SOURCE: Benson, Larry D. “Knighthood in Life and Literature.” In Malory's Morte Darthur, pp. 163-85. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Benson contends that Malory's depiction of chivalric deeds and tournaments in Le Morte Darthur was based on incidents and traditions established by real-life knights.]

The case of chivalry in its more general sense is much the same as that of courtly love. Romance chivalry—the idea that a knight must perform deeds for the honor of his lady and to acquire “worship”—was in the twelfth century a literary ideal, with only an indirect relation to the life of the times. The early romances present a heightened and purified image of the life that some of the more sophisticated twelfth-century nobles might have wanted to live if they had been blessed with the wealth and leisure to do so. But we know of none who, gorgeously equipped, jousted for the sake of honor, went on knightly quests for the sake of their ladies, and lived by the code of Lancelot or Tristan. In England William the Marshal (1144-1219) came closest to leading a life of chivalric adventure, for in his youth he traveled about Europe as a knight-errant taking part in tournaments, and he became one of the most famous and successful jousters of his time. His life, L'histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, provides our fullest surviving portrait of an actual knight of the late twelfth century. This work was written between 1226 and 1231 at the command of William's son and of his old friend Jean d'Erlee.¹ We may therefore assume that it places William in the most favorable possible light, and the author does indeed represent his hero as the ideal knight. But William fulfills the ideal of his own times. He is loyal, generous, wise, brave, and admired by the ladies. But he is no servant of the ladies. As Sidney Painter writes, “William's code is not the chivalry of a Lancelot or a Galahad but one that is purely military and feudal.”²

Though William's greatest virtue is largesce, as one might expect in a romance written by a professional minstrel, his main interest in knightly jousting is the profit that he gains from it. This is typical of his time, when tourneys were not so much a way of gaining worship as commercial undertakings, a means by which a landless knight, as William was, could become rich. There was thus little bother with knightly courtesy. At a tournament at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dive, when William and his companions were at dinner, a wounded knight rode by and then, fainting, fell from his horse, broke his arm, and lay helpless. William leaped from the table, rushed out, seized the fully armored knight, tucked him under his arm, and returned to his companions, throwing him at their feet and saying, “Here, this will pay your debts.”³

From 1177 to 1179 William and his partner, Roger de Gaugi, lived as knights-errant, touring the Continent to participate in tournaments; in less than a year they defeated 103 knights.⁴ But before they set out, he and Roger carefully drew up an agreement of partnership in order to split the profits they expected to make. Such agreements were not unusual: Richard I and Philip of France drew up a similar agreement before they set out on the Third Crusade. What is unusual, from the standpoint of later chivalric biographies, is the biographer's matter-of-course acceptance of the idea that profit is important in knightly enterprises. Later knights at least pretend to fight for honor alone. William fights for honor and plunder. Even on his deathbed he proudly recalls the wealth he has gained by his victories over five hundred knights, from each of whom he took horse, armor, and ransom.⁵ This is closer to the dying Beowulf looking with satisfaction on the booty he has won than it is to the exploits of the Chevalier Bayard. Bayard, who lived in the sixteenth century, at the other end of the chivalric age, once captured the treasurer of the Spanish army, who was carrying 15,000 ducats. When his companion insisted on a half share (though he had not been present at the capture), Bayard refused, and he was upheld by the Court of Chivalry. Then, having satisfied his honor, he gave half of the money to his companion, gave the other half to the soldiers of the garrison, and released the Spaniard without ransom, allowing him to keep all his personal possessions.⁶ This is an act of bravado and largesce comparable to William's in the tournament at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dive, but Bayard's largesce extends even to the captive Spaniard, and he would have been as horrified by William's unchivalric concern with profit as William would have been amused by Bayard's innocence. William learned early in life that ransom is the main business of a knight.⁷ How else, he would have asked, could one maintain the largesce essential to knighthood?

In the later chivalric biographies one hears somewhat less about largesce and almost nothing about the booty necessary to maintain it. Plunder and ransom, of course, remained the main business of war; Bayard's companion was clearly aware of this, and many knights setting off for campaigns during the Hundred Years' War made business agreements similar to that between William and Roger de Gaugi. But honor rather than profit was now becoming the more acceptable public motive. Jousting and tournaments became entirely matters of honor. Ulrich von Lichtenstein, who jousted his way through Europe a generation later than William, consciously patterned his actions on the heroes of romance (and was fond of jousting disguised as King Arthur or even Frau Venus), and though we hear much of the honor he gained in the tourneys, we hear nothing of the profit.⁸ How greatly matters had changed between William's day and Malory's is shown by the fact that in The Book of Sir Tristram the “evil custom” abolished by Lamerok at one castle is simply the ordinary rule of tournaments in the earlier period: each passing knight must joust, and if he loses, “He shall lose his horse and harnes and all that he hath, and harde if he ascape but that he shall be presonere.” That was the whole point of jousting in William's time, but when Palomides hears of it he is deeply shocked: “So God me help … this is a shameful and vylaunce usage” (X17 [Book X, Chapter 17 of Caxton's edition]).

By the time Malory wrote this, the most one could earn by jousting was honor and perhaps a jewel if he won one of the prizes.⁹ The old custom of the victor's claiming the horse and armor of his opponent survived only in his claim to, in the words of a challenge issued in 1438, “his helm or other a blymaunt the which he wears upon his head for to bear unto his lady.”¹⁰ A landless knight could hardly make his fortune in the lists, for expensive special armor was now required, and as often as not the victor of a passage of arms—the best way to gain worship at this time—was expected to give handsome presents to those whom he defeated and then, as sponsor of the jousts, provide a great feast for all who attended. A young squire like John Astley could earn a handsome reward from his king for fighting in the lists, but unless one had this sort of patronage he could hardly afford to enter and pay the many fees required, including even “nail money” to the heralds (a fee for nailing up the shields around the lists).¹¹ It cost the Bastard of Burgundy 3,000 écus to accept the challenge of Lord Scales in 1467,¹² and though few knights who jousted bore expenses that great, it is clear that the profit motive was completely gone from fifteenth-century tournaments and that honor and worship themselves were proving quite expensive.

Even warfare was now ostensibly conducted to gain honor rather than profit. This was, of course, more pretense than fact, but perhaps pretense is the best index to the moral ideals of any age. William the Marshal's contemporary (and probably his friend), the troubadour Bernart de Born, frankly delighted in the prospect of loot, and he apparently saw nothing unchivalric in the sirventes he wrote to Richard I and Philip August urging war for the sake of the plunder it would bring.¹³ Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century nobles were clearly just as eager for the wealth a successful campaign could bring, and they doubtless agreed with Joan of Arc's captain, La Hire, who said, “If God were a soldier He would be a pillager.”¹⁴ Yet they preferred their poets to sing about honor and renown. The Life of the Black Prince, written by the Chandos Herald, shows how much attitudes had changed. Like the minstrel-author of William's biography, the Chandos Herald presents his hero as an ideal knight, but now—in the fourteenth century—the ideal knight is motivated entirely by honor, and we hear little of the plunder Edward and his army actually gained.

It is significant that Edward's biographer was a herald rather than a minstrel and that the records of his knightly victories were kept by heraldic historians rather than clerks like the one who kept track of William's jousting, more in the manner of an accountant than a recorder of noble deeds. In the late Middle Ages the heralds became the official historians of the nobility, and they had the duty of recording the great chivalric deeds of the present and scaling them, as does the Chandos Herald, against the deeds of Caesar and Arthur, so that we are given the impression that the present may at least aspire to equal the past. The heralds, of course, presented their subject in the most favorable light; a fifteenth-century herald's oath specified that if he should hear something unfavorable to lords and ladies, “Ye keep your mouth close and report it not forth but to their worship and the best.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, heraldic records were meant to be official and accurate histories. The Chandos Herald was thus careful to record each deed in precise detail, with long lists of the participants that remind one not only of early romances, such as the Estoire de Merlin, but also of Malory's catalogs of names and his careful specification of the participants in tournaments. Such details seem tedious to the modern reader, but for fifteenth-century noblemen they may have added a touch of verisimilitude, lending Malory's fiction some of the tone of the works of contemporary heralds and chivalric chroniclers, such as the Chester Herald in England and Olivier de la Marche in Burgundy, who aspired to record in exact detail the noble deeds of their age.

The Chandos Herald, who wrote a century before Malory, still regarded chivalry as largely a matter of warfare rather than jousts and service to ladies. In his work “We have little talk of ‘ladye loves,’ nor any dwelling on the gaieties of times of peace or the feats of tournaments or the revelries of the hall.”¹⁶ A generation later, when Froissart lived and wrote, the ideals of chivalry were becoming a generally accepted part of the noble ethic. War was becoming—at least in aspiration—an extension of the tournament (rather than the reverse), and even powerful princes were beginning to attempt to imitate in life the deeds they read about in romances. Tournaments, “lady loves,” and the gaieties of chivalric courtesy were becoming an important means of acquiring “worship,” and Froissart in his Chroniques paid as careful attention to those forms of chivalry as to the battles he narrated. The imitation of romance in life had become an essential part of chivalry.

