One means of examining the ways in which the horse pervaded the medieval mind is to consider how often and in what ways it was represented in material culture. It is well known that the horse featured widely in medieval manuscript art, on wall hangings and in architectural sculpture. Its presence as/on/in artefacts (in two or three dimensions) has perhaps been less fully discussed, with the exception of the equestrian seal and the aquamanile (hand-washing vessel) in metal; both objects show knights on horseback and both hold elite associations. As a potential way into examining more popular reception of the medieval horse, in this blog post we will consider a relatively untapped source for exploring horse art – the corpus of metal-detected finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS).

In a previous post on the PAS dataset we introduced the range of actual horse equipment – horseshoes, harness pendants, stirrup-strap mounts, and so on. But within the PAS database, now numbering over 1.5 million artefacts, there are also a number of objects which either show, or take the form of, a horse, but which are probably not items of equestrian equipment. Across the two parts of this post, Laura Jones and Rob Webley examine two groups of medieval object that loom large within the set of ‘equine’ (rather than ‘equestrian’) objects – the subject of Part 1 is a horse-shaped padlock moulded in the round. In Part 2 the focus turns to a chape (i.e. the metal point of a scabbard or sheath) with relief decoration that includes a horse and rider.

Padlocks

Zoomorphic padlocks reported to the PAS database commonly represent horses, with just under 40 examples of such padlocks recorded to date. They are elongated, in a moulded case, with holes for the padlock bolt in the rear end of the horse and the keyhole situated at the horse’s chest; the padlock bolt fits into a hole located in the horse’s head. Very rarely, examples are preserved with the bolt in situ (see SUR-D02FD3 below).

Medieval zoomorphic padlock (PAS: SUR-D02FD3) (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme)

Regarding decorative details, these padlocks have lines that depict the horse’s saddle; others depict bridles, bands and even the mane of the horse – some decorative examples can be seen below.

Highly decorated medieval zoomorphic padlock (PAS: SOM-ABF421) (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme)

Medieval zoomorphic padlock depicting a harness pendant (PAS: WAW-565B1A) (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme)

Within these horse-shaped padlocks, there are certain distinct patterns – enough to suggest potential groupings of types, though no typology has been created as of yet. Many padlocks are rectilinear in profile such as SUR-D02FD3 (above). A particular challenge is how to group types of decorative zoomorphic padlocks such as SOM-ABF421, WAW-565B1A and LEIC-CE40BE because of the differences in the stature of the horse and equestrian equipment depicted on these padlocks in comparison to the rectilinear padlocks. Lastly, an ever-present question is how do we classify a given padlock when we have to take into consideration damage to the objects or unique features?

Medieval zoomorphic padlock depicting girth straps (PAS: LEIC-CE40BE) (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme)

A good place to start is to focus on the equestrian equipment depicted on the padlocks such as the bridle on SOM-ABF421 (above) that is demarcated by two crossed grooves on the horse’s head. If we contrast this to the horse’s head on LEIC-CE40BE (above), which shows compression of the object (possibly, as the record suggests, by the padlock’s bolt), can we be certain that there were no other decorative or unique details? Also up for discussion is the shape of the horse. Some padlocks are described on the PAS as stocky, which could allude to a pack horse, and others look almost taller in stature and tend to be what I like to term ‘dynamic’ (legs in pose or active stances). However, it is important to note that it is common for either/both front and hind legs to be broken. This changes our perception of the horse’s stance and stature and makes it hard to decide on a specific classification. In addition, there are unique details depicted on these padlocks such as the harness pendant on WAW-565B1A (shown on the band on the upper sides above the front legs) and the girth straps below the saddle on LEIC-CE40BE – commonly seen in iconography of the ‘warhorse’. For now, we shall leave the grouping of types to future discussion and refer to the general classification given to them in a wider discussion of padlocks by Lewis (2016, 168-9) – Type V ‘zoomorphic’ padlocks.

Regarding the date of these Type V padlocks, we can use excavated examples to ascertain a rough date range. A padlock was found within Winchester’s medieval city within a context that included a Clark type 2B horseshoe (Goodall 1990, 1011), the horseshoe’s typological dating of c. 1150-1225 supporting the dating attributed to the site phase (12th to early 13th century). On the PAS, the relevant Finds Recording Guide provides a broad date range for these padlocks of between c. 1100-1400 because of similar models from the Middle East that date between the 13th and 14th centuries. The evidence from Winchester, plus the way in which these padlocks are decorated, makes a 12th- to 13th-century date for them plausible.

