A (somewhat) Brief History of Jousting

About a month ago, when I was researching sword fighting, I noticed something interesting while looking at photos of the Bayeux Tapestry. The charging Norman knights aren’t carrying lances in the traditional way we think of Medieval knights. No. Instead they were throwing them – more as if they were spears than lances.

 

 

 

This got me thinking about spears and lances and research I did centuries ago while I was still a graduate student doing a PhD in Medieval Studies. In my first or second year, I wrote a paper about spears and lances in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

 

When Parzival gets to the Grail Castle, he witnesses a procession that culminates with his seeing the Grail. Most scholars, of course, focus on the Grail, which in Parzival is quite different from the standard chalice that most people picture for the Grail. What I was interested in was the other items carried in the procession, in particular “der bloutec sper” – the bloody spear.

 

Notice, I said “spear”, not lance. This is a different weapon.

  

In fact, at least one Mittel Hoch Deutsch scholar – probably the great Joachim Bumke, but it’s been so long ago that I can’t remember for sure – pointed out that young Parzival’s sin wasn’t just killing his cousin, i.e., killing kin. But also that the weapon he used – his spear – was a common hunting weapon, not a knightly weapon, so it was a sin against knighthood as well.

  

OK, Parzival was written over the last decade of the twelth century and the first of the thirteenth. Something had definitely changed between the Bayeux Tapestry and the writing of Parzival.

 

I started to wonder how jousting evolved.

 

First, let’s get a little terminology straight. 

• Spear – a long pole with a sharp point at the end, possibly even a separate point, such as a spearhead. Can be thrown or thrust.
• Javelin – smaller lighter version of the above. Usually meant to be thrown.
• Lance – a heavy, long pole meant to be held and thrust.

If we go back to Roman times, we find they used cavalry in their armies as support for the main unit of infantry. Until the latter part of empire, the period which would have been King Arthur’s, they were used for scouting and light skirmishing. In battle, two “wings” (alea) of cavalry were positioned one on each flank, to prevent the infantry from being outflanked. They relied on bows and arrows and spears that could be thrown.

 

The issue is one of equipment. Because of their lack of stirrups, Roman cavalry were not very effective when it came to directly engaging with the enemy through sword fighting or lance. Stirrups are an essential ingredient in keeping you in the saddle, as your feet in the stirrups provided leverage. Roman saddles had four horns to help stabilize a rider, but you could still be toppled off your horse.

 

Roman Saddle -- 4 horns but no stirrups

 

Interestingly, the foe the classical Romans feared the most was the cataphract – the heavy horse cavalry that originated in Parthia (modern Iran). This force featured huge warhorses specially bred for the purpose (the first historical record of a breeding program). Both rider and horse were covered from head to foot with scale armor.

 

Cataphract.  This one is from the 5th century -- roughly "King Arthur's" time.

 

Cataphracts carried spears that were unusually long and heavy. These are still spears, not the heavy jousting lances we know from tournaments.

 

According to one source I researched, cataphracts used them to pierce their enemy. Without stirrups, though, a spear would have minimal impact. If you were galloping at full tilt at someone and ran him through, assuming you didn’t get knocked off your horse with the impact of the blow, you’d certainly get your spear tangled in the person you just ran through and have to, at best, abandon the weapon.

 

The power of a cataphract charge came from the mass of heavy horses themselves frontally assaulting a line, and supported by a barrage of arrows fired by archers stationed at the rear. The archers kept the enemy busy while the cataphracts charged.

 

Ironically, by the late Roman period, cataphracts have been absorbed into the Roman army and form the basis of its heavy cavalry. They’re also a key ingredient in Byzantine military strategy. And the source of the medieval knight and his equipment, as we know it.

  

(As another interesting aside, cataphracts were also a feature of Chinese armies during the San Guo – Three Kingdoms – period that followed the Han Dynasty.)

 

OK, fast forward to 1066 and the Bayeux Tapestry.

 

Stirrups appeared in northern Europe in the 9th century, so our Norman knights would have had them. But they haven’t changed their tactics yet from spear thrower to lance thruster.

