Maryland’s Farmers Ring in the Olde With Medieval Jousting

In some American farm towns, the locals throw horseshoes in their spare time. They might play some softball or hold a fishing tournament.

In Maryland, they joust--dairy farmers and horse breeders, galloping through the dust like latter-day knights, almost every weekend from May to October. While the rest of us climb aboard SUVs for trips to the supermarket, they’re saddling up, shouldering homemade lances to skewer tiny rings while friends and family applaud.

As long as they’ve still got time to finish the daily chores, that is.

“When the kids were little, lots of times we’d have to get home to milk the cows in the evening,” said Leon Enfield, 68, of Brunswick, now in his 53rd year of jousting. “We very seldom had time to take a vacation, so we’d go to the jousting events on Saturdays.... Now there’s nine of us, and five of us can be competing in the same class against each other. It’s good competition, and nobody gets mad at anybody, and there have been a few times--not many--when we have won all four places.”

There would be 10 Enfields jousting these days, but, as Leon’s wife, Shirley, said, “I was so busy raising kids and fixing meals and keeping score that I never really had time to get back into it.”

Jousting has been going on in Maryland for 374 years, ever since the Calvert family brought the game ashore along with Maryland’s first English colonists.

Yet, in an age when virtually every other so-called leisure sport--bowling, cycling, running, badminton, you name it--has elevated its top players to the status of full-time professionals, jousting remains a rustic outpost of amateurism. With its $5 entry fees and $50 prizes (if you’re lucky), its churchyard and fairground venues, and its decidedly regional appeal, jousting is about as folksy as an old family quilt.

“You can’t get a scholarship with it, you can’t make a living with it, and you can’t go to a sporting-goods store and buy the equipment,” said Mary Lou Bartram, 72, of Aberdeen, the sport’s grand dame. “It’s strictly down-home.”

This is not the jousting of Camelot lore, mind you. There are no lances crashing into armored breastplates and helmets, knocking riders and mounts to the ground. It’s like the little verse says on this year’s Maryland jousting schedule:

Enjoy with us the modern trend,

Where rings are speared

Instead of friends.

“A lot of us will preface it, before we even start talking about it, that it’s ring jousting,” said Ric Allen, president of the Maryland Jousting Tournament Assn.

The object of jousting is to skewer three 1.75-inch diameter rings suspended 6 feet, 9 inches off the ground. The rings are clipped to lines hanging from arches placed 30 yards apart in a straight line along an 80-yard course. A rider must complete the course within eight seconds (unless you’re a child who’s being led down the course by an adult holding the line). Each rider makes three runs, meaning nine rings is a perfect score.

In a state championship match, five or six of the top-class riders might score a nine, says Bartram, a three-time state champ and two-time national champ. To break the tie, riders then joust at progressively smaller rings, all the way down to a quarter-inch in diameter, if necessary.

But less important than who wins are the ingredients that give the sport its bake-sale ambience, a chummy event where 12-year-olds can go head to head with their granddads.

“It is very much frowned on to get too overly enthusiastic about winning,” Allen said.

The sport’s roots go back to the rough-and-tumble medieval times, when skewering rings was a perfect way to practice for skewering your enemy. But the popularity of man-to-man jousting faded, attributed by some historians to the deaths of prominent participants such as King Henry II of France. Others say jousting simply became outdated--why learn to knock your enemy off his horse when you could shoot him from a safe distance?

Whatever the case, the Calverts kept jousting at rings for relaxation, and they popularized it enough in Maryland for the sport to survive long after the colony became a state.

“During the ‘30s and ‘40s when I was a kid,” said 75-year-old Mack Ridout, who lives near Annapolis, “everybody in the community jousted--my cousins and uncles. It was a community of farmers.”

Leon Enfield saw his first tournament in 1947 and started practicing at his family’s dairy farm. He got pretty good at it, eventually winning eight state titles and four nationals in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Like just about all beginners, he started with rudimentary equipment--broomsticks or rake handles, whittled to fine points. Riders who improve make better stuff, or find someone to make them a nice steel point. “Most of these riders are country people,” Ridout said, “and there is always an old-time blacksmith.”

Ridout, now retired from jousting, eventually settled on a 7-foot lance weighing about 10 pounds, a bit on the heavy side as these things go. It featured a curving metal point made by a blacksmith at a shop run by a family in Annapolis.

Even more important than the lance, though, is the horse.

“It should be somewhat small, steady, fast, energetic and willing to do the job,” Ridout said. “You can’t catch (the rings) if your horse is too slow.”

“I’d say 80% of it is the horse,” Bartram concurred. “Outside of that, you have to have a steady arm and a good grip.”

In the old days, the rules tended to change depending on where you jousted.

“In western Maryland, you had to do the 80 yards in 10 seconds,” Bartram says. “It was seven seconds on the Eastern Shore, nine in central Maryland. And the Eastern Shore used a half-arch instead of a full arch. The height of the ring was anywhere from 6 foot, 7 inches to 6 foot, 10 inches.”

Forming the statewide Jousting Tournament Assn. in 1950 helped standardize rules, and today the biggest regional differences are in riding style--Marylanders hold their lances underhand, West Virginians overhand.

In 1962, Maryland’s General Assembly brought jousting to the attention of city folk by designating it the official state sport.

But by that time some jousting tournaments had fallen on hard times. The Woodsboro event where Enfield got started had already died out for lack of interest. And the St. Margaret’s joust, a mainstay since the 1860s at the historic St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Annapolis, had been discontinued four years earlier.

“Some of the people at the church didn’t want to be bothered with it,” Ridout said, “and of course, in 1958, you had some new people moving in.”

But the same forces of suburbanization that seemed destined to skewer jousting for eternity eventually helped lead to its revival. Typical of some of the new breed is Bruce Hoffman, 53, an insurance adjuster who discovered the sport about a dozen years ago.

“I had lived in Glen Arm (in Baltimore County) my entire life, and had never seen a single tournament,” Hoffman said. “All I knew was that we used to hear the PA announcer. The track was about a mile-and-a-half from our house.”

Then his daughter got interested enough to begin competing, “and we said, well, if we’ve got to drag her down we might as well try it, too.”

He got hooked.

So did Ric Allen and his wife, Vicki, after they came across a jousting event near their home in 1993. They, in turn, introduced a horse-riding friend from Pikesville, Jackie Rosenthal, to the sport a few years ago.

“These guys got me absolutely addicted,” Rosenthal said.

Still, ring jousting just doesn’t seem destined to move beyond its regional base of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.