In earlier times, jousts, tournaments, and knightly duels were generally regarded as at best frivolous and at worse damnable. They were forbidden by the decree of the council of Clermont, and Innocent III specified that those killed in tournaments should be denied Christian burial—“extra ecclesiam tamen careat sepultura.”¹⁷ This attitude persisted until well into the fourteenth century, when Bromyard reminded his hearers that jousting was forbidden by the Church and added that “the tournaments of the rich are the torments of the poor.”¹⁸

In England tournaments were rare until late in the thirteenth century. William the Conqueror had forbidden their importation from France, and they did not appear until the troubled reign of King Stephen (1135-1154).¹⁹ Henry II disapproved of them, though his son, Young King Henry, went to France to joust. Even a great warrior like Richard I never pretended to be a romance knight, battling in the lists for the honor of his lady (women were banned from his coronation feast), or a king of romance, presiding over jousts. As Richard Barber writes, “He left such frivolous matters to lesser princes, such as the counts of Hainault, and no chronicler ever saw their fondness for tournaments as anything other than youthful folly.”²⁰ Indeed, when Richard saw that the youth of his own realm were determined to joust, he characteristically turned their folly to his own financial advantage: he licensed tournaments and extracted a fee from all who wished to participate. The chronicler William of Newburgh explained that Richard established these tournaments to encourage military discipline, but the size of the fees seems to show that profit rather than skill was uppermost in Richard's mind: they ranged from twenty marks for an earl down to two marks for a landless knight.²¹

What the Church regarded as sinful and Richard saw as a source of revenue had become by Malory's time a noble and virtuous pursuit. Jousts, wrote Malory's older contemporary, Nicholas Upton, were necessary “to prove one his strength and manhood; which manhood and fortitude is a moral virtue; yea, and also one of the cardinal virtues.”²² Much more so the tournament with its “feats of the necessary discipline of arms,” as a fifteenth-century challenge put it, “to the experience and enabling of nobles to the deserving of chivalry, by the which our mother church is defended, kings and princes served, realms and countries maintained in justice and peace.”²³ The idea that tournaments had a direct military and moral value survived even in the Elizabethan Accession Day Tilts and in Vulson's seventeenth-century Vray théâtre.²⁴

An even more important justification for tournaments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the authority of ancient tradition. This, of course, was based not on a knowledge of actual conditions in ancient Greece and Rome (where chivalry was thought to have originated) or in the days of King Arthur but on the romances themselves. As early as the thirteenth century, tournaments begin to be imitations of romance chivalry, with knights appearing in the characters of Lancelot and Tristan (as they did in Cyprus in 1223), and the tournaments tending to be pageantlike recreations of the Round Table.²⁵ Edward I, a great reader of romance—Rusticiano da Pisa dedicated his compilation of Arthurian romances to him—seems consciously to have used his “Round Table” in an attempt to recreate Arthurian chivalry, just as Edward III decided to found the Order of the Garter in imitation of the Order of the Round Table.²⁶ In the fifteenth century, tournaments became even more elaborate recreations of romance, leaning often toward pedantry in their attempts at historical accuracy. The late fifteenth-century La forme des tournoys et asemblees au temps du roy Uterpendragon et du roy Artus is a set of tournament rules carefully culled from early romances.²⁷

There is more than a touch of the theatrical in all this, as there is in the use of the word “triumph” as a synonym for “tourney” and in Malory's use of the phrase “play his pageant” to describe a knight's participation in a tournament.²⁸ But, theatrical as such tournaments were, they seemed to participants and spectators more noble emulation than playacting. It is difficult to think of a more elaborately contrived and stage-managed tournament than that held to celebrate the wedding of Edward's sister Margaret to Charles of Burgundy in 1468, characterized by a twentieth-century historian of tournaments as mere “buffoonery.”²⁹ But the heralds and chroniclers who recorded the event regarded the whole affair as an admirable enterprise, worthy of more elaborate records than we have for any contemporary battle.³⁰

The more romantic life became, the more realistic romances seemed, so that sometimes, as Martín de Riquer has shown, it is difficult to separate fiction from reality both in fifteenth-century romances and in contemporary chronicles; the fiction seems real, the chronicle fiction. Riquer's study is restricted to Spain and Burgundy in the first half of the fifteenth century, but it can easily be extended to England, where chivalric deeds were also eagerly cultivated. Johonet Martorell, the author of Tirant lo Blanc, set part of the action of his romance in England, which he himself had visited as a knight-errant, and another of Malory's contemporary knight-romancers, Antoine de la Sale, regarded the English as admirably proficient in chivalric ceremonial—“The most ceremonious people in matters of honor that I have ever seen.”³¹ Riquer's best example of the interrelation of literature and chivalric life—his study of the “impresa del braccioletta”³²—applies to England as easily as to the Continent, and indeed is a necessary part of the history of the great chivalric duel held at Smithfield in 1467 between Lord Scales, one of the most celebrated English knights of his time, and Anthony, the Bastard of Burgundy, one of the most accomplished jousters on the Continent.

The “impresa del braccioletta” (emprise de bracelet) was based on the custom of a knight-errant's wearing a special device, an emprise (in this case a bracelet or leglet), which he has vowed not to remove until he has jousted with some suitable opponent. Knights in romance had sometimes carried a special heraldic symbol on their quests, as La Cote Mal Tayle carries the shield that the maiden brought to Arthur's court and that he must carry until he has completed the quest he has undertaken. In the late fourteenth century it became fashionable for real knights to adopt some heraldic emblem as a form of announcing their readiness to joust. Boucicaut, for example, had shields hung up at St. Engelbert, which, as in the romances, a prospective opponent would touch as a challenge to joust. Other knights of the time took to carrying about such emblems. For example, Sir Piers Courtenay, a famous English jouster of the last decade of the fourteenth century, had a new surcoat made with the emblem of a falcon on it and this legend:

I beer a falcon, fayrest of flith,
Qwha so pinchez at hir, his deth is dith,
          In graith.(33)

A Scottish knight, Sir William Dalzell, saw the device and rushed to buy a new surcoat, in which he soon appeared before Sir Piers. It had a magpie upon it and this legend:

I beer a pye pykkand ay a pes,
Qwha so pillis at hir I pik at his nese,
          In faith.

Sir William was as good as his word, and in the fight that followed Sir Piers lost his two front teeth.

This custom of wearing a special device, an emprise, as an invitation to joust had apparently become well established by the early decades of the fifteenth century, for Riquer tells us that on St. Sebastian's Day in 1431 a Spanish knight, Bernat de Coscon, was walking in the streets of Sarragoza, wearing the device of an arm pierced with an arrow, as he was accustomed to do on this day in honor of the saint.³⁴ Another knight, Antonio de Monte Aperto, seeing this emblem and mistaking it for a chivalric emprise, immediately challenged Bernat to joust. Bernat refused, because of the day, but agreed to satisfy Antonio on another occasion. Antonio thereupon drew up his “chapters of arms,” the formal challenge with the rules for the combat, calling them the “Capitoles de la empressa del Bracelot.” Probably as an allusion to Bernat's votive device, he announced that his emprise would be an armlet, and then to add dignity to the occasion he drew upon the “Joie de la court” theme of works like Chrétien's Erec, and explained that he was the prisoner of his lady, who had commanded him to wear the armlet until someone (that is, Bernat) agreed to joust with him in the manner outlined in his chapters and in “the honor of the lady whom I love.” Bernat accepted the challenge, and the desired duel took place.

A few years later, in 1445, a Sicilian knight, Giovanni di Bonifacio, who was in the service of the king of Aragon (and therefore probably knew of Antonio's adventure) added the theme of the quest to the “emprise del Bracelet.” He traveled to the court of Burgundy, “wearing on his left leg an iron in the manner and fashion of the irons worn by slaves, hanging from a little chain of gold.”³⁵ His chapters proclaimed that he would fight for his lady's honor with any knight in the court. The young Jacques de Lalaing accepted his challenge, to the great satisfaction of all concerned.

The next year Jacques himself, inspired by Giovanni's visit, undertook a similar adventure, vowing that he would wear on his arm “a bracelet of gold to which he had attached a lady's kerchief as a favor (un couvrechef du plaisance).”³⁶ In July 1446 he sent out heralds with his challenge, his chapitres d'armes, specifying that whoever should touch his emprise (restoring the older practice, overlooked by Antonio and Giovanni) would be, providing he was of suitable birth, bound to deliver Jacques from his vow by battle. He journeyed through Spain and Portugal seeking an opponent until Diego de Guzmán solemnly touched his emprise, and the two met in a magnificent duel in 1448 in Valladolid.

