On a horse, travelling at 25 miles an hour, in a suit of armour where all you can see
is just what's in front of you… there’s such an adrenaline rush with jousting
Playing the role of a knight… you're not acting, you are being
You've got to learn how to ride a horse
You've got to learn how to wear armour
And then you've got to use weapons
And then you're going to do it on a horse
So you're combining all these key skills at one point
These are the key skills to becoming a knight
I'm Dominic Sewell of Historic Equitation
History was the only thing I was good at school
It's the one thing that's always fascinated me and drawn me back
I grew up in a castle town
I played in the castle ruins as a kid
and it's been an interest that’s stayed with me literally all my life.
I started off just playing around with swords for fun
and then I met a group of people doing some medieval banquets in Nottingham
where I met some reenactors who had done these big, large, full scale battles
I was captivated when I first went to my first re-enactment, and the camaraderie amongst people
and how lovely it was to be welcomed in
and it just fired my imagination, fired my love of the 15th century
I remember meeting a friend of mine at that first battle
Three battles later he rides by on a horse and I couldn’t believe it
I said: ‘what, you can put the things together
and encapsulate that wonderful image of a knight on a horse?’
And so at that point in my mid-twenties I went to learn to ride horses
and I realised very quickly that this is something
you have to take seriously because you can’t just play with horses
You have to respect them, you have to learn about them
and you have to learn how to ride them
So to actually paint this image of a medieval
knight has taken 25 years to actually become a reality.
Traditionally, what we find from records is that young men at the age of seven would be
sent to be educated by a knight
He would work in their household as a Page,
working his way up so he would learn to serve at tables, serve meals.
He would learn... from the age of seven he would learn how to
ride and how to fight with weapons
He was trained to be a soldier, essentially
And from there, his whole life until he was
15 or 16, would be dedicated to his own personal training
The process in which people learn to train with arms takes time
You have to use and understand and learn what a sword does
You have to learn and understand what a lance does and how it should be used
This is our arming sword
It's a simple sword: two edges, a cross guard and a wheel pommel, and the grip
Now the sword can be used with both edges at the same time
We call this the leading edge or long edge
This, the false edge
You can cut down, parry around, and then use the false edge backwards
So, for example, if I cut forwards and miss I can still cut back again with the other side
What's most common in the 15th century that we're based in for the jousting
is the hand and a half sword
The blade is tapered and slightly diamond-shaped
It's not particularly sharp until the very end where it tapers away
This is because we can use a technique called half-swording, where the sword can be gripped
and used to set aside a blade and thrust into an opponent's body
This is particularly useful when fighting against another armoured opponent, where you
can search for the gaps within the armour and strike through
Knights were trained to use lots of weapons
But the most common weapon used by a knight on foot was the poleaxe
and in a tournament it was one of the first things that you would see
Clive takes up a defensive position with a lower guard
Lisa takes a high guard, and what she'll do is strike forward onto her right foot and
strike down upon her opponent's head, who parries it and then strikes towards her face
Clearly, the blow from Clive would have won that point
However, if it is a different course of affairs, Lisa does the same thing
She strikes to the head
Clive powers it down but Lisa turns, knocks
the cue out of the way and strikes again to the head
One point to Lisa
Here is a lance
It's 12 foot of pine topped with a training coronel
This is a cast polyurethane coronel instead
of a traditional steel one that would be used with a solid lance
But you can see how a lance like this would work
In the grip of an opponent... imagine that the wall is our opponent, we strike his shield
and then we can see the flex of the lance start to break
and once our horse goes forward and that lance
has gripped the shield, the lance can only do one thing
which is to break
and once it breaks, that energy explodes upwards into a shower of shards
It is truly an exhilarating display of force
[Increasingly faster drum beats]
The process of making armour is a long and complicated one
Traditionally, armour is made by heating steel plates and forming them to shape the body
What we do in the modern generation is we are reproducing armour of the past, a whole
process that could take up to six months: shaping grinding, filing, fitting, and then
we can start the polishing, until we're finally happy with what we've got
The first piece of equipment that a rider
puts on when he's getting ready to joust are the lower leg defences
These are called the greaves
Next, we move on to the knees and the upper thighs
Here we have a corset of maille
This is all made from six millimetre rings of maille
so it's more of a textile type of armour than solid plate armour
This is a two-part cuirass
This is the armour that protects most of the upper body
It's all made of hardened and tempered spring steel
It's as near as it is to the original type of steel used
– With the steel like this, it's not a stainless steel
A fingerprint will leave an oily residue on
it, and that will start rusting effective immediately
so it takes maintenance, and it's absolutely critical
So around the bottom of the cuirass, I'm attaching extra plates
This one at the back hangs down and protects the buttocks
These plates are called tassets and they give extra protection to the groin
So the next pieces are the arm defences
These are generally called vambraces
You may notice that the elbow piece on the
left-hand side is significantly bigger than the one on the right
When you're fighting on horseback with a lance, you’re using the lance over the neck of
the horse to the left, so the more that your
left-hand side is defended, the better it will be for you
This is a pauldron
These are the shoulder defences
Again, just like the arms, we find that this pauldron is bigger than its right-hand side
so, again, we are asymmetrical
So the final two pieces to put on are the gauntlets
and - most importantly - the helm
Training people on horses is a long and complicated process
but it's helped enormously by some of the medieval fighting manuals at the time
particularly one written by the King of Portugal in the
early 15th century, Dom Duarte, wrote a book called 'How to Ride on Every Saddle'
and in this, he describes in absolute implicit context how a man should joust
how to look at your opponent, how to carry
your lance, how to do it safely on your behalf and on your horse's behalf
So this is why we use the teachings of five hundred years ago, because they’re still
relevant today
There's something really profound about what happens to your senses when you’re
encased in armour
and a visor shut and you can see very little, and that focuses your mind
You can't just dive into it, you can't try
jousting. You have to joust
and that's a very long journey from when you say
‘I’d quite like to do that’ to actually achieving it
Riding horses just isn't enough for jousting
You have to be able to wear armour
so you have to be physically strong
You have to learn how to carry a lance for
long periods of time and to cope with the energy of a breaking lance
You've got to have a lot of aerobic support
You have to deal with a lot of mental stress
You have to deal with physical discomfort
You have to deal with cold, with heat
Sometimes all of those things at the same time
– "Laissez... Allez!"
What English Heritage offers is a chance to step back in time to something that is as close to
jousting as is actually possible to do
Because it is jousting
There's no pretend
People are breaking lances upon each other,
how it happened with the equipment that was used at the time
So what you're achieving is a very authentic
joust, and that's not something that anybody else can offer
There's many facets to my job and I love most of it
I love being able to train and watch their journey to being very proficient riders
and then performing in front of the public at a high level
And again, the same with the animals themselves
The horses are very, very important to what we do. Vital
And watching their progression in training from young horses that are completely untrained
never had a horseman on their back, to the
high levels of performance that they can do is wonderful
There's nothing better than seeing a horse when it has its first joust
That never leaves you
It's more than just a job, more than just an income
It's something that has become a way of life
It's something that's imbued within me
Doing what we do for English Heritage is just a wonderful way of… really, not growing up!