 

By the mid twelfth century, things had changed. Tournaments as competitions to provide practice opportunities for knights had become so popular that Henry II of England forbade them. Interestingly, these tournaments usually began with melee, a mock battle. It featured a “lance charge”, in which the two sides charged each other and attempted to unhorse with their blunted lances as many of the opposition as possible. In other words, stirrups have changed the way knights fight.

 

As a result of Henry II’s forbidding tournaments in England, many English knights resorted to tourneying in France – including Henry’s own sons.

Success in a tournament didn’t just win a reputation; it also was worth a lot of money in prizes and ransoms. You could also win -- or lose -- your armor or your horse. This could be the making of a poor knight. (Yes, the movie "A Knight's Tale" does have some historical veracity.)  In fact, it's how William Marshall, who started as the younger son of an insignificant lord, earn both wealth and the attention and trust of the Plantagenant kings.

 

While Henry may not have approved of the sport, his heir did. Richard I (the Lionhearted), when he ascended to the throne, granted licenses for five areas where tournaments could be held in England. The tournaments included jousting.

 

Early jousts appear to have started with the tilt – running at each other with lances – and then progressed on to battling it out with swords.  The use of a piece of cloth down the middle to separate the combatants is a late development, arising out of the 15th century.

Jousting also resulted in some modifications to the chest piece (or cuirasse) of the set of armor.  To help shield the chest from a powerful blow, armorers started shaping the piece so there was a hallow between the metal and the wearer's chest.  Hence the reason why the armor worn during the Rennaissance and later has a pot-bellied look.

 

 

Jousting continued right on to the period of Henry VIII, who held some of England’s last tournaments. In fact, it’s postulated that a head injury sustained at a joust may have caused a personality change in Henry that turned him from a charming prince loved by all to a tyrant.

 

Sword Fighting Techniques Through the Ages -- Part 2

Last week I blogged on the demo on sword fighting I saw at the RWNZ conference. There was a heap of info, so I focused on what I learned about watching fighters using techniques from the Saxon and Viking periods (700-1100 AD.) Today’s topic is the next hunk of sword fighting history – the age of plate armor.


Plate armor appeared in the late 13th century. Nic Harrison, who’s one of NZ’s guru’s on authentic sword fighting (among other things he was the technical advisor for Lord of the Rings), said that plate armor was developed as a response to guns. I’ve heard elsewhere it was developed to protect knights from crossbows.  Nic showed us the tiny dent in a breastplate and explained it was the armorer's "proof of quality".  To test the strength of a piece of armor, the armorer would set it up and fire a bullet at it.  If the bullet went through, the armor got melted down and the metal reused.

I’m wondering, though, considering the power of the swords at the time, whether the move to plate armor might just be a better way to protect yourself from your opponent’s sword. Remember I said in my last blog that the blade of a sword of that period was designed to cut. It couldn’t do that through chain mail, but the power of the blow could crush and create internal injuries. Well, as Nic showed us, a powerful blow to plate armor generally just bounces off. There’s no bruising, as the plate spreads the force of the blow. At this point, knights stopped using shields, as the plate was the shield.


There area a few vulnerable places, though. One of them is the plate of armor designed to protect the knee. A sideways whack to that could create a dent that would immobilize the knee mechanism, so your opponent’s knee wouldn’t bend. There were also various “cracks” in the armor – places where one plate joined another. These remained vulnerable.

King Ludwig III wearing prominent poleyns -- knee armor.  A

blow to the side of the knee would lock the knee.

With two knights plated up like that, the encounter could last longer. But plate armor is a lot heavier than chain mail, so its weight would have tired you out.


To damage a person, you had to get in close and “command his sword”. You could do this by hooking it with your sword, your arm or your elbow. The idea was to immobilize it while you got in with your sword.

Using a sword to block a blow.

