Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tournaments

TOURNAMENTS.⁠Tournaments and jousts were the chief military exercises and displays of the age of chivalry. Besides being the appropriate sports and pastimes of a warlike era and caste, they were intended to test the skill and exhibit the prowess of the knights and squires who took part in them. Considered under their more serious aspect, apart from their association with pomp and festivity, they were, practically speaking, the equivalents of the reviews and sham-fights of later times, and were designed as a preparation for the actual manoeuvres and real conflicts of the battlefield. Tournaments and jousts differed from one another principally in the circumstance that in the first several combatants on each side were engaged at once, and in the second the contention was between two combatants only. The former consisted of the mutual charges of equal troops of cavalry, while the latter consisted of a duel on horseback. Du Cange says that the French tournoi, English "tournament," "was a general expression which comprehended all sorts of combats that were performed by way of exercise. But it more properly meant such as were performed by companies, where many were in conflict against the same number, representing the form of a battle. When those general combats were ended, then single ones commenced; for all who were desirous of displaying their address, and attracting public notice for their valour, offered single combat with sword or lance against all who should present themselves"; and he adds that these combats were called by the old French writers "joustes," which is the same word as the English "jousts." But jousts were held far more frequently than, and quite independently of, regular tournaments throughout the period in which the customs of chivalry were observed, and, according to some authorities, the lance alone was used in them, while in the others all weapons except firearms were employed. In both cases such weapons were usually although not invariably rendered innocuous, and it was only rarely that the combatants were killed or injured by wounds, as distinguished from falls and bruises. But in one way or another tournaments and jousts were always extremely dangerous, and a long list of eminent persons met their deaths in them, from Raoul, Comte de Guines, to Henry II. of France. It may be assumed that jousts in some shape existed at all periods, in which men fought in armour and on horseback, and were in the habit of practising themselves in time of peace for the exigencies of warfare. But it is very doubtful when and where tournaments, in the proper sense of the term, were originally instituted. The older writers on the subject sought to connect them with the "Troja" or "Indus Trojæ" among the Romans. But this is a piece of archaeology of the same sort as that which identified the knighthood of the Middle Ages with the ancient "ordo equestris," and will not, of course, bear examination. Much reliance again has been placed by some of them on the account of a sham-fight which was held at the celebrated interview between the emperor Louis and Charles the Bald in 841, which in certain respects bore a close resemblance to a tournament, and was no doubt the kind of exhibition out of which the tournament of a later age was developed. Others attribute the institution of tournaments to the emperor Henry the Fowler, who died in 936, or to Geoffrey de Preuilly, the ancestor of the counts of Tours, who died in 1066. However this may be, it is certain that they were in vogue on the Continent at the end of the llth century, and that in the early part of the 12th century they were introduced into England. In the 13th and 14th centuries they were common all over Christendom, including the Eastern as well as the Western empire and the states comprised in or adjacent to it. It was not until the end of the 16th century that tilts and hastiludes passed out of fashion in Britain, and even in the earlier years of the 17th century they were occasionally celebrated under the patron age of Henry, prince of Wales, son of King James I.

The older authorities on tournaments and jousts are exceedingly numerous. But all that is material in what they have written will be found in Ste Palaye's Mémoires sur l'Ancienne Chevalerie and Mills's History of Chivalry. The "Dissertations" of Du Cange at the end of Joinville's Memoirs and the Chronicles of Froissart and Monstrelet may also be consulted. Ste Palaye and Mills were both industrious compilers, and the second is much indebted to the first.