King's Lancer

Baker, Mike mbaker at rapp.com
Wed Nov 20 08:54:00 PST 1996


No, Daniel, I don't necessarily devolve into Kiplingesque musings when I see 
"King's Lancer".

_Perhaps_ Napoleonic era, but not necessarily Bengali.

And the concept of a warrior whose primary weapon is the lance is far, far 
older than the citation given for 1590ce. Remember, among other minutiae, 
that "lance" & "spear" have been semantically equivalent for several 
centuries. If there is a distinction, it would be that the lance is 
considered a specialized sub-type of spear. Lance does not automatically 
equate with a horseman's spear, either, although that is the most generally 
recognized version.

Further, even among lances used by horsemen there is (and was) a wide 
variation in construction styles. The lance intended for battle was quite 
different than the standard tournament lance. There were differing types of 
horseman's tourney lance as well, some of which have been reasonably 
reconstructed by members of the SCA heavy weapons community and others which 
remain well beyond our scope (metal points of various patterns, weight, 
required method of use [e.g. fit into a saddle notch / special framework]).

The classic list of "historical" format with 
charge-each-other-on-a-half-ton-horse 
with-a-cloth-barrier-separation-of-lanes metal-pointed lances are beyond the 
*normal* capabilities of our SCA horsemen. (I doubt me not that there are 
wondrous riders among our ranks who have trained and equipped for non-SCA 
jousting groups...) Even the blunted, padded, shortened horseman's 
tournament weapon that was called a lance we do not consider appropriate for 
mounted combat against a living opponent. (For which safety rule I am very 
glad, particularly for the sake of the horses...) Exceptions we make allow 
for demonstrations of skill with lance against targets such as rings or a 
quintain -- and even there the lighter, more maneuverable forms of the lance 
are obviously superior & allow a wider range of (often only occasional) 
participants.

(Please, if I have mis-judged or under-represented our Ansteorran riders or 
the history and nomenclature of weapons, I would beg those with better 
information to let me know! I speak based upon my knowledge as it has been 
gleaned, and it is all too likely that I've not been harvesting in enough 
fields of late...)

Amr ibn Majid al-Bakri al-Amra
     currently residing in Barony of the Steppes, Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mike C. Baker                      mbaker at rapp.com
Any opinions expressed are obviously my own unless explicitly stated 
otherwise! 



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