Updated with videos!
Also, this might come in handy soon.
And, I'll move my drink pairing up from the comments: I actually have little idea what jousters drank, so I'll pair it with a drink from Merry Olde England, Samuel Smith's "Oatmeal Stout." With the brewery only founded in 1758, it's unlikely to have been part of a tournament champions celebration, but some horse cavalry might have enjoyed it. Should stand up well for sieges, too.
Update 2: Grim brings us up to speed on jousting beers and suggests a hoppy lager. None actually spring to mind. I'll have to go looking for one.
Also, check out these Shire horses Samuel Smith's uses for deliveries. Beautiful.
6 comments:
The tournament armor the medievals wore was in excess of 60 pounds.
No wonder they couldn't get on their horse without a stool or squire boosting them.
Some of them may not be capable of getting back up after a horse fall either.
60 pounds is nothing. A good Milanese harness is upwards of 80 pounds, and those guys may have used a step to get on their horses, but get on their horses they certainly did.
See these guys running around in the stuff:
https://youtu.be/qzTwBQniLSc
Now, to *arm* that is, to put all that crap on, you definitely need some help, but that's just soldier stuff, and if you'd ever served, you'd know that you help your squad mates put on their gear. Nothing odd about that.
*Surviving* pieces of armor in places like the Met have a great amount 16th century Saxon sport jousting armor, which is very heavy, it's not for the field, and one wasn't supposed to get hurt in it.
If English heritage is really serious about this, I want to know what their standards on armor and lances and horses are going to be. I think it would be easier to do the original hoplite run in armor. More in the spirit of the games, too.
I mean, anybody might not be able to get back up after being knocked off a horse charging at full speed, by someone charging in the opposite direction at full speed. Even if you didn't get the air completely knocked out of you, the fall could seriously injure you. Armor mitigates some of the risks, but makes others worse: f=ma.
In any case, the armor I wore in Iraq was 33 pounds, with an additional 4 pound helmet, before you added any pouches of ammo or packs or anything. We could move in it well enough. I've often taken backpacking trips with packs in the 65 pound range, even in the mountains. And that's way less well-distributed weight than body armor would be.
I don't know about all that, but what I do know is it looks like fun. I'd like to give it a tilt.
Oh, and I actually have little idea what jousters drank, so I'll pair it with Samuel Smith's "Oatmeal Stout." With the brewery only founded in 1758, it's unlikely to have been part of a tournament champions celebration, but some horse cavalry might have enjoyed it.
The heyday of jousting actually coincides with the popularization of hops in beer. Before hops became popular, ales were flavored with herbs and spices. Hops became overwhelmingly popular in the late Middle Ages, resulting in the division of "beer" from "ale," where "beer" was the hoppy stuff and "ale" the non-hoppy stuff. (Since then, of course, hops have become so dominant that now all beer and ale has hops in it -- the difference between the terms 'ale' and 'beer' now depends on top versus bottom fermentation).
So, some good hoppy lager would be a great pairing. Not that you can go wrong with Oatmeal Stout.
I saw some French people, speaking French, demonstrate the acrobatics in plate seen in EB's video, a few years ago.
Tournament armor isn't designed for flexibility or battlefield use, it was something specially crafted to prevent the jousting points (even if blunted) from penetrating. Other than that, I don't see any reason to pack in more if they merely wanted the armor to deflect sparring hits.
It's also difficult to tell if the weight includes the inner layers of the armor, not merely the outer layers of the plate.
The outer plate can stop a blunt javelin or jousting spear from penetrating, but the impact will still transfer, especially when backed by a charging several hundred pound warhorse. The inner layers, the gambion or impact absorption layer, must be additionally buffed up. That would cause an appropriate layer of stiffness around the joints, which would be very difficult to move in. Similar to the feeling of a heavy winter coat, when doing stretches.
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