthirsty age people wanted to see death and mayhem, but there was a move to have tournaments over several days, with jousting acting as a warm-up for two, three or four days, leading to the grand finale of the mêlée. One assumes it would have been impractical to reverse this: the knights would all have been sore and probably deaf after the mêlée.
King Edward II was always very keen on tournaments: his favourite, Piers Gaveston, was a talented fighter, by all accounts. However, Edward was soon persuaded that tournaments were inherently dangerous and he should not allow them to continue. This was because 289 knights met at Dunstable for a tournament during which they co-ordinated their grievances against Gaveston, which were then related at the following Parliament in the April of 1309. Again, in 1312, a tournament was used as the excuse for a gathering which allowed rebels against Gaveston to raise an army. After this, Edward set himself against any tournaments until 1323 when he submitted to the wishes of his brothers and permitted one.