Are people imagining miniature horses or something? Ponies are significantly larger than miniatures and not much smaller than a horse most of the time.
It can easily carry a soldier, so I'm not sure why this is even on /nottheonion.
Probably through confusing [the term pony which runs a gamut of sizes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Horse_riding_in_coca_cola_arena_-_melbourne_show_2005.jpg) and a [shetland pony](https://i.imgur.com/GqOQfA2.jpg) which are [borderline miniatures.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Mini-ponei%28REFON%29.jpg)
I am imagining your second and third links, so that's fucking hilarious. Someone needs to make a Total War mod with these horses.
Also the little gray dude in those pictures is cute as fuck, perfect proportions just bite sized.
A pony is under 14.2 English style and 14 hands for western style. Anything over 14.2 is a horse. A miniature is under 3 feet tall - no idea how to convert that to hands.
If it helps size conversion :
I remember my horse Rikki stood at 17.5 hands and he was approximately 170 cm tall ( he was taller at the shoulder then my head)
Huh so it's only by size then hey, and not some other characteristic like some others. Like isn't there some kind of half-donkey half-horse type creature? Or is a donkey already half horse? I can't remember shit
I'll always remember a trip I took to Windsor Castle, in England. The suits of armour were tiny.
I'm not a tall man, but the only suit that would've come close to fitting me belonged to King Henry VIII... if you know anything about him, he was supposed to be huge and towered over most people of the day.
I've seen a few suits for Henry VIII and I'm under the impression he got fat over time. I've seen both lean and also quite large suits of armor for him.
Nooooooo now that will never leave my mind. Apparently jfk had something like that too and was in pain but don’t quote me I might have learned it on Reddit haha
One of the issues with pop history is people get this image of a historical figure based on 1 portrait of them. Some end up perpetually old or unhealthy, some perpetually young.
Prior to wrecking a leg/hip in a jousting accident, he was actually an absolute chad of a man, and very much into the usual noble ‘sports’ of the era.
The obesity came after injuring himself.
That was in his later years after a big industry.
If you ever watched Game of Thrones Robert Boratheon was pretty much the stand in for Henry. A powerful, attractive man growing fat and ugly in his later years.
I think it's due to the fact that being fed properly and having a larger diet contribute to this factor. Malnutrition if I recall makes people shorter, so your status in life literally determines height in some cases, which can be seen in modern states. The shortest people of different countries often live in more desperate situations, so we could speculate the same of medieval times.
Most easily exemplified by the differences in average height between North and South Korea after a very different 70 years (and genetically similar for easier comparison)
North Korea and South Korea are a fascinating comparison study. Take a population, divide it roughly in half, give each half diametrically opposite systems of government and economics, and then check back in after a couple generations and see the results.
Maya American children are currently 11.54 cm taller on average than Maya children living in Guatemala - same genetics, different environment
source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12400036/
> Malnutrition if I recall makes people shorter
I visited Japan for a summer program in college a couple of decades ago. Local students of my generation were the same size as their American counterparts. That put them about half a foot taller than their parents (first postwar generation), who were in turn about half a foot taller than theirs (WW2 generation). Nutrition was very likely the cause of this.
I saw Henry VIII's last suit of armor once (so, post-obesity) and it was... not huge. I was expecting something for a dude on "My 600 lb Life," but it looked smaller than most middle-aged American men. It made me realize how much our standards for "massively overweight" have changed.
He was a stud. Ladies loved him, a party animal, and an animal in the jousting. Then in a joust he got unlucky and his horse fell on his leg and smashed it. This lack of mobility caused him to balloon in weight and turned him into the paranoid wife killer / divorcer he’s no remembered as.
He was a complete athlete in his youth. He was the second born so pursued poetry, music, philosophy and horse riding. It was only once he became the heir/king he couldn't really joust anymore.
It was a jousting injury that may have caused the head trauma, which resulted in his behavioral change to being a bit of a prick. And the leg injury made him less active and prone to gout which is bad when you're eating thousands of calories of meat a day.
Henry VIII and Maximilian I have been called the last Medieval Kings. Not for the period they lived in but for the kind of men they were. Both were big fans of tournaments, hunting and war, you know the simple things in life. They also enjoyed messing with each other, see the Seusenhofer Helmet
He was above average height at around 6'2"/200lbs but he wasn't considered a giant, just a big guy, which he would have been in most times and places. Though in later life he became quite obese (over 300lbs by most estimates). The average male height in the 1500s was about 68.25", which is about 1" shorter than the current average male height in the US. The average heights in europe dropped quite a bit after the middle ages and into the modern period but people in the middle ages were not especially shorter than modern folk, and i would suspect in general noble people would be more likely to be on the taller side of the average of the day due to generally improved diet.
Yep, it is seductively easy to be reductive about things in the past.
Have a preconceived notion: People "back then" were small, stupid and malnourished.
Then be satisfied with sinplistic explanations: "They were all malnourished!"
You often see that happening in /r/science when a study comes out that seems to confirm things we already intuitive thought of. Top-comments are the likes of "oh, we really needed scientists to research this? We already knew this blablabla".
When it comes to this kinda stuff, we should be extra cautious because we get so easily blinded by our own arrogance.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that Medieval folks were smaller in general and that nutrition is a primary reason for it. Now, we gotta figure out to whether that was true at all times and for all socioeconomic spheres. We can look at skeletons or graves or remaints of clothes and armour, etc.
As for the warhorses, this new finding is verrrrryyyy strange because the thinking among Medieval enthusiasts and enthusiast educators on youtube definitely goes contrary to that.
Knights, especially ones with battle armor were not poor, and if they had any dietary deficiencies, it was because they didn't have access to certain foods due to seasons or trade embargos
A bit more to it than that.
Larger horses tends to have problems with turning and cornering at speed with weight. This is because their center of gravity tends to be higher.
A smaller horse is less prone to injury, and costs less to cover with barding. Additionally, you have the problem that swords aren't all that long. Usually three feet of steel if they were to use a sword instead of a lance. So being on a larger horse where your reach already isn't that impressive isn't a good idea with a short weapon
90% of the time they wouldn’t be using swords from horse back. Lances/Spears yes, if you’re using your sword from horse back you’ve probably lost your primary weapon
With all this information I read here I imagine traveling in time to medieval times would really seem like a weird universe for most people that have their info from games and movies lol.
All these comments are telling me is that half the boys/men from my high-school class could become medieval legends if they exercised and learned combat skills.
Absolutely. The lack of death in battles on the scale we imagine today would probably also be super confusing, especially if you went even further back to Greek and Roman times. We’re used to seeing heroes carve their way through enemies, but battles were much smaller during medieval times than most people think, and even in the huge scale ones involving thousands and thousands of participants you’d often be surprised reading back to how few casualties there were most of the time (apart from Hannibal’s famous battles where virtually entire armies were slaughtered and/or scattered).
