Chivalry isn’t dead: Inside the world of modern jousting

Piece by piece, a squire dresses his knight, buckling steel over her arms, cinching straps across her shoulders, checking every fastening. 

He holds her close for a few moments, humming softly in her ear. When she’s ready, he gently lowers her helmet into position, watches her mount her horse, and secures a shield across her chest.

Once the knight’s visor is down, her world narrows to a slit of daylight, and the squire becomes her eyes and ears, guiding her into position before the charge.

The knight is Kyle Van Dolah-Evans, and her squire is Stacy Van Dolah-Evans, her husband. ​“I’m called Stacy and she’s called Kyle – I know, the irony,” Stacy laughs. ​“It took me 37 years to find a woman with a man’s name I wanted to marry.”

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They are competing at the Arundel Castle International Medieval Jousting Tournament, widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious full-contact jousting competition. Over six gruelling days, knights from Britain, the United States, Canada and France battle for team and individual honours at ​‘the Wimbledon of jousting’.

With riders wearing full medieval armour, wielding lances almost six feet long and clashing at speeds of up to 60mph, it’s easy to assume victory is decided by brute force alone.

In reality, jousting rewards extraordinary precision over raw strength, and demands absolute trust: in yourself, in your squire, in your horse and in the rider charging straight towards you.

“Once you put that helmet on, all your thoughts are inside your helmet with you,” Stacy, himself a previous champion at Arundel, explains. ​“The temperature starts to go up. You’re literally cooking inside your own head.”

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“I wasn’t going to do the tournament unless Stacy squired for me,” Kyle tells me. ​“The person handing you the lance – they’re the ones telling you what’s going on. They’re your pit crew, your wingman, everything rolled into one.”

Every advantage counts. At 59kg, Kyle is the lightest competitor in the tournament. Modern jousting has no separate women’s and men’s divisions, so her opponent, Canadian veteran Jean-François Drapeau, outweighs her by 21kg. He’s also been jousting for 23 years, while Kyle has only been jousting for three.

What Kyle lacks in jousting experience, however, she makes up for in the saddle. A lifelong rider, it was partly frustration at other jousters’ horsemanship that pushed her into the sport in the first place.

“There are guys who can’t ride to save their life going around this country thinking they’re the cat’s meow because they happen to be put on a really easy horse,” she says. ​“They manage to stay on for 10 seconds and think they’re God’s gift!”

Kyle was already embedded in horses and history. A self-described ​“history whore”, she’d spent years performing on horseback across eras from Roman to Regency. ​“I don’t really care what period of history you’re having me do,” she says, ​“as long as I’m on the back of a horse.” 

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Eventually, Stacy had an obvious solution to her complaints. ​“Well, you can do it,” he suggested. ​“Let’s get your armour.” As the fittings began, Kyle remembers panicking over the cost: ​“I don’t even know if I’ll like it!” 

Her first competition came after just two practice runs, wearing borrowed armour because hers hadn’t been finished in time. Three years later, she’s representing the United States at Arundel.

Back on the field, there is little to distinguish three years of jousting from 23. Encased in steel and flanked by teammates carrying national flags, both riders cut equally formidable figures.

The compère announces: ​“Arm the knights!” The squires place the lances into their knights’ hands. At the call ​“Laissez aller!” (“Let go”), the knights urge their horses into a full gallop, thundering towards each other.

Three seconds later, wood splinters against steel. Jean-François strikes Kyle square on the targe – the shield across her chest – his lance shattering cleanly on impact. Kyle’s lance breaks too, but fails to land cleanly enough to score. On this pass, experience wins.

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The scoring is deceptively simple: three points for a hit to either the helmet or targe, two points for the body, one for the arm, plus a bonus point if the lance shatters on impact. Jean-François’s clean strike earns him the maximum four points for a pass, putting Canada 4 – 0 ahead.

Determining whether a rider has earned those points, however, is no easy feat. In jousting, there’s no video replay. Even when photographs appear to contradict a decision, the marshal’s judgement stands.

The man responsible for those final calls at Arundel is the tournament’s Marshal of the Field, Per Estein Prøis-Røhjell – known to everyone as Pelle. An expert in horseback fighting who runs a riding school in Norway, he’s an imposing presence on the field; ​“the Norse god of chivalry”, as the compère dubs him.

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“I’m nervous, and I’m not even jousting!” Pelle exclaims to the crowd. Later, I ask why. ​“I’m worried I’ll let my fellow jousters down,” he says. ​“I want to live up to the moral conduct that we expect from each other.”

That moral code extends far beyond judging. Unlike almost every other combat sport, where avoiding being hit is the objective, ​“Jousters are responsible for presenting a good target for their opponent,” Pelle explains. ​“You can’t do good jousting if there aren’t two participants. We have to trust each other’s integrity.”

That responsibility extends to the horses, who are recognised as athletes in their own right – the compère reels off the horses’ credentials with as much fanfare as the knights’.

The partnership between knight and horse, however, often has to be forged at remarkable speed. At international tournaments, competitors can’t always bring their own horses, meaning they must quickly learn to work with whichever mount they’re given. At Arundel, the challenge goes further: every time they ride, they’re given a different horse, with just two practice runs to get to know each new mount.

