Why does it sometimes seem in the dialogue in aSoI&F as if breaking lances is a good thing? I thought the aim was to knock the other guy off his horse. Does the lance need to break for it to happen?

Well, a tourney lance is made to shatter rather than impale your opponent, because tourneys are supposed to be nonlethal. So breaking a lance meant that you scored a good direct hit against your opponent’s shield or armor.

See, the thing is that while knocking the other guy off your horse was a clear victory, jousting didn’t always require it. There were quite a few victory conditions, depending on the style of joust – knocking off the crest of your opponent, causing a spring-loaded shield to detach, or simply winning on points.

To use a modern analogy, winning a boxing match by K.O is very straightforward, but a lot of matches are decided on points. So breaking a lance would be like landiing a hard and clean shot which will contribute to the judges scoring a round in your favor.

Quick question about tourneys/ransoms as I’m rereading The Hedge Knight. After the first day of the tourney Dunk notes that Ser Humfrey Hardyng had beaten 14 knights over the course of the challenges. In that style tourney, is he getting a ransom from everyone of those knights? If so what would that be equivalent to if you could do the math? Feel like he would have been set for life if he had been able to survive the whole affair!

Good question!

It’s a bit tricky, because prices do fluctuate a bit. Let’s say a ransom is equal to the price of a horse and a suit of armor:

Horse prices: in 209 AC, Dunk sells Sweetfoot for three gold plus some silver, whereas 299 AC one gold per horse is the going rate. So let’s go with 1.5 gold on average.
Armor prices: in 209 AC, Dunk buys a set of plain steel armor for 800 silver (~3.8 gold), although this is mail, gorget, greaves, and greathelm rather than a full suit of plate, which one would guess would go for substanially more. The semi-canon RPG books give a price of around 14 gold for a suit of plate. So let’s go with an average of 9 gold.

So I would say that a tourney ransom is somewhere around 10-11 gold minimum, which means that Ser Humfrey made around 140-154 gold on the first day of the tourney. (Ransoms in times of war are a good deal higher – Brienne’s father offered 300 gold, which Jaime considers a good ransom for a knight – since there’s something of a disincentive to return an enemy combatant to the field.)

Now, how much is that worth? Well, given that a good income for a smallfolk works out to between 3.5-5 gold, that would certainly set an adult peasant up for the rest of their life. However, it’s not that extravagant by noble standards.

In terms of how much it’s worth by today’s money, that’s about $140,000-154,000 U.S dollars, which is quite a sum but not exactly “set for life” money.

“If the Starks want gold, they can melt down Jaime’s armor” Would you care to speculate about the probable value of Jaime’s gilded sword & armor, and since he never gets them back, we can assume maybe something like this happened, so would liquidating it have made a dent in the expenses of the Kingdom of the North & the Trident? It’s made clear just what an asset armor is in the parts dealing with tourneys. Also, would a winning jouster get to charge higher ransom for nicer armor, or was it set?

Tyrion was making a joke – gilded armor does not contain a significant amount of gold, the no doubt master-crafted armor would be worth far more in its original state than melted down, and in either case would not have been worth enough to fund the Northern war effort.

And since you’re not the first person to ask me about jousts and ransoming armor:

Were tourney ransoms generally a form of collateral, to ensure prompt payment? In order to be of any use, armour needs to be a perfect fit, so another man’s armour would be of no use to the victor himself and would have very limited resale value.

As we see with the Mystery Knight, ransoming armor is not about being worried that someone else might sell it, although horses are a different matter, obviously, and the armor thing is not 100% (chainmail can be resized and human body shapes aren’t so wildly different that it’s always unusable). Rather, because a knight’s armor and horse are essential tools of their profession and prerequisites of their social class, no knight would willingly forfeit them and thus they are perfect collateral for a debt – the medieval equivalent of leaving your credit card for a deposit.

