More festival than drill
It is tempting to describe the tournament as practice for war. That was part of its purpose, but it was never the whole story, and by the later Middle Ages it was often a smaller part. A better comparison is to a major sporting festival today: a planned occasion, publicized in advance, with famous competitors, a paying and non-paying audience, ceremony, food and drink, and a great deal of social display. For the general course of events from early mock battle to late pageant, see the longer history of the tournament; this article looks at the event as a sport and a spectacle.
Announcement and setting
Tournaments were usually tied to a larger celebration, such as a royal wedding, a coronation, a knighting ceremony or a religious feast day. Heralds carried news of the date and the conditions, sometimes across several countries, so that knights could travel to take part. Some events were held by kings and great lords, and others by town authorities or rich citizens’ associations in the later period.
For the larger jousts a purpose-built arena was prepared. Wooden stands or galleries, hung with fabric and painted shields, held the nobility, while ordinary townspeople crowded around the fences or on rooftops. The scene was bright with banners, horse trappings and colors on helmets and shields. Because so many knights wished to be recognized, display drew on coats of arms, and the role of heralds and tournaments became bound together: heralds announced each competitor, identified him by his arms, and kept the records.
The audience and the ladies
Spectators were a defining feature. Nobles saw the event as a chance to see and be seen, to judge the quality of the fighters and to assess possible allies or retainers. Ordinary people came for the excitement, much as they did for other public events like fairs and processions.
The role of women is easy to romanticize but was real. Noblewomen watched from the stands, and in later tournaments they were often asked to hand out the prizes. A knight might wear a lady’s token, a sleeve or scarf, tied to his arm or helmet as a sign of devotion, a practice linked to the literary tradition of courtly love. How far such gestures reflected actual feeling and how far they were polite convention is debated. Either way, they gave the contest a romantic framing that suited court culture.
Prizes and money
Rewards varied widely. In the early melee, the main gain was the horse, armor and ransom of captured opponents, which could amount to real wealth. In later, more ceremonial events the prize was often an object of value such as a jewel, a piece of silver or a ring, given in public to the knight judged the best. In some cases the winner got a more modest symbolic reward, and it was the honor that counted. Heralds and judges decided who deserved the prize, and disputes about their decisions were not unknown.
Expenses fell on the competitors as well as the hosts. Armor, horses, servants, tents, travel and banners were costly, and a host who held a large tournament also needed to provide feasts and lodging. For that reason the sport was effectively limited to the wealthy or to those with a patron. The costs of such feasts are part of the reason that church writers criticized the events as wasteful, and the same banquets feature in accounts of noble feasts, which often accompanied them.
Entertainment around the fighting
The jousting was only one part of the occasion. Before and after, there might be dancing, singing and storytelling. Courts used such events to showcase musicians and minstrel performers, and the evening often involved court dances. Falconry and hunting could fill the days between contests. In the later period, tournaments absorbed elements of the medieval pageant, with knights arriving in costume as characters from romance, accompanied by floats, giants or allegorical figures. These shows could be elaborate, and they belonged to the same family of entertainments as the plays and processions of the age.
Other medieval sports existed, from archery contests to wrestling, football-like village games and hunting, but the tournament stood apart because it was reserved for the noble class and bound to ideas of honor.
Danger and its limits
Danger was part of the attraction, and also part of the criticism. Falls from horses, broken lances and crushing in a melee killed and maimed participants. Chroniclers sometimes list a few notable deaths, and larger totals attributed to particular events should be treated with skepticism. Rulers and organizers responded by using blunted weapons, a tilt barrier for the joust, marshals to stop fights, and heavier specialized armor. The risk could not be removed, and church authorities for a long time denied burial in consecrated ground to those killed, though this was often relaxed in practice.
Another danger was social. Large armed gatherings could turn into political trouble or private feuds, and rulers sometimes forbade tournaments at times of unrest.
Tournament versus battle training
The line between sport and military training is real but blurred. Skills used in jousting, such as managing a heavy horse and striking a target with a lance, had some battlefield value, particularly for the mounted knights of earlier centuries. The heavy tilting armor, scoring rules and festival setting of later tournaments, however, had little in common with an actual cavalry charge. Writers of the time, including the French knight Geoffrey de Charny, ranked tournaments below real war in terms of honor, which suggests that men who did both saw them as different activities. The tournament should be understood, then, as a social and cultural institution, equal parts sport, ritual and display, and only partly a school of arms.