Gone Medieval - Medieval Warhorses

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

While Braveheart isn't known for its historical accuracy - there is one surprising fact it gets dramatically wrong. In the medieval period, the large formidable horses often depicted riding into battle were actually no bigger than a modern day pony. This week Cat is joined by Oliver Creighton and Alan Outram from the University of Exeter to discuss their new, fascinating findings into this topic. Working along side other research teams, they have been able to extract and analyse DNA from horse skeletons at over 171 different archaeological sites to bring a new light onto medieval warhorses.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hithttps://access.historyhit.com/?utm_source=audio&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Podcast+Campaign&utm_id=PodcastTo download, go to Android or Apple store:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.historyhit&hl=en_GB&gl=UShttps://apps.apple.com/gb/app/history-hit/id1303668247If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Gone Medieval content then subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter. Follow the link here:https://www.historyhit.com/sign-up-to-history-hit/?utm_source=timelinenewsletter&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Timeline+Podcast+Campaign Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. The medieval war horse leading a warrior or a knight into battle is often depicted on our screens as large, powerful and imposing. But other sources like manuscripts and illustrations are a little bit more unclear. So we haven't really been certain those horses really looked like. Until now, a collaborative team of researchers based at the universities of Exeter and the universities of East Anglia, funded by the Utson

Humanities Research Council, have concluded that, in actual fact, the medieval war horse was pretty tiny. In fact, it was more or less like a modern pony. Joining me here on the podcast today, I have the principal investigator on that project, Professor Oliver Creighton, an archaeologist from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Exeter. Thanks so much for joining me today, Oliver. Thank you very much. It's good to be here. So this is such an exciting project, isn't it? And we've got that really fun headline about the size of the horse and the slightly disappointing size of the war horse. But I think it'd be great to talk to you a little bit more about the wider context of that and the whole project that you're

working on and how that's come to be. But I wonder if we could just start with this idea, this sort of image of a large medieval war horse, is that just a sort of media thing or where's that come from? Yes, lots of people, lots of your listeners will be, when they think of a medieval warhorse, their image of what one of these beasts look like will be based on film. Lots of people who would have seen El Cid quite a few years ago.

people may have seen Braveheart, they may have seen more recently a knight's tail. And in these films, typically a knight's steed is depicted as an enormous great, sturdy, sturdy beast. And ultimately our research has shown this wasn't the case. Many, many medieval horses were, yes, they were the height of ponies. So other sources, and I mean, that's all sort of film and popular culture, really. But did we not have other sources written material or anything like that to describe them? Yeah, I mean, that's the point. of departure for our project really, established understandings of warhorses, what they look like,

how they were bred, how they were trained, very much based on historical sources, based on documentary sources. And what we've done is taken a different angle, a different point of view. We've approached the subject of horses and war horses from the archaeological evidence, evidence that's grounded in, if you like, material reality. And we've really tried to analyze, try to examine the fullest range of archaeological evidence for horses and war horses, from their bones, so from their physical remains. Documents about their breeding and training, we've looked at landscapes where horses were bred and trained, the material culture related to them, equestrian objects, horseshoes, decorative equestrian equipment. So the full range of evidence to try and give the

subject a completely different slant, different spin. And this is, is this is the kind of first results that have come out of that study now. Yeah, absolutely. So the paper that's hit the headlines, and we've had members of the team doing radio around the world and delighted to see the findings reported in all the main papers. Yeah, so this is a headlines paper from the zoo archaeological evidence. So by zoo archaeology for our project,

it means looking at animal bones, looking at horse bones. So it's been based on measurements, many thousands of measurements from bones from many hundreds of archaeological sites. So we haven't dug these bones up ourselves. They're bones that were dug up many years ago and are stored, usually in museums and archives. And our team members have reanalyzed these bones, but also collaborated with other zoo archaeologists around the country to bring together their data sets, their information to build a huge, a huge data set.

the biggest, the best that's ever been assembled about horses generally. So it's a big collaborative piece of work. And I'm going to talk to your colleague actually about that actual physical evidence from the animal bones a bit later on. But thinking a bit more back to this idea of the horse in medieval society, do we know that they were really using specific types of horses for warfare and for battle? Or do we have much information about that?