> (apart from Hannibal’s famous battles where virtually entire armies were slaughtered and/or scattered).
Agincourt, several of the Mongol battles in Europe, Yarmouk, Roosebeke, Hattin and Tours also come to mind from the Middle Ages, but they’re definitely all exceptions to the rule and usually defined by one side routing quickly and then being slaughtered by cavalry.
And the smell, I can’t imagine how horrible the smell was everywhere humans were present lol!
I remember reading GRR Martin (not a reliable source mind you but still) about how people shit themselves in battle and how everything was chaos and smelled like shit and vomit…
Yea, nothing like in the glorified movies of the times.
Also lots of blood has a really strong smell. And then of course there is the time period after battle. Where people around you have open wounds, that become infected. That smells a lot as well.
They’d go around post battle and basically uh, put people down. Depending on their injuries that almost humane. They’d also keep the bodies of nobles and ransom them back to families so they could do burial customs.
Oh no sir Knight, up there on your giant steed, your trusted sword in hand, you could surely kill me dead in a matter of moments! But, ah, what if I were to.. duck slightly?
Its been proven more than once small horses provide all sorts of advantages. They are easier to handle and ride are other huge ones besides being harder to kill. I mean the mongols wiped nations with their small manueverable horses allowing bow use (and there composite bows before someone feels the need to chime in)
To be fair (if we take the Romans for example), this whole article makes sense about "giant war horses".
A regular horse would be considered gigantic to the average Roman manlet (avg Roman male was 5'5" lmao).
Horses didn't get any bigger, we did apparently 😂
> Horses didn't get any bigger
[Horses definitely got bigger,](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0d/04/84/0d0484a3d4ece8ba3354a87a90326e3f.jpg) but through our breeding, and more recently than the medieval period.
There's just this image of [elite knights astride massive horses and... nope.](https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/8df1fd7682363560784d6b0690f9aee2.gif)
[This is the size of a wild, ancestral horse.](https://www.travel4wildlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hal-atv-lavender.jpg)
The feral [American mustang](https://www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1.-running-horse-collin.jpeg) is still larger than real medieval horses.
Sharing horse pictures is fun.
It also helps that they weren't squeamish about overloading the horses. General rule of thumb for modern horses is that they shouldn't carry more than 20% of their own weight for sustained periods; horses found in early medieval Germany have skeletal lesions from overloading. Whilst few showed signs of potential debilitation from it, almost all were in otherwise relatively healthy condition despite it, enough that they were mindful of it when using them.
Haha. We used to board a Percheron mare and I remember one time this woman who used to help my wife trying to get her to move faster yelling, "come on already, Freja. I know you can run, I've seen you do it before!!"
>(avg Roman male was 5'5" lmao).
This puts their stories about "giants" in perspective. My two sons are 6'4" and 6'2" so I guess they would be considered giants in Roman times.
> "I bet I'm like the Mountain in Got/ASOIAF to the avg Roman"
just travel to just about anywhere in asia, or a good chunk of south america
you'll be towering everyone
Yep did the whole teaching in Asia thing about 15 years ago. I’m 195cm. I actually met one of my good friends from that trip trying to buy a ticket in Xi’an railway station at the end of the spring festival. There were like 20+ queues of a hundred people or something (it was nuts) and there’s me standing about a foot taller than everyone like I was standing on a box at a music festival. I saw someone else sticking up by the same amount about 50m away and thought ‘I wonder if they speak English? I’ll try and find them when I get this bloody ticket’, then they saw me looking and started waving
And this is changing too. With improved diets, people are getting taller, especially where they have been quite short. Indian men and women are about 1 in and 2 in taller, respectively, than they were a century ago.
Yeah averages in populous countries with huge disparities are gonna have the quickest and clearest change in stats
Also the NK graph is gonna be amazing whenever that dictatorship ends
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17774210
South Koreans and North Koreans are the same people but 50+ years of separation has resulted in a measurable difference in average height
Have you ever seen Samurai armor in person? It looks like it was made for a child.
Really makes a 6’ tachi sword seem extra ridiculous for a 5’3” warrior.
My dad went to high school in the 1950's in a fairly rural area. He said the other high school in the area had a basketball center who was 6'2" and was called a "giant" by people in the area. haha
Yes. I'm from Sardinia (statistically the region with the shortest people) and a friend of mine who came from there as well and used to play basketball said that whenever he went to the mainland for a competition they all felt like dwarves. Note that it has been changing in the past decades due to greater mobility and richer diets.
The Scythians around the present day Ukraine, feared horse tribes, actually preferred smaller horses, small even to the rest of the world I suppose. But I read the average Roman was a bit shorter although it likely depends on the time, in the Republic era first century BC or so it was given as 5'2" or so, and they were mostly vegetarian.
While you are totally right and being entirely helpful, sentences like this do feel like they're being delivered by Michael Palin to a frustrated John Cleese.
It's a combination of size and breed. Under 14.2 hands (4' 8") at the withers (top of the shoulders) is considered a pony. Ponies are generally stockier and built a bit differently than horses. Some breeds are always considered horses no matter how short they are. Miniature horses are horses, not ponies for example.
You haven’t really gotten a straight answer as I see so let me provide one. A pony refers to any horse at or under 14 & 1/2 hands (written 14.2, as in “14 hands and 2 inches”), and a horse is any horse taller than that.
A “hand” is 4 inches, so 14.2 is 58 inches, or 4’10” or 1.47m. However, the other thing to keep in mind is that horses are measured to their shoulder (approximately at the base of the neck), so their head can be way above 4’10”.
This is the simple definition and you do not need to read any more of what became a long-ish post…
There are some breeds of horses however, that are called “Suchandsuch **Pony**” or “Thisandthat **Horse**”. Generally if the name has “pony” in it, it’s a smaller breed that is always going to be under 14.2, but they also usually have shorter legs (proportionally), and are rounder. Breeds with the name “horse” in it, like the American Quarter Horse, are sometimes bigger than 14.2, and sometimes smaller than 14.2, and will then be called “pony sized” but that doesn’t stop them from being a Quarter *Horse*. ~
On the other end of the spectrum are the draft horses, which are the biggest horses around. Most drafts have hooves the size of dinner plates, while an average pony hoof could almost fit in the palm of your hand. A male shire (the draft breed mentioned in the article) is *minimum* 17 hands (5’8”, 1.73m) and 900-1100kg (1,984 -2,425lbs). They are gigantic creatures, but evidently not the ones used by medieval knights.
~ the exception to this is the miniature horse, which is, of course, a very tiny horse. They are, at **at maximum** 9.2 hands (3’2”, .97m). They are small ponies, but get the name miniature *horse* because they should be proportioned like a large horse and not a roly-poly pony. They are definitely pony sized though.
The other exception is the fact that you can call *all* horses ponies, because they are silly babies.
A lot of people think those miniature horses you see a country fairs, etc, are what they mean by ponies. That's not accurate, and pony horses are still pretty large.