The other thing to keep in mind is the class expectations of the people involved – as noblemen, knights are supposed to be A. men of their word of honor (so being too pushy about repayment calls that into question), and B. not concerned about money (which means being too pushy about repayment is an issue, but so is not paying your ransoms). At the same time, noblemen also like cash to fund their magnificent lifestyles, so you need to make sure that you get paid.

Ransoming armor or horses, like handing over your sword when you surrender, is a way of resolving this tension: it allows both sides to pretend that this isn’t about money and that everyone trusts everyone else, while making sure that ransoms get paid on time.

How historically accurate are the prizes/penalties from the tournaments in GoT and Ko7K? They always seemed like they had a horrible Risk/Reward ratio to me to attract so many competitors. It would be like the NFL having several thousand teams, but only paid the one team that won the Superbowl, and any teams that lost in the first round of the playoffs would have to hand over their personal houses to the team that beat them.

Well, I’ve talked about the prizes recently.

But when it comes to the penalty, yes that’s accurate. Most tourney knights made their money off of ransoms and not prizes, since there were many more of the former than the latter in each tourney.

However, you have to keep in mind the class and class mentality of the participants involved. Tourneys were a pastime of the nobility, not that much different from hunts or feasts or dances, so it was expected that the combatants in a tourney were A. rich enough to be able to ransom themselves/their arms/horses and B. not supposed to be concerned about money.

To use your sports analogy, imagine if you had to be in the top 5% of incomes and wealth to play in the NFL at all.

Reading your Anguy question, how much money was 10,000 gold dragoons actually worth? Was it a realistic pot for winning a contest?

See here for my estimates on the value of a gold dragon.

As for whether it’s a realistic pot, it’s a bit tricky, because medieval tourneys don’t seem to have given out prizes in cash, but instead gave out prizes in jewelry, plate (hence why so many modern sports tournaments have “cups” as trophies), and the like. And without these objects to hand, it’s a bit hard to value how much a “gold vulture” or a “very rich ring” should be valued at, or (given how popular diamonds were in medieval tourneys) how to appraise precious stones in the abstract.

However, I can say that 10,000 dragons work out to something on the order of 6,000-7,000 English pounds (in 1300 CE pounds, that is), which is far, far bigger than any tourney prize I can find an example of.

So I think this another example of math being GRRM’s Achilles’ heel.

Rereading A Game of Thrones it kind of surprises me that there were no Northerners at all in the Hand’s Tourney except for Eddard’s guards. Not even Manderlys and White Harbor knights when they follow the Seven and practice knighthood. Do you suppose this is due to the Manderlys adopting the Northern disinterest in tourneys? In fact besides Ned’s household I don’t recall seeing any Northerners in King’s Landing or anywhere in the south before the war. The North seem detached from Westeros.

First, about jousting in general. According to WOIAF:

“As knighthood is rare in the North, the knightly tourney and its pageantry and chivalry are as rare as hen’s teeth beyond the Neck. Northmen fight ahorse with war lances but seldom tilt for sport, preferring mêlées that are only just this side of battles. There are accounts of contests that have lasted half a day and left fields trampled and villages half–torn down. Serious injuries are common in such a mêlée, and deaths are not unheard of. In the great mêlée at Last Hearth in 170 AC, it is said that no fewer than eighteen men died, and half again that number were sorely maimed before the day was done.”

In other words, Northmen don’t joust (much – Brandon Stark didn’t do too bad at Harrenhal, there’s Jorah Mormont at Lannisport) because they consider it too refined, too sanitized, too fancy, and boring to boot, whereas southerners consider Northern melees to be disorganized, disorderly, and insanely violent. It’s a nice continuation of the North/South cultural divide.

Second, about the Hand’s Tourney. The makeup of tourneys depends very much on the location and publicity of the event, and in this case the Hand’s Tourney was A. located down in the South, which means folks oop North are going to hear about it much later and have a hard time getting there, and B. a spur-of-the-moment decision of Robert’s, so there wasn’t the time to get the word out as much as there was for the Tourney at Harrenhal, for example. (Notably, in that latter tournament, the Starks were there in force, they brought their bannermen and companions, so there were way more Northerners)