The following year Jacques delivered his challenge to James Douglas and journeyed to Scotland, where he and his companions fought with Douglas and other Scottish nobles. Then he went to London, carrying the same “braclet d'or” that he had worn to Spain. However, King Henry VI refused to allow any of his knights to accept the challenge, probably for political reasons rather than any objections the saintly Henry may have had to jousting. His son was an enthusiastic jouster, and when Henry granted a judicial duel in 1453 the order specified that the scaffolds should provide a place for the king to have a good view of the proceedings.³⁷ Nevertheless, Henry's knights were not to be deprived of their pleasure, and as soon as Jacques returned to Burgundy, an English squire, one Thomas (probably Thomas Kay), arrived with his own challenge. The duel took place in Bruges in the presence of the duke of Burgundy and many English and Burgundian nobles. The fight was furious—axes were the weapons—and Jacques was badly wounded.

From the real lives of knights like Giovanni di Bonifacio and Jacques de Lalaing, the “impresa del braccioletta” passed into literature. It appears next in Antoine de la Sale's romance, Petit Jehan de Saintré.³⁸ The romance is set in the fourteenth century, when a Jehan de Saintré actually lived, but it is based on fifteenth-century life, and it is a didactic work, a handbook of chivalry for fifteenth-century gentlemen. Little Jehan's adventure with the “impresa del braccioletta” is, as Riquer demonstrates, based directly on the real-life adventure of Jacques de Lalaing. In this romance version, the idea that the knight carries his emprise on behalf of a lady is given substance by making the adventure result not from the hero's vow but from his lady's command. Jehan's chivalric career begins when his lady, the Lady of Belles Cosines, tells him he must wear a golden armlet, adorned with precious stones. She explains (adding—a touch Malory would have appreciated—that she will finance the enterprise) that he must wear the armlet for a year, seeking a gentleman “de nom et d'armes sans repreuche,” who will battle him on horse and foot, and she tells him to send out his heralds to announce this fact and find a knight who will deliver him from his charge. Jehan does so, and he finds a suitable adversary, as Jacques did, in Spain.

Had Riquer extended his researches to England, he would have found the next development of the “impresa del braccioletta” in one of the most famous duels to occur in Malory's lifetime, the battle between Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, and the Bastard of Burgundy.³⁹ The episode in Petit Jehan de Saintré had been based on life, and now this episode in life seems almost to have been based on Petit Jehan. When Lord Scales, who was Edward IV's brother-in-law, was at court one day, he was surprised by a group of ladies, who attached a golden ring adorned with pearls to his leg. On it was a richly enameled fleur de souvenance (a forget-me-not), and with it came the ladies' command that Scales wear the ring until he had done battle with a great knight “of four lineages and without any reproach.” The situation is the same as in Petit Jehan, and even the words of the command are similar (“de nom et d'armes sans repreuche”), though this is a common formula. The ring is worn on the leg (as in the case of Giovanni di Bonifacio) rather than the arm, but this is perhaps an allusion to the insignia of the Garter. It is a scene from romance realized in life.

Scales, nevertheless, did exactly as he was commanded, for he probably did not consider the event romantic playacting so much as a necessary part of the chivalric life. He had perhaps heard of Jacques's adventure, and he surely knew that the knights of the Bath wore a white lace on their shoulder until they achieved some worshipful adventure. He therefore sent his herald to one of the most famous knights in Europe, the Bastard of Burgundy, who solemnly touched the fleur de souvenance, and in 1467 the battle was fought on horse and on foot at Smithfield, near London. The lists were constructed at great expense, and the ceremonies were of such magnificence that even the Burgundian chronicler Olivier de la Marche was deeply impressed. Much of the panoply may have been due to the fact that the Bastard came partly as an ambassador to arrange the marriage of Margaret of York to Charles of Burgundy. Nevertheless, the fight was furious. The weapons were not rebated (dull) but sharpened weapons of war, and the duel was therefore regarded by at least one London chronicler as for “life and death.”⁴⁰ The first day the fight was with lances and sword on horse, and the Bastard, according to the same chronicler, was cast down “horse and man.” This may have been the fault of the Bastard's horse. At least he thought so, and he told Olivier de la Marche, “Doubt not, he has fought a beast today, and tomorrow he shall fight a man.”⁴¹ Malory's knights often react in the same manner to being unhorsed: “For thoughe a marys sonne hath fayled me now, yette a quenys sonne shall nat fayle the!” (VIII.33; cf. VIII.22, XX.22). Tempers may have been short the next day, when the fight was on foot and with battle-axes. Scales fought with his visor raised, a daring act given the use of sharpened weapons, and the battle became so furious that King Edward had to stop the fight: “Then the king, perceiving the cruel assail, cast his staff and with a loud voice cried, ‘Whoo!’ Notwithstanding, at the departing there was given two or three great strokes, and one of the ascot's staffs broke between them.”⁴² As Lancelot tells Arthur, knights sometimes lose their tempers in tourneys. This happened to Lord Scales in a tournament in 1477,⁴³ and it is likely that if Edward had not stopped this battle there would have been an unfortunate international incident.

The fight was therefore stopped in the same way and in the same words as we read in Malory's account of a duel between Palomides and a strange knight (Lamerok) with the Haute Prince and Lancelot sitting as judges: “Then the Haute Prynce and sir Launcelot seyde they saw never two knyghtes fyght bettir; but ever the straunge knyght doubled his strokys and put sir Palomydes abak. And therewithall the Haute Prynce cryed ‘Whoo!’” (X.44). Then, when King Edward had stopped the fight, there followed the usual outcome of a draw in romance: the reconciliation of the two knights, who swore henceforth to be friends and brothers in arms. Moreover, they kept their oath. The next year, 1468, at the great tournament at Bruges, Scales would not fight against the Bastard of Burgundy. He jousted with Burgundian knights, “but not with the Bastard, for they made promise at London that non of them shold never dele with othyr in armes.”⁴⁴ It was just as well, for in the jousting the Bastard was badly injured.

Lord Scales died (by execution) before Caxton printed Malory's work, but if he could have read the Morte Darthur in manuscript he would have relished the great duels, which not only have the same general shape as the great jousts in which he took part but echo the very sounds that he knew so well—the trumpets and minstrelsy, the heralds crying “Leches les alere!” and the king shouting “Whoo!” (XIX.9). Had Scales lived he would doubtless have been a reader of Caxton's edition, for he was a patron of Caxton and a man of letters as well as the most celebrated jouster of his time. He translated the Dictys and Sayings of the Philosophers and the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pisan, both of which Caxton printed.

Scales's combination of chivalric and literary abilities was not unusual in the fifteenth century, for chivalry and learning were thought to be closely related. As the biographer of the marshal Boucicaut put it: “Two things have by the will of God, been established in the world, like two pillars to sustain the order of divine and human laws … These two flawless pillars are chivalry and learning, which go very well together.”⁴⁵ They do indeed, and the great patrons of learning in Malory's time, such as the dukes of Burgundy or King René of Anjou, were also the great patrons of chivalry. Antoine de la Sale's account of the education of his ideal knight, Jehan de Saintré, contains a massive reading list, mainly in classical and religious texts, and though probably few actual knights read so ambitiously as Jehan, the illiterate of the twelfth century had long since passed from the scene, and a good number of knights—like la Sale himself and of course Malory—were men of letters. As Sir William Segar observed as late as 1602, “Indeed, very rarely doth any man succeed in arms that is utterly ignorant of letters.”⁴⁶

In England the union of arms and letters was perhaps best exemplified in John Tiptoft, the earl of Worcester. He is known best to students of literature as one of the earliest English humanists, famed even in Italy for his command of Latin oratory. It was said that his eloquence brought tears to the eyes of the great humanist Aeneas Sylvius, Pius II. Like Scales, Tiptoft was also a translator whose works—English versions of Cicer's De amicitia and Buonaccorso's De vera nobilitate—were published by Caxton. When Tiptoft was executed (deservedly; he also found time to earn the sobriquet Butcher of England), “the axe destroyed in that one head more learning than remained in all the surviving nobility of England.”⁴⁷

Yet Tiptoft was also an expert on matters of chivalry. He was Constable of England, chief authority in matters of chivalry. In 1466, at the command of Edward IV, he drew up the rules for jousting, Ordinances for Justes and Tournaments, which were used for the next hundred fifty years in England.⁴⁸ As Constable he presided over the joust between Lord Scales and the Bastard of Burgundy as well as the other jousts that occurred on the following days, and he performed his duties so skillfully that he earned the praise of Olivier de la Marche, who as maître d'hôtel of the court of Burgundy was a strict judge of such matters.⁴⁹

As Constable it was also Tiptoft's duty to write a report of the joust. He prefaced his report with a statement that shows how deeply life and literature had become intertwined by this time, since his justification for writing his report of a real event is strikingly similar to the justification that Caxton used twenty years later for printing Malory's account of fictional events: he explains that “by virtue of the said office to us commit, it appertaineth not only to do put in writing all the noble deeds of arms which in our time have been accomplished” so that they will be remembered, but also to make them known in other lands, “That other worthy men to their ensaumple should encline them to apply to such and semblable deeds and that by such noble exercises of armes the augmentacioun of worthy knighthood should be the more and longer continued.”⁵⁰

Another official at the duel between Scales and the Bastard of Burgundy was Sir John Astley, who if not a patron of literature was at least the owner of an important manuscript of chivalric ordinances (including Tiptoft's), accounts of contemporary deeds of chivalry, and literary works (such as Scrope's translation of the Epistle of Othea).⁵¹ He was also a skilled knight. In 1438 he fought Pierre de Massé in answer to a challenge—“half at my request and half at his”—before the king of France; Astley killed his opponent. Again, in 1442, when Philip Boyle of Aragon came to London carrying his challenge, Astley accepted the challenge and fought at Smithfield, using sharpened weapons, and he did so well that King Henry VI knighted him and granted him a pension of 100 marks a year. Boyle survived and later visited England as Spanish ambassador.⁵² Astley fought at least one more important duel, against Francis de Surienne;⁵³ he became a knight of the Garter in 1461 and lived until 1486, a year after Caxton published the Morte Darthur. Given Astley's interest in chivalric matters (as shown by his manuscript), he could well have been one of the “noble gentlemen” who urged Caxton to publish Malory's work.