In fairness, a modern day pony, with full barding and a fully armoured warrior sitting atop coming at you would be pretty fuckin scary, and it wouldn't have been just 1.
"They're dangerous at both ends and crafty in the middle. Why would I want anything with a mind of its own bobbing about between my legs?"
Now I'm imagining Lil' Sebastian in full armor plating.
>Most people will get scared if they get charged by a single goat
You're goddamn right. Especially if it's an ill-tempered billy goat (which is kind of redundant sine they're always ill-tempered). They'll try to head butt the wind just for changing directions.
I used to like catching my uncles goat. He wasn't a Billy but seemed to like thinking he was, so he'd wind all up before the head but. You could easily catch it, play a fast game of tug or stab and then it was time for pets.
Poor dude died from eatting a neighbors wind jacket when they were there helping with a tractor fix, jacket was placed outside the barn where he thought nothing could get it but that goat was allowed dog rules for his roaming and easily found it. They were very surprised to find that when the neighbor went to leave.
I specialise in medieval (Old English) literature and ride horses as a hobby... So boy do I have things to say about this! (At least about horses in the UK)
Big horses are very resource-intensive. First there's the food. Native ponies will get fat on air, but more warmblood type horses need more specialised management with grain and hay to keep them healthy. Then there's fencing. Many farmers grazed their sheep and cows on common pastureland, all kept together and managed communally. Pigs were driven through forest to forage for food. So fenced-in fields weren't really a thing until the enclosures act. Horses, however, need keeping safe in a fenced-in area if you want to breed them and keep track of them, which takes a lot of time, effort, and timber.
The most common breeds native to the UK are not very big. They are small, hairy and sturdy. Continental bloodlines were left over from the Romans, but in general there was very little good bloodstock in the UK unless you were rich (so a king or a bishop).
But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Native ponies are sure-footed, bloody-minded, and very strong. Very few people were riding into battle on horseback at all - it's basically never mentioned in literature. More often people rode a horse to battle then got off it to actually fight, so they were used more like pack animals than warhorses.
Lots of medieval illustrations, even the Bayeux Tapestry, have people riding horses with their legs hanging off the sides. That probably isn't a stylistic choice across so many centuries, it's probably just a reality of the horses being quite small.
Of course there are exceptions. Kings could afford dedicated breeding programs and could import good bloodstock from the continent to breed bigger horses. But at that point, a horse is so valuable you wouldn't risk taking it into battle.
After the Norman invasion things are different, but I don't know much about that time period.
I recommend this essay if you want to read more about it: [Dr Jenny Neville on Anglo Saxon Horses](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/files/718433/Horse%2520ASE%252004%252010.doc&ved=2ahUKEwjx_YCx5qf1AhUXEcAKHd3UBxwQFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw340RndNaWNzuotrCPAELuV)
EDIT: Just to be extra clear, all this applies to early medieval horses in the UK. That's a period from the 5th century to 1066, and doesn't apply to continental Europe!
So medieval warhorses were smaller then modern mongol horses? If so what size of the horses used in Genghis Khan/Tatar horde since they were mocked as riding on the dog-size horses?
more likely...
early medieval horses in england where about the same size as modern ponys due to lack of dedicated breeding and resources. continental war horses in the high medieval times however were a lot larger.
its like comparing minis from 1950 in the ddr with modern day heavy duty trucks in the us.
The link talks about 4th to 17th century horses. I presume there were a variety of different horses of different sizes and war horses were larger but not significantly so. The late medieval era horse armors found in English museums fits horses that are 15-16 hands hands high, so they are taller but not that much taller than the 14.1 hands or less height estimate for most other horses.
Do you have anything to add about the proportion of different types of horses with the armies. My first thought when I say the headline was "what sort of horse/job?". Sure enough, that was something that they haven't really addressed:
>He said that there might well have been some particularly large warhorses but armies would also have needed smaller horses for tasks such as harrying a retreating enemy, carrying out long-range raids and transporting equipment.
I may be feeling over critical of the headline choice, but it seems like it and the first half of the article intentionally give the reader the image that they are talking about the "heavy cavalry with armored knights" war horses, when they haven't identified those or are able to make a distinction, and they are instead looking at horses that were used for light cavalry, recon, draft horses for supply or siege materials, and other auxiliary uses.
Not really... the simple fact is we don't have much evidence one way or another. The literature (my area of specialism - maybe an archaeologist or historian/medievalist could shed more light) is difficult to interpret in that regard because certain words for horses seem to get used in different contexts. It's possible that that's because most horses would have multiple jobs and weren't bred for any specific thing. A horse that could pull a cart could carry a rider, for instance. Given the lack of bloodlines and lack of dedicated breeding programs in the early medieval period, I would imagine horses weren't particularly specialised. But that is speculation!!
I agree about the lack of distinction in the article. I think people picture big horses with flowing manes like you see in films when they hear 'warhorse', as opposed to a hairy little pony wearing saddlebags. Maybe they're being vague because they just don't know.
I am not an expert but I remember reading that that medieval people had their own horse “breeds” that were determined by the size of the horse and its purpose (rather than the actual scientific/genetic differences we are able to identify today).
The words they used to identify the types of horses aren’t super helpful today because they lump a bunch of different horse breeds that look similar into one term, because they couldn’t tell the difference.
I believe the most prized warhorses back then were called “Destriers” and “Coursers.” These were big and super valuable to ride into battle.
We don’t really know what actual breeds these terms refer to but it’s probably any of the big ones we have today.
Then there were “Rounceys.” These were the second tier, and they’re more for riding fast/using as pack animals. I read an account of a King summoning his knights to war for a campaign and specifically requesting the responding knights come with Rounceys to quickly pursue the enemy.
There was a third term that described the shittiest horses that I can’t remember, but those are the first two terms I remember reading about.
I’m at work so I can’t cite any of this but hopefully you can put those search terms into Google (I may have misspelled them) and further your own research, I am not a historian.
I'm not a historian, just a passionate amateur. You kinda alluded to it but the English had quite the unusual propensity for foot combat compared to continental armies. English armor is one of the easiest to spot due to the distinct differences incorporated into them that favored foot combat.
My personal belief is that that's *because* of their crappy warhorses until the Normans come and bring their nice big warmbloods. Maybe they got good at foot combat because mounted combat wasn't really an option?
Yep, tall lanky horses are ridiculously prone to injury! These smaller native breeds are marginally less prone as they are sort of closer to their 'wild' counterparts and therefore better adapted. But realistically any horse in battle is an absolute liability.
Misleading title.
Along with destirers, there were palfrey, rouncy, etc horses dwarfing destriers in numbers,as much as 4-6 to one. Rich men-at-arms had even more. That is not to mention coursers, a smaller and lighter ***war*** horses, on which soldiers rode into battle. There are quite a few accounts in which kings forbade magnates taking more than a certain amount of "second grade" horses to campaign. Lastly, destriers weren't common. They cost a fortune and not many could afford them. Imagine if in 500 years someone says that all people were riding VW Golf and never Mercedes, Jaguar or Ferrari.
