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While jousting in a tournament to celebrate his daughter's marriage in 1559, France's Henry II received a splinter in the eye, and died not long afterwards. According to Wikipedia, this marked the death of jousting in France but the practice continued in other countries.

What improvements to the safety of jousts were investigated and made in response to Henry's death? How widespread was their adoption?

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I don't think they began by establishing of committee of inquiry tasked with preparing a whitepaper. – quant_dev May 4 '12 at 9:37
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Actually it seems like it might have. Apparently the committee came to the conclusion, "mang it's really not smart to have people charge at each other with sharpened poles, we should probably not do it or something". – BrotherJack May 4 '12 at 19:13

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It was probably pretty much finished by then anyway.

The original joust (behourd, melee) was pretty dangerous, knights were expected to get killed. 80 died in one contest in England in 1241. It was really proper 'live-fire' combat training.

After Banockburn, second thoughts about the tactic of charging heavy horses into men that had pikes driven into the ground started to put the English off jousting. Although the French carried on with the tactic of charging at English archers for another 100years.

From the mid 14C jousting was more delicate affair with rules and only a few deaths. And by the mid 16C it was pretty much dieing out.

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I agree that it was dying, but according to Wikipedia, England held jousts up to at least 1624, 65 years after Henry's death, which is plenty of time to at least investigate safety improvements if there was the desire. If you have anything that shows that investigations into safety improvements were not considered worthwhile due to the decreasing frequency of jousts, I'd be happy to accept that. – lins314159 May 10 '12 at 5:49
tempted to edit this to say "stupid tactic". Heedless headlong calvary charges got them slaughtered at Crecy, again at Poitiers, and yet again at Agincourt. – T.E.D.♦ May 10 '12 at 13:42
@T.E.D. - probably depends what language you are speaking ;-) – mgb May 10 '12 at 15:04

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