Knight shift as jousting troupe aims for indoor tournament during crisis
THEIR FOREBEARS fought the Great Plague and the Black Death, so Britain’s modernday jousting knights were never going to take the present pandemic lying down.
Yesterday they announced plans to fight back by battling behind closed doors, in the hope of raising enough money to see them through to next year.
Les Amis d’Onno, a troupe of professional riders based on a farm at Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, normally spends the summer entertaining crowds at fetes and festivals across the country. But its diary for this year has been wiped out, leaving them facing “bleak” times, they said.
They hoped that a private tournament would help them pluck victory from the jaws of defeat, entertaining fans remotely while generating the cash to keep them in business.
Sue Zacharias, a partner in the family business, who is in lockdown with five adults, two pre-school children and 22 horses, said: “We’re a resilient team and we have to keep exercising the horses and doing
what we’re doing. We knew a lot of our fans were going to be really disappointed that the shows are cancelled and we wanted to do a fundraiser to help us survive the season.
“As the summer rolls on we will hopefully film a tournament here at our farm because we have the facilities, with all the live action and all the stunts and thrills that we normally do.”
The team, which also provides horses and riders for movies, has been making tongue-incheek videos about the knights’ experience of lockdown and preparations for the tournament, which have been posted on the Jousting Scotland Facebook site.
Les Amis d’Onno had fallen through the net for grants and support, but were determined to raise their lances again, Mrs Zacharias said.
“The live horse performance shows are our life – we’ve done it for about 20 years – 10 years in France before we moved to the Borders,” she said. “We will survive, though we don’t quite know how. We just have to get through a very, very lean time.”