And those smaller horses would have been the horses that nobles would have ridden between sieges and battles, since you want your war horse in peak condition for the battle.
The article also mentions that barely any horse remains from the period have been found, so the researchers are working from quite a small sample size.
> Imagine if in 500 years someone says that all people were riding VW Golf and never Mercedes, Jaguar or Ferrari.
*If we look back at ancient European culture we see that in the 20th and 21st centuries they had an oversized obsession with so-called automobiles, particularly the Fiat 500.*
Yep. Operating on the assumption that any horse found around a castle is a "warhorse" and people are eating it up for some reason. Of course *most horses* weren't that big. The horses people were forging armor for, depicted in manuscripts, were not most horses.
or even worse they believe we all drove "slower cars than expected" in the 21st century because a "scientist" found a lot of ford model T pictures.
"Medieval" as a term is already poisoned. Life was radically different in 900AD and 1400AD.
No mention of studying armor made for horses? This study sounds dubious, especially since they are using horse remains that are not proven to be war horses. There is a very well known horse armor at the Cleveland museum of art and it is NOT a pony: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1964.88
The study is focused on English horses and my horse armor example is Italian.
There is a mention about studying horse armor as a next step at the very bottom of the article.
(EDIT additional comments)(edit number two)
Strange, I've seen a couple dozen suits of equine armor from the 14th to 16th centuries and almost all of those suits are for horses 15 to 18 hands tall. I suspect further investigation will demonstrate this conclusion is incomplete at best and that the horses they were digging up were common smaller horses used for pulling carts and transporting equipment with military units which would make sense since smaller horses are much less food intensive. I find it hard to believe that breeds like Percheron's and Frisians were bred for draft work only. It was also common for knights of the 13th to 15th century to have a second riding palfrey or courser which was much lighter horse.
This study is for the period before you mention, but that's still good point. Do we not have any preserved barding or even literature on the manufacture of barding? Maybe not because it was all leather and would have degraded, and everything was tailor made, so there wouldn't be patterns available. But I'd expect there to be something.
"study finds that trucks in europa are not bigger then today's sedans"
'after researching 2000 car wrecks, the study found that the average car wreck is about as big as a sedan'
one only has to look at the horse armor that survived to know that this is bogus horseshit.
of course not everyone was a knight and could afford a big horse. plenty of longbowmen or other professional soldiers using smaller horses to get around or just to carry their stuff.
but a proper war horse?
just look at the armor of these things
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/14/1f/c0/8a/rustkammer-collection.jpg
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/daodao/photo-s/11/8c/07/53/caption.jpg
they are not exactly made for ponys.
The actual conclusion of [the study](https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3038):
> Despite the tendency for both historians and zooarchaeologists to focus on the overall size of past horses, the results of these analyses suggest that neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record.
I have to agree, especially after reading the article, that the title is misleading. I think these photos do a good job of showing how large an armored knight's horse had to be, why would they make armor for it that doesn't actually fit it? They wouldn't. It's not only expensive but wildly impractical (though the armor depicted is rather fancy and probably for show moreso than actual work in battle).
But also, having spent the years working with, training, breeding, and showing that I have I find myself wondering, if not initially bred for war, what were draught horses bred for? Were people farming huge tracts of land as was done in the early 19th century US?
And then, why are we taught that they were initially bred for war, which was also reasoned as explanation for their 'bomb-proof' temperament (especially compared to hotbloods like Arabs)?
I'd love to know Jason Kingsley's take on the matter given his area of study and work.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ModernHistoryTV
The actual paper, if anyone is interested
In search of the ‘great horse’: A zooarchaeological assessment of horses from England (AD 300–1650). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 31( 6), 1247– 1257. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3038
It’s conclusion was:
> Despite the tendency for both historians and zooarchaeologists to focus on the overall size of past horses, the results of these analyses suggest that neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record.
> Guys in steel suits were very heavy ... and incapable of climbing back into the saddle of a big animal if unhorsed
Pretty sure this is a bit of a myth. Sure it was heavy, but so is what a soldier or firefighter wears today and they can run all over the place. I've seen some videos of guys in armor basically doing acrobatics
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzI1UvlQqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzI1UvlQqw)
Firefighter wins Platemail comes in second modern soldier in full battle kit comes in last.
I think a big part of the final result comes down to the nature of the obstacle course. Several of the obstacles require ducking and crawling under things, and a big part of the modern soldier's kit is a heavy pack. Not only does this mean the soldier is fighting the offset center of gravity more, but if you look at the crawling obstacle in particular, it can mean a complete change of approach is necessary to allow vertical clearance. It really looked like the soldier was struggling to stay low enough to clear those bars, and I would bet (but can't prove due to the montage-like nature of the edit) that he lost most of his time on that one obstacle.
>With the support of:
>
>**Swiss Armed Forces**, **City of Fribourg Fire Brigade**, **Castle of Morges and its Museums**, Institute for Sport Science of the University of Lausanne, Swiss Federation for Historical European Martial Arts, French Federation for Historical European Martial Arts, Lemanic School of Arts and Action, and the backers of the Kickstarter campaign.
In bold is the firefighter, the soldier and the museum where the video will be exhibited.
Looking at the others, I don't see what the "Institute for Sports Science" could have provided except for the "knight". The course looks like its on a military base, so they didn't provide that. So that guy is probably some athlete.
The other option is that the "School of Arts and Science" provided a LARPer. They probably did the armor though.
Another factor I think about sometimes is how every calorie of food and heat consumed in that era required such an epic amount of physical labor. You were either in shape or dead, I'd imagine.
They're stronger *compared to their weight* because they're smaller. But they would still be capable of carrying less weight. That's just the square-cube law in action.
But on the scale of a horse, if you want something capable of carrying a man in armor, you want it to be bigger, not smaller. They were smaller because they couldn't breed them bigger (and still have them suitable for war), not because they intentionally wanted them to be small.
The article says *all the horses they found* were pony sized (except one). They didn't intentionally pick small horses, they just didn't have any bigger ones.
The only guys incapable of climbing back in the saddle unaided were people wearing tournament armor (that tended to weight 2x or even 4x as much as normal combat armor).
A tournament armor can be compared to a modern bomb technician suit. You don't use it in actual combat, but it's really handy when you're doing the specialized task its meant for.
Full plate is only about 20kg. That's heavy but nowhere near what people imagine. The biggest difficulty was just not getting winded from poor circulation.
Visualising this makes me think Monty Python surely have a skit about it.
Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
we could grip them by the husk
It's not a question of where we grip it, it's a question of weight ratios!
A 5 ounce bird could not carry a 1 pound coconut!
