hastilude

n. spear game, medieval tournament for knights to practice their fighting skills

Hastilude is a generic term used in the Middle Ages to refer to many kinds of martial games. The word comes from the Latin hastiludium, literally 'lance game'. By the fourteenth century, the term usually excluded tournaments and was used to describe the other games collectively; this seems to have coincided with the increasing preference for ritualistic and individualistic games over the traditional mêlée style.
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Literally a ‘spear game’. Often used as a generic form for tournaments , or a "mêlée " form where knights fought as integrated groups called conroi to practice their unit skills and to capture their opponents and thus capture their horses and equipment. Sir William Marshal was perhaps the pre-eminent tourneyer in the day of the hastilude, but after his death in the early 13th century the tournament became more and more regulated, becoming a very structured pageant by the 16th century when Henry VIII and Françis I of France held the Field of the Cloth of Gold, C. 1515.