The tournament might not seem an obvious place to begin a discussion of court masking. A tournament, we might assume, is a war exercise in which face-covering is functional, rather than a theatre game in which it is expressive. Yet throughout Europe the tournament was an inextricable part of courtly revels: records of tournaments predate those of almost any other entertainment. An association between these tournaments and disguising spectacles begins very early: from at least the thirteenth century, European tournaments began to be framed as chivalric pageants, and by the sixteenth century it is often impossible to separate the elements of disguising and combat in chronicle accounts.1 The overlap between the defensive and the expressive qualities of the visored helmet is equally difficult to unravel. The primary reason for covering the face does not cancel its signifying effect on a spectator. So the helmeted motorcyclist or American footballer, or the masked surgeon, may have no thought but to protect themselves and others; but concealing the face immediately changes the wearer’s relationship with those around. The impression of aggressive threat, heroic glamour, or impersonal objectivity that such face-coverings can activate is not simply dispelled by knowing that these masks are primarily protective. The same is true of the jousting helm.
English medieval tournaments were part of the European tradition, in which the most elaborate events had always attracted international participation. The history of the European tournament as a court sport shows distinct shifts both in the structure and in the purpose of events.2 The overall trend was away from the early focus on group combat towards encounters between individuals. This mirrors changes in the social function of the tournament. Evidence suggests that it was initially seen primarily as a training exercise in battle skills and in chivalry.3 But between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the increasing presence of spectators, especially female spectators, the provision of dedicated and defined tournament grounds, and above all the enhanced degree of spectacle, show this military role gradually overlaid by other purposes. Early studies argued that the seriousness of the original tournament was eroded by such ‘mere theatricality’, but it is increasingly recognised that the spectacular pageantry of the later tournament had purposeful and serious functions of its own. In England the immensely lavish tournament events of Edward III, like those of fifteenth-century Burgundy imitated by James IV of Scotland and Henry VIII, were not simply inert and frivolous shows but worked to create the very power and magnificence they sought to demonstrate. Late medieval and Tudor tournament spectacle confirmed and broadcast important political and social perceptions about the noble participants and their roles within their societies.4
We are primarily concerned with one particular aspect of tournaments: the fact that, from very early on, the participants covered their faces during at least parts of the activity. From the end of the twelfth century the commonest form of head protection was the ‘great helm’, which covered the head, face and neck, sitting on the shoulders and fastened with straps to the body-armour. Bars or slits in the face allowed for vision. From the early fifteenth century the great helm was gradually overtaken either by the visored bascinet or by the frog-mouthed helm, an entire head-covering hasped to the body armour, whose point-repelling structure not only covered the face within but disguised even its human shape, leaving only the tiniest crack for sight.5 This face-concealing helm, though primarily a piece of combat equipment, also links the tournament with other kinds of courtly masking.
FIG. 4: Great Tournament Helm (Black Prince)
FIG. 5: Frog-mouthed Helm
There was a very practical connection between the two. Not only does the tilting helm produce a similar effect to a full-head mask, but its construction and decoration involved very much the same skills and materials as we find in later mask-making in the Revels accounts. Edward III’s Wardrobe accounts reveal how it is the armourers who are paid for ‘velvets, taffeta, silks, and buckram for trappers, banners, and … falsa visagia to be worn in Tournaments’.6 When the Office of the Revels itself was first established in 1544/5 its Master was made responsible ‘As well of all and singular masking garments … as allso of all bards for horsis, covering of bards and bassis of all kynds’.7 In other words, he was in charge of producing the ‘costumes’ for tournaments as well as maskings and disguisings.8 Originating as they did in the same workshops, it is not surprising that they had a shared theatricality.
The tournament’s steadily increasing focus on theatrical display clearly affects the potential significances of the helm. Once the purpose of the combat became not only to improve one’s battle skills and win, but to display oneself to spectators while doing so, the conscious performance of chivalry threw a crucial emphasis on appearance. The chivalric ethos itself tends to view the knight’s appearance as not incidental to but semantically inextricable from his qualities of nobility, as shown in the common allegorical readings in the literature of chivalry of the knight’s accoutrements.9 On display at the tournament, the great jousting helm becomes not just a practicality but an increasingly significant theatrical sign directed at the spectators, an emblem, as well as a protective concealment, of the wearer.
The presence of spectators was accompanied by an escalation in spectacle: armour, accoutrements, trappings, and the tournament ground itself became increasingly sumptuous, the splendour of all aspects of its presentation an assertion of the magnificence of the sponsor and participants, and a cause of wonder for the spectators. This gorgeousness extended to the helm with its increasingly elaborate decoration and crest, which draws attention away from the fighter’s concealed face and onto the brilliance of his carapace, so that his personal identity is subsumed into the spectacle of magnificence he presents. The massive frog-mouthed helms of the fifteenth century, surmounted by fantastic crests that towered above or swept below the combatants, replace the vulnerability of the human face with a rhetorical theatrical splendour.
This growing emphasis on theatrical display accompanied changes in the role of the individual combatant. The earliest tournaments were largely group affairs where bands of fighters would meet for ‘friendly’ battle on ground that was initially not even defined or fenced.10 Gradually the battle ground was delimited, place made for spectators, and from about the end of the thirteenth century individual combat, in particular the horseback joust with lances, begins to take over from the general melée as the centrepiece of tournament display. The joust was enhanced by various technical innovations. Advancing technology of steel-production which led to the introduction of plate armour during the fourteenth century made the direct lance-charge more feasible because less deadly.11 The ‘tilt’ or barrier that guided and separated the combatants also threw more emphasis on the artistry with which spears might be broken or opponents unseated. Elaborate rules of play and of scoring were formulated for the jousts.12 The general display of skill in battle offered by the melée had by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries been overtaken by a spectacle in which two lavishly adorned individuals competed for personal glory in a dangerous but highly-defined battle-sport.
