Using horses in warfare as cavalry
is a stupid idea and that's what I'm going to talk
to you about in this video which has
been sponsored by our friends at the Great Courses Plus
More of them later
Now, I want you to cast your mind back
back to when the horse had just been domesticated.
I don't know exactly when that was
and nobody else does either
The figure 3000 B.C.
is very often cited
but 4500 to 2000 perhaps is closer to the truth.
And it's somewhere in there probably, it's a bit vague.
When exactly an animal becomes domesticated
is debatable, too.
A lot of people say it's when the animal
requires mankind looking after it to survive
Another definition is that it's when man is selectively breeding
controlling the breeding if you like
of the species and selectively breeding for those traits which suit man.
So which dogs get to breed are the ones whose behaviors suit working with men
And which horses who get to breed are the the type that men want rather than other horses.
So somewhere in that period the horse gets domesticated.
but I want you remember that your horse was of course before that a wild animal
and when it just being domesticated it's still fairly wild and not very different
from its wild ancestors. So its instincts are still those of a wild animal and if
you've ever been to a rodeo you will perhaps be well aware that even modern
horses if they have not been trained are very reluctant to have people ride them
on their backs and if you try jumping on the back of some other wild animal, jump on the
back of a wild zebra or ostrich, or buffalo or whatever and
you'll find that it really objects to your being there quite strongly
so if some smart aleck said back then
"Hey I've got this brilliant idea why don't we ride these things into battle?"
There are a couple of possible reactions to that one might be the
people have said "Wow, that's a brilliant idea why didn't we think of ourselves, we've
got to try it!" But I think it's more likely that they said,
"Don't be such an idiot."
I mean it's ridiculous the idea that you could
ride a horse into battle. If you're an infantryman you got both feet on the
ground you can control your movement you can have a nice big shield, a big spear,
and you know exactly when you're going to move and in what direction because you
are in control of those movements and you can wear lots of armor and you can
if you fall over you can just get back up again. If you're on a horse things are
completely different.
How are you going to stay on that horse? How are we going to get the horse to
bear the weight of you and all the armor? because the horses of course what much
smaller than that the large things we have today they're ponies really and
a large man in armor will be quite a burden to such a horse. And how is he
going to stay on it? I have once been bareback riding and I can tell you,
that boy you have to grip with your thighs!
And the back of a horse is very rounded and his fur is really quite
skiddy. Got to remember velcro with all the little hooks hasn't been invented
yet so you got nothing like that to hold you on want and you wouldn't want to tie
yourself onto the horse bit of rope or anything, because if you did fall then
you'd be dragged and that would be horrendous! Dragged and kicked and
ahh, the injuries so you don't want to do that. You want to be able to get off the
horse safely but not fall off the horse. You want to get off when you choose
So if the horses galloping along and suddenly stops you don't want to go
sailing over its neck and head and land on the ground in front of it in the big
heap for the enemy things just go "stab." You don't want that.
Another thing that's really difficult about that the horses, if you think
about it back then is that they're so scared! Even horses today, if you've been
riding at much at all you know that horses spook at the most bizarre things.
You could be riding down the road a car goes "Zoom!" straight past you much too
close. "Idiot!" You may shout something rude after the driver but he won't hear you
but the horse is fine. Then a few more yards down the road "Ahhh Crisp packet, crisp packet!
The horse is panicking because it's a crisp packet!
It's a blue one , it's a blue one!
It should be salt and vinegar but I bet that one's cheese and onion and
that's just so wrong! Ahh, crisp packet! And a tractor goes
thundering past, doesn't bother the horse at all but crisp packet!
The most bizarre things will spook a horse. They're very timorous things and
and they're quite intolerant to pain. They don't like fighting and don't like even
treading on on people. If in battle their bodies lying on the ground
horses don't want to tread on bodies, even dead bodies. So the idea of riding
one into battle would probably to the first people who heard it sound like a
really amazingly stupid idea. How are you going to control it or put a bit in its
mouth? Okay so we put a bit in his mouth and spits it out.