Lewis (2016) refers to the ambiguous nature of these zoomorphic padlocks – we do not know their specific function nor do we know their connection to medieval society. One possibility is that they are connected to high-status sites within the English landscape – locations such as manor houses, castles and palaces. Jervis (2011) was influenced by zoomorphic pottery found at high-status sites in Southampton and applied the idea of zoomorphic symbolism connected to wealth to these padlocks. This assumption is linked to elite symbolism of animals related to the hunt – by displaying them through objects, it may reinforce a message of wealth, hence reinforcing their connection to elite sites. Of note is the distribution of these padlocks across England; as you can see from the distribution map, most of the padlocks are situated in rural remote locations (apart from a few clusters around urban sites such as Winchester, York and Norwich).

Map of Lewis Type V padlocks (by Laura Jones)

When researching the context of the find location spots for these padlocks, all have medieval manorial links (medieval manor houses proximal/directly on or to the location of the padlocks). Interestingly, some find spots such as the above records from Warwickshire and Surrey have close connections to horses; the Warwickshire record was found in a medieval settlement tied closely to the area known as the Vale of the Red Horse (an area between Edgehill and the Northern Cotswolds); the Surrey record has surrounding horse-related place names such as The Paddock and elite place names like Kingwood Common and Earl’s Wood (all of the above forming the 12th to 13th-century parish where the de Grey family manor is situated). The exact function of these padlocks (beyond fastening a casket) is hard to ascertain, regardless of what the distribution map or the context of location spots may reveal to us. The links could support the theory of these objects being associated with the elite however the contextual information of a few records are not definitive evidence that they are solely linked with elite sites (and the location of the Winchester example is certainly not in a high status one). More research would have to be conducted into these sites by looking at further Type V padlock records, alongside additional historical records, to reveal more about the connection between medieval society and these padlocks, which may even reveal more about their precise function.

To be continued

Bibliography (Part 1)

Goodall, I. H., 1990. ‘Locks and Keys’, in M. Biddle (ed.), Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester: Artefacts from Medieval Winchester, Oxford: Winchester Studies 7, 1001-1036.

Jervis, B., 2011. ‘Placing Pottery: An Actor-led Approach to the Use and Perception of Medieval Pottery in Southampton and its Region c. AD 700-1400’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southampton.

Lewis, M., 2016. ‘Mounts for Furnishings, Padlocks, and Candleholders: Understanding the Urbanization of Medieval England through Metal Small Finds Recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme’, in B. Jervis, L. G. Broderick and I. G. Sologestoa (eds), Objects, Environment, and Everyday Life in Medieval Europe, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 159-185.

In this latest post, Dr Gary Baker explains the equine organisation within the royal household.

Much of what has been written on king’s horses in medieval England has focussed upon the royal studs: the locations in which the monarch’s warhorses of the future were bred. What is often neglected is the other part of the royal equine network: the horses within the royal household. The relative lack of scholarship on the royal household horses is important, because it was the royal household into which the horses bred in the king’s studs were sent, used either as mounts for the king and his inner-most associates or else requisitioned for use in the household’s myriad of departments. Also, whilst the studs provided warhorses for the king for the most part, some of these animals deemed unfit for war were used by the various household departments as pack horses, messengers’ horses, or everyday riding horses.

The royal household on the move. Horses were used for a variety of purposes in the household such as riding, baggage, for messengers, and pulling important persons, as here

The organisation of the royal household in the early fourteenth century was laid out in a household ordinance of 1318. The ordinance specified five great offices of the household: the steward, the keeper of the wardrobe, the chamberlain, the controller, and the cofferer. The king’s horses appear within the Marshalsea, a ‘sub-department’ under the jurisdiction of the keeper of the wardrobe, who acted as the household’s treasurer. The Marshalsea (not to be confused with the Marshalsea Court which administered justice in the household and twelve miles around the itinerant household as it moved around the country) was staffed by several senior officials, each with specified functions related to the maintenance and care of the king’s horses. There was the chief clerk, whose job was to account for the spending of the chief purveyor of the avenary, the latter of which was charged with obtaining foodstuffs and other goods for the horses. The day-to-day care of the horses was supervised by two sergeants known as harbingers, each with a deputy, and three sergeant-marshals.

The medieval household was a vibrant place, with many courtiers and officials present at any one time

The 1318 ordinance does not provide the names of any of these equine officials, but we can identify a good number of them by looking at near-contemporary wardrobe accounts. The wardrobe book of Roger de Waltham, Keeper of the king’s wardrobe for 1 May 1322 – 19 October 1323, is a perfect example in this regard. Members of the royal household were provided with an annual allowances for clothes (robes) and shoes, with senior members of the household entitled to allowances twice-annually in winter and summer. Waltham’s 1322–23 account, which straddles three of Edward II’s regnal years (15–17), therefore covers the payment of garment allowances in the summer of 1322, and the winter and summer of 1323, and lists by name members of the royal household in receipt of these allowances. From these lists we can name virtually all the members of the royal equine establishment at this time.