These technical changes in the form of combat demonstrate two opposing impulses that help to define the special role of the helm. On the one hand the new plate-armour increasingly encased and concealed the individual fighter, accentuating the obliteration of the human figure inside. The closed visor confirmed the anonymity of the wearer who became an almost mechanical symbol of chivalric magnificence. Yet the growing focus on single combat which the plate armour facilitated paradoxically made the identity of the now hidden individual an increasingly important aspect of the tournament’s purpose. The quest for personal achievement and glory meant the gorgeous panoply must display, as well as protectively conceal, the identity of the wearer. So alongside the development of plate armour we find the development of a complex heraldry to identify the combatants. From the late thirteenth century the coats of arms, crests, and devices which identified the knight by family and inheritance grow more spectacular. Simple colour patterns are overtaken by more elaborate visual decoration and emblems revealing his genealogy. Identity is presented in magnificent and public terms, locating it in the birth and nobility of the wearer.13 These conflicting impulses to conceal, yet reveal, identity have special bearing on the tournament helm. With the face concealed, the surmounting crest became ever more elaborate: exotic creatures, emblems, and objects surmount the wearer’s head. These crests signify the hidden identity of the fighter, but it is a public identity in which both the individual and his society are defined by the magnificence of noble display.
In understanding the assumptions of the late medieval English tournament a good place to begin is René d’Anjou’s Traité de la forme et devis d’un tournoi (Traité des tournois), an elaborately illustrated fifteenth-century French treatise which offers a detailed commentary on the organisation of the ideal tournament.14 It is a central document for the culture and thinking surrounding the European tournament, whether or not its practices were ever exactly followed. Most of the treatise, both the text and the striking illustrations, is devoted to the ceremonial spectacle of the tournament. In this display the helm plays a central part. Detailed illustrations of armour show revealingly how the bascinet, the plain protective steel head-piece with face-covering visor, is surmounted first by a leather cap and then a gloriously elaborate heraldic crest, turning the simple helmet into a fantastic theatrical masking spectacle. In the following pictures of the fully accoutred knights this helm definitively transforms the fighting man into a lavish emblem of magnificent chivalry [PLATE 9]. The heraldic crested helm insistently reveals the dynastic identity of the wearer; but its masking effect suppresses all other aspects of identity. This effect probably facilitated the combat of the tournament, depersonalising the fighters so that the paradox of ‘friendly’ chivalric aggression could be played out. Malory’s Lancelot, roughly contemporary with René’s work, is shown as deliberately engaging in ferocious tournament combat with his friends and kinsmen when they are visored, but is unable to continue once he pulls off their helms to reveal their faces: ‘he myght have slayne them, but when he saw their visages hys herte myght nat serve hym thereto, but leffte hem there’.15
PLATE 8: Construction of the tilting helm and its crest. René d’Anjou Traité de la forme et devis d’un tournoi.
Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2692 fol. 20r, detail.
Cliché © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
René’s idealised tournament envisages another important role for the helms. He recommends that the day before the combats the participants’ crested helms should be displayed in a convenient cloister. The judges, and the ladies as crucial spectators, visit the display of crests: while a herald identifies the land and name belonging to each crest bearer, the visitors may point out and reject any dishonoured participants [PLATE 10]. In this display and judgement of the crests the mask-like helm takes over and almost replaces the person of the wearer. Within the context of the tournament, the knight is the crest. W.H. Jackson points out that in some fifteenth-century German tournaments the object of swordplay in the melée was ‘not to injure an opponent, but to hack off the decorated crest of his helm’.16 The Traité des tournois confirms the chivalric importance of the helmet-mask as a vividly visual expression of heraldic identity.
Tournaments and Theatrical Spectacle
The spectacular was as important a part of tournament head-coverings as the heraldic. Even by the fourteenth century magnificently elaborate and fantastic headpieces were appearing widely in works that purport to illustrate real as well as fictional events.17 Alongside lavish plumes, colours, and streamers, are figures of real and mythical creatures, emblematic objects, fantastic or grotesque crests, often doubling or tripling the height of the helm. Examples from the early-fourteenth-century German Manesse anthology show crests of trees, a peacock’s tail, eagle, wolf, and dragon. The Traité des tournois depicts a giant’s head, a wheel, reversed manacled legs, a candelabrum. Hall records Henry VIII running at the ring ‘with a great plume of fethers on his head peace, that came down to the arson of his sadell’.18
PLATE 9: Helmed knights waiting for the beginning of the melée. Among the helm devices are a man pulling his own forelock, a pair of legs in manacles, a pillar, a seven-branched candlestick, and a bridled donkey René d’Anjou Traité de la forme et devis d’un tournoi: Flemish (c. 1465). Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2692 fol. 62v, detail.
© Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library.
PLATE 10: The ladies survey the helms. René d’Anjou Traité de la forme et devis d’un tournoi: Flemish (c. 1465). Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2692 fol. 48r, detail.
© Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library.
One obvious effect of such superstructures is to increase the size, height and impressiveness of the wearer.19 In part this simply corrects the proportional balance between head and massively armoured body: just as classical Greek theatre required elevated footwear to balance the full-head masks of tragedy. But the impression of being larger than life which the crested helm endows also asserts the heightened and idealised chivalric prowess of the combatants. In England, fifteenth-and sixteenth-century accounts of jousts sometimes record crests being removed before fighting itself begins: the defenders in Henry VII’s jousts of 1495 were trapped with black velvet and gold ‘with mygthy ostrych ffedyrs upon theyr helmettys The which they avoyded when they began to Run’, while the Duke of Buckingham jousting before the King at Westminster in 1501 ‘wyth an excedyng bush of Ostrych ffedyrs upon his helmet … cawsid the said Bush of ffedyrs to be takyn ffrom his hede pese and to be presentid unto the kyngis Tent’ before the jousting.20 This confirms an impression that the dramatic splendour of the helmet-mask was not primarily concerned with practical questions of either identification or defence. The splendour of the crest asserts the glory of the wearer in the spectacular entry into the lists: tournament descriptions, both in treatises and chronicles, suggest that this was almost if not more important than the combats themselves. René d’Anjou in fifteenth-century France and Edward Hall in sixteenth-century England both spend a great deal longer describing ceremonial and, in Hall’s case, minutely detailed costume, than any fighting. It was in this spectacle that the great helms played their most significant role.
