[The following is an excerpt from a paper by Suzanne Marshall, a Columbia University graduate student, baroque dressage instructor, and fencer. The text of the full article is available here. -ed.]

A hundred years earlier and a continent away, an audience in England eagerly awaits the arrival of the defender of the tournament. They are not disappointed as the Pope enters the list, followed closely by twelve cardinals.

Although these may be the most spectacular examples of religious disguise in medieval tournaments, they are by no means singular. The chronicles abound with knights dressing as abbots, monks, and religious pilgrims. In an age when religion and the accoutrements of religion were taken very seriously, these choices of disguise are startling. Questions cannot help but come to mind as words written hundreds of years ago conjure up images of the pope jousting, tonsured monks swinging swords, and canons attacking foes with pilgrims' staves. Violence and Christianity, always strange bedfellows, are once again juxtaposed. Were these disguise choices mere novelties? Simply frivolous jests and whims? Considering the importance of tournaments, there must have been more to it than that. Although the minds of men long dead cannot be known, by examining the available facts, it may be possible to come closer to answering the question of why these knights chose religious attire as their disguises.

The tournament as a distinct form of martial sport first appeared in the eleventh century. Initially, the tournament or hastilude was most often a melee^[4] and differed little from actual warfare. Knights fought in melees for military training, and for the ransom and goods gained by capturing other knights. Jousting in single combat does not appear until the thirteenth century.^[5] Not until the desire for personal recognition and honor overwhelmed the desire for booty did single combat becomes prevalent and records of disguise wearing begin to appear. Disguises did find their way into the melee format, such as the behourd^[6] held at Boston Fair in 1228 when an "army" of monks fought an "army" of canons, but it was primarily a development of the individual battles of the joust and the pas d'armes.^[7] It is also in the pas d'armes that the most elaborate forms of disguise are found.

The pas d'armes, consisting of a formal challenge and elaborate, usually allegorical, storyline, is built upon the "chivalric value which placed individual achievement above all else."^[8] Gaining popularity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it is the most inherently theatrical form of the tournament, and so not only lends itself to, but almost demands, the contrivance of disguise.

The cost, in both time and money, of mounting a successful tournament is staggering. By the time disguises became commonplace, a tournament and the banquets and entertainment associated with it, absorbed "the greater part of the income of some nobles."^[9] Records for the town of Ghent in Burgundy show that in 1370, over twenty percent of the town's yearly income was spent on festivals, tournaments and pageants.^[10] Expenses include the building of lists and houses, prizes (usually jewels and gold), the cost of heralds used to proclaim the event, lavish decorations, feasts and pageantry. Even if one could not assay the expense of hosting a tournament (which by the fifteenth century had become so expensive that only royalty and the wealthiest of nobles could afford to do so), the expense of tourneying itself was prohibitive. Costumes were lavish and costly. At one event held in 1475, some jousters were clad in costumes made with as much as twenty pounds of pearls.^[11] Good horses were also difficult to come by, and so expensive that they were often borrowed. The knights often traveled tremendous distances. In 1435, Juan de Merlo was recorded as complaining about how few courses he was allowed to run at a tournament, despite the fact that he had traveled such a great distance and at such great expense.^[12]

Footnotes

^[1] Castile was one of the kingdoms that make up what is now Spain.

^[2] The list is the arena where tournaments and jousts are fought.

^[3] Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (Woodbridge, 1970), 182.

^[4] A melee is hand-to-hand fighting between groups of men. Either on horseback or on foot, a wide assortment of weapons are used including lance, axe and sword. Richard Barber and Juliet Baker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageant (Woodbridge, 1989), 213.

^[5] Jousting is single combat on horseback using lances.

^[6] A behourd is a more casual form of hastilude usually fought by squires and knights in training.

^[7]N. Denholm-Young, “The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century.” Collected Papers of N. Denholm-Young (Cardiff, 1969), 115.

Pas d’armes is a very elaborate form of the tournament which became extremely popular in the fifteenth century. In the pas d’armes there was a story line, role-playing and actual combat. It was usually a defender, or tenant, vowing to hold a pas (a defined and usually allegorical space) against all comers, or venants. Barber and Baker, Tournament, 213.

^[8] Barber, The Knight, 194.

^[9] Strayer, 174

^[10] Nicholas, David. “In the Pit of the Burgundian Theater State: Urban Traditions and Princely Ambitions in Ghent, 1360-1420.” City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe. (Minneapolis, 1994), 285.

^[11] Barber, The Knight, 189.

^[12] Ibid., 202-3.