Senior officials of the Marshalsea in receipt of allowances for robes, 1322-23

In the summer of 1323, for example, the wardrobe book names 32 carters in receipt of an allowance to buy shoes. These men worked throughout the household’s various departments along with 85 valets, sumptermen, palfreymen, and keepers of the horses of the king in the household’s stables . These 85 men are listed within the departments in which they worked, such as one man managing the pantry’s horse and another the banquet hall’s horse; beasts most likely used to carry the various equipment of those departments. The allowances for robes are even more revealing, as they also name several senior equine officials. The chief clerk of the Marshalsea at the time was Simon Eycote; Maurice Drageheved was the sergeant of the palfreys; Master John Gilmyn the marshal of the horses; John Mildenhale was senior farrier; Giles de Toulouse, was keeper of ‘certain horses of the king within the household’; Hugh de Beaurepaire, was keeper of certain of the king’s horses outside the court (extra curiam); and John de Reading, was sergeant and harbinger of the sumpters and carthorses. In addition to these senior officials the lists of those in receipt of robes also name 4 purveyors, 2 harbingers, and 5 farriers, along with 30 sumptermen working in diverse other departments. Unfortunately no overall totals for the number of horses in the household is provided, but historians have argued that since each groom was usually in charge of one horse, there could well have been anywhere between 100 and 200 horses present at any one time; a combination of the king’s warhorses and also the various horses required for baggage, messengers, and transporting the household’s people and goods round the country.

Horses were bred in the royal studs and probably looked mean, like this lot!

At this stage the external network of the king’s studs was also accounted for in the wardrobe (it would later do so at the exchequer). In 1322–23 we can thus see the external stud network operating in parallel to that of the household. The aforementioned Hugh de Beaurepaire received £344 9s 7½d for the period 1 May 1322 – 7 July 1323 for his wages and the upkeep of an unspecified combination of 40 destriers, coursers, and other horses at the royal stable at Reading, and another £71 1s 10d for keeping 30 horses, again at Reading, from 8 July to 19 October. At the same time the royal southern studs were in the custody of Brother John de Redemere, a Dominican friar. Redemere received £210 1s 1d for his wages and for those of various stable hands, and the costs of keeping 4 stallions, 23 mares, and 41 foals at Woodstock; 2 stallions and 24 mares at Cornbury; 2 stallions, 19 mares, and 6 colts at Risborough; 32 colts at Odiham; and 4 stallions, 71 mares and 26 colts at Rayleigh (254 animals in total), and an unspecified number at Windsor, from 1 May 1322 – 7 July 1323. In the north, first Richard de Merksale (9 January – 20 March 1323), and then John de Neusom (20 March – 19 October), received £253 10s 5d for their expenses, wages, and the wages of John de Derlington (Darlington), Marshal of the horses, one farrier, and other valet’s and pages, keeping 28 of the king’s ‘great horses and a lesser number of other horses’ in Yorkshire.

Whilst this is only a snap-shot in time it should hopefully show that there was more to the royal equine administration than the horses in the king’s studs, and as the household grew so too did the number of horses required for its personnel and baggage. The royal household on the move, with hundreds of people and animals on the move must, therefore, have been a very impressive sight.

A year is a long time in research, and the interval between the last project summary blog in January 2020 and this update twelve months later has seen some seismic shifts in ways of working for a project such as ours due to the ongoing Covid pandemic.  As well as confronting some obvious challenges, our project has put in place mitigations and work plans to drive the work forward and make exciting progress and new discoveries on several fronts.

A meeting of Warhorse project staff 2021 style

The Zooarchaeological Work Package has developed in particularly innovative ways during the crisis in order to mitigate some of the difficulties around many museums and archive collections being closed for long periods of time, which has prevented ready access horse bones for analysis.  Carly Ameen, our Project Officer, has led the way in building a large digital dataset of existing measurements of horse bones. Containing in excess of 6,000 records sourced from a wide network of zooarchaeological collaborators, this dataset is proving a rich and remarkable platform for deep analysis of horse metrics. Preparing this resource has been time consuming and involved, including extensive cleaning of records and streamlining for consistency, but we are quietly confident that it will enable us to model changes in horse size through the centuries in a way not previously possible. Preliminary analyses are both promising and intriguing, and the database has the potential to bring out contrasts between horse remains from different types of sites (such as castles, religious communities and settlements) and between the rural and urban worlds, as well as through time. We are already preparing a manuscript for a paper to present some headline results. Despite the issues of accessing museums, the team has still managed to locate specimens of horse bones from some choice sites that have been transported to our facilities in Exeter for sampling and analysis (see this earlier blog post). The materials have ranged widely — from early medieval horse bones derived from Whitby Abbey on the coast of Yorkshire through to early modern examples from Bradgate Park, Leicestershire — and our work has involved X-Ray recording and the extraction of samples for genetic analysis that have been mailed off to our partner’s laboratory in Toulouse. We await seeing the preliminary results…