If Astley did read Malory, he probably read the accounts of duels with special care, both the duels of chivalry such as those in which he himself had fought, and the judicial duels, such as Palomides fights at the tournament at Surluse and Lancelot fights on Guenevere's behalf against Mellyagaunce and Mador de la Porte. Astley seems to have been something of an expert on judicial duels; he was appointed to serve as an official at the duel between John Lyalton and Robert Norreys in 1453, and he served again in 1456 at the duel between John David and his master (who was drunk and easily killed by David).⁵⁴ The most elaborate judicial duel in Malory, that between Lancelot and Mador de la Porte, follows the general outline of procedure set forth in Gloucester's rules for judicial combat, which governed the duels at which Astley helped officiate (he also owned a copy).⁵⁵ Mador formally “appeled” the queen of treason, “For the custom was such at that time,” Malory explains, “that all maner of shamefull deth was called treson” (XVIII.4).⁵⁶ The king assigns a day for the trial of arms, and on the morning assigned the queen is put in the Constable's custody, and the fire is prepared. There are lists for the battle, spectators, and a tent for each of the combatants. The appellant, Mador, and defendant, Bors, formally swear. Mador takes the field first. And, when Lancelot has appeared, taken Bors's place in the fight, and defeated Mador, there are “knights parters”—the knights whom Gloucester specified were to assist the Constable in “departing” the combatants—to conduct the wounded Mador to his pavilion. Malory's mention of the Constable and his assistants (neither appeared in his source) seems to indicate that in writing about this fictional duel he was reminded of actual judicial duels, and, perhaps without thinking too much about it, supplied the expected details.

Lancelot's duel with Mador is thus a good example of the blending of fiction and actuality that readers such as Astley would have found in the Morte Darthur. Certainly Astley had never seen a judicial duel in which one of the combatants suddenly appeared and fought incognito, as Lancelot does, for the rules of combat were very clear about the proper identification of the participants. But this bit of romance fiction exists within a context of recognizable reality. The same is true of the other judicial duels in the Morte Darthur; the casting of the glove, the appointment of judges, the erection of lists all provide verisimilitude for the fiction. Even Palomides' beheading of his opponents, Generydes and Archades, was not entirely out of the range of actuality. Exactly the same thing happened—the victor beheading his defeated opponent—in a judicial duel fought before an English judge in Ireland in 1586, over a hundred years after Malory's book appeared in print.⁵⁷

Indeed, the even later career of Captain John Smith, of Virginia fame, provides a striking real-life analogue to Palomides' duel with the Saracen champions.⁵⁸ Smith tells us that he jousted in full armor before the noble lords and ladies of the duke of Transylvania's court against the Saracen champion of the Turkish army. Smith killed his opponent with his lance and then, like Palomides, beheaded him. The next day, again like Palomides, he was challenged by a second Saracen champion, whom he also killed and beheaded. Smith went Palomides one better, for he faced a third Saracen, though this time he killed his opponent not with a lance but with a pistol. We may doubt the whole truth of Smith's account, just as we may doubt that Smith's contemporary, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), was really the chivalric knight-errant he claimed to be in his autobiography.⁵⁹ But Smith's contemporaries believed him and found nothing incredible in the idea that a seventeenth-century gentleman would wear full armor and engage in chivalric jousts à outrance (to the death).⁶⁰ And probably Lord Herbert actually did challenge a Frenchman to a duel “because I thought myself obligated thereunto by the oath taken when I was made a knight of the Bath.”⁶¹ Ideas of chivalry survived even in the seventeenth century. The difficulty, as a contemporary observed, was that by this time the country was so well governed there was “no employment for heroickal spirits.”⁶²

The survival of the knightly duel for so long after Malory's time may come as a surprise to those readers who believe that chivalric practices were dying in Malory's day. The judicial duel was indeed regarded with suspicion by many in the fifteenth century, and few were fought, but the closely related chivalric duel was gaining in popularity, and men were “appealed” for “treason,” which, as in Malory, meant not lese majesté but betrayal of one's knightly oath; hence it is possible for a king, like Mark, to be guilty of “treason” toward his subject, Tristram.⁶³ The judicial duel itself long remained at least theoretically possible; as late as the eighteenth century Parliament defeated an attempt to abolish it, and it was defended as one of the pillars of the English constitution. The last judicial duel arranged, though not fought, in England was in the year 1817, and the custom was not abolished until 1819.⁶⁴

Sir John Astley and others of Edward IV's court would have known in life another of the conventions of romance, the knight-errant, who travels about Europe, as did Jacques de Lalaing, seeking battle in whatever courts he visited. Philip Boyle, whom Astley fought à outrance, was such a knight, who journeyed from Spain to England, seeking opponents.⁶⁵ He was one of a number of Spanish knights-errant who visited England, including Pedro Vasquez, who died in 1477, and whom Riquer suggests as the model for the hero of Tirant lo Blanc.⁶⁶

The author of Tirant lo Blanc, the Spanish knight Johonet Martorell, was in England in 1438 and 1439, just a few years before Astley's duel with Boyle. Martorell came to ask Henry VI to preside at a duel to the death between himself and Joan de Monpalau, who had broken his word to marry Martorell's sister. Henry agreed, and the duke of Huntington's herald carried Martorell's challenge, but the fight did not take place.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, Martorell was so impressed by the English chivalry that he used England as the setting for his romance, and made Tirant an English knight of the Garter. He drew on English traditions (his is the earliest record of the story of Edward's founding the order to honor the garter dropped by the countess of Salisbury), on English literature (Guy of Warwick is one of the principal sources of the first part), and perhaps even on English life, for it has been suggested that some of the details of Tirant's career are based on the life of Richard Beauchamp, the most celebrated English knight of the early fifteenth century.⁶⁸ Martorell, who began writing his romance in 1460, must have been almost an exact contemporary of Malory, as well as of Antoine de la Sale, another knight who wrote romances during Malory's lifetime.⁶⁹ We know that Martorell and la Sale drew on their own chivalric experiences for their works, and its seems likely that Malory did the same.

Knights from Hungary, Germany, Burgundy, and France also came to England seeking duels and jousts, and English knights traveled to the Continent for the same purpose.⁷⁰ The English squire Thomas, who wounded Jacques de Lalaing, was such a knight-errant, as was John Chalons, who killed a French knight, Louis de Beul, in Paris in 1449. Richard Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick, traveled throughout Europe seeking duels and tournaments. Knight-errantry was, in short, a widespread activity in the fifteenth century. I have already mentioned Galeot of Mantua, who journeyed about Europe for an entire year and sent back at least two captives to Joan of Padua, in the manner of Lancelot sending his prisoners to Guenevere, but perhaps Galeot's conduct is less remarkable than that of his prisoners, who actually came to surrender to Joan. She could have done with them as she wished; the canons of St. Peter's Church in Rome held—and badly mistreated—a knight who had been sent to surrender to them. But Joan was as magnanimous as Guenevere, and she set her prisoners free.⁷¹ Few carried knight-errantry that far, but clearly when fifteenth-century readers such as Sir John Astley read of Malory's knights traveling about seeking adventures or going to a foreign court to joust, as Lamerok comes to Mark's (VII.33), they would have recognized not just a romance convention but a fact of the noble life of the times.

Another fact of experience in Malory's time was the pas d'armes, in which a knight sets himself up at a given spot, often on or near a main highway (hence pas) and offers to joust all comers. This is a familiar motif in romance, perhaps originating in something like the “Joie de la court” episode in Chrétien's Erec, in which the hero is commanded by his lady to battle all comers until he is himself overcome and relieved of the obligation (the situation of the Red Knight of the Red Lands in Gareth). Or a knight may set up in the manner of Alexander the Orphan, defending his lady, la Beall Pylgryme, and fighting all comers on her behalf for the space of an entire year. This literary motif was imitated in life by the famous Marshal Boucicaut, who in 1390 held a pas d'armes at St. Englebert near Calais. Two shields were suspended from a tree, and a challenger could choose to fight with either rebated weapons or sharpened, depending on which shield he touched. The pas was maintained for thirty days, with great ceremony and feasting.⁷²

In 1434 the great Spanish knight Suero de Quiñones held a pas d'armes even more directly patterned on romance, the famous Paso honoroso. He announced that he was the “prisoner” of a great lady (apparently on parole) and that he could be released only if he and his companions defended against all comers the road leading to St. James of Compostella, theoretically denying passage to all.⁷³ The resemblance to Mabinograins in the “Joie de la court” episode in Erec (as well as to Malory's Gareth) is obvious, and the whole affair was conducted with literary overtones (it has been suggested that Suero patterned his life on that of Amadís de Gaul)⁷⁴ and with great magnificence. Suero and his companions held the passage at a bridge near Leon for an entire month, fighting 705 duels with sixty-eight knights, with one killed and several wounded.