Okay well obviously that's going to require a bit more work, but you'll think
of a way maybe to control it to with with some sort of harness that goes
around its snout, perhaps with a couple of ropes. That it won't be that great but
you'll have some steering control. Maybe if you spend an awful long time training
this horse. But then you going to ride into battle on your own? Because that just
means you you get there before everyone else and you're really conspicuous and
they're going to shoot you first and your horse is a really big vulnerable
unarmored target and it's intolerable intolerant to pain and if anyone hits it
it is going to bolt and then you're probably going to fall off or you're going
to go hurtling across the battlefield on your own
How is that any help to anyone? And you could say all right what maybe if we
train up loads and loads and loads of guys we have a cavalry force then we can
rumble across the plains and scare the wits out of the
enemy with thunderous hooves and shaking of ground and so forth yeah right now I
could happen then again you might just get the ironic applause as you all then
scatter across the plain and fall off and the few of you left realize that you
can't possibly take on an infantry unit because how do you actually fight on a
horse? You ride up to infantry unit you then got infantryman all around you very
very quickly and they've got so much to aim at and your angles of attack will
essentially got down and that's it. So it's fairly easy to work out where you
have to put your shield in order to parry, and you're hopeless.
What's it going to achieve writing cavalry into battle? And it seems that nobody did
ride cavalry into battle for really quite a long time after the mess the
domestication of the horse but something that they did use horses for was pulling
things. Now, the horse is very good at that you can get them to pull carts and so
forth and various heavy loads and that was something that was useful in
everyday life in farming and in
building and so forth and you could of course train them to pull chariots.
Chariots were used in warfare for quite a long time before cavalry appeared we
don't know exactly when the first chariots were, but again big round number
about 2000 BC and they got more and more prevalent it seems in certainly
Middle Eastern and warfare until around 1300 BC around the battle of Kadesh for
instance which we know about through historical reports of it which involved
vast numbers of chariots that seems to be the peak. By the time Caesar
invaded Britain the the Celts in Britain were still using charities but it seems
that they were the exception. The Gauls in what is today France it seems
weren't still using chariots. The last mention i think of warfare setting
in the West was Mons Graupius I think.
One reason that you would get a horse to pull something like a chariot is because
they are small. If you've got a very small horse that's not very powerful and you
put a big weight on top of it such as a guy with armor and so forth then it's
quite a burden and it's it's going to have a struggle galloping along with you on
its back. But, if you put your weight on the ground via a wheel and make the
ground and the chariot bear the weight and all the horse has to do is get the
wheels to turn around,
then that's different, and a couple of horses could pull you really really fast.
Chariots are going to be a lot faster than cavalry because they're not
burdened every time they do the "up" part of the gallop, they don't
have to lift you and your armor up each time. Instead they can just get it
forwards pulling, as long as the terrain is course favorably flat, and pulling
this this light spoke wheeled basket behind it with you in it. Then you
could go really fast and perhaps fight from there and it seems that people did
now in the works at Homer of course, we read it loads and loads of heroes
rushing around the the plains outside Troy on their chariots and IF the Trojan
War happened ,which it might not have, and if it did happen around 1250 BC, which it might not have
but that's the that's a commonly estimated date for the Trojan War, then
there would be no cavalry, so all those references in your translation to
cavalry of Homer, are probably referring to those parts of the army that used
horses which is chariots really. It does seem perhaps that messengers and
people like that not running into battle we used before cavalry as an arm of an
army arrived. It could be that in ancient Egypt you would have a couple of
guys on horses riding to deliver messages it's a little bit faster but
right at the enemy and fight from horseback? That would be ridiculous!
On something as timid and vulnerable as a horse off which you can fall so
easily?
So how do you keep yourself on a horse? Well, one way is to use a saddle which
helps a bit, you're not quite as skiddy as the horses back. The first good evidence we
have a saddle is around 700 BC in places like Assyria.They may of course, be
older than that, I suspect they are a bit, but that's the first really good
evidence we have for them but the saddle on its own is really enough to turn you
into a cavalryman. And when do stirrups arrival? The stirrups don't arrive
until quite a lot later.
More recently than perhaps you realize. I've read about loops of rope that
would go around the big toes of a rider in India as early as the 2nd century,
end of the second century BC, but that's not really a true stirrup as we would know
If you just have straps or ropes going to something like a loop around your toes
that puts a lot of strain on in one small part of the horses back and the
horse will get sores from that. It's not terribly practical. To get stirrups to work
properly, you have to have pretty solid preferably framed saddle which then
then translates the downward strain over a
broad area over a large bit of the horse's back so
it doesn't get those sores. Now, when when does the true
stirrup get invented as we know it today? Well, probably China some around 400 and
something AD seems to be the time and why?