Progressing our Material Culture Work Package during the Covid-19 pandemic has been a little less challenging than some other areas of the project given that it has as its core the analysis and enhancement of a digital resource that is fully online — the Portable Antiquities Scheme Database. Aided by Laura Jones, a University of Exeter Undergraduate Archaeology student on a year-long work placement with our project, Rob Webley has been driving forward work on cleaning and enhancing digital records relating to equestrian finds and on the spatial analysis of findspots. The project has already contributed to the development of the online Finds Recording Guides created by the Portable Antiquities Scheme — this link gives a good flavour of the work and of the types of horse gear that metal detectorists around the country are finding every day. Sometimes copper-alloy components can help us analyse equipment otherwise dominated by iron — an article published recently by Rob Webley suggests that a previously mysterious type of mount was in fact used on (iron) bridle bits. Harness pendants have been a particular focus of work, and the team have broken new ground in exploring representations of heraldry on these tiny but illuminating artefacts (see this earlier blog post) and studying their patterning in the landscape. One particularly tantalising possibility that we are exploring is that some documented medieval tournament sites preserve diagnostic artefact scatters including horse harness pendants. In the last year we have also made great initial strides with measuring armour, starting with the stored collections of the Royal Armouries in Leeds (see this blog post), but this is an element of the project that will have to stay in abeyance until museums and collections open up.

The History and Landscapes Work Package, led by our team at the University of East Anglia (Rob Liddiard and Gary Baker), has been making remarkable progress despite the challenges presented by the non-accessibility of some key historical archives during the Covid pandemic. The preliminary work on photographing records of royal horse accounts held by the National Archives in Kew that was carried out pre-pandemic has meant that some initial analyses have been possible — for example see this blog post on what these documents reveal about the maintenance, care and feeding of horses in the fourteenth century. One of the aspects of the project that excites us most is the potential for interplay between different categories of evidence, and a particularly novel aspect of this work package is the question of how we can relate documentary records of horse management to the physical evidence of the landscape. Excellent progress has been made on mapping for the first time the nationwide distribution of horse studs as it evolved through the centuries, and on reconstructing the hinterlands on which individual studs drew upon for resources. Hard details on the appearance of stud infrastructure is proving frustratingly elusive in the documents but we are hopeful that future combing of select archives will produce results, while the evidence of place-names provides another clear area of potential: see this blog for some early thoughts on what place-names can tell us about medieval equine landscapes. Over the course of the next year we will be selecting sites for fieldwork, including geophysical surveys, in our hunt for stud sites, and following up other leads in the documentary record.

With a series of journal articles in different stages of development and some already out: see for example: https://royalarmouries.org/stories/all-the-kings-horses/) and the outline of our project monograph developing fast, the team is keeping a keen eye on outputs and even follow-on funding opportunities to help build a legacy of our project. Project team members are also active on the international conference circuit, with highlights among planned presentations over the coming months being a paper at the EAA (European Association of Archaeologists) conference and the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies.

Do look out for future posts as the project develops in these directions and others.

I am Karina Rapp, and I am an Honorary Associate Research Fellow, Zooarchaeology Masters graduate, and PhD hopeful from the University of Exeter. I am an active horsewoman, equine journalist, and the president of a nonprofit registry that promotes a rare breed of historic cavalry horse, supports global rare breed conservation efforts, and educates the public about the benefits of genetic diversity. I greatly enjoy hands-on research that has the ability to change people’s perspectives on history, especially when it includes faunal remains. The Warhorse project ticks all the boxes for me, and I am so grateful to contribute towards a small part of it! My area of interest is equid conformation (functional shape), and I enjoy exploring ways to adapt modern conformation studies to archaeological remains and skeletal biomechanics.

Archaeological horse bones and material culture (such as bits and armour) can be compared to measurements from modern live horses to give a potential idea of the size and body type of past horses. Several basic types of horse exist, such as small ponies, average horses, and draught horses. This is relevant for reconstructing what the Medieval “Great Horse” actually looked like, and for the very interesting history of selective Medieval horse breeding. By developing a baseline of reliable data from modern horses (including important information such as their height and body type) we can see where ancient horses lie on the allometric spectrum between small ponies and large draughts.

