Our project’s PhD student Helene Benkert has been on another mission to infiltrate the world of medieval re-enactment. This time it took her to Tewkesbury Medieval Festival, one of the largest gatherings of its kind in Europe.

Thousands of enthusiasts gather each year on the fields near Tewkesbury Abbey, the very same fields where on 4 May 1471 the Lancastrian army was defeated by the Yorkist contingent, to relive this critical battle. Stalls and tents of re-enactors from all over Europe are scattered across the area and swarmed by excited visitors.

Just like the big Easter Jousting Event at Leeds, Tewkesbury’s Medieval Festival draws a huge crowd. It seems, hitting each other with sticks – whether lances or swords, on horse or on foot – is as popular as ever. At least, they have cut back on the blood that gave The Bloody Meadow its name.

While this event is mostly horse-free – there is a single mounted knight with a stunning Percheron-type grey, aptly named ‘King’ – there would have been plenty of equids in the original battle, whether for combat or transport.

In lieu of the actual horses, the ‘Warhorse’ project acts as their ambassador at Tewkesbury. Armed with posters, flyers and real horse bones from Exeter’s reference collection I go about my mission to draw people into the world of medieval warhorses. And people are most willing to follow the lure.

After a fabulous day of chatting with many wonderfully engaged and interested people about our project and horses in general it is time for the Big Event, the re-enactment of the Battle of Tewkesbury. Narrated like a modern football game, we watch the drama unfold as several hundred re-enactors in full armour and armed with lances and swords charge at each other in a rain of arrows and the smoke of large guns. It truly is a spectacle and the audience dutifully holds their breath and cheers at the appropriate moments.

For the final skirmish, re-enactors and visitors alike make their way through Tewkesbury town and to the abbey. The conclusive beheadings are accompanied by much cheering and laughter (perhaps not too much unlike the real ones some 600 years ago) and followed by friend and (revived) foe joining each other for a pint or many.

It’s wonderful to see so many people interested in history and a town so invested in its own past. As much as importance is placed on authenticity, the feeling of community and integrity within the accurate historical settings is just as valuable.

Next year, we will be back to represent medieval warhorses. We will happily share our newest research and chat about horses. There will also be fun activities for old and young alike, so do pop by and say hello.

Helene Benkert, a doctoral student studying at the University of Exeter as part of the Warhorse project, went on a fact-finding mission to the Royal Armouries to experience their world-famous Easter jousting event. In future years the project hopes to develop display materials that can help engage with members of the public at these events.

Helene writes:
The International Jousting Competition at the Royal Armouries in Leeds is a huge event. Even in our modern times, jousting can still draw a big crowd. It wasn’t any different back in the medieval period.

Perhaps a little like football matches today, nobility would come together to ride, fight and cheer. Those knights successful enough would be celebrated like stars. Often enough, however, a career was ended prematurely through serious injuries or even death of the combatant, and attrition rates for horses were notoriously high.
Tournaments emerged in eleventh and twelfth centuries as a way to train for war and pass time between battles and campaigns. Soon they developed into the biggest sports events for nobles and a stage to show off skill as much as wealth and status.

The joust, where two knights on their valuable warhorses would charge at each other with lances, is the most widely known part of these competitions. Horses, of course, were an integral part of these tournaments.

The horses competing with their “knights” at the Royal Armouries in 2019 are sporting their owner’s colours and shiny metal chaffrons are protecting their heads. They pick up on the excitement of the audience and reenactors around them, ears pricked and prancing about the arena.

These are stunt horses – professionals – from Atkinson Action Horses, and they are used to all sorts of noise and racket. They are highly trained, just like medieval war and tournament horses had to be excellently trained to ensure their riders’ safety and, of course, victory. The horses were and are the real stars, directed by the knight in the saddle.

Back in the Middle Ages, a destrier or charger would have been the best bred and trained horse on the market and sold for exorbitant prices only the very rich could afford. Bigger than normal working horses, these were swift, fierce and strong stallions, clad in silver armour.

They certainly are impressive to watch in the tilt yard of the Royal Armouries as they gallop towards each other in the bright colours of their owner’s house. It is easy to imagine people enjoying this kind of entertainment so many centuries ago as the modern crowd cheers for their favourites.

Next year we will be back, with lots of facts and fun on and around medieval horses. So come and join us for talks, activities, crafts or a chat.

