le. The young mounted yeomen arranged a
great tournament in their Elbe island "the Marsh," under their Maigraf,
Bruno von Stoevenbecke; the arrangements were all written down, and the
merchants of Goslar, Hildesheim, Braunschweig, Halberstadt, and
Quedlinburg invited. They came splendidly-equipped, and courteously
broke a lance with two young comrades of Magdeburg in front of the
city, and then rode festively through the gates to the island on which
many tents were pitched. The prize settled by the Magdeburgers for this
May tilt was, like the figure on their coat-of-arms, a maiden.[58] An
old merchant from Goslar won the beautiful Sophie; he took her with
him and married her, giving her so good a dowry as to enable her to
live ever afterwards honourably.

A century later, in May 1387, the Magdeburgers celebrated a great
festival on the "Marsh," and again they contended for a maiden; but the
combat was no longer in the style of a tournament, such as their bishop
held at the same time on the other side of the city, but it was in a
great archery court. To this archery meeting they again invited the
friendly cities of Brunswick, Halberstadt, Quedlinburg, Aschersleben,
Blackenberg, Kalbe, Salza, and Halle. A citizen of Aschersleben won the
maiden.

During this century there was a great change in the life and
constitution of the German cities; the patrician youth with their
knightly customs were no longer the representatives of the power of the
burgher class, the commonalty of the city already began to feel
themselves masters, and their weapon, the cross-bow, gained the prizes.
Soon after 1300, the societies of Archers arose in the German cities,
with their regulations, archery houses, and yearly shooting festivals;
as a brotherhood they erected an altar or built a chapel, and obtained
from the Pope's Legate absolution for all who attended the mass, which
they established on the day of their patron saint, the holy St.
Sebastian. These guilds were favoured by the city magistrates, who
helped to arrange the great prize shootings of their city. But however
much the citizen bow superseded the knightly lance at the feasts of
arms of the cities, some of the terms of knightly language continued
long in use. The prizes were still in the sixteenth century called
"_ventures_;" still longer did the term "_tilting_" denote the
contention between individual marksmen who had shot into an equal
number of circles, and a "course" signified