The Warhorse in the 12th and Early 13th Centuries by Elizabeth Chadwick.

The other day there was a discussion on a historical list I'm on concerning the warhorses that would have been around during the days of William Marshal - knight par excellence in the mid 12th and early 13th centuries. The Ardennes breed (example in photo) was suggested as the type of great beast that William would have ridden to high success in the tourneys in which he took part.

It's amazing how this stereotype continues to prevail despite the amount of research that has been done on the fighting horses used at this time in history and despite all the pictorial and historical evidence we have to show that the medieval warhorse of the 12th and 13thc's little resembled the animal above.

As horse historian Daphne Machin Goodall says: 'The shire horse type may be comfortable at the walk, but he would be impossible at the trot, and heaven help the knight if his steed broke into a canter.'  As Tim Severin found out when he tried to ride an Ardennes cart horse to Jerusalem and ended up having to have a special saddle made before he could even sit the horse!

So, what do we know about the medieval warhorse of this time?
Anne Hyland, a historican of equine matters, carried out detailed assessments of horse in relation to horse transport ships and came to the conclusion that 'early medieval destriers were of a very moderate size!
'I estimate the build as stocky, and a height range of between 15 and 15.2 hands.'
The heavy horses of today are bred for haulage.  Weight to pull weight.  Even those said to throw back to the war horses of the Middle Ages have been bred to be taller and weightier than their ancestral counterparts. By the Tudor period Henry VIII was declaring that no heavy horses under 15 hands were to be kept for breeding, but that was not true of earlier centuries.
The ideam 12th and 13thc medieval warhorse wasn't bred to pull weight.  it was bred for speed, responsiveness, and to withstand the short, sharp shock of the charge and clash. In other words far more like a steer roping horse (an American Quarter Horse for example)  than a draught animal. It had to be sturdy enough to bear the weight of a man in a mail shirt and chausses; and to exist on what fodder was available in times of battle campaign. It also had to be trainable, intelligent and feisty but not umanageable.
Breeds are not mentioned - it was too early in history for that, but countries and regions sometimes turn up as providing the most desireable beasts. Spanish horses were hugely valued. William the Conqueror was presented with one on the eve of Hastings, and Norman baron Robert de Belleme had a stud of Spanish grey horses that he grazed on his Welsh Marcher lands. Arabian horses were prized too and one Oliver de Rohan brought nine of them back from the Holy land to run on his pastures.
In the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, horses from Lombardy are highly prized, although there is no indication as to what these kind of mounts might have looked like.
You will often find the Percheron horse cited as the descendant of the destrier, but don't be taken in by today's beautiful modern greys, active and fine though they are.  The medieval warhorse that came from the Le Perche region of France was 'of less massive conformation and generally brown in colour. In fact the early horse of le Perche, looked much like his neighbours, the Breton and Norman cobs.' So says Daphne Machin Goodall in her 'A History of Horse Breeding.'  She also makes the point that if such wonderful horses had existed in Charlemagne's time, he'd have been portrayed sitting on one of them to display his might, and not a basic cob!

So, if someone was looking around in today's market for a horse that best resembled the look if one was to go back in time to watch a tourney, what would one be looking for?

Possibly an Andalusian - a Spanish horse of ancient lineage and the correct characteristics.

Modern Andalusian - compare with the 13thC warhorse below

13th century warhorse - Matthew Paris. Nothing like a 'heavy horse' is it?

Or perhaps a Morgan horse - a breed believed to be suggestive today of resembling the destrier type by historian Matthew Bennett.

One of the four horsemen of the apcalypse - 13thC

Or perchance the Welsh cob.

For anyone further interested, there is a clip of a modern destrier in Terry Jones' programme on the crusades at 38 mins 54 seconds. Medieval warhorse, example of the type

Suggested further reading:
The Medieval Warhorse from Byzantium to the Crusades by Ann Hyland published by Sutton
A History of Horse Breeding by Daphne Machin Goodall published by Robert Hale (out of print)
The Medieval Warhorse reconsidered: Essay by Matthew Bennett in Medieval Knighthood V: Papers from the Sixth Strawberry Hill Conference 1994

God took a handful of the South Wind… by Katherine Roberts



An Arabian horse in the desert. Antoine-Jean Gros, c. 1810 in the public domain

 …and from it formed a horse, saying: "I create thee, O Arabian! To thy forelock I bind victory in battle, on thy back I set a rich spoil, and a treasure in thy loins. I establish thee as one of the glories of the earth. I give thee flight without wings."