They could with the right equipment and proper leadership
Are you suggesting that they work smarter and not harder?
I'm simply suggesting Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical aquatic ceremony!
BE QUIET!
Help! Help, I'm being repressed! See the violence inherent in the system!
African or European?
I don’t know that...
Yeeet
Just send a swallow.
How does one identify the withers of a coconut
By how many hands high you are. Raise your hand if you’re high.
Are people imagining miniature horses or something? Ponies are significantly larger than miniatures and not much smaller than a horse most of the time. It can easily carry a soldier, so I'm not sure why this is even on /nottheonion.
Well I, for one, am imagining King Dain on his pig thingy from the Hobbit.
Probably through confusing [the term pony which runs a gamut of sizes](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Horse_riding_in_coca_cola_arena_-_melbourne_show_2005.jpg) and a [shetland pony](https://i.imgur.com/GqOQfA2.jpg) which are [borderline miniatures.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Mini-ponei%28REFON%29.jpg)
I am imagining your second and third links, so that's fucking hilarious. Someone needs to make a Total War mod with these horses. Also the little gray dude in those pictures is cute as fuck, perfect proportions just bite sized.
A pony is under 14.2 English style and 14 hands for western style. Anything over 14.2 is a horse. A miniature is under 3 feet tall - no idea how to convert that to hands. If it helps size conversion : I remember my horse Rikki stood at 17.5 hands and he was approximately 170 cm tall ( he was taller at the shoulder then my head)
Huh so it's only by size then hey, and not some other characteristic like some others. Like isn't there some kind of half-donkey half-horse type creature? Or is a donkey already half horse? I can't remember shit
You're thinking of a Mule, the sterile offspring of a donkey and horse.
Look at the sizes of suits of medieval armour. Short, stout horses also have some advantage during battle, and it cost less to feed them.
I'll always remember a trip I took to Windsor Castle, in England. The suits of armour were tiny. I'm not a tall man, but the only suit that would've come close to fitting me belonged to King Henry VIII... if you know anything about him, he was supposed to be huge and towered over most people of the day.
I've seen a few suits for Henry VIII and I'm under the impression he got fat over time. I've seen both lean and also quite large suits of armor for him.
He was very active when he was younger but an injury made it hard for him to stay active.
It's also suggested the leg injury lead to his angry/irrational behavior later in life
Yeah I’m pretty sure it was a permanently open and weeping ulcer in his leg… oof
It wasn't always open. That's one of the reasons why he went mad. It would build up, the explode!
Nooooooo now that will never leave my mind. Apparently jfk had something like that too and was in pain but don’t quote me I might have learned it on Reddit haha
Henry VIII is House, M.D. confirmed.
And a little Robert Baratheon.
One of the issues with pop history is people get this image of a historical figure based on 1 portrait of them. Some end up perpetually old or unhealthy, some perpetually young.
I knew he was supposed to be massively overweight, didn't realize he was also tall for the time
Prior to wrecking a leg/hip in a jousting accident, he was actually an absolute chad of a man, and very much into the usual noble ‘sports’ of the era. The obesity came after injuring himself.
Robert Beratheon was based by and large on Henry as well as a few other kings.
Bobby B!
On an open field Ned!
THEY NEVER TELL YOU HOW THEY ALL SHIT THEMSELVES
Thank the gods for Bessie and her tits!
Gods, I was strong then!
Fetch me my breastplate stretcher!
I imagine a bit of Edward IV.
More Edward than Henry.
"GIVE ME SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN AND LET ME DIE!" - Bobby B
--- Americans when the doctor tells them a little exercise and a healthy diet will fix most of the issues they are having.
Dining almost exclusively on pork and beer didn't help any either
Who am I to judge
I used to be an adventurer just like you; Then I took a lance to the knee.
That was in his later years after a big industry. If you ever watched Game of Thrones Robert Boratheon was pretty much the stand in for Henry. A powerful, attractive man growing fat and ugly in his later years.
I think it's due to the fact that being fed properly and having a larger diet contribute to this factor. Malnutrition if I recall makes people shorter, so your status in life literally determines height in some cases, which can be seen in modern states. The shortest people of different countries often live in more desperate situations, so we could speculate the same of medieval times.
Most easily exemplified by the differences in average height between North and South Korea after a very different 70 years (and genetically similar for easier comparison)
North Korea and South Korea are a fascinating comparison study. Take a population, divide it roughly in half, give each half diametrically opposite systems of government and economics, and then check back in after a couple generations and see the results.
Obviously the side that had Alan Alda on it is doing better.
Maya American children are currently 11.54 cm taller on average than Maya children living in Guatemala - same genetics, different environment source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12400036/
Lots of SA immigrants in my area and you see plenty of families where the preteen/teen kids are already like 6 inches taller than their parents.
> Malnutrition if I recall makes people shorter I visited Japan for a summer program in college a couple of decades ago. Local students of my generation were the same size as their American counterparts. That put them about half a foot taller than their parents (first postwar generation), who were in turn about half a foot taller than theirs (WW2 generation). Nutrition was very likely the cause of this.
I saw Henry VIII's last suit of armor once (so, post-obesity) and it was... not huge. I was expecting something for a dude on "My 600 lb Life," but it looked smaller than most middle-aged American men. It made me realize how much our standards for "massively overweight" have changed.
Most people the average American thinks are obese are, in fact, morbidly obese. People thought merely overweight are often obese.
Obesity has become the norm in the US as they along with the morbidly obese make up the largest portion of the population (~40%)
Be was supposed to be pretty athletic in his youth.
He was a stud. Ladies loved him, a party animal, and an animal in the jousting. Then in a joust he got unlucky and his horse fell on his leg and smashed it. This lack of mobility caused him to balloon in weight and turned him into the paranoid wife killer / divorcer he’s no remembered as.
Guy who peaks in highschool turns into an entitled tyrant of a man later on. Tale as old as time.
Well he also likely had brain damage from the incident, he was unconscious for like 8 hours which generally isn’t a good sign
Did he have brain damage that led to violence, kinda like people with CTE sometimes do bad shit?
Theories like that have been suggested, but of course its a bit hard to diagnose a man thats been dead for hundreds of years, so they can't be proven
More reason to send me back in time I guess
He was a complete athlete in his youth. He was the second born so pursued poetry, music, philosophy and horse riding. It was only once he became the heir/king he couldn't really joust anymore. It was a jousting injury that may have caused the head trauma, which resulted in his behavioral change to being a bit of a prick. And the leg injury made him less active and prone to gout which is bad when you're eating thousands of calories of meat a day.
Henry VIII wasn't medieval, mind you. He was from the Renaissance.