Blows got more sophisticated, too. One of the things that surprised me was how a knight would actually place his hands on his own blade to direct it. For example, one of the vulnerable spots is at the base of the neck, at the top of the chest plate. A knight might get in close to his opponent, hold his sword by one or two hands on the blade, (rather than both hands on the hilt), and use the lower hand to direct the tip of his blade into the crack between the top of the chest plate and his opponents neck. The upper hand would add strength to the blow, driving the sword down into the enemy’s lungs.


Another effective blow was what the Germans called the “murder stroke”. In this the knight held the sword by the blade. The left hand held the tip, the right was positioned half way up the blade. The hilt was in the air, with no hands on it at all. This effectively turned the half of the blade near the hilt into a club, and that’s exactly how it was used. The fighter would push the hilt forward in an arc towards his opponent’s head and bring it down through the middle of his skull or use it to hook him.

The knight on the right is moving in for a murder stroke.

Here his opponent uses the middle of his longsword to block the blow.

Italians were known for a type of stroke that used the pommel (end of the hilt) of the sword. The knight held his sword with both hands – one on the hilt, the other towards the tip. As his opponent slashed at him, his blocked his opponent’s blow by catching it with the middle of his sword. He then heaved his opponent’s sword aside and at the same time stepped to the left, “inside” his opponent’s reach. As he stepped to the left, he brought the pommel of his sword up into the fragile area under the opponent’s chin.


A smaller opponent would try to go for his opponent’s legs, especially the knee. Tall fighters learned to “defend low”.


I’ve been talking a lot about fighters holding their blades in their hands. Yes, they still didn’t wear gloves. And, yes, the things could cut your fingers off. Nic said the trick was how you held your sword. You never gripped it hard. Instead, according to the treatises on sword fighting from that period, you “hold your sword as if it were a bird.” Blows are “thrown”, not chopped.


Also, when you held your sword, you never wrapped your hand around it the way you would an ice cream cone. If you did, a yank from your opponent would cut your fingers off. Instead, you held it with your fingers curled over one edge of the blade, and your thumb stretched along the side of the other edge. With this kind of grip, an opponent cannot pull the sword from you hand.


When it came to the actual encounter, there was still a lot of posturing and moving around to get into position. Eighty percent of the fight is footwork. The two knights were trying to get each other to expose a vulnerable spot. Once one of those was exposed, they moved fast, attempting to take command of the enemy’s weapon, thrust it out of the way and thrust their own blade into a “keyhole” in the opponent’s armor.


By the fifteen century the long sword appeared. The long sword was the first weapon that could both defend and attack. The concept of “garde” was everything. It meant the potential to attack and defend, and basically was built around footwork and balance. You wanted to keep your weight centered. A lot of the blows were aimed at the face.


Thanks to the laws of physics, long swords had a lot of power behind them. So you didn’t try to block a blow from a long sword. But the power came from the arc of the blow and the distance the sword covered through air, which would build its force. Not it’s weight.


People talk about long swords being heavy. Except for ceremonial swords that were never used in battle, they were not. According to Nic, a good weight for a long sword was under 3.5 pounds (about a kilo and a half.) To use the long sword, you had to be fairly acrobatic and needed to be fit.


So what did you watch when you were in a fight and wanted to anticipate your opponent’s move? Nic said, never look at the sword. A good place to look is your opponent’s eyes, as they often give away where their next blow will be aimed. Feet and hands can also signal what an opponent is going to do next.


Next week: Swashbucklers, rapiers and maybe the saber. (Depending on how chatty I get.)

Bonus Post -- Sword Fighting References

A couple of the sword fighters from the RWNZ demonstration sat next to me at the lunch that followed their demo, and I picked their brains a bit.  Here are some internet sites they said had good, authentic information on sword fighting.

ARMA Association for Rennaissance Martial Arts.  Covers both the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance.  Focuses on serious study of the fighting techniques of that period.  http://www.thearma.org/  I've checked out this and it's got a wealth of information, including demo videos of fighting from various time periods.

Stoccata School of Defense.  http://www.stoccata.org/ Focuses on the Renaissance and beyond, with a small amount on the late Middle Ages.