Working remotely in the United States, I have traveled to four barns in southern Idaho to study a variety of animals: working ranch horses, children’s Welsh ponies, show jumping warmbloods, and Belgian draughts used under harness for agricultural work. Measuring a living breathing creature can be more complicated than old bones, though! Hard-edged callipers and bone boards are traded out for flexible seamstress measuring tapes and custom devices for getting around a horse’s muscular curves. Quiet measurements of bones deep in a well-lit lab are traded for dusty barn aisles, quick-moving targets, and sometimes unwilling 1000 lb. subjects in small spaces. The bones of living animals are encased in cartilage and muscle and tendons; it is important to understand that living measurements will never match up exactly with the dry measurements of skeletal materials. Measurements are therefore less about exact bony markers and more about best-guess estimates of chosen data points that correlate as close as possible to certain bone lengths.

Basic body measurements of the horse (such as face and leg measurements) are obtained with a flexible seamstress tape, and can help relate horse size to custom-fit equine armour. Bit sizers are used in the modern horse world to measure a horse’s mouth length in order to choose an appropriately-sized bit (the metal piece that fits in a horse’s mouth) for riding. Bit length is important because a too-small bit can pinch or damage the skin of the mouth, and a too-large bit can slide through the horse’s mouth and knock against cheek teeth while riding. In an archaeological context, we can take an actual historical bit and compare it to our baseline collection of mouth/bit lengths from modern horses. Together with other data, bit length could give us an idea of the potential size of the ancient horses who may have worn them.

A standard height-weight horse and pony tape is also used to calculate the height of each horse, which is important allometric data along with general information, such as the horse’s known breed (which indicates its body type, such as pony, small stock horse, draft, or warmblood). Even if a horse’s height is known by the owner, it’s good scientific practice to maintain consistency with data recording; one person takes each measurement for each horse, therefore limiting the human error factor.

While actual hooves have a small chance of appearing in the archaeological record, horse shoes are much more durable. And because horses wear many, many sets of shoes in their lifetime, it is more likely that we might find historical horse shoes. But what good are these artefacts if we have nothing to compare them to? How do we know the size of the horses who wore them? Taking a look at the size and shape of many living horses’ feet can be one way to figure that out. Measuring something as variable and oddly shaped as a horse’s foot can be tricky though, and this is where a little bit of creativity is needed. We have called the device developed for Warhorse our “Hoofometer”; it is a simple piece of clear plaskolite with two traditional scale bars added. By holding a horse’s hoof (as one does when cleaning their feet) and holding the hoofometer flat against the bottom of their hoof, it is possible to photograph it and therefore create a picture that can be shared with other researchers. They can then choose which measurements to take and how to define the shape and size of the foot.

Another tricky measurement that requires a creative solution is the hip of the horse. Rounded and bulging with muscle, it is not the kind of body part that can be measured with a simple seamstress tape. Such a measurement would result in a contour that follows the slope of muscle, and a contour measurement is a lot harder to relate directly to a skeletal measurement. Two metre sticks and some light hardware and scale bars are all that is needed to create a device that takes straight measurements of large muscled areas such as the hip. The sliding scale has two arms that rest against the chosen data points, resulting in a number that is a little closer to the greatest length of the pelvis.

Modern methods (such as the use of bit sizers for bit length and measuring a horse’s hoof for shoe size) can sometimes be useful when examining material culture in an equine context, and while not directly comparable, live body measurements can provide an interesting dataset next to skeletal measurements. Zooarchaeology can sometimes require interesting experiments and creative thinking, which makes it an endlessly enjoyable endeavour. Plus, any data-gathering that requires paying the subjects in carrots is a special bonus! I am immensely grateful to the team of Warhorse for letting me join their fun, and I look forward to the results of this great collaborative project.

Digital Camera

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!

I am Laura Jones, and I joined the project as a University of Exeter undergraduate Archaeology and History student in the summer of 2020. I am grateful to all the team for taking me on board and bringing me into the world of all things horse-related. Being a former secondary teacher, an intern at the University’s Digital Humanities Lab and a volunteer within the archaeology collections at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, I hope to bring my experience of material culture and public engagement to the project. Working alongside Rob Webley, I am focusing on the material culture package of the project that includes the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s (PAS) data to bring more understanding to our knowledge of medieval horse equipment – see Rob’s previous PAS post here. Whilst interpreting the PAS data, we have also been on a hunt for medieval horse iconography from across the UK/Europe to enhance our understanding of medieval horse equipment and how the medieval warhorse was perceived and represented.

Figure 1- Exeter Cathedral misericord of a locust like figure- ‘courtesy of the Dean & Chapter of Exeter Cathedral’ 2020.

