Eleanor Janega Tries Real Medieval Jousting

So far in this exploration of medieval delights, we've walked the streets of York, poked around a king's bedroom, and fermented a brew fit for the Middle Ages. In this episode, I'll discover what kind of sports medieval people got up to, from gallant knights charging at each other on horseback... I mean, I look like I'm doing a really terrible version of the robot. ...to the complex game of real tennis. Back in the corner there, the grill, you might see a picture of Henry VIII. If you hit him, you get a point. We will look up high and low, and I'll find out if I've got what it takes to join a crossbow guild. There we go. I hit something! You hit the target! Yeah! As we dive deep into the world of medieval sport. First of all, enter the ultimate medieval sports star, the noble knight. We're ready for the tournament. If you wanted to come out on top during the Middle Ages, you need to be well-versed in the art of medieval warfare. Being able to handle weapons in a horse and practice harmony to defeat your opponent was a must, so much so that it became a focal point of entertainment for medieval people. When we think about the Middle Ages, jousting is probably one of the first things that we think about, and there's a reason for this. People absolutely love it. People from all walks of society are going to come to tournaments and really enjoy watching the sport there. However, not everyone is allowed to participate in tournaments. In order to be involved in something like this, you have to be from the knightly classes, which means the nobility or higher. So if you are a noble or you are a king, you can participate in tournaments, and in fact, you're probably going to be training from a very early age in order to do so. As you might remember from my first series when we talked about the nobility, what defines a noble is that they are the people who fight. As a result, tournaments are held in order to show the crafts they learn and also hone them for the battlefield. So you'd only be wearing something like this if you're a noble or a royal. However, you might be in the stands, enjoying a beer, having a flirt, and just enjoying a bit of a match. And if you were able to take part, you needed all the right kit, from a well-trained steed to shining armor. But this armor didn't just look impressive, it was also practical. At the Royal Armories in Leeds, I'm meeting a real expert, top 21st century jouster and a master of live historical demonstrations, Andy Dean. So Andy, I am wearing some armor, I think that's what we could say. You are, so this is a mid-15th century armor, and of course, armor should be absolute, like a sort of several row suit on you. However, Leeds must, you look pretty good in it. So you're very Italian in your style currently. There's more metal, basically, to an Italian armor and the smoother surfaces mean that things deflect nicely. I think Italian armors look more imposing on the battlefield and in the tournament field. It's not quite as heavy as I thought it would be, but what it has done is changed my center of balance quite a lot. So I noticed that if I kind of move over, I'm a lot more top-heavy than I otherwise would be, and the movement is very restricted. I'm glad you said that about the weight, because when I see that depiction yet again of men sort of either being hoisted on horses or they suddenly fall down in the mud, and they're down there, and all you have to do is just get up. I'm too old to do it, and I can do it. Everything you do out of an armor, you should be able to do in an armor. Last bit goes in, brow first, there we go. Underneath the chin. Armor like this could have been worn in a tournament or on the battlefield, and seeing as I'm so often buried in books and lectures, getting to try the kit on is an excellent change of pace. I got quite cocky after the chest plate went on, and I was like, this isn't so bad. I've got this in the bag. But what it does do is give you a lot of forward momentum here. I mean, I look like I'm doing a really terrible version of the robot. There isn't a whole lot of range of motion in my arms, but I guess that all I really need is, you know. As long as you get your elbow to about here, then the rest of the sword follows, but you look good in that. Well, thanks, Joan of Arc, eat your heart out. It's me now. But at heart, I'm a historian, not a jouster. So having given the armor back to Andy, I'm continuing my research into medieval sport by meeting a vital part of the knight support team, his pit crew, the squires. So if you are a squire at a tournament, you are assisting the knight, you are on the job, absolutely. But is there anything else that you get to do? Would you ever participate, for example? You are a nobleman, by fact, so you will be of a similar standing to a knight, you just don't have that title yet. So you will be participating in the feasts and other activities. You're not gonna be sat in your little tent waiting for the knight to come back. You are there as yourself. But your main role is to assist the participants in the