The more fantastic crests confirm the underlying playfulness of the tournament occasion. They also accentuate the mechanical, almost inhuman, quality of the armoured faceless knights who can appear almost like marionettes of themselves.21 But there were also crests which represented recognisable heads: human or animal, fantastic or realistic. Usually we are shown an entire head and neck surmounting the helm [PLATE 11], but the head could be built into the helmet itself, as with the ‘hedpeces … lyke Lyons heddes the Mouthe devowringe the mannes hed helmetwise’ mentioned in the Revels accounts of 1553.22 Some idea of the effect can be gained from the splendid parade helmet, possibly Venetian, illustrated in PLATE 12.23 Otherwise the head might grow out of the ‘neck’ provided by the helmet, as we see in the striking tournament helm of John de la Pole on his tomb in Wingfield parish church24 which is crested by a wonderfully carved rather larger than life Saracen’s head [FIG. 6]. When worn, such a helm would turn the jouster into a theatrical giant, a dramatically towering being. An illustration from the early-seventeenth-century Kraichgauer tourney book, purporting to picture a joust of 1179, gives some impression of the effect such a helm conveys in action, the galloping knight topped by a giant’s head with flowing hair.25 The awesome effect of such figures clearly partly depends on an element of impersonation.
The combatant’s helm signifies his own chivalric identity, but it also creates an identity of another kind.
FIG. 6: De la Pole crest, Wingfield Photo: John Marshall
Impersonation, at many levels, had from early on become an intrinsic part of tournament display. Across Europe tournaments had soon begun to borrow from fictional romance.26 In the thirteenth century the famous French tournament at Le Hem in 1278, recorded in the elaborate Roman du Hem, was paralleled in an English Round Table of Edward I in 1284: both were constructed around romance themes, with defenders and challengers taking on Arthurian roles.27 Increasingly, such fictional romance frameworks led to knights assuming the names and roles of romance characters, familiar or invented. This is where the tournament gear becomes in a modern sense a ‘disguise’ or theatrical costume, endowing the knight with a new persona for the duration of the tournament. It is one of the areas of tournament practice where we can see most clearly the overlap with drama and performing art. Early romance scenarios reached a climax in the tournaments of fifteenth-century Burgundy in which, as Gordon Kipling shows, ‘costumed knights regularly entered the lists in pageant cars, hung their shields upon trees, and fought among elaborate scenic devices that transformed their combat into episodes from chivalric romances’.28 However, although knights entering such tourneys were often richly dressed with identifying coats of arms, the masking element of such disguise is less crucial in such events, since the impersonation of a Lancelot, Tristan, or Florimont is largely determined by narrative context rather than appearance.
PLATE 11: Joust between Louis de Beauveu and Robert d’Estouteville, Saumur, 1446. René d’Anjou Pas du Perron, French (c. 1470–80). St Petersburg: National Library of Russia, MS Fr. F p XIV 4, fol. 22v.
© Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Russia.
PLATE 12: Venetian lion helmet (salade), c. 1460: steel, enclosed in copper gilt. The knight’s face is glimpsed through the lion’s mouth. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1923 (23.141).
©A11 rights reserved, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Later, but much more striking examples of genuine masking impersonation are provided by the 1557 Tournament of the Hussars’ in Prague, where the twelve knights representing the enemies of Christendom had visors portraying the faces of Turks and Moors fitted to their helmets. These, in all their characterising detail, can still be seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna [PLATE 13].29 The idea of turning a helmet visor into a fully characterised mask is clearly ancient. The Roman helmet-masks found in England and Scotland and described as ‘parade’ or ‘circus’ helmets, are sophisticated examples, which may link with the Anglo Saxon helmet from Sutton Hoo.30 All would seem to confirm the powerful association between protective and expressive face-coverings.
PLATE 13: Moorish and Turkish visors from the Prague ‘Tournament of the Hussars’ (1557). Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Hofjagd-und Rüstkammer, B 69 and 62.
© Reproduced by permission of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Records of English tournament disguises confirm the power and popularity of direct impersonation even without either romance frames or helmet-visors.31 Here the disguises shift the focus from the individual to the group. London in the mid-fourteenth century saw elaborate tournaments in which the teams were disguised as Tartars (1331), the Pope and Cardinals (1343), the Mayor and Aldermen (1359) and even the Seven Deadly Sins (1362).32 Costume details, where recorded, suggest that masks formed a striking feature of the ceremonial processions preceding the combats, though the relationship, if any, with the tournament helms is not always wholly clear. In the 1331 ‘Tartars’ tournament we find William of Montacute, the tournament’s patron, processing together with King Edward III and other chosen knights, omnes splendido apparatu vestiti et ad similitudinem Tartarorum larvati (‘all clothed in splendid apparel and masked like Tartars’). These sound more like disguising masks and costumes than helmet visors: although there is plenty of later evidence for knights fighting disguised as Turks, Tartars, and Saracens. Apart from the steel Turks’ visors of the Hussars tournament, we find Malory describing Lancelot’s party as fighting in a tournament ‘arayed … as they had ben Sar[a]syns’; while in 1501 Sir Nicholas Vaus is recorded as jousting ‘apparaylid afftir the Guyse of a Turk or a Sarasyn with a white Rolle of ffyne lynyn cloth abowth his hede the endys hangyng pendaunt wyse’.33 Such impersonating disguises, apart from confirming the close relationship between jousts and masking spectacle, could contribute overtly to the topicality of the tournament. The defending team who fought disguised as Pope and Cardinals in 1343 against challengers including the Prince of Wales, reflected a particular moment of hostility against the Papacy. The theatrical battle thus allowed the political conflict to be ceremonially enacted and played out.34 The tournament of the Seven Deadly Sins in 1362 was held responsible by chroniclers for ensuing disasters, probably because it was a deliberate and foolhardy joke against the pulpit commonplace that tournaments were a hotbed of all seven.35
While such disguises sharpen and enhance the tournament war-games, others seem to play in tension with the combat. In the mid-thirteenth century Ulrich von Liechtenstein undertook a personal jousting quest from Venice to Vienna in disguise as Lady Venus, apparently in women’s clothes, and claimed that his disguise was never penetrated.36 It is impossible to tell how far his account is fictionalised, but the contradictory vision of the heroic male fighter representing himself as the feminine icon whose vulnerability he supposedly defends is a powerful one, and clearly relates to the complex psychology of the chivalric ethos which plays upon blurred distinctions between friend and enemy, civilisation and aggression, and even male and female.37 Such cross-gender tournament disguises are recorded at the coronation jousts of Henry of Cyprus in Acre in 1286, where the participants:
… contrefirent la table reonde et la raine de Femenie c’est asaver chevaliers vestus come dames et josteent ensemble; puis firent nounains quy estoient ave moines et bendoient les uns as autres … et mout d’autres jeus biaus et delitables et plaissans.38
… impersonated the Round Table and the realm of the Amazons, that is to say, with knights dressed as ladies jousting together; then enacted nuns who were with monks, who fought against each other … and many other fine, delightful, and pleasing sports.
The fighting Amazons are naturalised by the tournament context, but the knights disguised as nuns in combat with monks (at a time when the Church still opposed tournaments) clearly contravene two different decorums, of gender and of religion, in what was obviously felt to be a delightfully pleasurable violation.39 Costumes like this also demonstrate the non-illusionist nature of most tournament disguise. This cannot be a disguise which attempts to persuade the spectator that the knight ‘is’ a nun, Amazon, or even Tartar or Cardinal. Tournament disguise projects an extravagantly and consciously playful theatrical identity held at a distance from the knight beneath.40
At its extreme, recognition of this impulse led to playful caricature armour. Examples survive of grotesque German parade helmets with visor-faces said to be based on carnival masks. One was presented by the Emperor Maximilian to Henry VIII and is now in the Royal Armouries at Leeds:41 the visor represents a detailed and expressive comic face, probably a caricature of Maximilian himself, surmounted by extravagant ram’s horns [PLATE 23]. More serious play with the distance between knight and disguise is found in the figure, popular in English tournaments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the hermit knight, an old warrior retired from arms to contemplation yet returning for a final display of chivalry. He appears in the tournament celebrating the marriage of the four-year-old Prince Richard, son of Edward IV, in 1477/8. Antony Woodville, Earl Rivers entered the lists in a portable pavilion made like ‘the house of an Ermyte walled and covered with blak velwet wyndowed of umple in the fourme of Glas’.42 Rivers emerged with a white cassock over his armour, and a streamer ‘fro the upermost of his helme unto the crowpour of his horse’ of tawny satin sprinkled with golden tears, before removing his cassock to enter the joust in honour of Prince Richard whose tutor he had been appointed.
Here, as in subsequent examples, there is almost a double disguise: the hermit persona of age and contemplation casts off his cassock to reveal the fully armed emblem of chivalry ready for the tilt. So we find Charles Brandon in the Great Tournament of 1511 entering the lists in pilgrim’s hat and ‘a long & fforgrowyn berd Rechyng to his Sadyll bowe’ who ‘cast ffrom hym hastely his clothyng berd & hat and shewid hym sylf In brygth harneys’.43 participants were clearly aware of the effects of such layered disguises: at Greenwich in 1515 Henry VIII, disguised as a white hermit in ‘scopelary mantel’, and the Duke of Suffolk ‘appareilled like a black armite all of blacke velvet, both ther berdes were of Damaske sylver’, threw off their disguises to reveal reverse colours, the king armed in black, the Duke in white.44 Opposing identities, all theatrical, play against each other.
Allegorical identities were also frequently demonstrated in ways which exploited the helm. Tournament crests might present a symbolic object, like the winged heart which identifies the ‘chevalier du cuer’ in the impressive illustrations to René d’Anjou’s fictional allegory Livre du Coeur.45 Very frequently though, allegory was identified in mottoes or imprese, words or emblematic pictures which appeared on the combatants’ armour and trappings.46 The tournaments of Edward III sometimes featured emblems and mottoes of the concealed King (‘It is as it is’ for tournament gear in 1342); the trappings for Henry VIII’s tournament of 1511 carried the allegorical names assumed by the king and his co-defenders, Coeur Loyal, Vaillant Desir, Bone Vouloyr, and Joyous Penser.47 At the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520:
… on the bardes and apparell were litle mountaines & springyng braunches of Basile, wrought all of fyne gold, and every braunche, lefe, and stalke, was lose and waveryng, all thicke and full of leaves and braunches … ye reasons written on the borders was thus, Breake not these swete herbes of the riche mounte, doute for dammage.48
Such imprese are not directly connected with the masking effect of the helm itself; but by further focusing on the idea the knight represents they draw yet more attention away from the hidden wearer; and the glorious enigma of the impresa is intensified when the knight’s helmet covers his face. The spectacular theatricality of the later tournaments had transformed the simple face-protection into a complex masking device.
Tournaments and Individuality
The development of the tournament towards single combat obviously led to increasing focus on the skills and glamour of the individual fighter, a fact often exploited by rulers in the establishment and advertisement of political power.49 In Britain, where monarchs took part in tournaments from very early on, Richard I, Edward III, James IV of Scotland, and Henry VIII all used their tournament prowess to create and publish powerful chivalric images for themselves.50 For all participants, the competitive structure of the tournament made the individual display of martial skill and glamorous chivalry central.51 The emphasis on individual prowess naturally heightens consciousness of the fighter’s identity, as revealed by both helm and face. Some later chronicles note a careful etiquette of visoring and unvisoring, riding helmed or bare-faced, at different moments of the tournament. The Great Chronicle of London records how after the spectacularly costumed jousting of 1501 for the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon ‘the Deffendours were conveyd abowth the Tylt opyn vysagid & bare hedyd theyr helmys born befforn theym’. Similarly it records two triumphant laps of the tilt by Henry VIII in 1511, first ‘wt his hede pese upon his hede’ and then in an entirely new costume ‘Ridyng bare hedyd’ with his helmet borne before him.52 The bare-faced acknowledgement of triumph seems an important adjunct to the spectacularly concealed display in combat.
With such heightened awareness it is not surprising that later tournaments became occasions for playing with the display of identity. Participants show a fascination with dressing up and disguise, with both self-display and anonymity, which is not only theatrical but also intimately connected with ideas of the chivalric self. Romance literature across Europe, for example, shows a notorious preoccupation with knights who choose to fight tournaments either in disguise or anonymously: the chevalier inconnu, an object of fascinated attention who displays chivalrous skill in public spectacle yet remains unknown to the spectators, is a key figure of many romance tales.53 Devisers of tournaments drew on and exploited this figure.
Malory’s Lancelot offers a familiar English example which may help to unravel the significance of the chevalier inconnu in later English tournaments. When Lancelot conceals his identity in tournament at Astolat or Winchester, he does so by the obvious masking gesture of keeping his visor closed and changing his habitual shield and crest, the insignia of his chivalric and public self. He borrows a shield, fastens a lady’s sleeve to his helm, and immediately the full armour is an impenetrable disguise.54 While complex reasons of personal loyalty are often established for Lancelot’s change of persona, one central underlying motive is the need to demonstrate glory by personal merit rather than reputation. The unknown knight links to ongoing debates about the external or internal nature of honour, whether it is derived from birth, inheritance, or reputation, or from intrinsic virtue.55 Is the tournament knight noble by virtue of the inherited heraldic identity he displays, or by virtue of his personal capacity in action? To fight in disguise allows the knight to explore the limits of his public and private capacity.56 When Malory’s Lancelot fights unknown his role is to prove that outer and inner are inseparable: his reputation as the best knight is always justified by his performance. But for the gesture to be fully successful he must in the end be recognised. A knight who fights unknown puts off the public chivalric identity of the heraldic tournament armour; but he does so in order to prove his right to it. Since this requires public recognition, the knight must first deny but then resume the public identity embodied in the tournament insignia.
Various tournaments framed as romance narratives involve figures of ‘unknown knights’, but in these the anonymity of the fighter is defined by the fictional frame. More notable are instances of knights, especially the powerful and famous, fighting anonymously for non-fictional purposes. Edward III is recorded as fighting in a tournament at Dunstable in 1342 ad modum simplicis militis,57 possibly in the arms of his infant son Lionel whose betrothal the tournament honoured; while in 1334 he had apparently fought in the Arthurian incognito of ‘Sir Lyonell’,58 and at other events in the arms of certain of his knights.59 Not enough information survives to determine Edward’s motives, but apart from the Arthurian delight in such fictive disguise it offered the opportunity both to prove his own powers and to honour those subjects whose arms he bore. When Christ comes to ‘juste in Pieres armes’ in Piers Plowman, Faith explains that he does so for ‘gentries’, to show humility and honour to Piers, and in order to set aside the protection of his status by not being known as God.60 In Edward III’s case all such purposes would be dependent upon his disguise being penetrated. If none of the spectators and participants realised that the unidentified knight was the king, honour would not redound either to Edward or to the subjects whose arms he bore. Tournament disguise must at some level be intended to be transparent.
A later anecdote about Henry VIII’s youthful jousting enthusiasm throws further light on this. Henry was seen by contemporaries in the early years of his reign as ‘yong and lusty, disposed all to myrth & pleasure’, including the exercise and display of his chivalric prowess, and games of disguise.61 In the first year of his reign the eighteen-year-old king ‘beyng secretly informed’ that some gentlemen were holding a private joust, armed himself with one of his privy chamber ‘and so came into the Iustes, unknowen to all persones, and unloked for’.62 As the chevalier inconnu pattern demands, there was ‘greate praise geven to the two straungers, but specially to one, whiche was the kyng’. The apparently impromptu nature of this incident suggests that Henry was indeed aiming by concealment to prove his valour and skill, though how much stage-management was involved we cannot tell. The climax of the episode involved the discovery of the king’s identity. When his companion was badly hurt, ‘one persone there was, that knew the kyng, and cried, God save the king, with that, all the people wer astonied, and then the king discovered himself, to the greate comforte of all the people’. The episode sounds rather less spontaneous than Hall implies, but confirms both Henry’s use of anonymity for chivalric honour and the need for identity to be ‘discovered’ if the gesture is to have its proper impact. The disguise of the closed helm might well have been total, and the injury that led to its removal unlooked for; but Henry’s action nonetheless seems based on the premise that at some point his identity would be revealed.
Most records show anonymous participation in tournaments as carefully planned, and playing far more openly with the spectators’ penetration of the disguise. One fully recorded and beautifully illustrated example is found in the career of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, an enthusiastic tourneyer of the early fifteenth century. As captain of Calais, Beauchamp ‘cast in his mynde to do some newe poynt of chevalry,’ and devised an elaborate three-day tournament in which he would act as defender against all comers, incognito.63 On the first day he came ‘to the felde his face covered /a bussh of Estrich fethres on his hede’ and after unseating his opponent ‘wt cloos visar retorned unknowen to his Pavilyon’. The second day he jousted again ‘his visar cloos /a Chaplet on his basnet /and a tufte of estrich fethres alofte’, while on the third day ‘Erle Richard came in face opyn /his basnet as the day afore. Save the Chapellet was rich of perle & precious stones’ [PLATE 14]. His mask now removed, Beauchamp claimed the victories of the two previous days and set out to repeat them. This seems a fairly straightforward version of the chevalier inconnu, with increasingly spectacular mask-helm, finally revealed to claim his rightful honour. Yet the account also meticulously reveals the arms Beauchamp bore: on the first day those of his ancestor Lord Tony, on the second family arms of Mauduit of Hanslope, on the third these quartered, plus those of Guy and Beauchamp. This heraldic declaration, together with the elaborately set up and publicised challenges and arrangements, make it highly unlikely that any one could have been unaware of his identity.64 The ritual of anonymity must have been an open secret in which the spectators colluded. The mask-visor must be kept on until due time in order to establish and enhance the honour of the wearer; but it is a chivalric sign for concealed identity rather than an actuality.
