Tournament, a military sport of the middle ages, in which combatants engaged one another with the object of exhibiting their courage, prowess, and skill in the use of arms. Spectacles of this kind seem first to have become common in France, whence the usage spread to Germany and England, and afterwards to the south of Europe. A tournament was usually held on the invitation of some prince, who sent a king-of-arms or herald through his own dominions and to foreign courts. The intending combatants hung up their armorial shields on the trees, tents, and pavilions round the arena for inspection, to show that they were worthy candidates for the honour of contending in the lists in respect of noble birth, military prowess, and unspotted character. The combat took place on horseback, or at least was always begun on horseback, though the combatants who had been dismounted frequently continued it on foot. The usual arms were blunted lances or swords; but the ordinary arms of warfare, called arms à l'outrance, were sometimes used by cavaliers who were ambitious of special distinction. Tournaments were the subject of minute regulations, which in some degree diminished their danger. The prize was bestowed by the lady of the tournament on the knight to whom it had been adjudged, he reverently approaching her, and saluting her and her two attendants. The period when tournaments were most in vogue comprised the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries; and the place where the most celebrated English tournaments were held was the tiltyard near St James's, Smithfield, London. The church at first discontenanced tournaments, some of its decrees prohibiting persons from engaging in them under pain of excommunication, and denying Christian burial to a combatant who lost his life in one. The church seems, however, to have looked with more favour on these combats after the middle of the 13th century. During the 15th and 16th centuries tournaments continued to be held; and no better conception of a tournament can be gained than from the account of the combat at Stirling in 1448 between the knight-errant Jacques de Lalain and the Master of Douglas (Hume Brown's Early Travellers in Scotland, 1891). But by 1500 the alteration in the social life and warfare of Europe had changed their character, and they are rather to be regarded as state pageants than as real combats. The death of Henry II. of France, in 1559, consequent on a lance piercing his eye at a tournament, led to their general abandonment, both in France and elsewhere, and there have been few attempts to revive them even as mere spectacles. The progress of firearms helped also to put them out of fashion; but tournaments still took place in the reign of James I., and at the Hague in 1633 the Prince of Orange held a 'passage of arms,' in which Prince Rupert 'carried away the palm.' A magnificent entertainment consisting of a representation or imitation of the old tournament was given at Eglinton Castle in August 1839, by the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton: Lady Seymour was the Queen of Beauty, and many of the visitors enacted the part of ancient knights; among them
Prince Louis Bonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III.—According to Ducange, the difference between a tournament and a joust is that the latter is a single combat, while in the former a troop of combatants encounter each other on either side. But this distinction has not been always observed.