How to Win at Tournaments: the Technique of Chivalric Combat

Abstract

SummaryAlthough it has generally been maintained that chivalric combat depended solely on strength and endurance, there is ample evidence that skill, dexterity, speed and control were also required. This paper attempts to reconstruct the techniques used in foot combats, tourneying on horseback and jousting (especially tilting)—in England, France, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula—on the basis of narratives and technical treatises, concerning sword and lance play, written between the late fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries.