Late Middle Ages

Games, sports, and tournaments in the late Middle Ages

The fifteenth-century lord who opened Rene d’Anjou’s Livre des tournois (c. 1460) and the labourer who sat in a London tavern with a pair of dice and a cup of small ale were playing, in some sense, the same game — the great aristocratic pursuit of ébatement, of killing time in the approved way. The literature of late medieval leisure is in fact two literatures, almost: the chivalric, which sees pastime as the proper occupation of the noble, and the homiletic, which sees it as the gateway to sin. Both are wrong, and both contain useful evidence. The broader context of books, education, and leisure is set out in the overview, and the writing world that recorded and misread these pursuits is in The medieval book and the late medieval scriptorium; the urban and village settings are in Ale, beer, and the medieval drinking habit and the theatre that descended from religious festival is in Mystery plays and medieval theatre.

The tournament in the age of chivalry

The tournament of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was, despite its name, not a single thing. It was at least four: the mêlée (a team-on-team fight that descended from the early thirteenth-century buhurt); the joust (the single, head-to-head charge that took over from the 1380s); the tourney by barriers (a foot or mounted contest in a fenced enclosure); and the round table or pas d’armes (a ceremonial challenge held at a particular bridge or gate). The most spectacular English events were Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor in 1344, the tournament of Cheapside in 1334, and the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, the last a hybrid that still served the late medieval ideal of the confrérie d’armes. Froissart, who was no mean judge, gives a particularly good description of the great English and Burgundian tourneys of the 1380s and 1390s, and the Livre des tournois of René d’Anjou (c. 1460) is the closest we have to a contemporary manual of the formal tourney.

The tournament was useful to the crown as a school of war and dangerous to it as a school of faction. The two were not always separable. The death of Henry II of France in a joust in 1559 is the end of a long late medieval story in which tournaments killed kings, dukes, and countless less exalted men. Louis IX of France had attempted to forbid the mêlée at the Council of Tours in 1163, and the prohibitions were repeated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and by numerous diocesan statutes in the following centuries. The prohibitions worked with varying success; the Black Prince’s son Richard of Bordeaux was forbidden to joust on pain of excommunication, and jousted anyway. The reality is that the late medieval tourney was, in the words of the standard modern study by Malcolm Vale, an institution of the secular nobility that the church could slow but not stop.

The cost was as prohibitive as the risk. A good horse, a full harness, a pavilion, and a varlet cost as much as a small manor. Edward, the Black Prince’s tournament at Chandos-le-Plein in 1360, at which the heralds first recognised the Prince’s arms of the lions passant guardant, is also the kind of event that the duke of Lancaster, the earl of Salisbury, and a dozen greater lords could afford, and the lesser gentry and the household men-atarms could only attend. The hierarchy is the same in Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie (c. 1350): the great tournaments are for princes, the lesser for lesser men, the épreuve and the prix for those with something to prove. Maurice Keen’s Chivalry (1984) remains the indispensable account of the social setting; Juliet Barker’s The Tournament in England (1986) and Malcolm Vale’s The Princely Court (2001) are the best studies of the event itself.

The hunt and the chase

If the tourney was for princes, the hunt was for everyone of substance, and the amount of time the late medieval noble spent hunting is genuinely astonishing. The Mesnagier de Paris (c. 1393), the household manual of a wealthy Parisian bourgeois, devotes a long section to the keeping of falcons, hounds, and horses; the Livre de chasse of Gaston Phébus, count of Foix (c. 1387–1389), is one of the great illustrated books of the Middle Ages, and it shows the count himself, the dogs, the beaters, the boar-spears, the whole panoply. Phébus’s Livre is also useful as a source for the language of the hunt: lancer, courre, forcer, tomber, the terms that the varlets and the valets de chiens used and that the venery of the next century would try to codify.

Three quarries dominated. The red deer (the cerf noble) was the quarry par excellence, the one whose pursuit was reserved, by the assises de la chasse, to the greater lords; the boar was second, a dangerous and prestigious quarry whose tusks were displayed on the hall wall; the hare and the fox were the everyday chases of the smaller gentry and the parson. The falconer and the austringer had a parallel hierarchy: the gerfalcon for kings, the falcon gentil for dukes, the sacre and the lanner for earls and barons, the merlin and the hobby for ladies and priests. The Boke of St Albans (1486) codifies the hierarchy in rhyme — “An emperor, a king, a duke, a baron, an earl, a knight, a squire …” — and the rhyme is the tip of an enormous technical literature that includes Phébus, Edward of Norwich’s Master of Game (c. 1406, a translation of Phébus), and a great number of modi* and routiers. The hunt was, in addition to a sport, a system of social distinction and a serious economic activity: the lord’s veneur and the garenne of the manor were both part of the system that Rosamond Faith and Richard Wunderli have made the subject of their respective studies of the medieval peasantry.

The criticism of the hunt is the obverse of the literature. The late medieval sermon is full of complaints that the gros veneur neglects his family, his tenants, and his prayers; that the long chase on Sunday is a scandal; that the venery of the great is the ruin of the small. Christine de Pizan complained in Le Livre du corps de policie (1406–1407) of the duke who keeps varlets and horses but neglects his subjects’ justice, and the English homiletic tradition is equally clear. The result is a useful corrective to the picture of a uniformly enthusiastic hunt culture: the late medieval hunt was contested, both by those who were excluded from it and by those who, from within, saw it as an excess.