tournament. You're not simply a servant, but you wouldn't necessarily be the star of the show. From a modern perspective, people think squire is almost like an insult or something like that. But really, there are these extraordinarily important people who have an incredibly integral role in all of this. This is obviously a really gorgeous set of armor. You've got plenty of lovely detail on it. But I've seen some really incredibly opulent pieces in museums. Is that the sort of thing that you would see in jousting? Or is that just for the purposes of ceremonies? Battle armors did differ from ceremonial ones. This particular harness is based on one from the Germanic styles. Tended to be rather ornate with lots of fluting, which is this corrugation you see. And it runs all over the arms as well as the breast and the back. There are straps at the sides as well. The front must overlap the back just to make sure most of the impact's coming from the front, you see. It's sprung steel, this stuff, two to three millimeters thick. So it takes a real beating, almost as a memory. The ones that were specifically designed for the tournament, they were reinforced on one side where you're gonna take the hit of the lance. So they tended to build up the left-hand side of the body and leave a bit of space on the right-hand side for you to couch your lance. Whilst armor could be used on the battlefield and in tournaments, in the late medieval period, it became increasingly specialized and differences began to emerge between sport and warfare. It became ridiculous how much they built up this side until it got to the stage where you literally wouldn't be able to fight in it very effectively at all. And it was purely just for jousting. Flexibility in it became quite limited because it was purely to go sprinting down the tilt and get smacked by a lance at a combined speed of about 50 miles an hour. All right, so here we are, we're all dressed up. Can we please go see some jousting? Absolutely, let's smash some lances, brilliant. By the high to late medieval period, jousting had evolved from battlefield skirmishes into its more refined and chivalrous form that we're more familiar with today. Meant to imitate the effects of running into oncoming cavalry on the battlefield, our two riders begin at opposite ends of the field. A signal is given and they gallop towards each other at high speeds with the intention of either breaking their lance on the opponent's shield or trying to unhorse them. By the end of the medieval period, several important members of the nobility had become seriously and even fatally wounded by the sport. So in the interests of safety, jousting became less about dehorsing and more about rules and complex point scoring. Points could be scored for shattering a lance, hitting your opponent on a certain spot like the visor, or simply persevering the longest through the grueling match. When a rider has had enough, they could remove their helmet, declaring the other the victor. Well, that was amazing. I'm absolutely delighted, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. This is obviously exhilarating. You know, I'm just one modern person and I'm absolutely losing it right now. But what do you put this on for? You know, it seems like a really big crowd pleaser, but who are we trying to please? Well, like everything else, feasting. You're making alliances all the time. So when you go onto the tournament field, you're trying to look as impressive as possible, but only to those who actually matter. And they're the ones that are sort of jingling their jewelry rather than clapping their hands kind of thing. So you'd be focused on that. You want to marry well or you want to make a good alliance. And of course, if you're going to make that kind of alliance, then you make it look fantastic. You know, allegorical, you can have all sorts of things going on that make it look stunning. So I could come dressed as a peasant and then reveal myself as the great knight, so whoever. Oh, right. There's lots of storytelling as well as just the jousting itself. So it's a sporting contest, but you've got to look fabulous when doing it. So there's a little bit of theater in there with the sport. Certainly later in the sort of the history of jousting. So by the sort of 15th century and then early into the 16th century, that's sort of the peak. So yes, it was still a practice for war and the guys who were on the horses were expected to lead armies, but you were being entertaining as well. What we're doing is exactly the same as what was happening in 1480 in Burgundy or whatever. I mean, we are doing real tournament on real horses in real armor. And I'm sure I'm getting the same pleasure from entertaining as they would in 1483 or whatever it might've been. Absolutely. So yeah, I love doing it. And while the body still holds up, I'll continue. While this type of jousting is the one most commonly known today because of its portrayal in film, it wasn't the only form of jousting. A number of lance-related games were developed around jousting and proved effective training tools for both combat and tournaments. Lances come in all shapes and sizes. I mean, they're all long, but they can be very thick and very long or they can be hollowed out. But for us, this is the type that we use. Okay. All the rest, we'll be looking at sort of skill at arms. Running a quintain, for example, involved a form of jousting towards a stationary target. The spear throw would help to perfect one's accuracy by throwing a spear from horseback at speed into a target, often in the shape of a large boar. If you really wanted to impress the king or perhaps a lady in the stands, you might try running at her glove. But if a knight wanted a real test of accuracy and skill, there would be no nobler trial than jousting at the rings. Jousting wasn't the only military sport on show at tournaments. Knights would use these grand events to engage in a host of challenges that showed off their skills with horses and weapons. This is a boar sword, and you can see that it's designed in a diamond shape at the bottom. And then it's got this sort of curious cross piece. Basically, boars get very upset when you try and stab it. I've heard that. And they can, unlike sort of fallow deer who'll run away, a boar will turn and try and gore you and or your horse. So as it drives itself up your sword, that cross piece stops it. Ah. Of course, a knight wouldn't be a knight without his sword. So we'll cut some deadly cabbages and try and pluck a heart from a pillar. If you weren't posh enough to compete in the tournament, there were alternative martial sports for the relatively wealthy. In continental Europe, these included the so-called crossbow guilds. So I'm absolutely delighted to talk to you about crossbows because I think it's one of these big unsung sports of the Middle Ages. And I think everyone kind of imagines the crossbows being used in battle, and they definitely were, but that's not the only thing they're for. You're absolutely right about the sport of it. In fact, there was a whole community of people who loved crossbows. Typically, these would have been merchants or the medieval middle class, if we want to call it that. People with money, but not necessarily nobility who couldn't participate in these larger tournaments. So they'd go out, they'd buy themselves a very nice crossbow, and they'd go and compete in their own tournaments and their competitions. In fact, people could make some decent money out of it going from tournament to tournament all over Europe. Also, there are applications that are a little bit more practical. You could hunt with a crossbow, right? Absolutely. So crossbows are really, really popular hunting weapons. In England, a lot of nobility would practice with bows, which takes a great deal of time. So they estimate around seven years to get decent with a long bow. But for a lot of nobility, there was really no interest in practicing with a bow because you don't need to use it in the battlefield or anything like that. And so the crossbow comes in handy in those situations because this is actually a very easy weapon to master. And that's down to the way it's been constructed. This is a relatively good example of a crossbow during the 1300s, 1400s. Great. It's got a little bit of features from all over the place. It sort of travels through time. But this one's got a very low poundage bow arm. So it's actually able to be used or reloaded using the stirrup. So what we're gonna do is simply place it onto the ground, put it into the stirrup, and then you're just going to use your hands to lift that thing up and lock it into the lug like so. Okay. This is where the crossbow becomes an easy weapon because unlike the bow, if I was to try and draw the bow back, at this point, I'd be holding all that weight in my body. Right. And that typically means that you're going to want to find your target, lift the bow up, draw it back, and loose immediately. Okay. Now, because this is doing all the hard work for me, I can take my time for as long as I need to and really work out where my target is before I shoot. So it makes it a very easy weapon for pretty much anyone to master. Because in England, we had a culture of longbows. Everyone was practicing with a longbow. So we had huge amounts of people to draw on in that sense. But in Europe, less so. So we see a lot of people hiring mercenaries like the Genoese mercenaries. I guess that also makes sense if it's the sort of thing that you're picking up as a sport, right? Because if you spend all day working as a businessman, you're not going to have all day long to be out in the field practicing with a longbow. Absolutely not, no. So it's a really easy weapon that anyone can pick up and be trained with. The amount of crossbow training you receive as a historian is zero. But I'm not going to let that stop me from cranking it back and giving it my best shot. Now we've got the crossbow ready to shoot. We want to make sure we put a projectile in it and not dry fire the bow. And the reason for that is if you dry fire it, all the energy in the bow arm goes straight back into the arm. And that can cause it to shatter or break or damage itself. So what we need to always do is make sure we have a projectile when we do this. So if I place the bolt in there for you now, and then what you would do traditionally as well is you'd put your thumb on the bolt to keep it in place. However, this one comes with a lovely little what I like to call a mechanical finger, which were around at the time. The reason you want to do that is because if you don't take your thumb off, it's going to take the skin off your thumb when you shoot it. Okay, right. Awesome. I'd rather not. Exactly, exactly. Now with this particular weapon, what's really interesting is that you've adopted more of a gun position. There's no recoil on this weapon. So what I'm going to do is bring it up to your cheek. Yeah, and they can look right down towards your target. Absolutely. See, you can take the girl out of America, but you know. All right. Now the trigger is quite stiff, so try it with one finger. If you can't achieve it, just pop two fingers in there and give it a good old squeeze. Let's see what I can do. Nope. There we go. Hey, I hit something. You hit the target. Yeah. Brilliant. That was a passable first attempt, albeit at point blank range. How about we try one with a little more firepower? This one's from a little bit later, but the way it operates is fairly similar to how they would have done it in the medieval period. Okay. With a slightly stronger bow. So the way this one works is I'm going to take this particular lever mechanism, as it were. Wow. Hook it to the front of this bar, lift it up, and we want that wood just to sit into the string itself. There we go. I think that's on. Perfect. Right. And then I'm just going to pop my foot against it there. And then basically what I'm doing is I'm going to use that lever to push. Okay, there. We've got the click. So now that is loaded. Right. Once again, I'm just going to place the bolt on there for you. Thank you very much. Try not to tilt it downwards because this doesn't have a way of pinching the bolt. So over the shoulder. Yes. I'm looking down. Looking down. That one's got a nice cheek guard as well. Okay. So we're good. And aim and fire. I can't. Okay. Two fingers again. One, two, three. There we go. Hey! Okay. So you can suddenly feel the power of a crossbow. It's buried itself much deeper. That's going to be a nightmare to get out later, but you can understand now just the amount of energy you can contain in something so small. So if I want to go hunting or if I'm going to be doing something like just archery for archery's sake, this is probably going to be my man. Yeah. It's probably going to be something a bit more like that. The other one was probably a little bit too weak. Yeah. For hunting, that would have been a perfect sort of crossbow. In fact, that one is designed on a hunting crossbow that we have in our collection, I believe so. I love it. There's all sorts of different ways to really kind of enjoy archery with a crossbow. Absolutely. And anyone can do it. That's the best part of that weapon. It's very accessible. Okay. I'm going to have to pick it up now. Yeah. Absolutely. We'll start running some competitions. Great. It wasn't just the dangerous sports that managed to draw a crowd. For the poised among us, there were also more civilized sports born from the middle ages. I am here talking to Nick Wood at the Royal Tennis Courts about real tennis. Now I understand that some princes and kings at various points in time were accused of liking tennis a bit more than they liked their royal duties. Is that correct? That's right. Yes. They're often been found on the tennis court. In fact, Anne Boleyn was watching a game of tennis when she was escorted off to the tower. When you watch the game of real tennis, it's kind of weird to think that somebody invented it and you'd be right. They didn't. The Origins are actually a street game sort of played by the townsfolk and became immensely popular in some districts. It was actually banned because no one was doing any work anymore. The monks played it and they were banned from playing because they weren't dedicated to their duties. It sort of became an ideal activity for royals, nobles of Europe. And they started to play a similar sort of kind of game within their courtyards, within their chateaus, castles and palaces. The method of play became unified and the rules became more unified and courts were purpose-built. And this was the predominantly the most popular style of court. A lot of the time, we tend to think about sporting culture as starting at a high level and trickling down. But this is kind of a case where it's organically gone up. That's right. Yeah, very much a game of townsfolk. A lot of gambling going on, not just from the players, but people watching. The royals, they would have invited dignitaries. It would have been a real treat to have played the king and an honor to play the king on his royal court. There would have been some sizable wages being put on as well. So I do believe that Henry VIII's losses are recorded, but not so much his wins, primarily because the losses went out of the palace