PLATE 14: Earl Richard jousts on the second day at Guisnes with his visor closed. The Beauchamp Pageants (1485–90). London: British Library, Cotton MS Julius E IV fol. 15v.
© Reproduced by permission of the British Library.
PLATE 15: King Henry VIII enters under his pavilion as Noble Coeur Loyal (1511). London: College of Arms, Great Tournament Roll of Westminster mb 13.
© Reproduced by permission of the College of Arms.
Henry VIII’s enthusiasm for tournaments also expressed itself in very consciously manipulated play with notions of disguise and identity. His impromptu appearance at the private tourney heralded a number of spectacular official tournaments in which he participated in magnificently transparent camouflage. The 1511 tournament to celebrate the birth of his son, extensively documented in chronicles, expense accounts, and the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster ordered to record and celebrate the event, provides a characteristic example. The fictional framework of this tournament is that the Queen Noble Renome, hearing of the birth of the prince, has sent four knights – Coeur Loyal, Vaillant Desir, Bone Vouloyr, and Joyous Penser – to celebrate with feats of arms. Although references to Henry in the challenge suggest that the king’s role will be that of patron rather than participant,65 Henry in fact took the role of Coeur Loyal, and along with three noble companions appeared in the disguising revels and the two days of jousting in lavish costume, each adorned with his allegorical name in letters of gold. The magnificent costuming was, in part, aimed at disguising the combatants’ real identity and at presenting them as four equals. While the challengers enter the lists in a wide variety of pageants and costumes, Henry and his supporters are all attired in the same colours and designs, all adorned with the letters H and K.66 The masking effect of their tournament armour and helms is intensified by their entry into the lists, each in a matching portable pavilion held over him as he rode, a full-body ‘mask’ which drew even more spectacular attention to the hidden defenders inside. The king rode ‘under a Pavilion of cloth of golde, and purpul Velvet enbroudered, and poudered with H & K of fyne golde … in the front of the chafron was a goodly plume set full of musers or trimbling spangles of golde’ [PLATE 15]. These pavilions not only hid the riders on their way to the lists, but acted as a changing room for Henry to shift into other splendid garments at stages during the proceedings. The richness of the display was both an end in itself, and a concealment of the king; it drew the gaze, yet hid the occupant from it.
But in spite of the masking effect of the pavilion, matching costumes, visored helm, and allegorical persona, it is obvious that the whole tournament was in fact designed to reveal and celebrate the identity of the king. Anglo has demonstrated how the organisation of the processions and jousting show ‘the King always occupying the most striking position’, the spectacle always focusing on him.67 It is clear, too, that the king’s masking accoutrements were differentiated from his supporters in ways that drew attention to his uniqueness: their pavilions are of damask, his of velvet and cloth of gold; all topped with the golden K, but his surmounted by an imperial crown; theirs fringed with silk, his with damask gold. All the while that his splendid disguise asserted that he was unknown, it simultaneously insisted on his identity. Like Richard Beauchamp, Henry and his spectators were taking part in a chivalric game of anonymity designed to heighten the individual honour of the masked knight. As Castiglione explained, the exponent of feats of chivalry must:
… pascer gli occhi dei spettatori di tutte le cose che gli parrà che possano aggiungergli grazia … motti appropriati ed invenzioni ingeniose, che a sé tirino gli occhi de’circonstanti come calamita il ferro.68
… feede the eyes of the lookers on with all thinges that hee shall thinke may give a good grace … and to have proper devises, apt posies, and wittie inventions that may draw unto him the eyes of the lookers on as the Adamant stone doth yron.69
Tournament disguises could also reveal more personal aspects of the tourneyer’s hidden self. As far back as Ulrich von Liechtenstein, we are told that his persona as Lady Venus was a dramatisation of his own rejection by a lover.70 It has been argued that James IV’s famous Edinburgh tournament of the Black Lady in 1507/8, in which James jousted as the Wild Knight led by wildmen in goatskins and horns, enacted the king’s ambivalent relationship with the recently ‘subdued’ highlanders. By adopting a mask of wildness, James was able both to appropriate and to celebrate the savagery of the highlanders, while at the same time civilising it through the chivalric sophistication of the tournament form.71 Spectators were apparently ready, at least to some degree, to read the concealing magnificences of tournament as revealing the self in this way. At a tilt in 1515 defended by Henry VIII and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the duke’s armour bore the motto ‘who can hold that wyl away’. Hall points out that ‘this poyse was iudged to be made for the duke of Suffolk & the duches of Savoy’.72 It is clear that the enveloping accoutrements of the tournament are far from being either simply protective, or simply identifying. Increasingly these are masks that conceal in order to reveal – chivalric, political, or even personal selves.
These complex games of spectacle, performance, and role-play all confirm the close connection between tournament helms and masks. Jousting festivities were not only accompanied by, but slipped into masking games and shows. Accounts of tournaments frequently present the evening masking entertainments as of equal importance to the occasion as the jousting, involving the same performers.73 The costumes and scenarios of the tournament also overlap with the pageantry of masking shows. When in 1331 we find a royal tournament team accompanied to the lists by over fifty spectacularly dressed shield bearers omnes larvati tam milites quam armigeri (‘all masked, both knights and arms-bearers’), it seems clear that the chivalric splendour of the tournament is intimately bound up with the lavish masked costumes.74 Conceptually, too, it is clear that similar issues of display and concealment, performance and identity were exploited by both tournament combat and masking entertainment. The intricate relationship is neatly summed up in the interplay of images from a sixteenth-century novella, in a scene in which the identity of the hero Erastus, fighting a tournament incognito, is uncovered. An admiring opponent,
… seasing upon the hinder skirt of his helmet wyth an ardent boldnes, drew it so rudely, or rather happily towards him, as the latchets and buckles slipping, he openly discovered the bare heade of our Rhodian Erastus, who besides his naturall beautie, painted hys cheekes wyth a certain shamefastnesse, like one in a maske or mummerie, whose vizarde sodaynely falleth from hys face in the companye, from whence he woulde departe unknowne.75
The conjunction of the images of helm and mask, tournament and mummery, reveals the implicit relationship felt between the two. It is scarcely surprising that the term visor carried the two meanings it did.