Sword Forum International.  http://swordforum.com/  Focuses mostly in the weapons themselves.

SWORD FIGHTING TECHNIQUES THROUGH THE AGES – Part 1

The last morning of the RWNZ conference, sword expert Nic Harrison, assisted by eight or so sword fighters from three New Zealand historic sword fighting clubs, demonstrated a thousand years of sword fighting history to an enthusiastic audience of historical novelists.

Nic teaches historic sword fighting techniques. He’s been the technical consultant for a number of movies. The swords these fighters used were real weapons – not the blunted wooden swords used by the SCA. Most were replicas of ancient swords, but a couple were actual weapons from their time period, all beautifully maintained. Well, as well as possible. Nic show us black marks on one blade and commented that there’s only one thing that can corrode a sword like that. You guessed it. Nic commented there’s an irony in the fact that the only thing that can damage a sword is the one thing it’s designed to seek.

The first group to fight represented the Viking period, from about 800 to 1100 AD (later in the North.) Saxons, he said, would have used similar weapons and techniques. Most of our information on how Vikings fought comes from the Norse and Icelandic sagas.

Fighters of that period were well armed. They usually carried a round shield, a two-edged sword, a saex (a foot-long knife with a long triangular blade —the word “Saxon” comes from it), and often a fighting axe. They would wear a helmet and either armor constructed of leather or, if they could afford it, chain mail running to their knees. Altogether, their equipment could weigh has much as 35 kilos, about 80 pounds.

There’s no evidence that swordsmen of that period wore gloves, by the way. Even the fighters in the Bayeaux Tapestry, which depicts William the Conqueror’s 1066 invasion of English, had no gloves.

This picture from the Bayeaux Tapastry, by the way,

alos shows the knight carrying a heater as his shield.

The style of helmet changed through the period.

What our fighters were wearing wasn't much different from the famous

helmet from the Sutton Hoo burial pictured above.

Those from about 700 AD, which were what our demonstrators were wearing, were rounded on top and straight at the sides. They came half way down the face in the front, with eye-shaped holes cut for the eyes. Cheeks were exposed but a metal plate or nasal covered the nose. Often extra metal was added over the eyes to create an eyebrow effect. Nic commented that the intention of the helmet designer would have been to provoke fear in those looking at the wearer.

In fact, as they started to fight, fear was a good deal of the swordsmen’s strategy. There was a lot of posturing, posing and making of noise. Nic said that often the winner of a battle was determined by who stepped back first.

The shield was not only an important part of the fighter’s defense. It was part of the offense, as well. It could be used to push an opponent or to thrust his weapon aside.

Ideally, the shield should cover the fighter from his nipple to his knees, but the bigger a shield gets, the more it is vulnerable to being pulled by the wind. Shields were made of lightweight linden wood or a laminate of linden and oak, which combined lightness with strength. Some had steel bands on the face. They had straps on the back that the fighter slid his arm through. Most shields from that period were round, but heaters were also used.


Anyone who’s read Bernard Cornwell’s King Alfred series knows of the formidability of a shield wall. Nic had the fighters demonstrate a shield wall for us and it was easy to see why opposing one would have been such a challenge. As the fighters stood shoulder to shoulder, their overlapping shields were locked to each other by tucking the shield’s right edge between the next soldier’s shield and his left arm. This created a virtually impenetrable wall across the army’s front. Further, two or more fighters so locked together could maneuver as a unit, providing a strong, wide front that would protect the weaker fighter.

Saxon defenders making a shield wall, from the Bayeaux Tapestry.

The shield wall is on the right.

Shield walls are not entirely impenetrable. Though an attacker couldn’t get through the shields themselves, he could go over the top, with a blow to the eyes or, more commonly, underneath, with a blow to the legs. Nic commented that battlefield burials are full of men with missing legs.

Here’s where a further Saxon/Viking weapon came in handy: the long axe. This is nothing more than an axe mounted on a handle as tall as a man. It gave its carrier the advantage of distance. It could be used to snake a shield away from a swordsman, making him vulnerable to the axe blow that followed.

