MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES.

MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES. Mary Jane commented that the actors we saw in the Guerrilla Theatre production of King John, who stripped to the waist for fight scenes, were really “ripped.” Then she commented that the muscularity seemed to be contemporary—an anachronism. And then we thought about it some more and decided that the nobility in about 1200 must have been “ripped.” They were professional warriors who fought with in chain mail with heavy weapons. Every so often when I am watching a football game, I think that the professional football players of today would have been nobility in medieval times. (As an aside, I did some googling and found that chain mail apparently weighed about 30 pounds while plate armor weighed about 90 pounds. However, as this wikipedia article says, “The notion that it was necessary to lift a fully armed knight onto his horse with the help of pulleys is a myth originating in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”)