The games of the tavern and the hall

The games of the late Middle Ages were many, and they were contested too. The most prominent were chess (the jeu des échecs, the ludus scaccorum), tables (backgammon), dice (les dés, taxilli), cards (which arrived in Europe in the 1370s, perhaps from Mamluk Egypt, perhaps by way of the Italian peninsula), and the various ball-and-stick games of the plaine and the clôture. Chess was the most respectable. The Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile in 1283 contains chess problems still studied by modern players; Jacobus de Cessolis’s Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (c. 1300) was the chess moralised, in which each piece embodied a social role. The text was translated into most western European languages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the English version, The Game and Playe of the Chesse printed by William Caxton in 1474, is one of the earliest English printed books.

Dice was everywhere and condemned accordingly. The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas has the question Utrum lusus sit peccatum, and Aquinas is at pains to distinguish the moderate ludus — the harmless recreation of a busy man — from the ludus noxius in which money, time, and virtue are lost. The late medieval sermon is more picturesque. The Jacob’s Well sermons (c. 1400) complain of diciour who cannot leave off throwing the ase (the die) and of tablers who play at tables from prime to evensong. The great late medieval treatise against gambling, Gerald of Wales’s Descriptio Cambriae (c. 1194) and the many De aleatoribus texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are useful for the very fact that they were needed: the evidence of the bishops’ visitations and the Surrey consistory court rolls shows the parish priest playing at tables in the alehouse, and it shows the laity doing the same. Barbara Rosenwein’s work on the emotional community of the medieval village has done a great deal to give us the affective setting of these pastimes.

Card games were newer and, on closer inspection, more alarming to moralists. The earliest European references are from the 1370s — the Brescia municipal ordinances of 1377 and John of Rheinfelden’s treatise of 1377 — and the spread was rapid. The earliest packs were hand-painted (the Cleveland Museum’s Stuttgart Playing Cards of c. 1430 are the best-known surviving example); the suit signs of swords, cups, coins, and clubs were already stabilised by 1400. Herman Pleij’s Dreams of Community (2003) and David Parlett’s The Oxford Guide to Card Games (1990) are the standard studies; the early evidence in England is in the wills and household accounts of the Pastons and the Stonors.

Spectacle, festival, and civic play

The boundary between the game and the festival is a late medieval invention of the modern historian, and the late medieval participants did not draw it. The mystery play of the York, Chester, Wakefield, and N-Town cycles is, in one sense, a game; the pageant wagons of the trade guilds were wheeled through the city, the audience was the whole city, and the play was a kind of civic tournament. The Field of the Cloth of Gold is a festival; the Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant held by Philip the Good of Burgundy at Lille in 1454, at which the duke and his companions swore on a live pheasant to recover the Holy Land, is a tourney in spirit and a state occasion in fact. The literature is large: the fêtes of the Burgundian court are documented in the chronicles of Englebert of Boutersheim and Jean de Wavrin, the English festivals in the wardrobe accounts of the king and in the letters of the Paston family. The standard modern treatment is R. W. Scribner’s Popular Culture and ‘Popular’ Movements in Reformation Germany (1987) and, for the late medieval background, A. E. Knight’s The Correspondence of the Pastons.

The popular entertainments of the late medieval city also included bear- and bull-baiting, the public execution (a kind of theatre in its own right, with a careful choreography of confession, procession, sermon, and last words), the Wren Boys and Morris dancers of the May Day, and the mummings and disguisings of Christmas. The account rolls of the city of London and the household books of the greater lords are full of small payments to performers: joculatores, histriones, ministralli, sotulares — the language is shifting, but the activity is the same. E. K. Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage (1903) is the older compendium; the more recent work of Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter has done a great deal to recover the actual practice.

The moral economy of leisure

What runs through the late medieval evidence is a recognisable debate about leisure. On one side, the contemplativus tradition of Bernard of Clairvaux and the De otio literature, the sermon against the ludus, the periodical episcopal injunction against the tabula and the alea: leisure is the parent of vice, and the gulae, luxuriae, and avaritiae gather around the ludus like flies. On the other side, the ludus tradition of Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon and Jean de Gerson’s De pueris ad Christum trahendis (c. 1400), the city chronicle that records the jeux of the basoche and the confrérie of the puy, the preacher who calls the parish diciour to account but who, on the previous page, has also played a game of mère foles with the children: leisure is a necessary part of the human condition, and the right ébatement is a relief to the studium, an alternative to the negotium, a way of keeping the body and the soul from the chafe.

The interesting work in recent scholarship has tried to hold the two together. Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006), Camille Slights’s work on the affective turn in medieval studies, and Wendy Davies’s and Paul Freedman’s collection on the medieval village have all, in different ways, insisted that the late medieval past is best understood neither by the monk’s lament nor by the noble’s boast, but by the parish priest’s ludus with the children and the parish clerk’s ludus with the tabula — both real, both ordinary, both worthy of record.

References

  • Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (Oxford University Press, 2001).
  • Maurice Keen, Chivalry (Yale University Press, 1984).
  • Juliet Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 (Boydell, 1986).
  • Gaston Phébus, Livre de chasse, ed. Gunnar Tilander (Cynegetica, 1971).
  • David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games (Oxford University Press, 1990).