Why Medieval Knights Went Completely Insane | Boring History For Sleep

We think we know the medieval knight. The armour, the horse, the code of honour, the shining courtesy. But the real man inside the real steel was a great deal stranger than the legend, and a great deal funnier. These were men who could not get dressed without two servants and half an hour. Men who spent fortunes they did not have on horses that cost more than a house, and then rode them directly at other men who were trying to kill them. Men who rode into tournaments with an enormous wooden swan mounted on their helmets. Men who swore binding public oaths upon a bird at a banquet, and who vowed to eat every meal standing up, or to wear an iron ring for years, or to keep one eye covered until they had performed some feat of arms in a foreign country, and who then sailed off to war half blind. The Church condemned their tournaments for a hundred and fifty years and was cheerfully ignored. And when the fighting grew dull at home, a wealthy young man might travel a thousand miles to a frozen forest in Prussia for a season of crusading, purely so that a herald would say his name at a banquet. All of it looks like madness. Almost none of it was. In this video we wander gently through the whole magnificent, expensive, thoroughly unhinged world of the knight, told softly and with a smile, as a calm and drowsy journey into a vanished age. Discover how a boy of seven was made into a knight, what a suit of armour was actually like to wear, and why the early tournament was not a joust at all but a battle spread across miles of open countryside. Learn about the ransom business, the swan crests and the covered eyes, the courtly love and the ruinous feasts, the sieges where nobody was magnificent, and the common man with a longbow who ended it all. And find, at the last, the ordinary human reason behind every absurd thing these men ever did. Then settle back, let your eyes grow heavy, and let the long, gentle story carry you off to sleep. Resources: Feast of the Pheasant – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_o... War Tourism in the 14th Century: What Were European Knights Looking for in Lithuania? – Orbis Lituaniae, Lithuanian Institute of History – https://www.ldkistorija.lt/war-touris... Teutonic Knight – World History Encyclopedia – https://www.worldhistory.org/Teutonic... The Knight in History – Frances Gies William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry – Georges Duby Sleep well, and rest easy — the knights are long at rest now, all their vows fulfilled or broken, all their tournaments ended, and there is nothing whatever left to prove to anyone.