Jousting

This joust is from the Slovakia 2007 tournament. Did you know that medieval knights who were particularly good at jousting and other tournament sports made a fortune on the tournament circuit, pretty much the way modern auto racers or golfers do today -- except people regularly got killed or seriously injured in these events. They often "played" with real weapons, not blunted ones. They didn't play to kill, but they played to win -- i.e., to take down another knight so they could win both a ransom for the losing knight and the knight's equipment, including his war horse, which cost about as much to men in the middle ages as a personal tank would today.

Much of the expense of the war horse was the result of its highly specialized training. War horses were trained not only to tolerate the smell of blood, the sounds of battle, etc., but to kill human beings by biting, kicking, and stomping, and these animals often responded only to the commands of their specific knight. We're used to going up to the gentle percherons at the renaissance fairs and petting them -- just don't let one of those babies step on your foot -- but mess with somebody else's war horse back in the days when they were a ton of ill-intentioned muscle and razor-sharp hoof and you were very likely to incur some significant damage.