Whether or not El paso honoroso set the fashion, the pas d'armes became widely popular in the decades that followed, often in increasingly elaborate forms. In 1443 at the pas de l'arbre de Charlemagne, near Dijon, thirteen Burgundian knights jousted for six weeks against all comers, who arrived from all over Europe to participate.⁷⁵ (Each of these was an international event that was, like the great tournaments of the time, announced by heralds to courts throughout Europe.) In 1446 King René of Anjou, one of the most cultured men of his time and an enthusiastic jouster (he wrote a book on the subject), celebrated the departure of his daughter, Marguerite of Anjou, to marry Henry VI of England by staging the magnificent Pas de la joyeuse garde.⁷⁶ A castle (the Joyeuse garde) was erected, complete with unicorns, lions, and tigers from the royal zoo, and René, disguised as Lancelot, defended the castle, with his lady (his wife) taking the part of Guenevere, and with many English knights participating, including the duke of Suffolk (who is remembered now more for his poetry than his chivalry). In 1449 the adventure of Alexander the Orphan was realized in life in the Pas de la belle pèlerin, in which the Bastard of St. Pol, disguised as Lancelot, defended “la belle pèlerin” for a month at the place on the road between Calais and St. Omer, known as “Beau jardin et a present le Crois de la Pèlerin.”⁷⁷ As it happened, this was a time of war, and only one challenger, an aged German, turned up to joust. Nevertheless, the Crois de la pèlerin was solemnly erected to memorialize the joust—as Merlin raised the “perowne” near Camelot to mark the site of the duel between Balin and Balan—and fifty years later the great sixteenth-century knight-errant, the chevalier Bayard, “piously went to visit this cross as if on a pilgrimage.”⁷⁸

That same year Jacques de Lalaing undertook to defend the Fontaine des pleurs on behalf of his “Dame des pleurs” for an entire year, from November 1449 to October 1450.⁷⁹ It was an elaborate setting, with shields in various colors for the challengers to touch, the lady herself in attendance, and a script, in verse, for a pageant to mark the end of the adventure. Lalaing, like a true romance knight, was disguised as the “knight of the Dame des pleurs,” and his chapitres provided that if a knight was unhorsed he had to wear a golden bracelet for a year or until he found a lady who would free him on condition that he serve her. The shields from this event were later hung in the Church of Notre Dame in Boulogne, solemnly dedicated to the Virgin. Such passages of arms continued to be held throughout the century, culminating in the famous event at Sandricourt in 1493, where, at the conclusion of the formal jousting, the participants rode out with their ladies, jousting with all whom they encountered, “as once did the knights of the Round Table.”⁸⁰

The popularity of this form of jousting was such that tournaments tended to follow its pattern, with either individual jousts, cast in the form of a pas d'armes and followed by a general melee, or with the knights divided into two parties, the tenans (those who hold the pas) against the venans (those who come to it), though in this case the pas might be a barrier or a castle. In 1467 Sir John Paston took part in a tourney at Eltham, with King Edward, Lord Scales, Sellenger, and Paston “within” (that is, as tenans), and the Lord Chamberlain, Sir John Woodville, Sir Thomas Montgomery, and John Appere “without” (as venans).⁸¹ This was a minor tourney, but apparently it was the sort of tournament that Malory describes in Gareth, in which there is a Castle Perilous and knights “within” to battle those “without” (VII.28), a convention a trifle puzzling to the modern reader (since Malory does not bother to explain why some are within the castle and some without) but easily comprehended by his contemporaries, who could have seen or heard of such affairs.

Such combinations of tournaments and passages of arms remained popular for the rest of the century. One was held in Paris in 1468, another in Ghent in 1469, one in London in 1474, and in 1477 six gentlemen challenged all comers to honor the marriage of Richard, King Edward's son, to Anne Mowbray; Lord Scales fought disguised as a “white hermit” and very nearly killed Thomas Hansard.⁸² Later in the century, by the reign of Henry VII, the challenge to all comers was the usual form of a tournament, and at Richmond a pas d'armes was held for an entire month, during the course of which Sir James Parker was killed.⁸³ But perhaps the most famous tournament in which English gentlemen participated in the fifteenth century was the Pas de l'arbre d'or, held at Bruges in 1468 to celebrate the marriage of King Edward's sister, Margaret of York, to Charles of Burgundy.⁸⁴ Caxton was probably present at this elaborate affair (Margaret became his patron), and it was once speculated—without foundation—that Malory himself was in Bruges at the time.⁸⁵ It was an elaborately staged affair, with a golden tree, a distressed damsel, a dwarf, a giant, and courtly ceremonies that left English spectators almost speechless. And it was a grand tournament: the Bastard of Burgundy was injured, Philip of Poitiers was badly wounded, and the melee so got out of hand that the duke himself had to ride into the lists waving his baton and shouting to the knights to stop on pain of death.

Such affairs were so elaborate, almost as much masque as tournament, that one must remind himself that they remained dangerous. The object of jousting was never to kill or to maim. Even in William the Marshal's rougher age the combatants knew that a dead opponent paid no ransom. In the fifteenth century the chapitres of challenges normally contained a phrase such as “God forbid” when specifying the rules that applied if one of the fighters was injured. Special armor was used to lessen the risk of injury; the barrier was introduced to separate the charging horses and prevent head-on collisions; and, since the object was purely to win “worship,” Jehan de Saintré's lady specified that a jouster must not even be angry with his opponent (p. 190).

All this, along with the extravagant pageantry, appears to be pretty poor stuff to most historians of the tournament, who sometimes seem a rather bloodthirsty lot, delighted to find that some sixty knights were killed at a tournament near Cologne in 1240 and a bit contemptuous at later, less bloody affairs. Most fifteenth-century tournaments were bloodless, and evidently even the spectators approved. In Chaucer's Knight's Tale, when Theseus orders that the tournament between Palamon and Arcite be à plaisance, the voice of the people “touchede the hevene: ‘God save swich a lord, that is so good, / He wilneth no destruccion of blood!’” (vv. 2561-64). Nevertheless, jousting remained a dangerous sport. Frequently, sharpened weapons were used, and sometimes special protective armor was forbidden, as in one of Henry VII's tourneys in which it was specified that only plain “hosting armor” is to be worn, “such as they will use in time of war.”⁸⁶ Jousting remained a dangerous even when special armor was worn and rebated weapons were used. As late as 1515 several knights were killed at a tournament in Paris.⁸⁷ In 1518 Charles V rode in a tournament in which seven knights lost their lives. Henry VIII was nearly killed while jousting, and in 1559 Henri II, king of France, did indeed lose his life while jousting before his assembled court. The next year the duc de Montpensier, a prince of the blood, was killed in the same way.

Real fifteenth-century passages of arms are reflected in fifteenth-century literature. One example known to English readers of Malory's time is in King Ponthus, which, as we have noted, is an adaptation of Horn et Rigmel. At the point where in the older work the hero leaves for exile in Ireland, the fifteenth-century author substitutes a pas d'armes (pp. 40-44). Ponthus disguises himself as “the Black Knight with the White Arms” and sets up his pas in a nearby forest. He sends a dwarf to announce that he will be there at prime each Tuesday for an entire year. On a tree he will hang a shield, which each challenger must touch. When he touches the shield, a dwarf will blow a horn, and from the pavilion will emerge an old damsel, accompanied by a hermit, who will announce to the challenger that the Black Knight will soon be ready to fight. There are many other provisions described, including prizes, a feast for the combatants at the conclusion of the adventure, and a marvelous well, like that in Yvain. In all, this seems the most fantastic episode in the whole romance. Yet it is in some ways the most realistic. The author even specifies that Ponthus hires the dwarf to act as his herald, goes to town to hire a suitably aged lady to play the part of the damsel, and himself assumes the role of the hermit (followed by a quick change into the role of the “black knight sorrowing bearing arms of white”). The whole elaborate adventure is based on the actual practices of real knights of the time, and apparently the author felt that the effect of the narrative was enhanced rather than diminished by the realistic details that underscore the dramatic, playacting element that surrounds the jousts.

