The Tournament: Its Periods and Phases

Those students of arms and armour who have Mr. Clephan’s work on Defensive Armour, Weapons and Engines of War in their libraries will expect to find valuable material for study when they find his name as author of a work on the Tournament. And in this they will surely not be disappointed. It is perhaps a novel experience for one who has for some years seriously meditated such a work himself to be asked to introduce the work of another; but in the study of arms and armour all men are brothers, and I take leave to say that we of this brotherhood know little of the jealousies and divisions of opinion which beset the student in other historical details. The perusal of Mr. Clephan’s work has shown me that it would have been impossible to undertake such a project without unattainable leisure, tireless energy, deep research and very real devotion to the subject. Mr. Clephan has dealt with the subject from a wide European point of view, and has amassed a vast amount of information from German sources which has, up till now, been denied to those unskilled in that language; and, with his copious notes and references, has made this material available for study, for which alone we must ever be deeply indebted to him.

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.”