Yeah, that's a great question. This phrase medieval war horse people can sometimes assume that there's one type of big medieval horse that's used in war. It's just not the case. It's clear that in all periods, there's a variety of horses of different stature, different confirmation, as we say, for different purposes. Even in warfare, there are horses of different types for different purposes. In medieval warfare, horses are used for a great variety of purposes. Perhaps the classic image people think of is the knight on horse. horseback with a lance charging in a great mass of cavalry towards the enemy. But horses are used for other purposes as well. They're used for raiding. They're used for harrying enemies. They're used for transport. Later in the medieval period, we have mounted infantry. In the 100 years, War, the English, are famous for deploying arches who travel to the battlefield on horseback.

So horses are used for a great variety of military purposes. And were you, when you started this project, were you, expecting to see a change over time that maybe at the beginning of the medieval period, sort of post-Roman period and into their high Middle Ages and with the Norman conquest, all of that's happening. Were you expecting to see differences in the bones? We approached the project very much with an open mind. We didn't have too many preconceptions of what the archaeology will say and how it may stand up against the historical evidence, but I think a really interesting feature, certainly for me, as a medieval archerxes,

was to get at how horses changed as a result of the Norman conquest. So we have this image from the Beiotapestry and other historical sources of the Normans using war horses as a decisive battlefield weapon. The received historical wisdom has always been. Anglo-Saxon warriors and Anglo-Saxon nobles fought on foot. They may have used horses to ride to battle, but they didn't use those horses to ride into battle, into the fight. So it would be really, really interested to see how horses change in size at that historical watershed of the Norman Conquest and a really interesting, and it's a preliminary

result at the moment from the data set that we've just published, is that horses seem, on average, to go slightly down in size, in height, after the Norman conquest. We don't quite know why, whether that's the result of the stud network. The studs are where horses are bred and trained, whether that network is disrupted because of the Norman conquest could be one hypothesis. And do you have any comparative data from France that you could look at to sort of compare those horses?

Or does that not exist yet? We do. We have a member of the team who's looking at horse remains and horse metrics from continental Europe. So yes, in the fullness of time, we'll have a wider data set to. compare the picture in England against. But a fascinating thing about it is that there's very little in the documentary sources that actually tell us how big Norman war horses were. We've got pictorial

sources. We have the Bayer Tapestry. There's one fascinating little anecdotal source which really intrigues me. There's a man called Richard. It's a Norman count operating in Italy in the Norman period. There's a fascinating account of him that he rides a horse that so small, his feet almost drag along the ground. Also, if you look at Norman seals, you look at the seal of William the Conqueror or other Norman kings, you'll see horses are depicted as a slightly more slender beasts than you might imagine. Okay, so that really backs up, I suppose, that's the idea of the tiny horse. Indeed it does. Indeed it does. That's very, very interesting. So far, you've looked at, or you published at least, this study on the actual animal bones themselves. What are the

aspects of the wider projects are you working on? Yeah, our project, it's a comprehensive archaeological survey of horses and war horses. So the evidence that we've just published and that we're talking about today is zoo archaeological evidence, it's animal bones, horse bones. But we've also got a research team. We've got researchers looking at the material culture evidence, and we have researchers working on the evidence of documents and the landscape. In terms of material culture, a fabulous resource for this project and many other archaeological projects across England is what's called the Portable Antiquity Scheme. It's an incredible scheme run by the British Museum. It's a great success story. It's a great flagship of British archaeology. And it's a

scheme that logs and provides a database of metal detected, mainly metal detected objects, and it has thousands upon thousands of objects related to horses. Some of these might be, seem more obvious things like horseshoes, parts of stirrups, but a really interesting artifact that we've analysed to a great level, what are called harness pendants. Now, they may not sound very much. They're little decorative dingle-dangles. They hang off the breastbands, mainly, of horses.

