From: kathy@xn.ll.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Another forbidden weapon
Organization: MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 00:15:01 GMT

In article <92Dec09.152446.15242@acs.ucalgary.ca> parr@acs.ucalgary.ca (Charles Parr) writes:
>
>And the saddles are backless, so that if you've been
>struck fairly, you *can't* stay in the saddle.

Actually, this was a relatively late modification to tournament practices.
Until the last 3-4 centuries of our period, tournaments were pretty deadly.
Pressure from the Church and various temporal authorities led to creation
of rules designed to keep the various kingdom's best warriors from killing
eachother without good reason.  In late period, one sees armor designed 
solely for jousting, or combination sets with extra pieces which were 
added for jousts, but not normally worn in real battle.  In some areas 
they also used saddles with break-away backs (but not to my knowledge 
real backless saddles.  Where did you find this?) so that they would not
be caught in the saddle and dragged.  Alternatively, the girth sometimes
parted company, resulting in the knight coming off, saddle and all.
They also introduced a barrier between the combatants, designed to mini-
mize problems of running into eachother, falling off under the other 
horse's feet, and so forth.
>
>As for the dangers of falling off the horse, ask any
>reasonably competent judo, aikido, or karate student
>how difficult it is to do that routinely. The answer 
>is that it's the *least* difficult part.
>
>Worry instead about breaking lances hitting spectators...
>
>It will come, sooner or later...Attempts to hold it back will
>fail, assuming people want to do it.

You may well be right.  I know some people in the SCA who are doing 
jousting designed to break lances, but THEY ARE NOT DOING IT UNDER THE
AUSPICES OF THE SCA.  They are SCA members who happen to do this at 
ren faires as well.  If this is ever to happen in the SCA, our insurance
policy will have to be substantially altered.  At the moment, we are not
permitted under the terms of the policy to perform any equestrian activities
not essentially similar to those one finds at a riding stable, unless the
person and horse performing them are *alone* in the ring.  That means 
absolutely, positively no jousting at eachother, under the current policy.
I can say this with some certainty, as I was the deputy autocrat at an
event at which we had horses here in the East last summer, and we had 
occasion to call the Society Insurance Coordinator Opal Doerr to find out
exactly what the situation regarding equestrian activities and insurance
was.  Also, for the record, if you have horses at event, the insurance 
requires that anyone riding be a paid member of the SCA, Inc.  

If we want to change this, and I'm not personally at all sure that we do,
we need to have enough support to convince the BOD and enough of the member-
ship for it not to cause a revolt, that it is worth spending more money on.
Right now, that doesn't seem very likely.

Assuming the legalities could be dealt with, frankly the idea of this kind
of activity as anything except a demonstration between people *who had 
practiced together at length beforehand* scares me silly.  Yes, police 
horses can be trained not to freak out at all sorts of things.  Yes, it's
certainly possible that a competent horseman could train a suitable horse 
to be safe jousting, and that suitable armor standards could be set to 
make killing someone unlikely.  Notice that word: *unlikely*.  Horses are 
a dangerous activity, under even the most controlled of circumstances.  
You can fall off a horse and be unhurt 99% of the time, but even for the
most experienced of horsemen, there is always a chance of serious injury.
All it takes is landing wrong, and you can easily break something in your
back, or your neck.  Or the horse can step on you.  99% of all horses will
do their best to avoid doing this, but if you fall under his feet, he may
not have the time or the coordination to miss you successfully.  

Of course, that could happen walking along in a procession, if you're 
unlucky enough.  On the other hand, I suspect that wearing armor might
substantially increase the risk of injury when falling.  At the moment it's
not designed to protect you from falling from a height, at significant 
horizontal velocity.  Injuries from falling can be very deceptive to 
protect against.  Ten years ago, the safety conscious people in the riding
community decided it would be a good idea to require a stiff brim on riding
helmets, to protect small children from falling off and getting their 
noses broken.  (A one-point landing on the face is not uncommon when coming
off a horse).  Several years later they had to revise their standards, 
because it became apparent that while it protected the nose, it impacted
the ground first, and caused the head to be snapped backward more violently
than landing face first without a brim, resulting in a substantial increase
in the number of broken *necks* that resulted from these sort of falls. 

Then there are the number of things that could go wrong with the lances. 
You commented that we should worry about the lance splintering and hitting
the crowd, not the horse, since the horse would be wearing armor.  FIrst
we should worry about the rider.  Historically, one of the British kings 
(Henry VII maybe?) was killed by a piece of a splintered lance going 
through his helmet visor and penetrating his eye.  About two years ago 
a jouster on the ren faire circuit was seriously injured *the same way.*
He lived, but I'm told he suffered permanent brain damage.  And this was 
a man who practiced this activity probably daily, performing it with a
partner with whom he was thoroughly familiar, having practiced with him 
daily as well.  

I am commited to seeing equestrian activities become a larger part of the
SCA, but I believe live jousting would be a tragedy waiting to happen.  I
would not want to get into a ring with someone whose skills I didn't know
thoroughly, trusting that they were skilled enough to be safe because they
had been authorized by a marshall I might or might not know.  There are a 
lot people out there who have inflated ideas about their skill, and frankly,
the ones most likely to be lacking in skill and be seriously hurt, are 
most likely to be sure they know what they're doing.  

							A'isha


A'isha bint Jamil, of the Barony of Stonemarche, in the Kingdom of the East
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Kathryn L. Smith	    System Administrator 		[The text above is
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