Likewise, the most realistic of the pas d'armes in the Morte Darthur is the most fantastic, that held by Lancelot when he is in exile from Guenevere, staying with Elaine at the Castle of Blyaunte (XII.6). First Lancelot, like his real-life counterparts, changes the name of the place: “Lancelot lat calle hit the Joyus Ile.” Then he adopts a fanciful nom de guerre, “and there was he called none otherwyse but Le Shyvalere Mafete, ‘the knyght that hath trespast.’” He adopts a symbolic heraldic device, “late make him a shylde all of sable and a quene crowned in the midst of silver and a knight clene armored knelynge afore her.” Like Ponthus, he sends out a dwarf to make a “cry, in hyring of all the knyghtes, that there ys one knyght in Joyus Ile, which is the castle of Blyaunte, and sey that his name is Le Schyvalere Mafete and woll joust ayenste knyghtes all that woll come.” Again like Ponthus, he specifies prizes (“a fayre maydyn and a jarfawcon”). In three days he jousts far more—five hundred—than any living knight in the fifteenth century, but, like most of the pas d'armes, the affair is bloodless and capped with grand festivities: “And there was nat one slayne of them. And aftir that sir Launcelot made them all a grete feste.”

Likewise, the grand tournaments in the Morte Darthur reflect the customs of Malory's own time, and the more elaborate they are the more closely they resemble real tournaments. Most of the jousting in the book is relatively informal, as was probably also the case in Malory's time, when only the great chivalric festivals were fully recorded, and lesser affairs passed unnoticed, probably because they were so common. We know of the tourney at Eltham, in which Edward IV himself took part, only because Sir John Paston was one of the participants and happened to write home about it. And we know that Henry VI's son and his companions frequently engaged in jousting only because Fortescue happened to mention it in the preface to his De laudibus legum Angliae.⁸⁸ Probably most of Malory's readers knew best about informal jousts of this sort.

Nevertheless, Malory's contemporaries would have found many familiar details in his tournaments. The “customs” of the various castles and bridges are obviously similar to those of contemporary passages of arms, even to the specification of what forms of combat may be used (thus one of Dinadan's opponents will fight only on horseback, for that is “the custom of this place”; X.10). Malory's knights, like knights in the fifteenth century (but not before), have special armor for jousting (“the harneyse that longed unto jostenynge”; XIII.6), and his tournaments are great displays, with minstrelsy and special scaffolds for the spectators. The usual order of events is first individual jousts and then the grand melee, and, as was the custom, first lances are broken, “Than whan this done was drawynge of swerdys” (VII.30). There are prizes for the best jousters, and feasts and dancing to conclude the festivities.

When Malory invents a tournament, as he does in the cases of the tourney in Gareth and “The Great Tournament” in The Book of Sir Lancelot and Guenevere, the tournaments are even closer to life, for Malory—probably without thinking about it and simply drawing upon his own experience—makes these tourneys affairs that are regulated by heralds who keep score and award the prizes on the basis of their record. In Gareth we read, “All this was marked wyth noble herrodis, who bare him best, and their namys” (VII.28). In “The Great Tournament” we are even given the actual score: “The pryce was yevyn unto sir Launcelot, for by herowdys they named him that he had smytten down fifty knyghtes, and sir Gareth fyve-and-thirty knyghtes, and sir Lavyne four-and-twenty” (XVIII.24). Score keeping by heralds is unknown to either life or romance in earlier times, and this is the earliest example in English romance of the practice. (David Aubert's Three Kings' Sons, written in Burgundy in 1463, is an early Continental example.) It is typical of real tournaments in the later fifteenth century, however; John Tiptoft's Ordinances consisted of rules for score keeping and were used for the score cards (“jousting cheques”) that have survived from the sixteenth century. Likewise, in another tournament of Malory's invention, that which concludes Lancelot and Guenevere, the prize is specified as not simply the “prys” or the “gre” but a diamond such as was offered in real life as the prize for the tournament held to celebrate Prince Richard's marriage in 1477.

By the time Malory was writing about such tournaments, the process of life's imitating art, described by Baron de Lettenhove, was complete, and one hardly knows which came first: Did Malory specify a diamond as a prize because that was the custom of tournaments such as the one at Richmond in 1477? Or was the prize at Richmond a diamond because of the tournament in Malory? The process, as Riquer describes it, is like that of the modern cinema. The cinema imitates life; life in turn imitates the cinema; and then the cinema imitates life, with the expected distortions at each stage.⁸⁹ Noblemen of the early fifteenth century patterned their tournaments on romance, with a few practical changes, such as the office of heralds. Romancers like Malory or David Aubert then patterned their tournaments on life, incorporating contemporary practices into their heightened accounts. Then the nobles of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century patterned their tournaments on these romances. A jouster of the thirteenth century, transported to the sixteenth, would have been baffled by the heralds, barriers, and score keeping. The participants would have been sure that their practices were ancient, authorized by “old romances” that writers such as Malory claimed to have transmitted unchanged from their ancient sources.

Notes

1. For a study of William's life see Sidney Painter, William Marshall: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England (Baltimore, Md., 1933).

2. Painter, William Marshall, p. 30; Painter also notes that “apparently the ladies and romancers had not yet had their way with the tournaments … Only in the case of the tournament at Joigni does the Histoire mention the presence of ladies … William and the other pure lovers of battle were still in control of the cult of chivalry” (p. 59).

3. L'histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, vv. 7209-32.

4. Painter, William Marshall, pp. 40-41; L'histoire, vv. 3381-3424. The count of captives is kept by Wigain, Young King Henry's clerk; this has not yet become the business of heralds.

5. L'histoire, vv. 18578ff.

6. Histoire du bon chevalier Bayart, pp. 62-64.

7. See the anecdote recounted in Painter, William Marshall, p. 22.

8. Ulrich von Lichtenstein, Frauendienst, ed. Reinhold Bechstein, Deutsche Dichtungen des Mittelalters, 6-7 (Leipzig, 1888). Recent scholarship has questioned Ulrich's veracity. See J. W. Thomas, trans., Ulrich von Lichtenstein's “Service of Ladies” (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), esp. pp. 12-22. Thomas argues that the work is mainly fictional and humorous. However, it is difficult to imagine a thirteenth-century German noble making himself the butt of his own joke.

9. As specified in the rules written by Tiptoft in 1466, the Ordinances for Justes and Tournaments.

10. As specified in the challenge of Pierre de Massé, printed in Harold Arthur, Viscount Dillon, “On a MS. Collection of Ordinances of Chivalry, Belonging to Lord Hastings,” Archeologia, 57 (2d ser., 7) (1901), 36.

11. In Samuel Bentley, ed., Excerpta Historica; or, Illustrations of English History (London, 1833), pp. 242-243, there is a transcript of an account of Lord Scales's expenses at the tournament to celebrate the marriage of Prince Richard in 1477, and of Scales's complaint at the size of the fees.

12. La Marche, Mémoires, III, 48, n. 3. The reasons for the Bastard's journey were diplomatic as well as chivalric; hence this huge outlay.

13. As an example see “Miei sirventes voulh far de ls reis amdos,” ed. and trans. in Frederick Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), pp. 232-235.

14. Alcius Ledieu, Un compagnon de Jeanne d'Arc: Etienne Vignoles (Paris, 1889), p. 83.

15. Dillon, “Ordinances,” app. D.

16. Chandos Herald, Le prince noire, p. x.

17. Sidney Painter, French Chivalry: Chivalric Ideals and Practices in Mediaeval France (Baltimore, Md., 1940), pp. 155-156; Charles Mills, History of Chivalry; or, Knighthood and Its Times (Philadelphia, 1826), p. 96, gives several examples of churchmen's teachings on the damnation of those who were killed in tournaments and quotes the story of Matthew Paris concerning Roger de Toeny, who appeared to his brother after death and explained that he was burning in Hell: “Vae, vae mihi, quare unquam torneamenta exercui, et ea tanto studio dilexi?”

18. Gerald R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1961), p. 355. By the time Bromyard was writing the Church had already softened its position. Richard W. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London, 1970), notes that tournaments were frequently held at the papal court at Avignon in the fourteenth century: “By 1471 they appeared in St. Peter's Square itself, and in 1565 the chief feature of the celebration to mark the completion of the Vatican Belvedere was a great tournament” (p. 187). For an account of that tournament and a survey of Italian tournaments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries see Mario Tosi, Il torneo di Belvedere in Vaticano e i tornei in Italia nel cinquecento (Rome, 1945). The Church's objection to earlier tournaments was based on the general licentiousness of behavior at them as well as their violence, for they were not the solemn and ceremonial affairs that they later became; the anonymous author of La clef d'amours advises the prospective lover to frequent tournaments, which are well stocked with available damsels (see The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love trans. Norman R. Shapiro [Urbana, Ill., 1971]), pp. 21-22. The advice is an adaptation to medieval times of Ovid's advice (in the Ars amatoria) that young Roman men should frequent the gladatorial games, but it applied nevertheless. See Giulio Ferrerio, Storia ed analisi degli antichi romanzi di cavalleria e dei poemi romanzeschi d'Italia (Milan, 1828), II, 110, plate 20; the ladies watching the jousting knights in this illustration of a thirteenth-century manuscript indecently expose themselves, leaving no doubt as to what the fighting is all about. It could well serve as an illustration for the Lai du Lecheor; see Per Nykrog, Les fabliaux (Copenhagen, 1957), pp. 182-183.

19. Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the English People, ed. J. Charles Cox (London, 1903), bk. iii, chap. 1, sec. 19. William of Newburgh says that tournaments were first held in England in 1135-1136, but as late as 1179, according to Matthew Paris, youthful nobles such as Young King Henry were in the habit of crossing the Channel to participate in “conflictibus Gallicis.”

20. Barber, Knight and Chivalry, p. 295.

21. Two marks was about a week's pay for a landless knight; in the year 1198, according to The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. L. C. Jane (New York, 1966), the abbot, whose own knights simply refused to answer King Richard's feudal call, hired in their place four knights “and gave them at once thirty-six marks for their expenses for forty days” (p. 135).

22. Nicholas Upton, De studio militari, ed. F. P. Bernard (Oxford, 1931); quoted by Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, N.C., 1960), p. 14. Strutt, Sports and Pastimes (bk. iii, chap. 1, sec. 22) quotes from MS Harley 69 an act of Parliament in the reign of Henry V Regulating tournaments “at the request of all the nobility of England.” The history of the English tournament is best treated by Dietrich Sandberger, Studien über das Rittertum in England, vornehmlich während des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1937), pp. 15-75, for the earlier period, and, for the later, by Sidney Anglo, The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster (Oxford, 1968), pp. 19-73.

23. Francis H. Cripps-Day, The History of the Tournament in England and in France (London, 1918), app. 6, p. xliii.

24. See E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait (Oxford, 1936), pp. 129-130.

25. Roger S. Loomis, “Arthurian Influence in Sport and Spectacle,” in ALMA, pp. 553-559.

26. On Edward III's determination to imitate Arthur's Round Table (though the Garter lost the direct association), see Adam of Murimath, Continuatio chronicarum, ed. E. M. Thompson, Rolls ser. (London, 1889), pp. 155-156, 231-232. The correspondence between King Henry IV and the Seneschal of Hainault concerning his challenge in 1408 states that the Order of the Garter was founded in imitation of the Round Table, and both Henry and the Seneschal assume that Garter knights are bound by that precedent: British Museum MS Add. 21370, fols. 1-4 recto; the letters are printed from “MS No. 8417, in the Royal Library at Paris” in George Frederick Beltz, Memorials of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1841), pp. 403-407.

27. La forme quon tenoit des tournoys et assemblees au temps du roy Uterpendragon et du roy Artus, ed. Edouard Sandoz, “Tourneys in the Arthurian Tradition,” Speculum, 19 (1944), 389-420. See also Ruth H. Cline, “The Influence of Romances on Tournaments of the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 20 (1945), 204-211.

28. On “triumph” see Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament, p. 17. The usage is based on the supposed relation of the tournament to Roman triumphs. Malory uses “play his pageant” at x.74 and 79, which Vinaver glosses as “do his part.” In Pageant of the Birth … Earl of Warwick the word “pageant” refers to the illustrations, which are the main feature of the book.

29. Robert C. Clephan, The Tournament: Its Periods and Phases (London, 1919), p. 78.

30. In Bentley, Excerpta Historica, pp. 223-239, there is an account by an English herald of this affair.

31. Des anciens tournois et faictz d'armes, p. 197, in Bernard Prost, ed., Traités du duel judiciare: Relations de pas d'armes et tournois (Paris, 1872).

32. Martín de Riquer, Cavalleria fra realtà e litteratura nel quattrocento (Bari, 1970), pp. 43-70.

33. The story is told in Bowar's continuation (written about 1449) of Johannis de Fordun, Scotichronicon genuinum, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1722), IV, 1123-24. After Sir Piers had his two front teeth knocked out, he complained that Sir William had better armor. William, hearing this, offered to ride six new courses—for a prize of 200 pounds—provided that the two opponents were equal in all respects. Sir Piers agreed, whereupon William, who had lost an eye at Otterburne, demanded that Piers should have one eye put out. This began a general brawl which King Richard, laughing, brought to an end.

34. Riquer, Cavalleria, pp. 43-47.

35. Chastelain, Chronique de J. de Lalain, p. 81.

36. Ibid., pp. 103-185; the adventures described in the next paragraph are found on pp. 186-212.

37. In his Excerpta Historica, Bentley prints the orders specifying that a scaffold is to be erected so that the king “may have sight of the battle” between John Halton, appellant, and Robert Norreys, defendant.

38. Petit Jehan de Saintré, pp. 69-82. The episode is summarized in Riquer, Cavalleria, pp. 69-78.

39. There are many accounts of this duel, which is mentioned, usually at length, by almost every English chronicler of the time. The fullest and best account is that of Thomas Whiting, the Chester Herald, who carried Scales's challenge to Burgundy and kept the official record; see Bentley, Excerpta Historica, pp. 171-212. Sidney Anglo, The Great Tournament Roll, p. 33, n. 2, characterizes the fight as a “fiasco,” but contemporaries found it satisfying. The Bastard's horse was killed when the jousters collided, and this cut short the first day's fight, for he hotly refused the offer of a new mount.

40. Gregory, Chronicle of London, p. 236.

41. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, p. 209.

42. Ibid., p. 211.

43. Scales was fighting with Thomas Hansard at the tourney held to celebrate the marriage of Edward's son Richard. The account is published in William H. Black, ed., Illustrations of the Ancient State of Chivalry Preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Roxburghe Club (London, 1840), p. 38.

44. Paston Letters, p. 539.

45. Quoted by Johan Huizinga, “The Political and Military Significance of Chivalry in the Late Middle Ages,” in Men and Ideas, trans. James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle (New York, 1959), p. 199. Huizinga also quotes a Burgundian chronicler's praise of Henry V: “He maintained the discipline of chivalry well, as the Romans did formerly” (p. 198).

46. William Segar, Honour, Military and Ciuill, p. 202.

47. For a full account of Tiptoft's life and works, see Rosamund J. Mitchell, Sir John Tiptoft, 1427-1470 (London, 1938). The quotation is from Thomas Fuller's History of the Worthies of England, ed. P. A. Nuttall (London, 1840).

48. The work exists in several versions (of which two are listed in the Bibliography). In Sir John Harrington's Nugae antiquae (London, 1779), vol. III, the Ordinances are printed as they were commanded in 4 Eliza. (1562) “to be observed and kept in all manner of Justes of Peaces Royall within this realme of England.” They provide for the prizes, “Reserving alwaies to the Queene and to the ladyes present, the attribution and gifte of the prize, after the manner and forme accustomed.”

49. “Le conte de Volcestre tint lieu de connestable et estoit accompagne du mareschal d'Angleterre, st sçavoit bien faire son office” (La Marche, Mémoires, III, 50).

50. Bentley, Excerpta Historica, pp. 189-190.

51. This is now Pierpont Morgan MS 775; it was analyzed and partially printed in Dillon, “Ordinances.” For a full account see Curt F. Buhler, “Sir John Paston's Grete Boke, a Fifteenth-Century ‘Best Seller,’” Modern Language Notes, 56 (1941), 345-351. Bühler's comparison of Astley's manuscript to the Lansdowne Manuscript (see Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament, app., for an analysis) and to Sir John Paston's “Grete Boke” shows the popularity of chivalric ordinances and accounts of contemporary chivalric deeds. Some, judging from the number of manuscript copies, were more popular than many romances.

52. The challenges for the fights with Massé and Boyle are included in Astley's manuscript. Cripps-Day believed that Astley killed Boyle as well as Massé and that he was “not improbably a bully like the expert duellists of later days” (History of the Tournament, p. 96). On Boyle's career see Riquer, Cavalleria, pp. 180-188,

53. Martín de Riquer, Lletres de batalla: Cartells de deseiximents i capitols de passos d'armes (Barcelona, 1963), I, 60.

54. Robert Fabyan's is the best (at least the most amusing) of the many accounts of this duel. As it shows, one did not have to be noble to fight in a judicial duel, though the degrading conditions imposed on the thief Thomas Whitehorn and his defendant in 1456 seem to show that the low-born were discouraged from appealing to arms; see Gregory's Chronicle of London, pp. 199-202.

55. Printed as an appendix in Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament; there are many manuscript versions of this ordinance, in both French and English.

56. This is not far off the mark. J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 109-116, explains that Richard II attempted to broaden the scope of the laws of treason. The murderers of John Imperial of Genoa were convicted of treason in 1397, since the victim had been given a safe conduct as an ambassador (p. 135). Sir Patryse is presumably also under royal protection, though no ambassador, since as a foreign knight he would have been granted a safe conduct by the king.

57. George Neilson, Trial by Combat (Glasgow, 1890), pp. 205-206.

58. The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith, in The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, etc. (Glasgow, 1907), II, 128-130. The fifteenth-century German knight, Georg von Ehingen, also fought a formal single combat against a Saracen, whom he killed and who was then beheaded. See Georg von Ehingen, Diary, trans. Malcolm Letts (London, 1929).

59. Basil Willey, “Lord Herbert of Cherbury: A Spiritual Quixote of the Seventeenth Century,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 27 (1941), 25. See The Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Written by Himself, ed. Horace Walpole (London, 1770).