And they're for decoration. And some of them contain, they feature the coats of arms or the symbols of noble family. So we've had a lot of interesting work involving mapping, the footprint, if you like, of noble families from these horse harness pendants. That's been really interesting. The other main package of work, as we call it, a work package, is the historical work and the documentary work. We've had historians and archaeologists combing the archives, combing the national archives for royal stud records, interrogating what those records tell us

about where royal studs were based, how many there were, what sorts of horses were bred within them. And we've carried out work on the landscapes of horse breeding. It turns out that many of these studs were based within deer parks, within medieval deer parks, which were safe and secure, where the stables and the infrastructure for this hugely, hugely important horse breeding programme, where it was coordinated and run. That sounds fantastic. And in terms of quite interesting in that material culture and the artefacts,

is there much there that is sort of helpful for showing how the horses were used in battle and in, I mean, because I didn't really have armour as such, I mean, if it's any of the horse equipment specific for battle at all? A lot of the horse equipment that we see recorded in the portable antiquities scheme, it's perhaps not so much diagnostic of horses for war,

but elite horses, horses that were definitely of, social status. Many of these artefacts are quite highly decorated. Many of horse harness pendants are enameled. They're quite expensively decorated. So they tell us about the appearance of the horse. It's only very, very occasionally that fragments of horse armour crop up and are found by metal detectors. So, okay, so this sort of idea that we have tiny little ponies, well not tiny, but quite small ponies in the most of the medieval period, was perhaps not to surprise, but perhaps not as opposed to the listeners at least. But then it's really towards the end of the period that you start seeing the first larger horses.

So can you tell me a bit more about that? Why do the larger horses come in, do you think? It's really in the 13th, in the 14th century, that we start in the archaeological record to see horses around 16 hands high. But that's actually quite in the grand scheme of things. When you look at all the results, it's quite a subtle change. The really big change that really stands out in the archaeological record is a very big change. that horses become a lot bigger in the 17th century. And that, of course, is the time of the agricultural revolution.

This is when we see a huge, huge leap in horse size. So it's the 17th century. And it's to do with very selective breeding, advanced agricultural regimes, but also probably linked to the popularity, the emergence of big horse plow teams. In the medieval period, it's mainly oxen that pull plows. By the 17th century, large teams of plough horses are being used. So it's a 17th century that really sees the big change.

So just to go back to something you said earlier on then, if this medieval warhorse didn't need to be a great massive thing and you didn't actually, that clearly wasn't affecting the size so much, you talked a bit a little bit earlier about different functions and different uses. Does it seem then that the small horse was actually quite beneficial in a way? So what our evidence is making very, very clear is that war horses, are not bred purely for their stature and size. What's critical is also their temperament. War horses have to be bred to be steady.

They have to be steady in the face of battle, the hullabaloo, the noise of battle. They have to have a steady temperament. But of course, they also have to be fierce and aggressive at the same time. So the temperament of these beasts is absolutely critical to their breeding. Now, if people want to follow this research, because clearly there's so much potential, there's so much going to happen from this project.

Is there a way that people can follow it as it progresses? Yeah, day by day, you can follow our progress on Twitter. We have a dedicated Twitter feed and also a project webpage. And how do they get to your webpage? Give the details so everyone can find it. So the details are medieval warhorse.exeter. You can, of course, Google Exeter Warhorse, and you'll find us very easily. And also look at medieval war horses on Twitter and you can follow us.

Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to see the results of this. I think this has got so much promise putting all those sources together is absolutely brilliant. So Oliver, thank you again so much for joining me on Gone Medieval today. It's been great. Nice to meet you. And joining me after the break is Professor Alan Outram, another part of Oliver's team, who is the specialist in zoo archaeology, which is the study of animal bones. To tell me more about those horse remains and how they came to this conclusion.