These famous words from Bedouin legend bring the horse prancing into time. And since the main reason I write historical fiction is because it contains horses rather than cars, I thought it fitting to write my first post about their place in history.

My personal definition of history is any society that uses horse power. That gives me quite a lot of years to plunder… from the first time someone climbed on a horse’s back (or, even earlier than this, harnessed up a horse to a chariot) right through to World War One, in which horses were still used in battle, as dramatised recently by Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. I know horses did not vanish entirely after that. The police still use them for crowd control, and you can find working horses in other parts of the world. But you can write a book set in contemporary times without mentioning a single horse, whereas if you tried writing something set in the 18th century without so much as a horse-drawn carriage this would seem rather strange. I actually wonder if there will be horses around in 100 years’ time, or if they will be as much a myth to our descendants as the Bedouin legend is to us. Already, they have vanished from my locality, the riding school I remember as child being replaced by smart barn conversions for second home owners - I find this a bit sad.

So I must plunge back in time to find my horses. And since I am also a fantasy author (I write fantasy for the horses, too!), I’m never happier than when I can mix magic, history and horses in the same story, which I managed to do in several of my Seven Fabulous Wonders books, although by the time I reached the building of the pyramids I had lost the horses. For my next book, I journeyed forward a bit to 300BC and had enormous fun writing “I am the Great Horse”, telling the story of Alexander the Great from the horse’s mouth. There isn’t as much fantasy in the pages of that one as you will find in my other books, but I still managed to squeeze in a magical “horse bond” between Alexander, Bucephalas and his groom Charmeia, also a few amazon warriors, and several ghosts (both human and horse!)

A few years ago, I proposed a novel about the first ridden horse and drew this timeline to show how horses entered history (it's not very neat – I don’t do neat when I am in a creative mood – but if you click on the picture to enlarge it, I hope you can see how it might inspire a story.)

What I find interesting about this sketch is that there are two distinct strands:
1. Historical - where the first horses (a small, tough, wiry breed) lived on the plains of central Asia and were tamed, probably in the Bronze Age, by the ancestors of Genghis Khan.
2. Mythical - where God takes a handful of the South Wind and creates the beautiful Arabian, which (so the story goes) he then gifts to Abraham’s son Ishmael, who has been driven out into the desert to start his own tribe.

The historical strand is based on archaeology, not terribly interesting to a fantasy muse, which might be why that book never got written... it eventually mutated into a book about Genghis Khan, which never got published. But if you want to read a beautiful historical novel about the steppe horses, then try I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade by by Diane Wilson, a young adult novel set in the time of Kubilai Khan.

The Bedouin legend is much more romantic, and appeals to me as a fantasy author because it has a spiritual/magical basis. I even started writing that book. My publisher didn’t like the idea, however, so it is only half a manuscript at the moment. Should I finish it? Even I can see it would not be an obvious best-seller. On the other hand, it contains my three passions so might make a half decent story… one day.

In the meantime, which strand of my diagram is right? History or myth? The Arabian (and all our modern breeds) have two fewer chromosomes than the wild Przewalski's steppe horse. What happened to those two chromosomes? Did the Przewalski horse mutate at some stage? Was the Arabian the result of selective breeding and environment on the early steppe horse? Or a completely different type of horse altogether, perhaps the horse of the desert mentioned in the Bedouin legend? The Arabian is undoubtedly more beautiful than its northern cousin, and nobody seeing the two side by side could possibly mistake them for the same animal:



Arabian





Przewalski's horse



As with so much historical research, it seems we need to look in more than one place to root out the true origins of the horse. I turned to the Bible, certain I'd find at least a couple on Noah's Ark. But no, horses are not mentioned that far back. Donkeys, yes... but donkeys are a different animal. (A challenge for you: where is the first mention of the horse in the Bible?)

From my reading of Genesis, it would appear that myth and history agree, and somewhere between 2,000BC (the approximate date of Abraham) and 1,500BC could indeed be about right for when the horse first entered into partnership with man and gave us “flight without wings.” Which means my period for historical novels lies anywhere between 2000BC and the First World War… hmmm... better get back to the writing!

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