Earlier this month the ‘Warhorse’ team ran a training event for our project partner the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) about the medieval equestrian metal objects that could be brought to them for recording. It was a session of its Covid-19 time, delivered successfully by Zoom to over thirty participants, PAS staff and volunteers alike.

Every year, staff at the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) are brought hundreds of small metal artefacts found by members of the public that formed parts of medieval horse equipment and decoration. The Warhorse team had lined up a training session for our project partner to consider this equipment, put it into context and discuss how best to record it, but it soon became apparent that we could not deliver it in person. With the welcome assistance of PAS staff, however, Rob Webley (Warhorse) and Laura Jones (University of Exeter) were able to offer this material culture training virtually in early November. It ended up being very popular, with over thirty attendees — more than if it had been run in person!

Screenshot of participants attending the material culture training session run by the Warhorse project in November 2020

The session was in fact run across two days — 10th and 11th November — to make it as accessible and digestible as possible. Content was split, with the first morning more introductory and contextual and the second tailored to the identification of material and its recording on the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s database. In part one different sources were examined to gain a sense of the types of medieval material that might be encountered and to also think through what might not have survived. There was also a special section on heraldry, which is particularly pertinent as many non-ferrous items of equestrian equipment have ‘heraldic’ decoration and also because it can be an obscure subject for the novice due to the technical language involved. It seems that such contextualisation was appreciated, with one participant commenting how good it was to see:

“PAS material put into the wider context of excavated material and documentary sources”

Detail from the Trinity College Apocalypse, Cambridge MS R.16.2, f. 23 © Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 license

On the second morning, our training session turned to the tailored PAS work of recognising, classifying and recording horse-related artefacts. Extended sections covered horseshoes, stirrups, bridle bits and spurs. If you are interested, further information about how the PAS records these items is provided in their online Finds Recording Guides, some of which were written by the Warhorse team. It was encouraging to see from the feedback that attendees could see that enriching the PAS data helped facilitate novel research into the material.

Screenshot of training slide detailing horseshoe terminology

With so much of 2020 about having to make the most of tricky and ever-changing circumstances, we were grateful that our training reached so many PAS staff members and volunteers, and we would like to thank the PAS for organising it. The format actually allowed for a different sort of engagement, including through the chat function and other, verbal question-and-answer sessions. Whether a re-run will be in person or online remains to be seen but we look forward to engaging more attendees with both the artefacts and the Warhorse project. As one of the participants commented:

“I had a look at the [Warhorse] website and found it extremely interesting. I’m looking forward to keeping up with some of the blogs. It sounds like a great collaboration for PAS.”

Screenshot of tweet by FLO Cornwall following the training

I am Camille Vo Van Qui and I am a new PGR student at the University of Exeter. In September, I started a PhD on the breaking-in and training of horses in medieval France, under the supervision of Professor Oliver Creighton (Archaeology) and Dr Helen Birkett (History).

I had started to work on this subject for my Master’s degree at Sorbonne Université (Paris IV) in Paris, prompted by a passion for real life horses and horse-training. At the end of this two-year degree, I decided to go on with a PhD, as I felt there were still many aspects of medieval horse-training to uncover. The University of Exeter’s Warhorse project made it the ideal environment in which to do so.

The main source I am intending to use is the De Medicina Equorum, written in Latin by the Italian knight Jordanus Rufus (Giordano Ruffo) of Calabria (c. 1200 – c. 1254) in 1250. It is a veterinary treaty and has been extensively studied from a hippiatric point of view, but its first chapters contain a very complete method for taming, breaking-in and training a horse – assumedly a warhorse given the context and the identity of the author. In the years following its production, the treaty was translated in several vernacular languages, including Italian, Sicilian, French and Occitan.

I am intending to study the French versions of this text: there are, to this day, nine manuscripts in that language. What interests me is to determine how the method elaborated by Jordanus Rufus was reinterpreted by the copyists and translators: the text varies greatly from one manuscript to the other, with some significant changes which could point at different training techniques and traditions. In several manuscripts, the chapters on horse-training have been abridged. Others show variations in the type of equipment used. To give one example, some versions state that the horse should first be ridden without spurs and that the rider should have a crop, while others omit that recommendation.

Rufus’s text has also been reused by other authors, such as Pietro de Crescenzi (1230 – c. 1320), in the Opus Ruralium Commodorum (also translated in French), in the first years of the 14^th century or Guillaume de Villiers, in another veterinary treaty, in the mid-15^th, among others. Again, analysing the changes they may have made to the original source can help to have a more complete picture of how horse-training was put into practice, or at least discover what techniques were the most widespread in a given cultural and geographical landscape.

Those changes also raise the question of knowing what type of horses were concerned by this training method. Rufus certainly had warhorses in mind when he wrote. However, Pietro de Crescenzi’s Opus Ruralium Commodorum, is an agricultural treaty. Do the transformations he makes to Rufus’s method indicate a focus on rounceys rather than destriers? How significant are those changes? Horse breaking and training is always done with a purpose: the future use of the horse. Though some techniques transcend this, the way a draught horse used for ploughing, a riding horse and a warhorse are trained will vary as much as what is expected from them differs.

In the case of warhorses, those expectations would have been to have an animal who would listen to his rider, respond to his aids and be easily controllable on a battlefield. He would have had to turn, stop and gallop, easily and on demand. Yet, having an obedient mount was not the only goal. Horse-training is, whatever the time and culture it takes place in, influenced by the way those animals are perceived, by the symbolism applied to them and by a degree of anthropomorphising. It goes further than the simple usability of the horse, and this is also what I intend to study.

It would be limiting to work on a subject such as the breaking-in and training of horses from a purely literary and theoretical point of view. This is the reason why I am also going to look at archaeological evidence, such as the remains of bits and spurs. Horse-breaking and training necessitates a number of tools, some of which, like the bits, are precisely described by Rufus. Those descriptions can be compared to the available archaeological material. The study of archaeological sources can also help to ascertain what effect the equipment used would have had on actual horses.

I look forward to furthering this project and to working alongside the Warhorse team!