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Fig. 868. From the picture of Mars and Venus

Painted for Lorenzo the Magnificent by Alessandro Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli National Gallery

lance assumed enormous proportions, not as regards length, but in girth and in weight. In the Schloss Ambras, near Innsbrück, and in the Imperial Armoury, Vienna, are preserved a large number of jousting lances that are like small trees cut down and roughly trimmed: some have a diameter of five inches. It must, however, be borne in mind that these planchons, as they were termed in French, were used against such mighty tilting sets as are described in Vol. ii, pp. 124 to 127. So great indeed was their weight that in Germany, in the gemein Teutsch gestech, it was often found necessary for the mounted varlets, riding in advance of their knights, to bear the weight of the spear upon their left shoulders, only abandoning it the instant before the jousters came to the cope. One of Lucas Cranach's finest engravings shows such a joust. There is in the Tower of London a great lance, fluted and painted, that bears the tradition as having been carried by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (Fig. 866). Paul Hentzner makes note of this in 1598, and mentions it in his "Itinerary," published in Nuremberg in 1612, "Lancea Caroli Branden Suffolciae quae tres spithamos crassa erat"; and in 1660 the Tower inventory mentions "Great lances, two said to be King Henry VIIIth's and one Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolke's." It is again mentioned in the 1683 inventory, in the 1688 inventory, and valued at £5, in the 1691 inventory, and in the 1693 inventory. At its greatest circumference, immediately in front of the grip, this so-called Brandon lance is obviously hollow, a circumstance that compels us to class it with the bourdonnasse, termed in English "bourdon," a type of tilting lance mentioned disparagingly by De Commines. We are therefore inclined to think that it is not the