Strikingly apparent is how the warhorse was an iconic figure within the medieval world and its imagination; most interestingly- and quite apt at the time writing, amidst the 2020 Covid pandemic – is how horses were depicted within medieval apocalyptic manuscripts. Brought to our attention by the Principal Investigator of the project Professor Oliver Creighton, is the representation on Misericord no. 41 (c.1240-70) at Exeter Cathedral (see Figure 1) of a locust-like figure – one of the Bible’s ‘locusts’ from the Book of Revelations (9:3). These locusts ‘“were like unto horses prepared for battle [with] breastplates of iron [and] their sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots [of] horses rushing to battle”’ (KJV, Rev. 9: 7-9). The locust figure is equipped with protective mail barding and a saddle with a high pommel and cantle – designed for keeping the rider on their horse. Does the representation of horse equipment in apocalyptic iconography, despite perhaps being as far removed from reality, give us some insight into medieval horse equipment? How did artists grapple with their depiction of ‘breastplates of iron’ in the phase prior to horse armour usage in the late 12^th century in comparison to before plate armour was consistently used in the 14^th century?

Figure 2: Selden Supra Part 2 Folio 69r, sourced from: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Illumination (from 35mm), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Folio 94 – from Beatus of Liébana’s Las Huelgas Apocalypse (1220), now held in The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (MS M.429, f.94), depicts the riders wearing mail but not the locusts. On first inspection, one could assume the locusts could be wearing armour; the white highlights on the horses in the breast and hind regions create a shine to the locusts: something that is usually seen with armour. However, when compared to other depictions, it is clear the highlight accentuates the musculature qualities and powerful strength of those areas that drive the warhorse. The saddles once again hold their riders in with a high pommel and cantle. Using iconography, despite its artistic nature, therefore allows us to assess trends in horse equipment, how it was used and in combination with the archaeological data and to apply chronological information to it.

Figure 3: Canonici Apocalypse, Folio 10v, sourced from: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Illumination (from 35mm), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Mail barding worn by horses was very common by the 13^th century. Similar to the misericord at Exeter Cathedral are the examples of locusts wearing mail barding (see Figure 2) in the Selden Supra, circa 1315-1325 (MS. Selden Supra 38, Part. 2, f.69r). Another good example is seen in Figure 3 from the Canonici Apocalypse, 1320-1330 (MS. Canon. Bibl. Lat. 62, f.10v). This shows a range of horse equipment. The familiar trend of the saddle that holds its rider in (high pommel and cantle), a girth to keep the saddle in place and horseshoes which aid durability of the hoof are clearly illustrated, linking the locust to the figure of the warhorse. This folio clearly depicts the importance of horse equipment being suitable for battle. What is interesting is that it is rare to find mail barding depicted earlier than the 13th century. However, Rob Webley came across Folio 23 (Figure 4) from the Bamberger Apokalypse of c.1020 (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Inventar-Nr. Bibl. 140, f. 23r.) which is one of the earliest examples of mail barding depicted in medieval iconography that we have personally found so far on a horse or horse-like figure.

Figure 4: Bamberger Apokalypse, Folio 23r, sourced from: Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc.Bibl.140. Photo: Gerald Raab. Made available through CC-BY-SA 4.0.

These examples are relevant to our discussions of not only how the medieval warhorse and its equipment were perceived but also how and why they could have been used. Applying due source criticism, we can match up iconographical depictions with material culture, understand typologies within the equipment and try to establish chronological frameworks for our understanding of the medieval warhorse. As our iconographical horse hunt continues alongside our work on material culture for the project, it will be interesting to see what other depictions/material comes to light and what we can learn from them.

Dr Gary Baker, Postgraduate Research Fellow on the Medieval Warhorse Project, has been systematically working through the accounts of royal warhorses in medieval England. Here he presents some of the findings of that work

Sir Geoffrey Lutterell, assisted by his wife and daughter-in-law

The warhorses of England’s medieval monarchs were some of their most prized possessions. Not only did they have a practical use in war and the tournament, but they also served to represent the king’s wealth and power to his people, with coursers, and especially the elite destriers, acting as physical embodiments of this power. They were important as gifts to those whom the king wished to reward for good and loyal service, and those wishing to curry favour with the king often presented him with prized destriers. Warhorses, therefore, acted as an important social glue which bound the king to his people.

