ABSTRACT
The great medieval tournament, with its knights in shining plate, its colorful lists and pavilions, and its throngs of heralds, minstrels, and brightly clad ladies, provides the popular imagination with its most vivid image of knighthood in its flower - in the grand days of the First Crusade or the times of Richard the Lion-Hearted. Yet there is little evidence that tournaments were common in the eleventh century and, Sir Walter Scott's "noble and joyous Passage of Arms at Ashby de la Zouche" and its Hollywood adaptations notwithstanding, tournaments in the days of Richard the Lion-Hearted had little of the elegance and spectacle that later became associated with the sport. They were crude and bloody affairs, forbidden by the Church and sternly suppressed by any central authority powerful enough to enforce its ban. Though older historians, beginning with Leon Gautier, believed that chivalry flowered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and steadily declined thereafter,1
the most characteristic form of public expression of chivalric ideals, the tournament, was just beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and thereafter steadily developed, culminating in the fifteenth and even sixteenth centuries with such glittering spectacles as the Field of the Cloth of Gold:
By the time Henry VIII and Francis I met on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the crude sport known to the twelfth century had developed into a solemn chivalric festival, lavishly supported rather than suppressed by kings and princes, and so acceptable even to the Church that the opening of the Belvedere at the Vatican was celebrated with a great tournament, one of the grandest Italy had ever seen.2 As Shakespeare's reference to Sir Bevis of Hampton indicates, literature played an important role in this development.