Generally, though, Saxon/Viking combat was very close range. And individual encounters, contrary to what we read about in novels, didn’t last long. The demo fights we saw moved fast. One or two blows, that was it.

Nic said the average encounter – if one of the fighters didn’t back off immediately – usually lasted no more than 20 seconds, unless the combatants were evenly matched and extremely good. (Think of a battle as a series of encounters.) So when the sagas talk about a fight such as a holmgang – a ritualized fight settling a dispute between two men -- lasting for hours, they are playing up the skill of the two men.


How did a person get killed? Well, weapons from that period were designed to cut, rather than pierce. But unless, you succumbed to a blow in the face (King Harold Godwinson died at Hastings from an arrow in the eye) or losing a leg, you were not likely to die from a cut. Chain mail was good defense against the sharp edge of a sword. The power behind the blow, however, would crush the mail into you, cracking bones and creating internal injuries. That’s a lot harder for primitive medicine to treat than an open wound.

Next blog post: sword fighting in the age of plate armor.

The First References to Arthur

So we’ve got twenty candidates in our search for Arthur. According to Michael Ashley, the “real” Arthur needs to meet the basic criteria of having fought in the Battle of Badon. This is one of the two battles linked to Arthur’s name in the earliest historical references to him: the texts ascribed to Nennius and the Welsh Annals or Annales Cambriae.

Ninth-century Nennius, who may not have existed at all, is highly problematical and leaves more questions than answers. Among other things, the work is full of self-contradictions. In an appendix, the so-called author lists Arthur’s battles. Although Ashley takes the work seriously, Francis Pryor’s (Britain A.D.) references make me think historians have seriously questioned its authenticity. We’ll leave it aside for another time.

The other work, the Annales Cambriae, is easier to deal with. The earliest copy of this text dates to the end of the tenth century – almost five hundred years, we shall see, after Arthur was supposed to have lived – though it is believed to copied from an earlier document, but not Nennius or his sources.

Earlier documents. Hmmm. As a medievalist, I’m familiar with this ploy. Medieval writers, whether of history or fiction, were always conscious of the credibility of their writing. Think our modern obsession with footnotes and bibliography. Anyway, to make their writing more credible, medievals would quote “sources” whom they called “authorities” -- auctoritas (I may not have the spelling right, I don’t have all my old Medieval Studies notes any more) – many of whom they made up, but who have led modern scholars on merry wild goose chases just the same.

So what I am saying is, just because a medieval cites someone else as his reference, don’t trust him unless you have the manuscript in your hand.

OK. We’ve got our first “real” references to Arthur. But four to five hundred years after his death.

The Annals are basically a chronology of events listed by year. The Arthurian references are as follows:

518 The Battle of Badon in which Arthur carries the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders and the Britains were the victors.
539 The battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was a plague in Britain and Ireland.

Medraut, by the way, later becomes Mordred in the tales. Interestingly, the Welsh Annals also contain a mention of Merlin, in his name’s earliest form: Myrrdin. But this Merlin figure appears thirty-five years – almost two generations – after Arthur’s death.

575 … Myrrdin became mad.

So what can we learn from these two references to Arthur?

518 reference:
• There is no explanation for who Arthur is. He could be a king, a soldier, a priest, a blacksmith (OK, I’m being facetious).
• Most people have considered him a warrior/leader of some kind.
• Scholars think “carries the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ… on his shoulders” is a reference to a shield. I have a problem with this, because the cross on the shield to which they refer is a much later shield, a Crusader shield from the late 11th century onward. Shields of the Celtic and Saxon periods were round and none of the many I looked at had crosses on them.
• If the cross is a reference to a shield, then the battle must have lasted three days. That’s unusually long for a battle in those times.
• Scholars assume because of the juxtapositioning of the clause referring to Arthur and the clause referring to the Britons, that Arthur was a Briton and their victorious leader.