(Fig. 1) Detail of an account showing the monthly expenses of stabling Edward I’s horses in 1299-1300

The maintenance, care, and upkeep of the royal warhorses has generated a huge number of records, many of which can be found in The National Archives UK. The amount of money spent on these animals shows just how important they were. From November 1298 to the end of his reign in July 1307, for example, Edward I spent nearly £16,000 on stabling his horses alone; nearly £1,800 a year (fig. 1). Edward and his successors continued to spend large amounts of money on the upkeep of royal horses. They were also keen on improving the quality of their warhorses, acquiring new animals from both home and abroad. In 1334-35, for instance, Arnold Garcy, keeper of the king’s great horses south of the Trent, travelled to Spain to purchase great horses for Edward III, including the purchase of 23 such animals for a total of £715 13s 4d.

Account of Arnold Garcy, keeper of the king’s horses south of the Trent, going to buy horses in Spain in 1334-35.

Edward III’s reign provides particularly rich information on the maintenance of the royal warhorses. From the start of his reign the king appointed separate keepers of the ‘great horses’ (a catch-all term applied mainly to destriers and coursers, but which sometimes incorporated other types of horse), north and south of the Trent. The accounts of these keepers provide minute details relating to their receipts and expenses including fodder (oats, cut grass, hay, bran, horse bread) equine equipment (bridles, lunges, reins, saddles, stirrups, trammels, hobbles, horseshoes, and halters), the wages of grooms and farriers, medicines purchased to treat ailments (including vinegar, honey, powdered ginger, tallow, ointments, and bandages), and candles for lighting the lamps around the stables and helping the grooms to see in the dark winter months.

The destriers in particular were well-fed on a diet of oats and hay, with each animal consuming up to half a bushel a day (with a bushel weighing roughly 40lbs) which would have made them more likely and liable to bite and kick. Unfortunately the records do not record the size of these elite animals in horse hands (hh), though the destriers’ diet would suggest they were large by contemporary if not modern standards, perhaps 15hh. Indeed, stature and musculature were likely more important qualities for warhorses to possess to the medieval mind than height, which explains why the latter information is never recorded in medieval English accounts. It has been estimated, given the volume of oats they consumed, that destriers probably weighed 1,600lbs or more. Compared to present-day thoroughbreds which weigh roughly 1,000lbs, the medieval destrier was doubtlessly an impressive animal.

The famous Warwick shaffron, housed in The Royal Armouries

Every care was afforded these horses, as disease could ravage a herd. ‘Murrain’ (a catch-all term which was applied in the accounts to a variety of equine ailments) was a particular problem. At the stud at Ightenhill in Lancashire in 1331-32, twenty-one out of the twenty-three newborns that year succumbed to the disease. Other diseases could be just as contagious. In October 1326 one grey at Reading died of farcy, a serious bacterial disease which causes growths in the lymph vessels. Wooden and thatch buildings where the horses were stabled were also at risk of fire. Three of the king’s ‘great horses’ (2 destriers and 1 courser) being kept in stables at Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, died in a fire that started in the night of 14 April 1352 outside of the stables, though the clerk was quick to assert that their keeper, William de Fremelesworth, was not at fault.

Copper, a mare at the Leeds Royal Armouries in her full armour. Mares like Copper were not used as warhorses in medieval England. Instead they were utilised as riding horses and baggage animals on campaign.

The adult stallions – all destriers and coursers in medieval England were male – were accounted for and, presumably, stabled separately from the mares, colts, and foals, which were kept at the king’s studs which were located all over the country. Some of the major studs in the north were at Ightenhill, Knaresborough, Burstwick, and Plumpton; whilst in the south, Cornbury, Guildford, Rayleigh, Princes Risborough, Stratfield Mortimer, Woodstock, and Windsor predominated. From at least Edward III’s reign these studs do not appear to have had resident stallions, with the great horses being sent to cover the mares at different studs in rotation.

The accounts also provide information on the number of the horses present within these studs, with detailed records kept of the numbers throughout the year, as can be seen from this example for Stratfield Mortimer, Berkshire, in 1349-50. Detailed descriptions were also provided of the coat colours of the animals to aid identification.

Mares: start 17 (1 bay with white spots and two rear white feet, 1 bay, 1 white-grey with one left rear foot, 1 black which blends into grey, 3 greys, 1 brown bay with two rear white feet, 2 blacks with stars in front, 3 sorrels with white spots, 1 black with two white front feet, 1 grey with white spots, 1 brown bay, and 1 bay-grey); 1 brown bay mare died on 4 October 1349, as appears in the inquiry headed by Adam de Dene, ordered by the king to inquire into the deaths of the king’s horses in the memoranda delivered to the treasurer enrolled in the Hillary term of the 25^th year of Edward III (1351–52) (16). Colts: start 4 born the previous year; 3 were delivered to Odiham on 4 October 1349 for breaking in amongst the king’s great horses (1); the remaining colt died on 3 October 1349. Fillies: start 7 (1 of 2.5yrs old, 1 of 1.5yrs old, and 5 born the previous year); 1 black filly, then 3yrs old, died on 5 June 1350, and on 11 June 1 grey then 1yr old died, and 1 black filly, then 1yr old, died on 16 June (4). Newborns: 6 born this year (3 colts and 3 fillies), all of which remain at the end of the account.