Well, some versions of history will say that the first stirrups were used in china
so that old frail people could get onto their horse, so it was just a mounting
aid and we have some reason to believe that Sarmatians some couple hundred
years later we're getting onto their horses perhaps when they were wearing
heavy armor using one stirrup, there's a stirrup just on one side so they would use
it to get up onto the horse and once on the stirrups job was done. It wasn't
actually riding aid, it was just a mounting and perhaps dismounting aid.
Is there some other way you can stay on the horse? Well, yes there is. But first I
want to tell you a little bit about the Great Courses Plus, our sponsor! So that
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Now, back to saddles.
So, there is another way, and it seems that this other way was developed by the Celts
The Celts later got copied by the Romans
And sometimes this saddle is known as a Roman saddle, and sometimes as a Celtic saddle, and sometimes a Romano-Celtic saddle, whichever you prefer.
Instead of stirrups, which are sometimes described as a great revolution that made feudalism possible,
Stirrups made the knight possible, the heavily armored guy who could fight from horseback possible,
Really?
I suspect not, because of these four pommeled saddles.
There are a few versions, but by and large, what you have is a pommel in front of your right thigh,
a pommel in front of your left thigh, and maybe two behind you quite close up our against your backside, or maybe a wall behind you that
that keeps you firmly in place.
How did these work?
The idea is that as you gallop along and you see a target, " Oh, I'm going to hit him! gallop gallop gallop"
And you lean out and hit him, this is a big problem
What happens next if you're a cavalryman?
How do you get back up onto the horse again?
If you are riding bareback and you lean over like this and whack someone,
then there goes my perishing center of gravity, goodbye everyone!
You're probably going to fall off the horse.
You have to be able to force yourself up onto the horse somehow, the reigns aren't going to help you.
If you have a stirrup that's firmly attached to a saddle, what you can do is push down on the stirrup on that side and get yourself back up on the horse.
Or if you're riding on a four pommeled saddle, you can lift your thigh on the opposite side from which you are falling, and lever yourself back up.
If I'm leaning to my right, I'd bring up my left thigh
against the pommel on that side and that levers me back up onto the horse.
If I lean to the left, I'd bring up my right thigh and that brings me back up onto the horse
with no need for stirrups
And if I thrust with some weapon like a spear forwards, then the force that is translated to me in recoil along that forces me back against the rear pommels of the saddle
which then keep me in place and I don't go flying off the back of the horse.
So I can lean to my right, lever myself back up. Lean to my left, lever myself back up, and thrust forwards and stay on the horse!
So shock cavalry, armored cavalry with swords and spears and so forth
that can go in against infantry and other cavalry and fight and stay on horseback is possible with this Celtic or Roman saddle.
And that's long before the stirrup.
Now the Romans in later periods did in fact encounter enemies using stirrups and they didn't straight away adopt the stirrup
So maybe that's because their system worked. They'd been using it for quite some while and they saw no particular reason to change it.
The reconstructions of these saddles are based, so far as I know, on the first reconstruction
which was by Peter Connolly and he came around to my university and lectured.
He had his reconstruction saddle on a vaulting horse and he showed off by vaulting onto it landing in it.
You've got to remember there were shorter horses so that was easier.
And he then demonstrated how you can lean one way lever yourself back up, lean the other way, lever yourself back up
And he had based his reconstruction on finds of the leather covers which have all their stitching and the stitching had been stretched this way and that
and he looked at how it had been stitched and he worked out what shape the object used to be once when it was in use
And there were also bronze or brass fittings of metal which go onto the pommels
And from these clues, he constructed a wooden frame
put his pommels and brass bits and leather over the top and he finally got it to work!
And today there are lots of people who have made reconstructions of these pommel saddles, tried them out on horses,
trained their horses to accept them, and them and at they work fine.
Which of course then begs the question: Why did people start using stirrups?
I don't know, I genuinely don't know, but I can say, that for most of the time that there have been domesticated horses,
Cavalry has been a really stupid idea.
Lindybeige!