London Fields, East London. Saturday the 17th of October. A slight north-northeastern wind is blowing. The sky is overcast, with a drizzle earlier in the day making the ground slightly softer than usual, but still firm enough to get a good grip. Perfect weather for the joust to make a return, after six hundred painstakingly long years. At long last, the beautiful game is back.
Here we are in heaven. Like many things in the last six centuries, the mechanics of the joust have changed. Where men used to ride on warmblooded chargers and destriers, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had its way and transformed their steeds into equally noble Lime Bikes – the iconic green rental bicycle that plagues London’s pavements and gives transit to its most downwardly mobile residents.
London Fields was not the initial choice of venue for this spectacle. The organisers had first attempted to set up shop in Shoreditch Park, but they had to move it to Allen Gardens, also in Shoreditch. After the videos promoting the bout blew up on social media, a Tower Hamlets Council official got in touch with the organisers, via Instagram direct message of all things, to inform them that they absolutely could not pelt full speed at each other with large sticks on heavy electric bicycles, so they had to move locations again, this time to Hackney. They only revealed the exact site for this legendary spar 30 minutes before kick-off.
Some 200 yards from the joust, there was a medieval-themed birthday party happening – a bizarre but brilliant coincidence. There were a thousand people signed up on the Partiful event listing, and a further thousand on its waitlist, the event itself attracting maybe three hundred attendees in person – still an impressive crowd. It was a terrific cross-section of the modern East London ecosystem – there were teenagers, bemused parents, slightly less bemused girlfriends dragged along by their boyfriends, and even a mother who had brought her young baby for his first-ever joust. By my count, there were eleven different media outlets covering the event, not including yours truly, an impressive press turnout for a sport that has been largely dormant since the reign of James I.
More amusingly, I encountered no fewer than three separate groups of people who recognised one another from Cambridge University. Jack Carden, a New Zealand-born East London artist, was to face off against Camtholomew the First, a whimsical actor and filmmaker, in a best-of-three match. Carden, the organiser and designer of this piece of ‘performance art’, wore a striking red cape atop a spray-painted red and blue bicycle, a sharp contrast to his jet-black hair when unhelmed. Camtholomew wore a rich dark green cape and rode a classic-coloured Lime bike. It’s worth noting that this whole event occurred in a Lime-mandated ‘slow zone’, limiting the speed of their mounts to a measly 8mph. After a short set of remarks, with a slowed version of the song ‘Golden Brown’ offering a soundtrack to their speeches, the two combatants retreated to their respective ends of the field, non-lethal lances were readied, and the first tilt commenced.
Camtholomew drew first blood, claiming victory in the opening encounter, but Carden was not to be outdone. He returned for the second tilt with renewed determination, sending Camtholomew off the side of his bicycle and into the mud, evening the score and setting up a deciding clash for the ages. It was at roughly this point that two PCSOs wandered towards the crowd, looking vaguely entertained by what they’d stumbled upon. They would radio it in, they explained, but what else could they really do? They remained on the fringes of the crowd for much of the proceedings, watching the spectacle unfold and giving a surprising number of interviews to the assembled media. I was told by an attendee who cycled past it that the original venue, Shoreditch Park, had been crawling with police, presumably preparing to thwart the event before it could threaten the King’s peace.
Thankfully, the boys in blue of London Fields were not as vexatious. Amidst the chaos of the tilts, a drone buzzed above the crowd, zipping around skittishly. Whether this was the work of an ambitious videographer or an asset of the Donbas gathering intelligence on the very frontier of British battle techniques remains to be seen.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has had its way and transformed their steeds into equally noble Lime Bikes
The final tilt was a triumph for the red corner, with Carden emerging victorious, while Camtholomew, the gallant green knight, was sent barrelling into the crowd. Happily, the assembled spectators appeared to survive the encounter, though several found themselves rather closer to the action than they might have anticipated. Such are the risks one takes when attending an unsanctioned tournament.
I, the arrogant fool, left too early with my comrades to attend to the serious business of Saturday evening drinking, and as a consequence missed what I’m told was almost an hour of axe-fighting. Alas, we cannot have it all. The knights of old would doubtless have understood. There is, after all, only so much combat a man can witness before the tavern beckons.
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