Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

eins. It is clear that it is intended that the lance be used to lend off blows in much the
same way as a sword blade or spear might be used on foot, and this should caution
us against assuming that couching lhe lance was the only tactic that might be used
after 1066.
The powerful impact of a lance strike could easily rip the lance from a rider's hand,
throw him, as well as his opponent, from the saddle or even bring both him and his
mount to a dead stop. A successful charge with couched lance required the ability
to time the lowering of the lance, the aiming of the point and the angle of the strike to
perfection, all coordinated with getting an extra burst of speed from the mount
to carry the rider past his foe, all the while trying to counter the animal's (and indeed
rider's own) natural tendency to shy away from the oncoming target and seemingly
inevitable collision. Trying to judge all of this from behind a helmet which limited his
view and upset his balance took considerable skill and daring.
Whilst the lance-armed charge was not the sole tactic used by the knight, after 1066
his equipment and mount were increasingly geared towards this specialist form of
combat, and it dominates the descriptions of combat in the period, especially the
idealized fictions of romance and epic. There was clearly something about this form of
combat that appealed to the knightly class psychologically. Perhaps it was a sense
of the raw power of the collision, the drama of the thunderous charge, or the purity of
the strike. It was a one-on-one encounter that tested courage, skill and physical
strength in equal measure. It was not, however, the only option available to the knight
on the field. If the lance was dropped or when it inevitably shattered, the knight would
then turn to his other weapons.
According to his biographer, one of William Marshal's favourite tactics on the
tournament field was to subdue an enemy by wrestling with him, getting him into
a headlock and tearing off his helmet. This dramatic approach is illustrated in a
tournament scene from the 13th-century German Manedde Codex, and the ways in
which this might be done were also recorded by Talhoffer, who shows plates of
horsemen catching their opponents' lances under their arms, grabbing the opponents'
reins at the gallop to overthrow both horse and rider, and employing various wrestling
techniques including arm- and headlocks.
Whilst such grappling might be a reasonably safe proposition at a tournament where
there was rarely any desire to do permanent injury to an opponent, on the battlefield it
was more normal to reach for one's sword, axe or mace. It has been argued that the
charge with the lance was of little danger to an opponent, being far more likely to knock
him out of the saddle, and that its use was symptomatic of the chivalric desire to capture
rather than kill an opponent. Whilst there is little hard evidence to support such a
proposition, which indeed seems counterintuitive given the physics behind it, it does