Knight's Lance

Origins

Horsemen had fought with spears for thousands of years, thrusting overarm or underarm, or throwing them. What was new in the eleventh century was the couched lance: the rider clamped the shaft firmly between his upper arm and body, leaned into the saddle, and let the horse deliver the blow. The technique depended on the high-backed saddle and the stirrup, which kept the rider in his seat at the moment of impact. The Bayeux Tapestry shows Norman knights at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 using their spears in both old and new ways, and within a generation the couched lance had become the hallmark of the Frankish knight.

Design & Construction

A war lance was a straight shaft of ash or a similar tough wood, about ten to thirteen feet long in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and heavier later, with a narrow, leaf-shaped or square-sectioned iron head for piercing mail. Later lances were thicker at the hand and tapered toward the point, and from the fourteenth century a circular plate, the vamplate, guarded the hand. The fourteenth-century knight also bolted a lance rest (the arrêt) to the right side of his breastplate, which took the shock of impact off his arm, and a ring behind the hand (the graper) stopped the lance sliding back. Pennons fluttered from the lances of knights and men-at-arms. Tournament lances for jousting à plaisance had blunted, crown-shaped heads called coronels.

Combat Use

A charge of knights riding knee to knee with lances couched was the most devastating shock tactic of medieval warfare. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene wrote that a mounted Frank could make a hole in the walls of Babylon. In the Crusades the charge of the military orders, including the Knights Templar, and the other crusading knights broke Muslim armies at Dorylaeum and Arsuf, though disciplined horse archers who refused to stand could wear it down, and a charge made at the wrong moment could be a disaster, as at the Battle of Hattin. The lance usually shattered or was lost in the first impact, after which the knight fought on with sword, mace or axe. In the Hundred Years War, English longbowmen and dismounted men-at-arms showed how a charge could be stopped, and knights increasingly fought on foot.

Legacy

The lance remained in use by heavy cavalry into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Polish Winged Hussar Lance carried the tradition to its last great battles, and lancers returned to European armies in the Napoleonic era and served until the First World War. The joust kept the knight's lance alive as sport and spectacle throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To this day the image of the mounted knight with lance lowered is the essential picture of medieval chivalry.