Originally Posted by
Knaight
The thing is, the situation being assumed here is a single fictional traveling knight with some sort of probably small retinue as imagined at the time. Lances as weapons are much more useful when you have supply trains full of them, and your lance charge is backed by a whole bunch of people next to you. One person, traveling alone has less use of a lance, and within that specific context the sword makes a lot of sense. It certainly upends assumptions made based on armies. Moreover, the sword's exaggerated role in fiction is actually relevant to how a fictional character at the time would be pictured.
The point is, the huge role of lances in an army setting is really of questionable pertinence. What would support this is lances described in period writings about knights, which largely means poetry and the occasional romance, with early novels at the late medieval period. That still supports lances fairly strongly, given the prevalence of representations of Pas d'armes in later works that strongly resembled jousting.