In the middle ages, martial sports evolved out of the training exercises that knights and squires practiced to hone their skills. These mock combats, or hastiludium (games with spears) [1], took many different forms throughout the middle ages; the more famous ones were the spectacular tournaments, involving teams of combatants in melees, and the joust, in which champions engaged in single combat. Both of these forms were elaborate and expensive to produce or participate in; the weapons used were usually of steel, and although they were often blunted, they still made expensive armour a necessity for the participants.

Alongside these more visible and spectacular events, another older type of hastiludium called the behourd also existed throughout the middle ages. This form of combat was much less formal and dangerous to participate in, and was often used as a training ground for young knights and squires [2]; indeed, its roots stretch back to the training exercised practiced in the Roman Empire [3]. The behourd was also used as an informal and friendly type of tournament to be held at special occasions such as weddings, knightings, coronations and other social occasions where the chivalry gathered.

These behourds were often fought using mock swords, usually made of wood, or more rarely of whalebone. The painting of a melee on an early fifteenth century chest (see details) at the Musee de Tours shows the knights and foot-soldiers armed in normal field armour, but wielding simple undecorated staves of wood. These wooden practice swords, called batons, are also referred to in medieval documents and accounts; a fifteenth century treatise on cries des joustes specifies a wooden baton two and a half feet long as the main offensive weapon [4] and another text refers to swords made of wands from lime trees [5] - King Richard I of England is even recorded as haven taken part in a tournament fought with sugar canes outside the walls of Messina during his journey to the Holy Land! [6]

For the more formal behourds, it was sometimes the case that the weaponry was decorated to make them look more like real swords. For example, in 1278 Edward I of England hosted a behourd in Windsor park in which the weapons were swords made of whalebone with leather hilts. The whalebone blades were decorated with strips of silvered parchment held on with glue (period duct-tape!) and the leather hilts were gilded [7].

In the fifteenth century the baton was becoming ever more popular in tournaments; in Germany, a form of tournament called the Kolbenturnier, or club-tourney, was gaining wide popularity among the nobility - Historian William H. Jackson relates;

"We can then see a decisive change in the form of the tournament emerging in the late fourteenth century and crystallizing in the early fifteenth century, as the Kolben, the club or baton emerges as the chief weapon of the tournament, beside the blunt sword." [8]

and;

"Throughout the fifteenth century the club remained the main weapon of the tournament, to be used for striking only above the belt, whilst the -blunt- sword was used for hacking at the crest of an opponent. These were separate operations, the normal pattern being that the club tourney came first, and then a signal was given after an hour or two to change to the sword stage." [9]

Then, as now, the use of practice swords allows the warrior to train and compete in the medieval martial arts with safety - and it is clear from the regulations of the Fifteenth century German tournament societies that safety was a factor. Hitting below the belt was forbidden (a precedent for our own off-target areas), the steel sword was only used to hack at an opponents' crest, and to prevent accidental injury to the face, there were strict controls on the size of weapons;

"The club was of wood and, like the tourneying sword, had to be broad enough not to pass through the grille of the participants' helmes;. . ." (German tourneying standards of the time stipulated a width no less than 3 and 1/2 fingers) [10]

The Fifteenth century tournament, like a modern SCA war also had its weapon checks and Marshals' marks;

"On the day before the tournament the maces and swords were presented to the judges, who marked them with a hot iron "to ensure that they were not of outrageous weight or length." [11]

Thus it seems that even in the fifteenth century they were worried about marshaling standards - some things never change.

[1] Barber & Barker, Tournaments. p.2.

[2] "If the joust was the first chivalric activity of the newly dubbed knight, the behourd was one of the most popular means of training him before he attained knighthood." Barker, Juliet, The Tournament in Medieval England. P. 148.

[3] Connolly, Peter, Greece And Rome at War. London; Macdonald Phoebus Ltd., 1981. p.218

[4] Barker, Juliet, The Tournament in England. pp. 149. ref. to Bodleian MS Ashmole 764 fo. 32r.

[5] 1375 encounter; du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis (Paris 1840) I 713

[6] Roger of Hoverden, Chronica ed. W. Stubbs, Roll Seriese 51 (1868-71) iii, p. 93-93

[7] Barber & Barker, Tournaments. p. 153

[8] Jackson, William H, "Tournaments and the German Chivalric renovatio: Tournament Discipline and the Myth of Origins", Chivalry in the Renaissance, S. Angelo ed., Woodbridge; Boydell Press, 1990. pp. 80.

[9] Ibid, p. 81.

[10] Ibid, p. 80-81.

[11] Arms and Armour: Essays by Stephen V. Granscay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 1920-1964. Ed. O'Neill, John P., New York, 1986. p. 280.

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