purse, but the wins certainly didn't go back in. Oh, cheeky. Okay, that's not a bad way to balance the books, I suppose. We're actually here with the court of Charles I, built in sort of 1629. The original court at Hampton Court was Cardinal Wolsey's court, who was the original resident here. When Henry VIII took over the palace, the Cardinal Wolsey's court was actually open air, primarily made of wood. And so Henry built a more magnificent court, which was just a bit further along near the Chapel Royal. In the field of the cloth of gold, just a few years ago, celebrated 500 years celebration of that period where the King of England and the King of France met in a field in France, and they played tennis in a constructed court. And it was a big carnival. It was a coming together of the kings and they had a famous tennis match. See, I absolutely love this because we know, for example, that jousts, tournaments like that, that's the sort of thing that people will come from miles around to watch. But we don't ordinarily think of kings engaging in tennis as being the same sort of carnival atmosphere, which is very, very exciting. The scoring in terms of, you know, love 15, that seems to be the same as lawn tennis is. How do we come to the scoring system? Why 15s? The sort of the numbers used in terms of the scoring 15, 30, 40 game, we believe is based on a currency, a domination based around the number 60, which is highly important to the ancient Romans and ancient Greeks, the astronomy and pyramid building and all that sort of thing. So the currency was based on that number as well. And 15, 30, 45, 60 was deemed sort of a value of coins. And that was the scoring system. And then once the scoring system was created, it just carried on those numbers. So as you can see, this bears very little resemblance to what you and I might think a tennis court is these days. We're standing at where you would serve from. You might notice along the wall here, there are marks that determine where the chase is. Those are the chase lines. And behind me, my favorite detail, back in the corner there, the grill, you might see a picture of Henry VIII. If you hit him, you get a point. I'm pretty sure that last rule is just for fun, but if we take a look at the court markings, we can see they're quite different to modern tennis with points being scored depending where the ball bounces on the court and where the players return from. The scoring is the same as in long tennis, however. 15, 30, 40, deuce, advantage, except that the score of the winner of the last point and not that of the server is called first. A set is won by the first player to win six games. So if the score is five games all, there is a final deciding game. At the conclusion of each game, the winner of that game has his score called first. I clearly may not have a future as a real tennis player, but that's fine because there's plenty more for me to get up to off court. Each court around the world has a team of professionals and part of their role is to continue the tradition of making the balls. We put a royal set of balls on court, which is 72 balls. They sort of get used, worn down in about 10 days. So every 10 days we need to have produced the next set of 72 balls. Okay, this is a real Sisyphean task then. All right, so today I'm going to get to be your apprentice? You are, yes. So we've got the ball at this stage, which has our cork ball in the middle and we're wrapping our cotton tape around that cork ball. I've started it off for you. Okay, fantastic. You're going to come and take a position on our horse and continue wrapping the tape. It's a little bit tighter and just try and have to go around the ball in a kind of a random pattern. Otherwise you just keep going over the same kind of. All right, random I can do. It's going to be any kind of pattern. Good job. Step one. Good job. So now we've got to secure that down and tie the ball with our twine. Okay. That's it. And then you can roll the ball along the twine and back again just to see if it's. Oh, easy for you to say. See how accurate you are. Oh, it's all coming undone, quite literally. Okay, so this is a terrible apprentice's job of making one. How quickly are you actually able to do this? I'm pretty quick. Yeah, it's not quite ready to go on court yet. So I think I better make a few adjustments. Okay, well let's see yours then. It's extremely satisfying to watch a hundreds of year old craft still in play today by real tennis players. Wanting to preserve the traditions of the medieval sport. And they're not the only ones. Hawking and falconry have roots going back even further than the middle ages. But were also an important aspect of hunting and fun for medieval people. Thank you so much for bringing down these absolutely gorgeous birds today. Because I think that when you take a look at them up close you can see perhaps why hunting with game birds is so popular in the medieval period, right? Yeah, these are such majestic, handsome creatures. And it just represents a wild, something that was like another world to us in the past. I see you attired, just as