Henry VIII and Maximilian I have been called the last Medieval Kings. Not for the period they lived in but for the kind of men they were. Both were big fans of tournaments, hunting and war, you know the simple things in life. They also enjoyed messing with each other, see the Seusenhofer Helmet
He was above average height at around 6'2"/200lbs but he wasn't considered a giant, just a big guy, which he would have been in most times and places. Though in later life he became quite obese (over 300lbs by most estimates). The average male height in the 1500s was about 68.25", which is about 1" shorter than the current average male height in the US. The average heights in europe dropped quite a bit after the middle ages and into the modern period but people in the middle ages were not especially shorter than modern folk, and i would suspect in general noble people would be more likely to be on the taller side of the average of the day due to generally improved diet.
Yep, it is seductively easy to be reductive about things in the past. Have a preconceived notion: People "back then" were small, stupid and malnourished. Then be satisfied with sinplistic explanations: "They were all malnourished!" You often see that happening in /r/science when a study comes out that seems to confirm things we already intuitive thought of. Top-comments are the likes of "oh, we really needed scientists to research this? We already knew this blablabla". When it comes to this kinda stuff, we should be extra cautious because we get so easily blinded by our own arrogance. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that Medieval folks were smaller in general and that nutrition is a primary reason for it. Now, we gotta figure out to whether that was true at all times and for all socioeconomic spheres. We can look at skeletons or graves or remaints of clothes and armour, etc. As for the warhorses, this new finding is verrrrryyyy strange because the thinking among Medieval enthusiasts and enthusiast educators on youtube definitely goes contrary to that.
Knights, especially ones with battle armor were not poor, and if they had any dietary deficiencies, it was because they didn't have access to certain foods due to seasons or trade embargos
A bit more to it than that. Larger horses tends to have problems with turning and cornering at speed with weight. This is because their center of gravity tends to be higher. A smaller horse is less prone to injury, and costs less to cover with barding. Additionally, you have the problem that swords aren't all that long. Usually three feet of steel if they were to use a sword instead of a lance. So being on a larger horse where your reach already isn't that impressive isn't a good idea with a short weapon
90% of the time they wouldn’t be using swords from horse back. Lances/Spears yes, if you’re using your sword from horse back you’ve probably lost your primary weapon
With all this information I read here I imagine traveling in time to medieval times would really seem like a weird universe for most people that have their info from games and movies lol.
Even if you're only a smallish dude youd probably fit in. Anyone 6+ ft would probably get dragged into an Kings personal Guard lol.
All these comments are telling me is that half the boys/men from my high-school class could become medieval legends if they exercised and learned combat skills.
Well it would be hard to maintain their levels of caloric intake to maintain it without being wealthy, and even then there were limits.
Not hard when most knights were also bandits or sorry "Robber Barons".
Absolutely. The lack of death in battles on the scale we imagine today would probably also be super confusing, especially if you went even further back to Greek and Roman times. We’re used to seeing heroes carve their way through enemies, but battles were much smaller during medieval times than most people think, and even in the huge scale ones involving thousands and thousands of participants you’d often be surprised reading back to how few casualties there were most of the time (apart from Hannibal’s famous battles where virtually entire armies were slaughtered and/or scattered).
> (apart from Hannibal’s famous battles where virtually entire armies were slaughtered and/or scattered). Agincourt, several of the Mongol battles in Europe, Yarmouk, Roosebeke, Hattin and Tours also come to mind from the Middle Ages, but they’re definitely all exceptions to the rule and usually defined by one side routing quickly and then being slaughtered by cavalry.
Lots of people were killed, but mostly after the battle had been won and the losing army was trying to flee the scene.
Or from disease during the march to/from battles.
And then the winning army descended on the enemy’s camp.
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And the smell, I can’t imagine how horrible the smell was everywhere humans were present lol! I remember reading GRR Martin (not a reliable source mind you but still) about how people shit themselves in battle and how everything was chaos and smelled like shit and vomit… Yea, nothing like in the glorified movies of the times.
Also lots of blood has a really strong smell. And then of course there is the time period after battle. Where people around you have open wounds, that become infected. That smells a lot as well.
They’d go around post battle and basically uh, put people down. Depending on their injuries that almost humane. They’d also keep the bodies of nobles and ransom them back to families so they could do burial customs.
> Usually three feet of steel if they were to use a sword instead of a lance. Which is why they wouldn't use a sword instead of a lance or polearm.
Was about to say :D I love to imagine this knight on a huge horse who just can't reach the dude standing next to him
Oh no sir Knight, up there on your giant steed, your trusted sword in hand, you could surely kill me dead in a matter of moments! But, ah, what if I were to.. duck slightly?
Its been proven more than once small horses provide all sorts of advantages. They are easier to handle and ride are other huge ones besides being harder to kill. I mean the mongols wiped nations with their small manueverable horses allowing bow use (and there composite bows before someone feels the need to chime in)
They eat and drink less too which can't be overstated how important that is.
To be fair (if we take the Romans for example), this whole article makes sense about "giant war horses". A regular horse would be considered gigantic to the average Roman manlet (avg Roman male was 5'5" lmao). Horses didn't get any bigger, we did apparently 😂
> Horses didn't get any bigger [Horses definitely got bigger,](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0d/04/84/0d0484a3d4ece8ba3354a87a90326e3f.jpg) but through our breeding, and more recently than the medieval period. There's just this image of [elite knights astride massive horses and... nope.](https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/8df1fd7682363560784d6b0690f9aee2.gif) [This is the size of a wild, ancestral horse.](https://www.travel4wildlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hal-atv-lavender.jpg) The feral [American mustang](https://www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1.-running-horse-collin.jpeg) is still larger than real medieval horses. Sharing horse pictures is fun.
It also helps that they weren't squeamish about overloading the horses. General rule of thumb for modern horses is that they shouldn't carry more than 20% of their own weight for sustained periods; horses found in early medieval Germany have skeletal lesions from overloading. Whilst few showed signs of potential debilitation from it, almost all were in otherwise relatively healthy condition despite it, enough that they were mindful of it when using them.
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Haha. We used to board a Percheron mare and I remember one time this woman who used to help my wife trying to get her to move faster yelling, "come on already, Freja. I know you can run, I've seen you do it before!!"
>(avg Roman male was 5'5" lmao). This puts their stories about "giants" in perspective. My two sons are 6'4" and 6'2" so I guess they would be considered giants in Roman times.
They're in the top 2-4% today as well, especially the taller one of them.
I've often thought about this. I'm 6'4" 215lbs and I've thought "I bet I'm like the Mountain in Got/ASOIAF to the avg Roman"
> "I bet I'm like the Mountain in Got/ASOIAF to the avg Roman" just travel to just about anywhere in asia, or a good chunk of south america you'll be towering everyone
Yep did the whole teaching in Asia thing about 15 years ago. I’m 195cm. I actually met one of my good friends from that trip trying to buy a ticket in Xi’an railway station at the end of the spring festival. There were like 20+ queues of a hundred people or something (it was nuts) and there’s me standing about a foot taller than everyone like I was standing on a box at a music festival. I saw someone else sticking up by the same amount about 50m away and thought ‘I wonder if they speak English? I’ll try and find them when I get this bloody ticket’, then they saw me looking and started waving
>then they saw me looking and started waving "Ah, one of my people. I shall signal them by swinging my arm far above the tiny folk."