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Everything's connected. And to understand them all is vital to continuing your culture and continuing your survival. Subscribe to the ancients on history hit wherever. you get to your podcasts. I've invited a second person along today to find out a little bit more about those animal bones and that is the lead zoo archaeologist on the team, Professor Alan Outram. So Alan specialises in the study of animal remains. Thanks for joining me today, Alan. It's a pleasure. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the sort of nitty-gritty of this and the details of the analysis. So you've actually got quite a wide range of

of sites, haven't you, and quite a lot of material to work with here? What sort of places have you got material from? As many places as we could get, ranging actually in this particular study from the Roman period, to give a little bit of context beforehand, early medieval period, high medieval period, through into the post-medieval world, so we can get a good look at the change of horse size and shape over that period. It's actually quite difficult to get enough bones to do this. Horse bones are not the most frequent bones at all in archaeological sites, and that's because they are not being used as a food animal. Food animals accumulate in much, much greater speed, because the animals tend to be slaughtered young, whereas animals are you

using for riding, you'll keep, you know, you can keep 20, 25 years. So they enter the archaeological record at a much slower rate. So if you dig an archaeological site, often you only have a few measurable horse bones. So what we had to do in order to get enough, was to talk to all of our colleagues, which is why there are a lot of authors on this paper, to try and get as much unpublished data as we could. Somebody might have measured a few horse bones, but they wouldn't have been important to publish on their own, just a handful. But by pulling it all together from well over 700 sites across that period, and just under 2,000 horses, we were able to get a really good, robust amount of information.

And you need that really, don't you, to be able to show trends over? time because otherwise it could just be one unique case. So you don't necessarily get many complete horse skeletons, do you? Do you just get a small amount of fragmented, you know, a few bones? Or is it common to get full bodies? It's not at all common to get full bodies. Often animals do get cut up for all sorts of different uses. The horses that would have gone to an Acky's yard and the meat may well have been used for dogs, the hide for leather, etc. So they still end up dismembered. Very rarely are the horses buried whole. There are a very small number of examples.

But importantly, the thing we don't have, which we would really love, is a mass grave of horses on a battlefield site, which would mean we were looking directly at war horses. But there aren't any mass graves of horses that have been found. Actually, there aren't that many mass graves of humans either. The most famous one on English soil is the Battle of Toughton, which did have a substantial mass grave of humans. It was the bloodiest battle on humans.

soil, as I recall, but no horses, unfortunately. And that means we've got to look right across the spectrum of different sites to try and get a full range of the type of horses that might have been around, because we can't just go to a place, right, these are war horses. We have to see what the full range is from different contexts. So we've looked at castles, urban sites, rural sites that might have been used for agricultural use. So we've got the full range. It's a complicated business because you might think, well, castles will be good to look at because obviously warhorses are going to hang around castles. And that's true, but of course, lots of other horses for other purposes

will also hang around castles. And when they die, they don't necessarily get deposited at castles. We know full well that a lot of the horses in the Royal Stud Network, if they died, were sold to Nakhazards in towns. So the animals would be taken away. And I think maybe the same thing happens to a lot of the horses that die on the battlefield, that they will be taken away and processed. and get mixed in with the rest of the horses.

So we've got to look at the whole range of horse bones of different types. So does that mean then that there really isn't a way that you can securely say this was a war horse? This was something that was used for military purposes. There are not many cases where that's very easy. There is one way we can tie at least metric size information to the horses, and that's through horse armour. That's actually largely from the later period of this. So most of the horse armour that survives in museum collections is sort of from Henry the 8th's time, in fact.