you are, as a noble lady. And this is because it's really a unisex sport for medieval people, is it not? Well, it is. And actual Hawking was one of the first sports or styles of hunting that ladies could actively get involved in. Because they were generally perched safely on the back of a horse. Right. Rather than on ports, which made sense. So there is this great myth that there were strict laws about who could own what bird. Right. And that is a myth. That's not actually true. It all essentially boiled down to you had whatever you could afford. Right. And it wasn't just about the purchase price of the hawk. It was about the fact that to fly and hunt a bird you need money to buy everything you need to support it. Preferably employing a falconer to do the job for you if you can. Ideal. You need access to land. Land, of course, was generally privately owned by this time. So hunting rights and access to land was restricted to the privileged few. Yep. And you needed to have plenty of time, free time. So you weren't working, which meant this was beyond the reach of any mere mortal that had to work, you know, to survive and feed their families. Of course. I mean, you're not going to do a full day of plowing and then go out and hawk, are you? Yeah, exactly. So of the birds that we've got here, who is our fanciest bird? Say that I can spare any expense, you know, I am a Duke and I want the best bird that I can get. What am I going for? Well, you'd have to be more than a Duke to have this bird. Okay. You'd have to be a member of royalty. All right. And that would be the beautiful white jerk falcon behind you there. The jerk falcon was very famously a royal symbol throughout the middle ages. You very often see heraldry coats of arms with white falcons in them. They were the largest and still are the largest species of falcon in the world. They are therefore the most powerful species of falcon in the world. And because they came from the Arctic, you would have to travel to the Arctic to acquire one. Wow. And that was a two or three year expedition at immense cost. So the import value of that, you can imagine, was big. These are extraordinarily courageous birds. I mean, you think they've got to survive in the Arctic. So they have to be big and bold and brave. They take on extraordinarily large prey. So in this country, they were predominantly used for hunting crane and heron. Crane. Some of our largest water birds. Wow. Who were not an easy take, not just by the fact that they're large, but they have beaks like spears. Yeah, they're carnivores, aren't they? So you're effectively going to battle when you hunt for a heron or a crane. Wow. And crane hawking and heron hawking were a royal pursuit. Next down that was the more affordable to general nobility hunting bird. And that, of course, was your peregrine. Okay. The peregrine had lots of subspecies. Okay. Depending upon where you got your peregrine from, it had an according price tag. So the superior peregrines were for your girls and your princes and that sort of thing. Your smaller, perhaps more Spanish or Italian sourced peregrines, they were for slightly lower nobles. Okay. Now this is the lady that I met earlier. So the land of falcon was for lesser nobility. Right. And that's because they were slightly less impressive, I suppose, on the wing. It's interesting that in the middle ages, these were known as the lanier, which is where the word lana comes from. Right. It's an old French word that means coward. Oh. So this was the cowardly falcon. Oh. And that is because they have an ambush style tactic of hunting. Right, okay. So rather than being highly visible as the peregrine is when it's diving out of the sky at its quarry, the lana will use cover in the local area. So grasslands, meadowlands, they'll weave through the tight grasses and then they'll surprise their prey. And that was considered to be cowardly. Ah. Not, it's actually highly effective. Yeah. And these birds in the middle ages were predominantly used for hunting partridge for the larders. Oh, partridge, okay, fantastic. And our little noisy chiddler at the end here is your classic medieval ladies hunting bird. Okay. This is the merlion or merlin as we know it today. And as you can see, it's a very small pint-sized little bird and therefore thought perfect for a delicate lady. A delicate lady. It essentially is a miniature version of a peregrine falcon. Okay. So it does all of the impressive aerial stunts that a peregrine does just on a much smaller scale, which meant that the lady could ride out very safely side saddle on horseback, a little falcon. It could do its thing. So you're hunting for skylark, maybe thrush, meadow pippets, blackbird. And that was done just for the excitement of the dashing flight. So there you are. This is an interesting case because I think a lot of the time when we think about sport and women, if it's hunting, we say, oh, they must be doing something for the larder. They must certainly be doing something for the kitchen, but they are actually out here with the least impressive bird if what you're trying to do is bring