When young horses reached maturity (usually around 3.5yrs old for fillies and 2.5yrs old for colts) the colts were sent for training and breaking in amongst the king’s great horses, and some of the mares were selected for breeding. The remainder were either sold or sent to the household to act as horses for messengers, as riding horses, or as gifts to members of the household.

Warhorse numbers in the royal studs and stables obviously varied over time, ranging from 500-600 horses of all types over the period 1320-60. From c. 1360, however, the large numbers of horses were sold and the new position of Master of the Horse was created. The man occupying this position became an important official in the royal household, but instead of dealing with hundreds of animals, he was tasked with maintaining a smaller number of more elite beasts.

Look at a large-scale Ordnance Survey map and it is perhaps surprising to see how many places that exist today owe their name to the presence of horses: Horsham, Horsely, Horsebridge, Studleigh and so on (Fig. 1).  One of the aims of Warhorse is to shed more light on what we might call ‘equine landscapes’ of the Middle Ages, and place-names represent an important category of evidence for investigation. Significantly for the project, many of our modern ‘horse’ names have Old English origins and so provide a valuable dataset for analysis.

Fig. 1 Horse place-names – East and West Horsley in Hampshire

Terms that refer to horses appear in both ‘major’ place-names given to settlements and also as more ‘minor’ names often given to fields or farms. Nationally there are literally hundreds of them. Clearly at some point in the past horses were such a feature of these places that they warranted naming as such and so our horse place-names potentially provide us with evidence for the location of specific breeding sites or concentrations of hooves on the ground. So far, so good.

But the interpretation of place-names is complicated by a number of factors. Firstly, there is the difficulty of whether names attest to the commonplace – a name relating to horses might indicate an abundance that made for a distinguishing feature – or the opposite – a scarcity of horses in any given area might mean those places where they did exist were distinctive. Secondly, names are not always straightforward: Maresfield in Sussex derives from Old English mere ‘pool’ rather than denoting the presence of equines.  Thirdly, names are often very difficult to date precisely. Clearly a proportion of the horse names found today are relatively recent (think of how many Black Horse pubs there are out there) and the exact date of many minor names, which are probably medieval, but where we would like more precision for the purposes of analysis, are frustratingly elusive. Fortunately, for major place-names, documentary evidence often confirms an early date (Domesday Book is very helpful here) and these cases must reflect in some way horse management in the pre-Conquest period.

Fig. 2Modern Landscape of Horsey, Norfolk

One such place is Horsey in north east Norfolk on the edge of the Broads (Fig. 2). In 1086 Domesday Book records the name Horseia meaning ‘horse island’ – from the Old English hors ‘horse’ and ēg ‘island’. Go there today and while you will struggle to find it (this is Norfolk remember), there are traces of a gentle hill where the church now stands and from which the ‘island’ part of the name was presumably taken. In the late eleventh century this island would have stood at the mouth of what is now the river Thurne and today’s semi-drained farmland would have been a wide expanse of estuarine salt marsh and grazing, something readily appreciable today even if the ‘island’ is not (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 What is now drained farmland would have been wetland grazing in the eleventh century.

So why ‘horse’ island? As the project is discovering, there is some evidence that the place name hors, denoted feral or semi-feral herds, and here it is interesting that Domesday Book also records large numbers of what it calls ‘wild mares’ in neighbouring manors. Such feral herds were presumably exploited much in the way that they are today, perhaps with young animals being drawn off on a cyclical basis for breaking in and use elsewhere.

So – should we be imagining a feral horse population around Horsey in the Anglo-Saxon period grazing on the extensive wetlands, perhaps analogous to Camargue horses in modern France? Perhaps the Norfolk Horsey was not unique as ‘horse islands’ are also found in the Somerset and Pevensey Levels, the Peterborough Fens, on the Essex coast and what is now Portsmouth harbour – once all very similar environments. And would the horse living in these landscapes had different characteristics to those grazing in different surroundings, such as upland Exmoor and Dartmoor, which Domesday Book shows was clearing taking place? Warhorse is currently exploring these and many other issues and it will be fascinating to see if the zooarchaeology and material culture strands of the project can help us to further refine our understanding of these early horse landscapes. It’s all in the name (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 A dim echo of a horse landscape of the Anglo-Saxon period? The clue is in the name…