A large component of the Warhorse project is the analysis of horse bones from medieval archaeological sites across Britain. Zooarchaeology, the study of ancient animal remains, provides insight into the unique roles that animals held in the past, both as food but also more significantly as important companions critically linked to social and cultural practices. The bones of these animals can tell us about their physical appearance, health, age at death and lifestyle, all of which combine to help us better understand the use of horses in the medieval period, and particularly to highlight the impact of their use in warfare.

   Fig.1 Assorted animal bones, including horse from Ipplepen, Devon

Animal bones are frequently recovered in large numbers from archaeological sites in Britain, often in refuse pits where the bones are the remains of food waste (Fig. 1). However, animal bones are also found as part of special deposits that could include animals which were given their own burials, animals included in human burials, or animals which were ritually deposited in other contexts. Understanding the context that remains are found in is an important first step for interpreting the roles of horse in the medieval period. While some burials of complete horse skeletons do exist, more often horse remains will be isolated elements as part of larger bone assemblages of many different species.

Fig.2 Disarticulated horse skeleton

For the Warhorse project, we will be using a combination of approaches to analyse these horse remains to integrate as many strands of evidence as possible for understanding the variation of medieval horses. We will begin by using traditional zooarchaeological techniques, which include taking a series of standardised measurements from the animal bones. These metrics will be used to provide evidence of size changes related to stature, including a detailed and systematic study of size, robusticity and shape, which could help us identify changes related to the increased use of horses in military activities. We will also record pathologies associated with working horses, such as spavin in the lower legs, back pathologies and bitting damage, to provide evidence for activities associated with military use/training.

Fig.3 Anatomical drawing of horse skeleton, showing location of elements used for GMM

Alongside these traditional metric analyses, we will apply advanced 3D geometric morphometrics (GMM) to study variations in astragalus and calcaneus bones. These particular elements have been selected as they are easily identified within archaeological assemblages and tend to preserve very well in one piece, an essential criterion for 3D GMM. Because these elements are located in the limbs (Fig. 3), their morphological variation is likely to indicate during life changes related to locomotor requirement. These requirements would likely differ between horses used for military and domestic purposes. Digital 3D models will be created through a well-used method of structure-from-motion photogrammetry (Fig. 4), which is quick, inexpensive, and does not damage specimens. By combining both the traditional metrics with these more advanced GMM techniques, we will be able to generate a new, independent chronology of changing horse size, morphology and appearance which will increase our ability to detect husbandry practices and management strategies during the medieval period, and hopefully identify a unique horse morphology specific to horses used for military purposes.

Fig.4 (top) Horse astragalus being photographed using photogrammetry, and (bottom), horse calcaneus during the modelling process.

Welcome to the webpage for a new research project on the archaeology of medieval warhorses that has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. While the website is still at an early stage of development — do watch out for new content as it builds — we hope that our page provides you with an initial snapshot of the work we have planned and that it gives some flavour of why we are so excited by it.

Over the next three years, our team of archaeologists and historians will be conducting the first ever integrated and systematic study of that most characteristic beast of the Middle Ages — the warhorse.  As well as being a famed weapon of war, the medieval horse was an unmistakable symbol of elite social status closely bound up with the development of knighthood, chivalry and aristocratic culture. Crucially, in developing a new archaeological approach to the subject, our project hopes to add something different and distinctive to our understanding of horses but also, by extension, to speak to some of these other intriguing and much-debated topics.

Our work will be wide-ranging: team members will be re-examining the physical remains of horses in the form of bones as well as the material culture associated with them, including horse apparel and armour, and mapping the landscapes in which horses were bred and trained. As such, we hope that our work will be engaging and interesting for a really wide range of people: not just medieval and military historians, zooarchaeologists (specialists in animal bones) and those interested in the historic landscape, but also people with a passion for all things horsey! We will be working closely with our collaborating institutions, the Royal Armouries and the Portable Antiquities Scheme, to develop events and activities that seize on the depth of public interest in equine culture and showcase our work more broadly.

One of the fascinating things about starting on an ambitious research journey of this sort is knowing that as well as making new discoveries on these various different fronts, other new possibilities and will reveal themselves as the work progresses. A project of this scope is also bound to have unanticipated spin-offs that we look forward to seizing upon and sharing. We hope that you look forward to following our journey on this website, via our Twitter feed (@AHRC_Warhorse), or — a little further down the line — through the events, publications and displays that our project will create.

The Project Team

February 2019

Welcome to the Warhorse project website. Our research gets underway in February 2019. Check back soon to find out about our research as it unfolds.