dinner to the table. I mean, there are records of ladies hunting with llamas and ladies hunting with peregrines as well, but that would have been a simple matter of just releasing the bird from the fist. They would have done very little more than that. But with something this small and delicate, a lady could certainly be a lot more hands-on with it. So it's more practical for a lady. As humans, we're hunting for two purposes in the Middle Ages. Of course, the primary function is to catch food for the larder. And everything that these birds catch, probably with the exception of the little merlin, is something that is edible. So regardless of why you were hunting, everything could be and would be eaten. But generally, those that were hawking for the table were hawking, as we call it. So they were hunting with things like the goshawk and the sparrowhawk. If you were practicing falconry for sporting purposes, that was falconry and not hawking. And falconry specifically relates to the falcon species, which are the ones we have represented here. They fly very differently to hawks. Hawks are woodland birds. What they do is in close country. You can't see it half the time, which makes for a rubbish spectator sport. Whereas the falcon family are open country hunters. They're bird catchers. So you get this high, thrilling, fast chase. That's the sporting element to it. And it meant that you could take a social group of friends out with you, take a picnic, make a day of it. And falconry hunting parties were very common amongst nobility and, of course, royalty. So their enjoyment was twofold. It was about watching the thrill of the chase. And you have to remember that to the medieval mind, the wild was a stage, it was a theatre, in which unexpected things could happen. And that was the whole point of flying a bird of prey, is you didn't really know what was going to happen. You didn't really know what they were going to chase. It is bringing to mind. Often we see there is a medieval art trope, the labourers of the months or labourers of the year. And in May, it's interchangeable because either you see groups hunting or you see people directly courting. So, you know, men singing poems to women. And May was quite an important month in the falconry calendar because it was the end of the falconry season. Right. So that was your last chance to get out in the field and do whatever it is you needed to do before your hawks went down to molt for the whole of the summer. And you wouldn't pick them up again then until the early autumn. Okay, so there's an expiration time on when and where you can be doing this sport. There is, and that's to do with the countryside. Once you get into summer, everything leafs up. The wilderness is thick and green. You can't see the prey to chase it. And your hawks will naturally start to molt in the summer. So they lose primary feathers and tail feathers, which means they're flight impaired. So you might as well just stop them during the summer, feed them up, let them completely molt out. And then come late August, early September, they are in perfect condition then to fly and go right through the winter when the countryside opens up once again and you can get back to your effective sport. But I think if you're gonna look at a bird and a majestic bird, there is nothing quite as fine as a bird of prey, is there? So beloved were these birds during the medieval and Tudor periods that they were often chosen for the emblems and crests of royalty. Famously, it was Anne Boleyn who adopted a falcon for her badge. And you can find it referenced in texts and songs that were written about her at the time. Sport is an intrinsic part of medieval society. And that's one of the reasons why today we still think about it immediately when we think about the Middle Ages. I bet you think about the joust the minute you start thinking about the medieval period. So when we begin to realize the pleasures that we can take in medieval sport, you're gonna get somewhere near how they were feeling about it. The medieval world was a place of pleasure and one where, if we know where to look, we can see our own desires reflected back at us. Whether it's sex, booze, or sports, medieval people held exactly the same interests that we do. The only reason we don't think about the medieval world as a place where people were enjoying themselves is because of how we want to think about our own world. We like to think about the Middle Ages as a gray and dour place because it means that we're the only people who are really truly enjoying ourselves. It's also true that we tend to take the church's warnings about pleasure and the dangers to the soul as true. But medieval people didn't always listen to what the church had to say. And in fact, if people weren't enjoying themselves, there'd be no reason for the church to be warning them off of pleasure in the first place. Pleasure is a complicated thing, even in our own society, and that's true of the medieval period. However, if we choose to think they never enjoyed themselves, how are we going to learn to enjoy ourselves in the present?