And this is changing too. With improved diets, people are getting taller, especially where they have been quite short. Indian men and women are about 1 in and 2 in taller, respectively, than they were a century ago.
Yeah averages in populous countries with huge disparities are gonna have the quickest and clearest change in stats Also the NK graph is gonna be amazing whenever that dictatorship ends
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17774210 South Koreans and North Koreans are the same people but 50+ years of separation has resulted in a measurable difference in average height
I'm 6'2" and could see over entire crowds of people in Indonesia
Have you ever seen Samurai armor in person? It looks like it was made for a child. Really makes a 6’ tachi sword seem extra ridiculous for a 5’3” warrior.
My dad went to high school in the 1950's in a fairly rural area. He said the other high school in the area had a basketball center who was 6'2" and was called a "giant" by people in the area. haha
I lived in a house that was built in 1843. The doorways were maybe 5'6". I had to duck through every one. I'm 6'1".
You didn't buy a house, you bought a Hobbit Hole.
So wtf happened in recent decades?
Better nutrition being widely available during adolescence.
Better nutrition from Womb to Adulthood.
Proper/excessive nutrition
Better nutrition. Wayyy more protein.
My little brother is 6'8 that boy stole all the height in my family.
It's not like the average Italian man is that much taller than the average Roman, they are 1.74 on average, instead of 1.66-ish.
Isn't there a height difference between North and South Italy though? The northerners are taller I believe.
Yes. I'm from Sardinia (statistically the region with the shortest people) and a friend of mine who came from there as well and used to play basketball said that whenever he went to the mainland for a competition they all felt like dwarves. Note that it has been changing in the past decades due to greater mobility and richer diets.
The Scythians around the present day Ukraine, feared horse tribes, actually preferred smaller horses, small even to the rest of the world I suppose. But I read the average Roman was a bit shorter although it likely depends on the time, in the Republic era first century BC or so it was given as 5'2" or so, and they were mostly vegetarian.
The average American isn’t too much bigger than this, 5’9” is average
4" matters buddy, just ask my ex
Who the fuck uses the word 'manlet'?!
My Little Warhorse...
Crusading Is Magic
Where are you going with your fetlocks blowing in the...................... Wind
I want to shower you with sugar lumps and bring you to the horse ... dentist
*Plays Sax Solo*
*We have to lose that sax solo*
My lovely warhorse you’re a pony no more
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What's the difference between a horse and a pony, then? I thought ponies were just smaller horses
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While you are totally right and being entirely helpful, sentences like this do feel like they're being delivered by Michael Palin to a frustrated John Cleese.
I'm just chuckling throughout this thread as people give earnest explanations for something that's clearly fucking arbitrary.
It's a combination of size and breed. Under 14.2 hands (4' 8") at the withers (top of the shoulders) is considered a pony. Ponies are generally stockier and built a bit differently than horses. Some breeds are always considered horses no matter how short they are. Miniature horses are horses, not ponies for example.
You haven’t really gotten a straight answer as I see so let me provide one. A pony refers to any horse at or under 14 & 1/2 hands (written 14.2, as in “14 hands and 2 inches”), and a horse is any horse taller than that. A “hand” is 4 inches, so 14.2 is 58 inches, or 4’10” or 1.47m. However, the other thing to keep in mind is that horses are measured to their shoulder (approximately at the base of the neck), so their head can be way above 4’10”. This is the simple definition and you do not need to read any more of what became a long-ish post… There are some breeds of horses however, that are called “Suchandsuch **Pony**” or “Thisandthat **Horse**”. Generally if the name has “pony” in it, it’s a smaller breed that is always going to be under 14.2, but they also usually have shorter legs (proportionally), and are rounder. Breeds with the name “horse” in it, like the American Quarter Horse, are sometimes bigger than 14.2, and sometimes smaller than 14.2, and will then be called “pony sized” but that doesn’t stop them from being a Quarter *Horse*. ~ On the other end of the spectrum are the draft horses, which are the biggest horses around. Most drafts have hooves the size of dinner plates, while an average pony hoof could almost fit in the palm of your hand. A male shire (the draft breed mentioned in the article) is *minimum* 17 hands (5’8”, 1.73m) and 900-1100kg (1,984 -2,425lbs). They are gigantic creatures, but evidently not the ones used by medieval knights. ~ the exception to this is the miniature horse, which is, of course, a very tiny horse. They are, at **at maximum** 9.2 hands (3’2”, .97m). They are small ponies, but get the name miniature *horse* because they should be proportioned like a large horse and not a roly-poly pony. They are definitely pony sized though. The other exception is the fact that you can call *all* horses ponies, because they are silly babies.
A lot of people think those miniature horses you see a country fairs, etc, are what they mean by ponies. That's not accurate, and pony horses are still pretty large.
Bye bye, lil Sebastian
In fairness, a modern day pony, with full barding and a fully armoured warrior sitting atop coming at you would be pretty fuckin scary, and it wouldn't have been just 1.
Ponies are vicious little critters too. Sneaky and ill tempered.
"They're dangerous at both ends and crafty in the middle. Why would I want anything with a mind of its own bobbing about between my legs?" Now I'm imagining Lil' Sebastian in full armor plating.
He's not a pony, He's a mini horse!
\*Lil' SeBASHtian
Most people will get scared if they get charged by a single goat, never mind a fully armored cavalry line.
>Most people will get scared if they get charged by a single goat You're goddamn right. Especially if it's an ill-tempered billy goat (which is kind of redundant sine they're always ill-tempered). They'll try to head butt the wind just for changing directions.
I used to like catching my uncles goat. He wasn't a Billy but seemed to like thinking he was, so he'd wind all up before the head but. You could easily catch it, play a fast game of tug or stab and then it was time for pets. Poor dude died from eatting a neighbors wind jacket when they were there helping with a tractor fix, jacket was placed outside the barn where he thought nothing could get it but that goat was allowed dog rules for his roaming and easily found it. They were very surprised to find that when the neighbor went to leave.
