Barriers
"Barriers" was a stylized martial combat, conducted on foot with swords and pikes; it was something like a joust without horses. Though ceremonial in nature, the practice had some inherent risk (as jousting did), and the sixteen-year-old Prince Henry had to persuade his reluctant father to allow his participation. The ceremonial challenge that initiated the barriers occurred on 31 December 1609; Prince Henry then kept an "open table" at St. James's Palace, which cost £100 per day. The Prince was supported by a team of six nobles and gentlemen: Ludovic Stewart, 2nd Duke of Lennox; Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel; Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton; James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle; Sir Robert Gordon, and Sir Thomas Somerset. The seven met fifty-eight challengers during the Barriers; "each bout consisted of two pushes with the pike and twelve sword-strokes, and the young prince gave or received that night thirty-two pushes and about 360 strokes."
Read more about this topic: The Speeches At Prince Henry's Barriers
Famous quotes containing the word barriers:
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)
“... so far from entrenching human conduct within the gentle barriers of peace and love, religion has ever been, and now is, the deepest source of contentions, wars, persecutions for conscience sake, angry words, angry feelings, backbitings, slanders, suspicions, false judgments, evil interpretations, unwise, unjust, injurious, inconsistent actions.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it is only when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)