But we must go back to the time of the zenith of the Middle Ages to see its tournaments, its tilts, and its passages of arms. In the halcyon period of chivalry, its sham fights, its courteous tournaments, and its warlike exhibitions, occasioned many an accident, and brought about many a fatal result. History mentions a tournament in Germany where sixty persons perished in a struggle waged with weapons deprived of edge and point. No question of mere gallantry, no point of honour, was involved in the oldest tournaments on record (the tournament was first alluded to in the chronicles of the reign of Charles the Bald); no pomp of drapery, no brilliancy of banner, adorned them then. No princesses, no noble ladies, showed themselves in all their pride of beauty and of dress around those ancient lists. The tournament (in old French _tournoiement_) of those days was merely a violent athletic pastime, in which the iron men of that period measured their strength one against the other with sword strokes, with lance thrusts, and with mace blows. But as the customs of chivalry gradually softened the manners of the nobility, so the primitive coarseness and roughness of these trials of strength became modified and regulated. Tradition declares that the tournament properly so called was first inaugurated in Brittany in the tenth century by Geoffrey, the Sire de Preuilli. [Illustration: Fig. 130.--“Here is shown how the king-at-arms, having on his shoulder the gold cloth with the two leaders painted on parchment, and in the four corners the arms of the said judges, proclaims the tournament, and how the heralds offer the arms of the said judges to whoever will take them.”--Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Tournaments of King René,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century in the National Library at Paris.]