Bohurt battles
IN MEDIEVAL ARMOUR: LAST MAN STANDING WINS
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she rubs her eyes as Gauteng knights in medieval armour do battle.
Bodies in full and very heavy armour clatter and clunk against each other as they fling blunt axes, anything to down each other in the lists. This is the Bohurt, a full-contact fight won by the last man standing.
Here the lists are in a creosote pole enclosure at the bottom of the Kyalami Country Club grounds. Poplar leaves are doing their green-silver flicker in a tender breeze and what look like meadows roll beyond. We could be on another continent back in some medieval situation but for the bakkies parked yonder.
The men and women clanking around in 14th century style armour have names like Karl, Anton, Vicky, Hylton, Jeffrey and Bronwen. Their metal burden is astounding and, when they remove their helmets, their heads are streaming with sweat.
Apart from the bohurt which is a mass mêlée, the duels with longswords or pole-axes only endure for one to one and a half minutes each. Winning is according to a points system.
“It’s a very violent sport,” says Anton, who is a tree doctor and makes most of the armour himself.
It’s definitely not identical and there are idiosyncratic preferences. Vicky’s neckpiece is quite beautiful, constructed of what look like owl feathers in metal. Her husband Hylton has toe armour because that’s his vulnerable spot, despite being “the man that no-one can topple in the bohurt”.
Jeffrey has chain mail sections. He’s done tai chi in his full armour, for training.
Karl, who has impressive injuries, says people either do this for their sense of history or for the violence. He’s been a rugby player.
Heather and I realise we’ve been here for ages and only the recent part has been about the fighting. The rest was the painstaking ritual of getting into armour “from the bottom up,” with padded heavy jackets under and over all the armour and then South African tabards.
This is a section of our team representing us at Scone in Scotland.
Anton manoeuvres my hand into a mail gauntlet, gives me a sword, puts his visor down and asks me to attack him “harder, harder!” I swing the sword high in the air, to build up some momentum to clip him on the helmet or against his own sword. Noone watching looks scared.
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