The horses’ safety is paramount. In the final stretch, riders must wait for the opposing horse’s head to pass by before slipping the lance in behind it, a movement that gives them, Pelle estimates, little more than a 10^th of a second to find their mark.

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For Pelle, the best joust is one both riders get right. ​“I never think, ​‘I hope they miss.’ I prefer it if we both hit. If you hear a proper crash that has metallic sounds in it, that’s been a great hit!” he chuckles. ​“You’ll learn to kind of appreciate that.”

It doesn’t take long to see what he means. From the sidelines, the beauty of a perfectly executed pass is unmistakable: a single clean crack, two shattered lances and both riders still balanced in the saddle.

“If jousting’s done well, it looks quite easy,” says Emma Pearn, competing for Great Britain, one of the most recognisable faces of modern jousting. She’s greeted with some of the loudest cheers at Arundel as she powers onto the field, her trademark blue hair spilling from beneath her helmet. ​“It really was just to make a point so I was easy to find as one of the females,” she explains.

A project manager by day, Emma has developed a far higher threshold for workplace stress thanks to jousting. When things get tense, she finds herself thinking: ​“That’s not worth being up at night for. No one’s going to die.”

For all the jokes, death has always been a possibility in jousting – albeit increasingly rarely.

Medieval historian Dr Thomas Smith, an expert in warfare from the age of the Crusades and author of The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt (Yale, 2026), traces the sport back to the 12^th century, when it was ​“basically like a running battle across fields” and ​“really, training for war”. Fatalities, he explains, happened ​“not infrequently”.

By the late medieval period, however, it had become ​“much more about entertainment, about chivalry”. People still died, but largely through accidents: ​“If a lance splinters and it goes through the eye slit on a helmet and kills the wearer, that would be quite rare, but it does happen.” As he puts it: ​“In some ways it’s very violent,” yet ​“also very controlled.”

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Today’s battles aren’t entirely removed from its medieval ancestor – Dr Thomas believes a jouster from the period would recognise ​“the actual combat at the heart of it”. 

In modern jousting, when fatalities have occurred, Emma says, they have usually been traced back to equipment failure rather than the joust itself.

When they have occurred, Emma says, they have usually been traced back to equipment failure rather than the joust itself. But exactly what constitutes safe equipment remains undefined. ​“We haven’t got any sort of base metrics to say what is or isn’t safe,” she admits.

Nor are the rules themselves settled. There is no global governing body, and what counts as good jousting in one country might be penalised in another. In Norway this year, Emma competed under rules where blows to the head were actively encouraged; weeks later in Italy, they were completely off limits.

Emma is part of a growing international effort to turn that patchwork into a modern, professional sport.

“There’s now proper global interest in trying to progress jousting and making it more accessible,” she says.

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But that means confronting just how difficult it is to get in. Armour presents the first hurdle. ​“It’s not something you can go down to Sports Direct and buy,” she points out.

Each suit is handmade, and the armourers capable of making them are a ​“dying skill set”, pushing prices higher still. For newcomers, that can mean spending thousands before they’ve really had the chance to find out whether jousting is for them.

Even money only gets you so far. There is no formal pathway into competition: entry is ​“purely based on networking” – word of mouth, someone vouching for you, an established jouster willing to take a newcomer under their wing.

“I’ve been lucky enough to make it in this sport,” she says. ​“How can I pass that on and make sure others have those same opportunities that I had?”

For now, only around 60 people worldwide compete at this level, making elite jousting an intensely close-knit world. Emma’s squire, Ciaran, is also her fiancé, who recently proposed to her at the Leeds Royal Armouries’ Easter jousting tournament. He describes life on the circuit as part sports team, part touring band. Now, he’s learning to joust himself.

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Stacy, meanwhile, is not only Kyle’s husband and squire; he’s also the tournament director at Arundel, a fact the compère repeatedly mines for jokes about how hard it must be to remain impartial. The couple have even jousted against each other, fittingly on their 11^th – or steel – wedding anniversary. As Kyle charged towards her husband, she remembers thinking: if he got injured, she’d be raising their boys alone.

At Arundel, that small world effectively moves in together for six days. Competitors live in an encampment outside the castle, an experience Stacy compares to Big Brother. Little is hidden from the thousands of spectators who pass through: they see the knights eat together, prepare for competition, and spend time with their families – all beneath a giant scoreboard, reminding the knights of every victory and defeat.

By the end of the tournament, Kyle has more than held her own. Out of eight competitors, she finishes tied for fourth place on eight points, while Jean-François, the 23-year veteran who beat her in that opening pass, finishes second on 10 – only two points ahead.

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By nightfall, the day’s rivalries have largely been forgotten. ​“In the evenings we are genuinely friends,” Pelle says. ​“Of course we’ll fight as hard as we can, but who won doesn’t matter.”

For Kyle and Stacy, jousting extends far beyond tournaments. Away from the armour, Kyle works in construction and Stacy in software, but their children have grown up immersed in the sport and its values. 

Kyle fondly recalls still breastfeeding through her first competition while Stacy changed nappies in full armour between jousts. 

For their two sons, knights aren’t figures from the distant past. Watching their mother put on a suit of armour and charge into battle is simply part of daily life.

“Mommy smashes,” Kyle says, grinning.

Ginnia Cheng is a freelance journalist and comedienne. Follow her on Instagram.

Magda Campagne is a music and culture photographer. Follow her on Instagram.

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