pt 2
In Flanders the reign of Philip of Alsace (1168–1191) saw the full flowering of tournaments and chivalry, which were closely related. About this time Counts Baldwin IV and V of Hainault were busily engaged in fighting in tournaments in countries bordering their own. A century later duke John I of Brabant reaped as great a success as Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders. Philip used special tactics in tournaments and acted as instructor to foreign princes, such as the young Henry of England. John of Brabant trained his knights so thoroughly in war-games that the victory at Worringen may be said to have been the result of that training.
Both princes lived the full chivalric life of their day: at the court of Philip of Alsace there were poets such as Chrétien de Troyes, Gautier d'Epinal and the unknown author of Li proverbe au vilain. Duke John was a patron of Adenet le Roi, and was praised by Jan van Heelu; he was also an occasional poet himself. Philip took part in two crusades and an expedition against Milan; John twice went on campaigns in Spain and travelled through England to fight in tournaments there. Philip died ingloriously of a common epidemic near Acre, and John of the consequences of a minor wound received in a joust.
Both had strong personal military ambitions. Philip's tactics in tournaments seemed lacking in chivalry, although his contemporaries approved them, and as far as he was concerned anything was permissible in dealing with an enemy. John wanted to settle the battle of Worringen sword in hand, and not with the help of ditches, and he preferred the destruction of robber-citadels to spectacular but useless expeditions to the Holy Land.
Through the influential example of these princes, tournaments flourished in the southern part of the Netherlands and in Lorraine, and Flanders, though they were chiefly held in France. France's renown in this respect was so great that the English chronicler Ralph Diceto called the tournaments conflictus gallici, and Ralph of Coggeshall spoke of a conflict more Francorum. Tournaments were forbidden in England by various kings, Henry II among them, because they gave rise to endless political troubles.
At the time of civil war during the reign of the weak king Stephen tournaments were popular. Later, Richard I, a man skilled in the art of war, saw that the French knights were better trained than his own, so he permitted knightly exercises. Being also an outstanding leader, Richard quickly succeeded in making up lost ground by his own example. This gave his fighting men such confidence that, according to the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, from then onwards they risked attacking forty Frenchmen with thirty knights, 'which never used to be the case'. Philip Augustus experienced this English confidence to his shame and sorrow at Fréteval on 13 July 1194, and at Gisors on 28 September 1198.