There's not an awful lot that's a lot earlier than that. So we're talking about a period when there were still lots of horses being used for jousting in competition. But we've been able to do some measurements on armour, and we're continuing to do that. In fact, we're off to the Tower of London to measure some more next week. And they do show, though, that that matches up perfectly well with what we've found from the animal bones themselves. There is definitely horse armour made for smaller animals, for pony-sized animals. But you've got to be careful with that and look for particular points on the armour that would match up with physical positions on horses.

And then we've had to carry out lots of measurements on live horses to then work out how you can convert those measurements into animal size. But we know that there are lots of chaffrons, which is the face plate of the horse armour, that would certainly not fit on larger horses. They would have to be pony-sized. Let's go back to the results then of this particular paper in this area. So I know that you're looking at a wide range of things, not just size of horses. I'm going to ask you a bit more about that in a moment.

But this conclusion that the medieval horses were really quite tiny, sort of pony-sized. Can you talk me through this a little bit more? And what sort of changes you saw over time in these results here? Yeah, so horses actually average perhaps between about 12 and 4. 14 hands through most of the medieval period. They were a little bit larger in the Roman period and they get larger again into the post-medieval period. But during most of the medieval period,

they really were quite small. And the official definition of a pony is 14-2 hands. So the vast majority of medieval horses were definitely of pony sort of stature. And just to give a little bit of comparison to that, Clydesdale or a shire would be about 18 hands. Warm Blood Sport horse used for things like three-day event. might be about 17 hands.

And the lowest size, the entry grade size for a police horse is 16-2. And in the entire 2000 we looked at from across the Middle Ages, there wouldn't have been a single horse that we'd qualify to be a modern police horse. Just to put it all in context. Talked a little bit to Oliver about this earlier. If size really wasn't that significant, if the large size wasn't needed for a medieval war horse, there were clearly other traits and things.

that were useful. Now, is there any way that you can pick out that from the archaeological material, or is that completely beyond what we can do? Yes, we can take things further, and we are taking things further. I think I'd just start by saying about the size, that I don't think size didn't matter at all, because it may well be that, I mean, the war horse is referred to as the great horse

in a lot of medieval literature, and it may well be that to us it's small, but it could still be the case that your average working horse could have been 12, 13 hands, and your war horses, 14, are very occasionally 15 hands. So there still could have been relatively larger horses.

So I think possibly the war horses were bred to a certain extent for size, just not to the extent that we would expect. But there are lots of other things that we think that they would be breeding for. They would want horses of a good confirmation. And confirmation is basically the general shape of the body in terms of its likely performance, things to do with the length of the back and how stout and strong

the rear end is in terms of the power house it can give. And we can see some of that by doing more complicated measurements and looking at the shape of the bones, not just their raw size. And we've already shown in the study that we've done that actually in the period when war horses are at their very height, it seems that there may be greater rear limb robusticity. And that could be something that people have bred for. So it could be to do with breeding horses to have that strong rear powerhouse for quick acceleration. But we need to investigate that a lot further. And we're doing that also by x-raying the bones and looking to see what the thickness of the bone is. The thickness of the bone actually is not something that's dictated by your genetics entirely. It can change over

life. And I think a lot of people don't realize that that happens. I think everyone knows that if you do lots of exercise, you'll build up muscle mass. But they probably don't realize that bones also remodel related to the activities you have. And just to give one example of that from humans, is we know that medieval archers get lopsided. So there was a good study on the arches that came from the Mary Rose. And it showed that from all of their practice at archery that one side was doing most of the work and they ended up with much more robust, thicker limbs on that side. And the same might apply to horses and it might indicate a very particular sort of training and activity that warhorses were undertaking. So we're going to get into the details of shape. So yeah, there are those

things which are to do with performance, but something else which is utterly critical for a warhorse is very difficult for a zoo archaeologist to get at and that's temperament. This is a horse that's got to not be scared in battle. It's also got to obey its rider and have a good, good relationship with its rider. So how on earth can we look at temperament? Well, actually, the genetics of horses is very well studied. I might be right in saying that perhaps the horse genome is perhaps the second most studied after humans, possibly because there's so much money in it, because of race horses and so on. And we actually know which gene produces a good, easy temperament. And we all already know that that's shown to occur in the modern lineage of domestic horses more than in

