The Medieval Tournament: Chivalry, Heraldry and Reality. An Edition and Analysis of Three Fifteenth-Century Tournament Manuscripts

In the Royal Armouries collection is a codex comprising three fifteenth-century manuscripts in French. The codex is not only unpublished, it has never been transcribed or translated. The content is a primary source for the study of the medieval tournament as well as many other aspects of the elite culture of late-medieval Burgundy, England, and France. It is composed of fourteen different texts called items. This edition comprises a transcription of over 50,000 words of text in three different hands and a translation from the medieval French into English. The commentary is tripartite. The first section is a technical physical description, with an investigation of the palaeography, provenance, and miniatures of the three manuscripts. The second is a discussion of the origin of the production of the codex. It will be postulated that it was produced by heralds for heralds. In the third section explanatory notes are given to the fourteen items to allow a greater understanding of the codex. Drawing on similar primary source material, much of it unpublished, a clearer definition of the terminology employed for the various forms of combat is offered. Often subsumed under the category of ‘the tournament’, the examination of the organization and regulation of, and specialized equipment used in, these forms of combat reveals a more complicated phenomenon than is often represented in current studies.