The preparations for a tournament afforded an animated and interesting picture. The lists, which at first were of a round shape like the amphitheatres of antiquity, were later constructed in a square, and later still in an oblong form; they were gilded, painted with emblems and heraldic devices, and ornamented with rich hangings and historical tapestries. While the lists were being prepared, the knights who were to take part in the tournament, as well as those who were to be only its spectators, had their armorial banners hung up from the windows of the houses in which they were putting up, and affixed their coats of arms to the outer walls of the neighbouring castles, monasteries, and cloisters. When this was done, the nobles and the ladies went round and inspected them (Fig. 132); a herald or a pursuivant-at-arms named their owners, and if a lady recognised any knight against whom she had any ground of complaint, she touched his banner or his shield, in order to bring him under the notice of the camp judges, and if, after an inquiry, he was found guilty, he was forbidden to appear in the tournament. Coats of arms, which were striking characteristics of chivalry, and which were adopted by the nobility as one of its most striking attributes, had no doubt a contemporaneous origin with the institution whose emblem it became. It is supposed to have been in the eleventh century, at the time of the First Crusade, that the necessity of distinguishing between the multitude of nobles and knights who flocked to the Holy Land led to the invention of the different heraldic colours and devices. Each Crusader chose and kept his own particular emblem; these emblems became the external marks of nobility, and were to be seen everywhere--on the war tents, on the banners, on the liveries, on the clothes, and on every object belonging to a noble family. Hence the language of heraldry, that figurative and hieroglyphic jargon, incomprehensible to everybody at that period except to professional heralds-at-arms. [Illustration: Fig. 133.--The Champion of the Tournament, from the Collection entitled “Vita Imperatoris Maximiliani,” engraved by Burgmayer from drawings by Albert Dürer (Fifteenth Century).]