At the time of the tournament, the war had become stalemated, with each faction controlling strongholds at different locations within Brittany, but occasionally making sorties into one another's territory.
[4] According to the chronicler Froissart, this purely personal duel between the two leaders became a larger struggle when Bemborough suggested a tournament between twenty or thirty knights on each side, a proposal that was enthusiastically accepted by de Beaumanoir.
[5] The poet also portrays Beaumanoir as a model of Christian piety, who puts his faith in God, in contrast to Bemborough who relies on the Prophesies of Merlin.
[6] This version was standardised in Pierre Le Baud's History of the Bretons, written a century later, in which Bemborough's alleged cruelty is explained by his desire to avenge the death of Thomas Dagworth.
[5] The battle, fought with swords, daggers, spears, and axes, mounted or on foot, was of the most desperate character, in its details very reminiscent of the last fight of the Burgundians in the Nibelungenlied, especially in the celebrated advice of Geoffroy du Bois to his wounded leader, who was asking for water: "Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir; thy thirst will pass" (Bois ton sang, Beaumanoir, la soif te passera).
[11] In the end, the victory was decided by Guillaume de Montauban, a squire who mounted his horse and rode into the English line, breaking it.
It was sung by trouvères, retold in the chronicles of Froissart and largely admired, and honoured in verse and the visual arts.
A commemorative stone was placed at the site of the combat situated between Josselin and Ploermel and King Charles V of France commissioned a tapestry depicting it.
[12] The renown attached to those who participated was such that twenty years later, Jean Froissart noticed a scarred survivor, Yves Charruel, at the table of Charles V, where he was honoured above all others due to having been one of the Thirty.
The willingness of all concerned to agree to rules and to actually observe them, to fight their best and not to run when injured or in danger of capture are the focus – and both sides are shown as equally worthy in that respect.
He situates the Franco-Breton Blois faction as all local gentry and aristocracy performing their proper social duty to protect the people, thus justifying, Muhlberger writes, "the privileges that nobles held as brave defenders of the weak".
The inscription goes on to assert that the "thirty Bretons whose names are given as follows, fought to defend the poor, labourers and craftsmen and they vanquished foreigners attracted on the soil of the Country by fateful dissents.
[15] This version was fictionalised by Arthur Conan Doyle in his historical novel Sir Nigel, in which Bemborough (called Richard of Bambro' in the novel) accepts the rules of the challenge in a chivalric spirit, but the Franco-Bretons win only because Montauban, portrayed as Beaumanoir's squire, mounts his horse, when the conflict was supposed to be on foot, and rides upon the English, trampling them.
Ainsworth argued that "Bembro" was originally "Pembroke" on the grounds that the Breton language version of the name was "Pennbrock".