wild horses. So in some of my other research, it goes right back to early domestication. We know that the modern lineage of domestic horses, several thousand years ago, began to show that this temperament marker in greater number. So it was selected for right at the start of domestication. But we can also look at it in relationship to the warhorse. And we can then start putting all of these bits of information together. We can look at size, we can look at shape, we can look at activity-related remodeling and temperament on the same individuals and see if we can start to properly identify what the war horse was like. The genetics will also tell us exciting things like what coat colour they were. So we'll be able to see if there was any selection for different

coat colours. And there may well be actually because I think certain, if you look at medieval manuscripts, it's often the case that your most high-status people are on white horses. for instance, because they're more impressive. So there could well be some coat colour selection in there too. Okay, so you mentioned stud networks there, and Oliver mentioned earlier on that you're looking at the wider geographic area, and obviously you've got a sample from all over the country. Is there any more information to get out of that

and things like where the horses are moving to and from? Is that something you're going to be looking at as well? We can disentangle some of the movements of horses by using a method called stable isotope analysis. And this will be very useful in telling us about how the stud networks did move horses around the landscape and actually where horses end up dying and being deposited. And indeed it might even show up if some of the horses are gifts from abroad

because we know that the king frequently received gifts of horses from abroad. And it might well be the case that we can evidence these gifts. I suppose I ought to explain how we can do that, how that works. The animal will be eating in a particular area and it will be taking in lots of chemistry of the area that it's in from the soil of the areas of its grazing. And a particular isotope of a metal called strontium is very good at showing up differences between different geologies. And while the horse is growing, its tooth is depositing the signals of the strontium from the particular area that it's been eating in. So the tooth starts growing when it's initially forming in the animal at the top of the crown and makes its way down quite a long distance because horse teeth are very big.

So you actually end up being able to look at quite a long period of time as that tooth is forming, not only where the horse was at one instance in time, but how it moved, because it will deposit different strontium in that. And we look at the strontium changes actually by burning a strip up the tooth with a laser and then a very expensive machine that cost about a million pounds sniffes what's burnt by the laser and analyzes its contents for the different strontium types. I love that explanation. That's brilliant.

But that is going to be really useful information, isn't it, and just showing those networks. And it's the sort of thing that you would never get from anything else. So just the actual mechanics, I suppose, and the logistics of this will tell us that bit more about the society and the administration of it. Yes, it will be great to see how they all move around. That says absolutely fantastic.

And is most of the bone preserved well enough for you to be able to extract DNA successfully from it? We'll have hits and misses, just depending on the site. This isn't really very ancient for ancient DNA work. We've very successfully sequenced horses from thousands of years ago. However, it very much depends on the site you're at and the nature of the soil and so on as to how well the DNA survives. We will certainly get some good results without doubt. That sounds absolutely fantastic. And I like the way that you're combining all of those traits with some of the things that Oliver mentioned like looking at the portable antiquity schemes and the artefacts and the objects and landscapes. So you're going to get a really comprehensive understanding for the first time, really, aren't you, of these horses in medieval society? Yes, absolutely. And we're very lucky that we're able to go as far as doing that really high-end genetics. And that's actually because there's a collaboration between our warhorse project, which is doing everything but the genetics.

and another project called the Pegasus Project, which is a European Research Council-funded project run by Ludovic Orlando in Toulouse. And I'm also part of that project. So we're able to pull two big projects together to get the maximum benefit, and we'll learn a huge amount. That's fantastic.

I can't wait to hear the rest of that. So thank you so much for joining me today, Alan. Thank you. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Ahead. As always, thank you so much for listening to us. please do subscribe to the podcast if you haven't done so already and we'd be very happy if you wanted to leave us a review wherever you're finding that podcast

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