539 reference
• “Fell” could be a reference to their deaths, to their defeats, or both.
• It is not clear whether Arthur and Medraut were allies or enemies. Medraut is a Briton, not Saxon, name. They could have been fighting on the same side.
• Of course, they could have been fighting against each other. However, if you look at other entries in the Welsh Annals and its sister chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, you’ll notice that neither names the defeated enemy leaders.

So there’s our start. Two ambiguous pieces of information, referring to events four hundred or more years before the text was written.

By now, if you know about the development of the King Arthur legend, you’ll be squirming in your chair saying “What about Gildas?”

In my next post I’ll get to that.

The Hunt Begins

First, a litle housekeeping for anyone following me: I can see what people say about blogging taking over your life! Hopefully now that I've got my site set up I can settle back to my writing. I'm planning to post on Tuesdays and Fridays, New Zealand Time (so that's Mondays and Thursdays for most of you in the rest of the world.)


When I decided to research the times of the “real” King Arthur, so that I could create an “authentic” background for my novel (in case my editor didn’t like my alternative 12th century), the first issue was sources. Not an easy task when you live in a somewhat remote coastal town in New Zealand where the price of an ordinary paperback is a whopping $29.95.


I did already in my library have John Burke’s Roman England, a pictorial guide to the main features of Roman-British culture. Plus heaps of novels, a few books on general medieval culture, mostly by the Gies’s, a lot of books on medieval art, and some dictionaries of the medieval versions of modern tongues (remember, I did my grad work in Medieval Studies). Most of the resource materials I’d had from grad school, though, had slowly been culled as I moved from Cornell to Nova Scotia to Florida to Arizona to China to New Zealand. Sigh.


I picked up Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of King Arthur because it promised to be just that: mammoth. Lots of info (I hoped) for a single financial outlay. It didn’t disappoint. Ashley’s work is an in-depth look at all the popular research on Arthur, post-Roman Britain, and the development of the Arthurian legend, right down to modern movies and novels.


That’s where I discovered that there was not one, but about twenty candidates for the historical figure who became the legendary king. They range in time period from second century Lucius Artoris Castor to tenth century Athelstan, grandson of King Alfred. Over half lived in the rough time period (fourth through sixth centuries) that Arthur was supposed to have lived. The exploits of the others reverberate with enough elements of the legend to make some scholars think they may have given rise to it. For every candidate at least one modern scholar has put forth a convincing argument.


Already my idea of an “accurate” cultural background was on shaky grounds. Pick any one of these candidates and you’ve got a different period in history, with a totally different cultural background.


My alternative twelfth century becomes more appealing by the minute…

King Arthur -- The Journey Begins

Why would anyone want to set a King Arthur story in an alternative twelfth century – the High Middle Ages – when the popular approach these days is to set it in the fifth or sixth, the period in history in which Arthur is supposed to have lived?

When I first started The Dark Edge trilogy, I confess I chose the twelfth century because my images of King Arthur had always been influenced more by Lerner and Lowe and Prince Valiant than Mary Stewart and Marion Zimmer Bradley (as much as I love them both.) As a graduate student of Medieval Studies, it was the twelfth century that captured my imagination. After all, where else in history could you find real life characters as exciting and intriguing as Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Gottfried von Strassbourg and Wolfram von Eschenbach (and even Wolfram’s ambitious and side-shifting overlord Herman of Thuringen)?

Plus the twelfth century itself was a period of flowering and change. The climate was warming, which allowed previously marginal lands to flourish. Courtly love (in itself a myth), the spread of stone castles, the establishment of massive kingdoms (between them Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine controlled a vast empire from the Scottish boarder to the Mediterranean), the crusades, the spread of trade and luxury goods, the birth of the Gothic style of art and architecture, and totally new styles of literature, not to mention a couple of good heresies, as well. It was a colorful period I knew well.

Just in case my editor thought differently, though, I decided research the fifth and sixth centuries. I’d always known that the identity of the so-called King Arthur was hotly debated over. As I dug deeper, I discovered myths behind the King Arthur myth. Join me as I blog about my discoveries about the “true” Arthur and the period in which he was supposed to have lived.