THE TOURNAMENT
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME
THE ARMOURER AND HIS CRAFT. By Charles Ffoulkes
DECORATIVE IRONWORK. By Charles Ffoulkes
OLD PASTE. By A. Beresford Ryley
A COURSE OF GERMAN GESTECH.
THE TOURNAMENT
ITS PERIODS AND PHASES
BY
R. COLTMAN CLEPHAN, F.S.A.
WITH A PREFACE BY
CHARLES J. FFOULKES
Curator of the Armouries at the Tower
WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR
AND 23 OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1919
PREFACE
Thosestudents of arms and armour who have Mr. Clephan’s work onDefensive Armour, Weapons and Engines of War in their librarieswill expect to find valuable material for study when they find his nameas author of a work on the Tournament. And in this they will surelynot be disappointed. It is perhaps a novel experience for one who hasfor some years seriously meditated such a work himself to be asked tointroduce the work of another; but in the study of arms and armour allmen are brothers, and I take leave to say that we of this brotherhoodknow little of the jealousies and divisions of opinion which beset thestudent in other historical details. The perusal of Mr. Clephan’s workhas shown me that it would have been impossible to undertake such aproject without unattainable leisure, tireless energy, deep researchand very real devotion to the subject. Mr. Clephan has dealt with thesubject from a wide European point of view, and has amassed a vastamount of information from German sources which has, up till now, beendenied to those unskilled in that language; and, with his copious notesand references, has made this material available for study, for whichalone we must ever be deeply indebted to him.
The Tournament, as practised in Germany and towards the close ofthe sixteenth century in England, France and Italy, must have been arather dull performance, as the minute regulations and the cumbersomeequipment precluded that dash and intrepid onslaught which make thedescriptions by Froissart and other writers of his time such excellentreading. Even the gorgeous displays of Henry VIII leave us rather coldwhen we find that the king invariably won, and that the queen couldstop the tilting at her pleasure, which was presumably when her lord[Pg vi]had had sufficient entertainment. We have only to note that the suit inthe Tower made for Henry VIII to fight on foot in the lists weighs 93lbs., to realize that no man could be strenuous or energetic in thisequipment; and when we find that the horse in the sixteenth centuryjoust had to carry a dead weight of 340 lbs., it will be manifest thathe could only amble gently along the tilt, and could not dash headlongdown the lists, as the artist would have us believe. The whole subjectof arms and armour teems with such disillusioning; but to the earneststudent these are taken with grace, because they are born of factsquarried out of masses of written and printed records with y