Noble Blood · iHeartPodcasts and Grim & Mild

A Medievalist of the Seven Kingdoms (with Dr. Hugh Doherty)

March 31, 2026·33 min·2 clips

Trial by combat traces back to pagan Germanic culture and a 1127 Flanders duel ended with a disembowelment and immediate execution.

The excerpt starts in promotional clutter, then gets to the good stuff: tournaments as sport with real bodily risk. Lances were not always safe. Their nonlethal ends could be altered, and the guest says suspicion of murder could follow if someone used a lance they should not have used. Death was on the table. Still, the contest was not treated as simple bloodshed. Honor and glory mattered, and so did money. The older tournaments sound much messier than the tidy jousts people often picture. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the guest says, these events were pitched battles across large fields. Knights tried to capture opponents instead of killing them outright. A captured knight could bring horses, armor, and ransom, so a good day in the field could become a fortune. Over time, the practice changed. In the thirteenth and then the fourteenth century, display took more of the spotlight. Horsemanship and skill at arms became part of the show, performed before glamorous spectators, women as well as men. The host presses on what capture actually meant, and the answer pulls the topic away from fuzzy medieval pageantry into unhorsing, holding, and profiting. Honor is still the hinge, but it shares space with danger, money, glory, and performance.

As heard by us

Noble Blood's guest expert peels back the chivalric romance to show what medieval tournaments actually were -- and what they eventually became.

Noble Blood brings in a guest expert to demolish the stained-glass tournament -- those single-combat jousts of romantic imagination. The actual 12th and 13th century contests were sprawling capture-focused melees across terrain the size of football fields, where a knight could…

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Why you'd press play

What if the tournament was less about chivalric honor and more about ransoming your captives for profit?

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