Notes
1 The association of tournament with masking and theatrical entertainments is well recognised; see e.g. Glynne Wickham Early English Stages: 1300–1576 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) 1: 13–50.
2 For general discussion of the tournament see Malcolm Vale War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the end of the Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1981) 63–87: chapter 3 ‘Chivalric Display’; Juliet Barker The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986); Alan Young Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: Philip, 1987); Richard Barber and Juliet Barker Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989).
3 Barker Tournament in England 17–44.
4 Early studies include Johan Huizinga The Waning of the Middle Ages: a Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries translated Frederik Hopman (London: Arnold, 1924); Raymond Lincoln Kilgour The Decline of Chivalry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1937). For criticism, see Maurice Keen ‘Huizinga, Kilgour and the Decline of Chivalry’ Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1977) 1-20. For later opinion, Barker Tournament in England; Anglo Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy; Louise Olga Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
5 For information on helmets, see Claude Blair European Armour: circa 1066 to circa 1700 (London: Batsford, 1958) 47–8, 157–8; Malcolm Vale War and Chivalry 105–10; Barker Tournament in England 164–6. Another version of the bascinet has a visor made of a grid of bars (see below Plate 8).
6 Sydney Anglo ‘Financial and Heraldic Records of the English Tournament’ Journal of the Society of Archivists 2 (1960–64) 183–95, at 184.
7 E.K. Chambers Notes on the History of the Revels Office under the Tudors (London: Bullen, 1906) 12.
8 The materials used for crests and masks were the same: see chapter 12 on ‘Materials and Methods’ 315: not surprisingly, as the craftsmen were the same.
9 See Maurice Keen Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984) 8–15.
10 See e.g. Barber Tournaments 14–15; Young Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments 11–14.
11 Blair European Armour 37–76, chapters 2 and 3; Barber Tournaments 154–7.
12 See Sir John Tiptoft ‘Ordinances, Statutes and Rules’ (1466) in Francis Henry Cripps Day The History of the Tournament in England and in France ([London], 1918) Appendix 4, xxvii–xxx.
13 Keen Chivalry 125–34; Barker Tournament in England 180–83. On the crest in heraldry and its connections with genealogy, see A.C. Fox-Davies A Complete Guide to Heraldry (London: Nelson, 1925) 340–45.
14 René d’Anjou Traité des tournois (Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, MS Dresd. Oc 58) edited Jacques Heers and Françoise Robin (Munich: Lengenfelder, 1993); also René d’Anjou Traité de la forme et devis d’un tournoi edited Edmond Pognon (Verve: Revue artistique et litteraire 4: 16; Paris: Verve, [1946]) illustrations reproduced from Paris: Bibliothèque nationale Mss Fr. 2692 and Fr 2695. Although clearly reflecting his own mid-fifteenth-century experience of mounting lavish tournament events, René claims that he drew on the best practice of Germany, France, and Flanders, as well as historical sources from earlier periods, making the tournament he describes both imaginary and yet apparently classic.
15 Thomas Malory Works edited E. Vinaver, revised P.J.C. Field, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 2: 1072.
16 W.H. Jackson ‘The Tournament and Chivalry in German Tournament Books of the Late Sixteenth Century and in the Literary Works of Emperor Maximilian I’ in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood edited C. Harper-Bird and R. Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986) 49–73, at 52.
17 See the fourteenth-century Manesse anthology (Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, MS Cod. pal. Germ 848, fol. 237); René d’Anjou Traité des tournois.
18 Hall Union 314. The best illustrations of this effect are found in Der Weisskünig, a romanticised biography of the Emperor Maximilian, illustrated by Hans Burgkmair, and printed in Vienna in 1775.
19 Compare the episode in the Iliad in which Hector removes his plumed helmet in order to avoid terrifying his infant son: Book 6, lines 466–73.
20 The Great Chronicle of London (London: Guildhall Library MS 3313) edited A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (London: Jones, 1938) 255, 313. Buckingham’s ostrich feathers were the crest of the Prince of Wales whose marriage the tournament honoured. Illustrations in the Great Tournament Roll (see note 31 below) also show crests removed for the jousting.
21 Compare the enveloping carapaces of e.g. Kabuki or Kathakali theatre.
22 Feuillerat Edward VI and Mary 133.
23 Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: illustration in MMA Bulletin 32: 4 ( 1973/1974) n.p.
24 See John Marshall ‘The Satirizing of the Suffolks in Wisdom’ Medieval English Theatre 14 (1992) 37–66, and plates 2 (page 43) and 3 (page 55). He links the helm with the disguising in Wisdom; another example of theatrical cross-fertilisation.
25 Lotte Kurras Turnierbuch aus der Kraichgauer Ritterschaft, Um 1615, Cod. Ross. 711 (Zurich: Belser Vorlag, 1983) fol. 23v. See chapter on ‘Courtly Mumming’ for the implications for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
26 See Ruth Cline ‘The Influence of Romances on Tournaments of the Middle Ages Speculum 20 (1945) 204–11.
27 Trouvère Sarrazin Le Roman du Hem edited Albert Henry (Travaux de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Bruxelles 9; Paris and Liège: [1939]); R.S. Loomis ‘Edward 1: Arthurian Enthusiast’ Speculum 28 (1953) 114–27; see Barker Tournament in England 88–95.
28 Gordon Kipling Triumph of Honour 117.
29 Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, in the Hofjagd und Rustkammer, inv. A420. See also the Turnierbuch of Ferdinand (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer, inv. K5134).
