What if there wasn’t a war, and we all showed up anyway?

There were two kinds of tournaments in the Middle Ages, tournaments and jousts. The terms came to be used interchangeably towards the end of the Middle Ages. ‘Tournament’ became the preferred name, but it was ‘jousts’ that have defined our modern understanding of tournaments. We all know what jousting is, but what was an old-fashioned tournament?

First, imagine a war. Now imagine you’re fighting it for fun.

Old-fashioned tournaments were open-world team deathmatches with sharp weapons. There could be as many as 200 knights to a side and the arena was often defined as the space between two villages or some other large swath of land full of terrified peasants.

Teams were usually divided by geography, French knights versus English knights, for instance. Each team had a safe zone and would ride out on horseback, armed with lance, sword and shield, to fight the other team. There were few rules. Knights could ambush stragglers, or gang up on isolated opponents, or just charge into a huge melee and start hacking away.

The point wasn’t to kill your opponent, simply to force them to surrender. Then, you could hold them to ransom for immense sums of money. The ransoms could be set before the tournament started, so they were less fight-to-the-death than high-stakes gambling, but with kidnapping. If your opponent died, you would have to content yourself with stealing their armor, their weapons, and their war house, assuming you hadn’t killed that as well.

The practice of ransoming off noble prisoners was common at the time, and it worked much the same in tournaments as it did in normal warfare.

However, tournaments were still fought with sharp weapons, and being worth more alive than dead wasn’t nearly enough to prevent deaths. It was a rear noble family who couldn’t point to at least one relative who had been killed in a tournament. The very first evidence of tournaments is a record of the death of a Godfrey de Preuilly in 1066 C.E. in a tournament he had organized.

Nothing demonstrates early tournaments' commitment to fair play quite like the Kipper. Capturing a knight could be very difficult; knock him off his house and he could just fight on foot, ride him down and you’d probably kill him and lose the ransom money, dismount to fight on foot and you’d give away your advantage. Kippers were the answer.

A kipper, from the Scandinavian ‘Kippa’- to seize, was a serf who followed their lord into the tournament and would collect the spoils so the knight wouldn’t have to stop fighting. When a knight was unhorsed, the opposing knight’s kippers would run up and beat the fallen knight senseless with clubs, steal their armor and weapons, and drag him off to captivity.

Imagine for a moment what, say, modern football would look like if every player was followed around by a gang of thugs with baseball bats, ready to beat the tar out of fallen players and steal their jerseys. It seems ludicrous now, but knights back then didn’t think twice about it, even though there was a good chance they would end up on the wrong side of a kipper themselves.

Under constant pressure from numerous kings and the Catholic Church, tournaments eventually became less bloody. Sharp weapons became rare, and kippers were seen as unsportsmanlike. Old-fashioned tournaments were phased out in favor of jousts, which, though far from safe, were at least safer than a general melee. Collecting ransoms became less important than showing off to the crowd. This focus on pageantry can make tournaments seem faintly ridiculous today, but it’s worth remembering that originally, a tournament was intended to be all the fun of a real war, with none of the boring politics.

Taliesin Rouleau

Taliesin is a student at Algonquin College. He was raised in the woods by Neo-Pagans and studies Medieval combat from old manuscripts as a hobby.