The Tournament of Blood

Author’s Note

When one considers the medieval period, one automatically thinks of damsels in distress and knights in armour. The era is filled with tales of knightly chivalry, of errantry, of honourable fights and pageantry. And one of the most potent symbols of that era of glorious chivalry is the joust. One man against another; both keen to show their prowess and courage.

Hollywood would have us believe that tournaments involved two men riding against each other, both behaving thoroughly courteously, both equal in rank and honour, each one trying to knock his opponent from his horse in as polite a manner as possible. Naturally when one fell, the other would wait until he was on his feet again, and then the two would go at it again, probably stopping for a nice cup of tea to refresh themselves.

But Hollywood hasn’t quite got it right. In the early days, tournaments were far from civilised, which is why the Church banned them from 1130 at the Council of Clermont.

Tournaments altered over time. There were several different forms, but all developed from one aim: to teach men to fight in war. The earliest version shows this most clearly, because it was a straightforward battle. Called a mêlée, it involved two groups of armed men meeting between two villages or towns (in other words not in a small field but in a non-specific and large battlefield); they charged and fought just as if they were in a real battle, no holds barred. Participants went at each other hammer and tongs, with three or four against one, while others hid behind trees hoping to ambush the unwary. The most unscrupulous might even wait at a nearby tavern until all the contenders were exhausted, then ride in to take as many prisoners as possible. Competitors wanted to win not because of some abstruse concept such as chivalry – but for hard cash.

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.

This being the case, the reader may be surprised that I have decided to set my tournament in 1322. It is even more surprising when one realises that under Richard I’s law, only some five specific fields up and down the country were to be used: they were near Salisbury, Stamford, Warwick, Brackly and Blyth. None was near Okehampton.

However, if there is one thing which is clear about history, it is the fact that nothing is clear. Even if one hears that hard and fast rules were imposed, one soon learns that the opposite is recorded. When I began to conceive this story, I read of Edward II’s ban on tournaments and was going to try to make the story fit his brothers’ event of 1323, but then I heard of a knight who had been forced to flee from a joust and beg for a pardon because he accidentally killed his opponent in 1318. This clearly happened during Edward’s ban, and equally clearly the location (Luton) wasn’t a site selected for licensed tournaments.

I believe that the evidence shows that the kings never intended to stop all training for knights. The intention of the royal prohibition was to prevent great multitudes of grandees gathering and plotting the current monarch’s downfall. Thus Edward would not have wanted Earl Thomas of Lancaster and the Earl of Pembroke to meet with all their men because the two were powerful and could unite against him – but a lesser baron like Hugh de Courtenay was not in the same league, and if Edward wanted Hugh’s men to help in the King’s host, should Earl Thomas rebel (as he did), obviously the King would want Hugh’s men to be capable of serving him. Therefore I believe that limited ‘training’ tournaments went on all the time; they were marginally less expensive for participants and were probably looked upon as handy for keeping rural knights and squires in training. England certainly had need of trained fighters – as she has all through history. It is only in the last fifty years that the British Government has become so fearful of its own subjects that successive Parliaments have banned target pistols, shotguns, target rifles, and even pea-shooters.

For those who wish to find out more about knights and tournaments, there are remarkably few good books. One I would recommend is Chaucer’s Knight by Terry Jones, because although it tells of a time a few decades after this, it is so readable and informative that it is invaluable. I would also recommend Chivalry by Maurice Keen, an excellent, scholarly work that explains much about the motivations of knights, squires and heralds. I can also highly recommend The History of the Tournament in England and France by F. H. Cripps-Day – but I fear that few will be able to find it, since it was published in 1918.

The main setting for this story is in and about Okehampton Castle. I have always been very keen to pick locations which readers can visit and ideally imagine how things might have been, and Okehampton gives a better impression than many other places.

Tournaments would often have been held in market squares – for the simple reason that contestants and spectators needed access to food, drink, clothing and weaponry. Pictures and woodcuts show townsfolk looking on as a pair of knights charge each other, or as a small army battered at each other with axes, swords or maces. All about can be seen shops and hucksters, clearly showing that the market continued while the knights fought.

However, I think it’s likely that a warlord like Hugh II would have wanted to be closer to the comforts of his castle than in a small town like Okehampton. He would, I think, have wanted to stage a tournament in a more magnificent setting, somewhere with the potential for processions, for drama and display. The castle is perfect from this perspective.

I have described the whole setting in the story itself, but perhaps a brief outline of the lands beneath the castle walls would be helpful. In effect it is a series of meadows. The first, at the eastern end, is a tapering area which is not quite so large as the others, bounded on one side by the river and the other by the castle. The next is a kind of rough oval, again with the river on the southern side, but following the contour of the castle’s ridge on the other. Finally there is a third area, which this time is less long and thin and is instead broader, if a little shorter. There is one ford up near the castle’s front gate, and a second in the third meadow.

The castle has been imaginatively protected from collapse by English Heritage without detracting from its character. The meadowland beneath the castle, lying within the sweep of the river, is flat and broad. Walking over it, it’s easy to imagine the small fair set up, trestles all over with pots and jugs of ale or wine, barrels broached and tapped, pies and poultry cooking over smoking fires, bread being offered by maids with baskets, the odd hawker, a beggar or two at the gate, while further on would be the merchants with their bolts of silk and velvet, trying to tempt the knights into buying presents for their wives, their lady loves, or more likely for themselves, to make them appear still more gaudily marvellous.

Okehampton Castle has suffered dreadfully over the centuries. It was built soon after Hastings, by Baldwin Fitz Gilbert, Sheriff of Devon under William the Bastard, and was mentioned in Domesday. It became a de Courtenay property when Robert de Courtenay married Baldwin’s great-great-granddaughter in 1172. The earls of Devon were the de Redvers family, but the male line died out in the 1200s. Hugh de Courtenay married one of the de Redvers women, and subsequently became Earl in her right in 1335.

There are enormous cracks in the walls, and the outer curtain wall to the north has all but disappeared, but this little castle has a wonderful feel to it, especially if one makes the laborious ascent to the old tower on top of the steep spur. From there you can peer down at the yard before you, or gaze down the steep hill toward the meadows, up at Dartmoor, or at the line of the old roadway. It may have been a small fort, but lying as it did on the main road from Cornwall, it had a tremendous strategic importance. It is well worth a visit.

After the forgoing, the more vigilant readers will have noticed that I spelled the town’s name as ‘Okehampton’ and not ‘Oakhampton’.

When I wrote the first of the Templar series, I wanted to use old spellings of place names. I thought they were more interesting, but to my surprise a number of people have complained or have accused me of not knowing the area because I can’t spell the town’s name properly. For them, all I can say is that I wanted to use the names as they would have been spelled in the past. In the same way I have stuck in the main to old-fashioned spelling of people’s names.

For those who dislike the ‘Oak’ spelling, I hope that seeing the more modern spelling here in the Author’s Note will satisfy them. After all, the Author’s Note is written in and about the twenty-first century – it’s only right that Okehampton should be given its contemporary spelling!

With a work of this type the writer has to study many aspects of history, from methods of fighting to the clothing worn, to how Okehampton Castle would have looked in the 1320s. I am hugely grateful as always for the help of the Exeter University Library staff and the staff of the Devon and Exeter Institution, and any errors are entirely my own.

I’ve found it enormously enjoyable getting to grips with tournaments and I only hope you find the story as interesting to read as it was for me to write.

Michael Jecks

North Dartmoor

April 2000