30 The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial edited Bruce-Mitford 2: 224. See above 16–17.
31 For thirteenth-century examples see The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster edited Sydney Anglo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) 23–4.
32 ‘Annales Paulini de Tempore Edwardi Secundi’ in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II edited W. Stubbs, 2 vols Rolls Series 76 (1882) 1: 353–5; Adam of Murimuth Continuatio chronicarum and Robertus de Avesbury De gestis mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii edited by Edward Maunde Thompson Rolls Series 93 (1889) 230–1; John of Reading Chronica edited James Tait (Manchester University Press, 1914) 131–2 and 151. See Juliet Vale Edward III and Chivalry 57–75, chapter 4 ‘Ludi and Hastiludia at the Court of Edward III’.
33 Malory Works 1106; Great Chronicle 314.
34 Murimuth Continuatio 231. Similar use of masked entertainments to comment on political issues can be found in the variations on courtly disguisings. See chapters on ‘Courtly Mumming’ 156–8 and ‘Amorous Masking’ 180–82.
35 Reading Chronica 151. Barber and Barker quote a range of commentators in Tournaments 143–5.
36 Ulrich’s adventures are recorded in the poem Frauendienst edited R. Bechstein (Leipzig, 1888); see Barber Tournaments 49–53. An illustration from a century later shows Ulrich in normal armour, but wearing a closed helm topped by an almost life-size model of Venus as queen with burning brand and dart of love: see Barber Tournaments 55.
37 See M. Vale War and Chivalry 64–5; this argument is much developed in the ‘Tournament’ section of Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament.
38 Philippe de Navarre and Gerard de Monteal [sic] Les Gestes des Chiprois: recueil de chroniques françaises écrites en Orient au XIIIe & XlVe siecles edited Gaston Raynaud (Publications de la Societé de l’Orient latin, Serie historique 5; Osnabruck: Zeller, 1968; reprint of edition by Geneva: Fick, 1887) 220; quoted Barker Tournament in England 89.
39 Barker Tournament in England 70–83.
40 See Emigh Masked Performance 24–5.
41 Claude Blair ‘The Emperor Maximilian’s Gift of Armour to King Henry VIII’ Archaeologia 99 (1965) 1–52. In the seventeenth century this suit was known as ‘Will Somers’ armour’. Will Somers is recorded as fighting a mimic duel in the Revels Accounts for Christmas 1551, but his armour was cardboard, ‘a harniss of paper boordes’ (Feuillerat Edward VI and Mary 73). The link, even if erroneous, shows that the helmet was associated in people’s minds with the revels rather than with serious combat.
42 College of Arms MS M. 3, fol. 12r. See Great Tournament Roll 33–4.
43 Great Chronicle 372.
44 Hall Union 568.
45 King René’s Book of Love introduction and commentaries by F. Unterkircher (New York: Braziller, 1975).
46 Young Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments 124–5.
47 Juliet Vale Edward III and Chivalry 64–5; Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas ‘Observations on the Institution of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’ Archaeologia 31 (1846) 1–163; Great Tournament Roll passim.
48 Hall Union 615.
49 Spectacular continental examples include Ulrich von Liechtenstein, René d’Anjou, and the Emperor Maximilian: see Ruth Harvey Moriz von Craun and the Chivalric World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Barber Tournaments 114–17; Jackson ‘The Tournament and Chivalry’.
50 See Barker Tournament in England chapter 3 ‘Tournament and Politics’; Anglo Spectacle, Pageantry 108–23; Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament 225–43; Young Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments 11–42.
51 Barber Tournaments 206–8.
52 Great Chronicle 314, 373.
53 Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament 184–5, 207–8.
54 Malory Works 1103–14, 1065–81.
55 See Keen Chivalry 143–61.
56 Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament 207–8. For further discussion of this topic in relation to courtly masking see chapter 6 on ‘Disguisings’.
57 Murimuth Continuatio chronicarum 123. See Juliet Vale Edward III and Chivalry 64–5.
58 Juliet Vale Edward III and Chivalry 68–9.
59 See e.g. ad faciendum unum harnesium pro corpore Regis de armis domini Thome de Bradestoni pro hastiludiis Regis apud Lychefeld (‘for making armour for the King’s body with the arms of Sir Thomas of Bradeston for the King’s tournament at Lichfield’) in 1348. See Nicolas ‘Institution of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’ 40.
60 William Langland The Vision of Piers the Plowman (B-text) edited A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1978) Passus 18, lines 22–6.
61 George Cavendish The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey edited Richard Sylvester EETS 243 (1959) 12.
62 Hall Union 513.
63 The tournament is spectacularly recorded in a contemporary biographical manuscript: see Pageant of the Birth, Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, 1389–1439 edited Viscount Dillon and W.H. St. John Hope (London: Longmans, 1914).
64 Confusingly his three opponents are recorded in a mixture of modes. The first day ‘le Cheveler Ruge’, the second ‘the blank knyght Sir Hugh Lawney’, the third ‘Sir Colard Fynes’. Games with identity are clearly being played.
65 Great Tournament Roll 109–11.
66 See the illustrations of the second day of jousting in the Great Tournament Roll, and the descriptions in Hall Union 516–19. H and K were for Henry and Katherine not, as one chronicler suggests, for Henry and King, though the mistake is revealing (Great Chronicle 371).
67 Great Tournament Roll 82.
68 Castiglione Il Cortegiano 102.
69 Hoby Courtier 96.
70 Barber Tournaments 49.
71 Fradenburg City, Marriage, Tournament 225–43.
72 Margaret of Austria: Hall Union 568.
73 Maximilian of Austria’s Freydal, chronicling a romanticised version of his wooing of Mary of Burgundy with shows and feats of arms, has a recurrent pattern of three jousts followed by an evening mummery: Freydal Des Kaisers Maximilian I Turniere und Mummereien edited Quirin von Leitner (Vienna, 1880–82).
74 ‘Annales Paulini’ 354.
75 Wotton Courtlie Controversie 39–40.