60. A Latin Life of John Smith, by Henry Wharton, trans. Laura Planyi-Striker (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), which was written in 1685, narrates Smith's jousts in an even more heroic and romantic style than Smith's own account and provides, Planyi-Striker argues, proof of contemporary belief in Smith's adventures. Everett M. Emerson, in Captain John Smith (New York, 1972), p. 94, quotes Phillip L. Barbour (writing in 1963): “Nothing Smith wrote has yet been found to be a lie.”

61. Quoted in Willey, “Lord Herbert of Cherbury,” p. 22.

62. Ibid.

63. Maurice H. Kean, The Laws of War in the Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 54-59.

64. Neilson notes that the last judicial duel was fought between Adam Bruntfield and James Carmichael in 1597; Carmichael was slain (Trial by Combat, p. 307). The duel of chivalry survived longer, and one was fought in 1631; see Clephan, Tournament, p. 167. On the attempts to abolish the trial by combat see Neilson, Trial by Combat, pp. 327-331.

65. For a full account of Spanish knights-errant see Riquer, Cavalleria, pp. 79-213, and Caballeros andantes españoles (Madrid, 1967).

66. Riquer, Cavalleria, p. 211.

67. Ibid., pp. 303-307.

68. Joseph A. Vaeth, “Tirant lo Blanch”: A Study of Its Authorship, Principal Sources and Historical Setting (New York, 1918). The resemblances between Tirant and Beauchamp are very general.

69. I am assuming that Malory was an older man when he began his work (as was Martorell). William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley, 1966), has shown that we can no longer be sure exactly who Malory was. Not all scholars are convinced by Matthews' argument; see esp. P. J. C. Field, “Sir Thomas Malory, M.P.,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 47 (1974), 24-35. Nevertheless, Matthews has cast real doubt on the previous identification of our author, and we cannot be sure whether he was old when he wrote, like Martorell, or young, like Antoine de la Sale, who did not die until the end of the century.

70. In the manuscripts analyzed by Cripps-Day, in the appendixes to his History of the Tournament, see Lansdowne MS 285, item 39; Harley MS 69, items 11, 12, 15.

71. Brantôme, Oeuvres, I, 340; Brantôme's authority is the work by the legalist Paris de Puteo, Duello, libro de re, imperatori, principi, etc. (Venice, 1521).

72. Froissart, Chroniques, IV. See Brererton's translation, pp. 373-381.

73. Riquer, Cavalleria, pp. 82-144.

74. P. G. Evans, “A Spanish Knight in Flesh and Blood: A Study of the Chivalric Spirit of Suero de Quiñones,” Hispania, 15 (1932), 141-152.

75. Clephan, Tournament, pp. 57-60.

76. For an account of this and René's other tourneys, see Marie-Louyse de Garnier des Garets, Un artisan de la renaissance française au xv^e siècle: Le roi René, 1409-1480 (Paris, 1946), pp. 143-146. For René's Traicté de la forme et devis d'ung tournay see Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament, app. 7, and Traité de la form et devis d'un tournoi, ed. Edmond Pogne (Paris, 1946). Antoine de la Sale in his Des anciens tournois remarks on the presence of Suffolk and many other English knights; see Prost, Traitiés du duel judiciaire, p. 216.

77. Clephan, Tournament, pp. 71-73; Marche, Mémoires, I, chap. 18.

78. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (London, 1924), p. 83.

79. Chastelain, Chronique de J. de Lalain, pp. 216-281.

80. “Comme chevalliers errans querans leurs aventures, ainsi que jadis firent les chevaliers de la Table Ronde” (Pas d'armes de Sandricourt, ed. A. Vaysièrre [Paris, 1874]); quoted in Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament, p. 89.

81. Paston Letters, p. 396.

82. Black, Illustrations of the Ancient State of Chivalry, p. 37.

83. Clephan, Tournament, pp. 82, 84. For references to the affair at Richmond see Viscount Dillon, “Tilting in Tudor Times,” Archaeological Journal, 55 (2d ser., 5) (1898), 299.

84. A contemporary English account (probably by a herald) is in Bentley, Excerpta Historica, pp. 223-239.

85. Edmund Reiss, Sir Thomas Malory (New York, 1966), p. 194, n. 10: “T. W. Williams has suggested that in the late 1460's Malory may have gone to Bruges and there have come into contact with Caxton to whom he gave a copy of his romance (Sir Thomas Malory and the Morte Darthur [Bristol, 1909]).” As Reiss puts it, “The idea is, if nothing else, certainly pleasant to think about.”

86. MS Harley 69, item 3, in Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament, app. 6.

87. For these sixteenth-century tournaments see Clephan, Tournament, pp. 114-115, 123-124, 125-126; F. Warre Cornish, Chivalry, 2d ed. (London, 1908), p. 108.

88. Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Anglie, ed. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 2-3. The prevalence of unrecorded jousts may be indicated by an edict of Henry V, reconfirmed in 9 Henry VI, designed to preserve the tranquility of the masters and scholars of Cambridge University, forbidding “Torneamenta aliqua, Aventure, Juste, seu hujusmodi hastiludia” within five miles of Cambridge. (Rotuli Parliamentorum ut et Petitiones, et placita in Parliamento [London, 1767], V, 426.)

89. Riquer, Cavalleria, p. 6.

Bibliography

This bibliography includes only primary works that are quoted or discussed in the texts. Literary works mentioned only in passing are not listed, and most historical documents that are quoted only once or twice have also been omitted (and bibliographical details supplied in the notes). Where appropriate, French originals of English works are listed in brackets. I have also frequently listed modern translations of literary works in foreign languages, though the translations of passages quoted in the text are my own.

All quotations from Malory are from The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford, 1967), 3 vols. The one-volume edition occasionally mentioned in the text is Vinaver's Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Oxford Standard Authors, 2d ed. (London, 1971). The Winchester Manuscript is cited from the microfilm copy in the Library of Congress.

The following abbreviations are used:

CFMA	Classiques français de moyen âge.
EETS	Early English Text Society (e.s. = Extra Series).
SATF	Société des anciens textes français.
SHF	Société de l'histoire de France.
STS	Scottish Texts Society.

Items are alphabetized by author or first principal word in the title; that is, La, King, Sir, and similar words are ignored. Short titles used in the text precede full titles.

Bayard: Les très joyeus, plaisant, et récréative histoire du gentil seigneur de Bayard, ed. J. Roman, SHF (Paris, 1878). [See also the same editor's Histoire du bon chevalier Bayart d'après le Loyal Serviteur et d'autres auteurs contemporains. (Paris 1882). The Story of Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and without Reproach, trans. Kenneth Hare (London, 1911).]

Brantôme: Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, SHF (Paris, 1864-1882), 11 vols. [For a translation of the Vies des dames galantes see A. R. Allison, trans., Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies (London, 1922).]

Chandos Herald, The Life of the Black Prince, ed. and trans. Mildred K. Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge (Oxford, 1910). [See also Le prince noir: Poème du heraut d'armes Chandos, ed. Francisque-Michel (London, 1883).]

Chastelain, Georges, Chronique de J. de Lalain: Chronique du bon chevalier Messire Jacques de Lalain, frère et compagnon de l'ordre de la Toison d'or, in Collection des chroniques nationales françaises, 41, ed. J. A. Buchon (Paris, 1825).

Froissart, Jean, Chroniques, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1867-1877), 25 vols. [Froissart's Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton, Penguin Classics (Baltimore, Md., 1968).]

Gregory, William, Chronicle of London, in The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. James Gairdner, Camden Society (London, 1876).

Guillaume le Maréchal: L'histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. Paul Meyer, SHF (Paris, 1891-1901), 3 vols. [Contains a full summary in modern French.]

Marche, Olivier de la, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and J. d'Arbamont, SHF (Paris, 1883-1888), 4 vols.

Pageant of the Birth, Life, and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, K.G. (1389-1439), ed. Viscount Dillon and W. H. St. John Hope (London, 1914).

Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis (Oxford, 1971), vol. I. [See also The Paston Letters, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1904), 6 vols.

Sale, Antoine de la,Petit Jehan de Saintré, ed. Jean Misrahi and C. A. Knudsen, Textes litteraires français, 117 (Geneva, 1965). [Little John of Saintré, trans. Irvine Gray (London, 1931).]

Segar, William, Honour, Military and Ciuill (London, 1602).

Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester, Ordinances for Justes and Tournaments, in Francis H. Cripps-Day, The History of the Tournament in England and in France ([London], 1918), app. 4. [Another version in Francis Douce, “On the Peaceable Justes or Tiltings of the Middle Ages,” Archeologica, 17 (1814), 290-296.]

Abbreviations

ALMA: Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959)

Essays on Malory: Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford, 1963)

Malory's Originality: Malory's Originality: A Critical Study of “Le Morte Darthur,” ed. Robert M. Lumiansky (Baltimore, Md., 1964)

Vinaver, Works: The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1967), 3 vols. (continuous pagination)

In the notes, as in the text, primary works that are quoted or discussed are cited by short title; full bibliographical references are included in the Bibliography.