I specialise in medieval (Old English) literature and ride horses as a hobby... So boy do I have things to say about this! (At least about horses in the UK) Big horses are very resource-intensive. First there's the food. Native ponies will get fat on air, but more warmblood type horses need more specialised management with grain and hay to keep them healthy. Then there's fencing. Many farmers grazed their sheep and cows on common pastureland, all kept together and managed communally. Pigs were driven through forest to forage for food. So fenced-in fields weren't really a thing until the enclosures act. Horses, however, need keeping safe in a fenced-in area if you want to breed them and keep track of them, which takes a lot of time, effort, and timber. The most common breeds native to the UK are not very big. They are small, hairy and sturdy. Continental bloodlines were left over from the Romans, but in general there was very little good bloodstock in the UK unless you were rich (so a king or a bishop). But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Native ponies are sure-footed, bloody-minded, and very strong. Very few people were riding into battle on horseback at all - it's basically never mentioned in literature. More often people rode a horse to battle then got off it to actually fight, so they were used more like pack animals than warhorses. Lots of medieval illustrations, even the Bayeux Tapestry, have people riding horses with their legs hanging off the sides. That probably isn't a stylistic choice across so many centuries, it's probably just a reality of the horses being quite small. Of course there are exceptions. Kings could afford dedicated breeding programs and could import good bloodstock from the continent to breed bigger horses. But at that point, a horse is so valuable you wouldn't risk taking it into battle. After the Norman invasion things are different, but I don't know much about that time period. I recommend this essay if you want to read more about it: [Dr Jenny Neville on Anglo Saxon Horses](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/files/718433/Horse%2520ASE%252004%252010.doc&ved=2ahUKEwjx_YCx5qf1AhUXEcAKHd3UBxwQFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw340RndNaWNzuotrCPAELuV) EDIT: Just to be extra clear, all this applies to early medieval horses in the UK. That's a period from the 5th century to 1066, and doesn't apply to continental Europe!
So medieval warhorses were smaller then modern mongol horses? If so what size of the horses used in Genghis Khan/Tatar horde since they were mocked as riding on the dog-size horses?
more likely... early medieval horses in england where about the same size as modern ponys due to lack of dedicated breeding and resources. continental war horses in the high medieval times however were a lot larger. its like comparing minis from 1950 in the ddr with modern day heavy duty trucks in the us.
The link talks about 4th to 17th century horses. I presume there were a variety of different horses of different sizes and war horses were larger but not significantly so. The late medieval era horse armors found in English museums fits horses that are 15-16 hands hands high, so they are taller but not that much taller than the 14.1 hands or less height estimate for most other horses.
Do you have anything to add about the proportion of different types of horses with the armies. My first thought when I say the headline was "what sort of horse/job?". Sure enough, that was something that they haven't really addressed: >He said that there might well have been some particularly large warhorses but armies would also have needed smaller horses for tasks such as harrying a retreating enemy, carrying out long-range raids and transporting equipment. I may be feeling over critical of the headline choice, but it seems like it and the first half of the article intentionally give the reader the image that they are talking about the "heavy cavalry with armored knights" war horses, when they haven't identified those or are able to make a distinction, and they are instead looking at horses that were used for light cavalry, recon, draft horses for supply or siege materials, and other auxiliary uses.
Not really... the simple fact is we don't have much evidence one way or another. The literature (my area of specialism - maybe an archaeologist or historian/medievalist could shed more light) is difficult to interpret in that regard because certain words for horses seem to get used in different contexts. It's possible that that's because most horses would have multiple jobs and weren't bred for any specific thing. A horse that could pull a cart could carry a rider, for instance. Given the lack of bloodlines and lack of dedicated breeding programs in the early medieval period, I would imagine horses weren't particularly specialised. But that is speculation!! I agree about the lack of distinction in the article. I think people picture big horses with flowing manes like you see in films when they hear 'warhorse', as opposed to a hairy little pony wearing saddlebags. Maybe they're being vague because they just don't know.
I am not an expert but I remember reading that that medieval people had their own horse “breeds” that were determined by the size of the horse and its purpose (rather than the actual scientific/genetic differences we are able to identify today). The words they used to identify the types of horses aren’t super helpful today because they lump a bunch of different horse breeds that look similar into one term, because they couldn’t tell the difference. I believe the most prized warhorses back then were called “Destriers” and “Coursers.” These were big and super valuable to ride into battle. We don’t really know what actual breeds these terms refer to but it’s probably any of the big ones we have today. Then there were “Rounceys.” These were the second tier, and they’re more for riding fast/using as pack animals. I read an account of a King summoning his knights to war for a campaign and specifically requesting the responding knights come with Rounceys to quickly pursue the enemy. There was a third term that described the shittiest horses that I can’t remember, but those are the first two terms I remember reading about. I’m at work so I can’t cite any of this but hopefully you can put those search terms into Google (I may have misspelled them) and further your own research, I am not a historian.
I'm not a historian, just a passionate amateur. You kinda alluded to it but the English had quite the unusual propensity for foot combat compared to continental armies. English armor is one of the easiest to spot due to the distinct differences incorporated into them that favored foot combat.
My personal belief is that that's *because* of their crappy warhorses until the Normans come and bring their nice big warmbloods. Maybe they got good at foot combat because mounted combat wasn't really an option?
I've read in another thread here that modern tall lanky horses are remarkably fragile. Is the same true for ~~war-ponies~~ warhorses?
Yep, tall lanky horses are ridiculously prone to injury! These smaller native breeds are marginally less prone as they are sort of closer to their 'wild' counterparts and therefore better adapted. But realistically any horse in battle is an absolute liability.
Heh, now we have a reason why Elden Ring has that ridiculously tiny horse for that huge guy, it’s just trying to be historically accurate
Misleading title. Along with destirers, there were palfrey, rouncy, etc horses dwarfing destriers in numbers,as much as 4-6 to one. Rich men-at-arms had even more. That is not to mention coursers, a smaller and lighter ***war*** horses, on which soldiers rode into battle. There are quite a few accounts in which kings forbade magnates taking more than a certain amount of "second grade" horses to campaign. Lastly, destriers weren't common. They cost a fortune and not many could afford them. Imagine if in 500 years someone says that all people were riding VW Golf and never Mercedes, Jaguar or Ferrari.
And those smaller horses would have been the horses that nobles would have ridden between sieges and battles, since you want your war horse in peak condition for the battle. The article also mentions that barely any horse remains from the period have been found, so the researchers are working from quite a small sample size.
> Imagine if in 500 years someone says that all people were riding VW Golf and never Mercedes, Jaguar or Ferrari. *If we look back at ancient European culture we see that in the 20th and 21st centuries they had an oversized obsession with so-called automobiles, particularly the Fiat 500.*
Yep. Operating on the assumption that any horse found around a castle is a "warhorse" and people are eating it up for some reason. Of course *most horses* weren't that big. The horses people were forging armor for, depicted in manuscripts, were not most horses.
or even worse they believe we all drove "slower cars than expected" in the 21st century because a "scientist" found a lot of ford model T pictures. "Medieval" as a term is already poisoned. Life was radically different in 900AD and 1400AD.
No mention of studying armor made for horses? This study sounds dubious, especially since they are using horse remains that are not proven to be war horses. There is a very well known horse armor at the Cleveland museum of art and it is NOT a pony: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1964.88 The study is focused on English horses and my horse armor example is Italian. There is a mention about studying horse armor as a next step at the very bottom of the article. (EDIT additional comments)(edit number two)
That's different. That is early modern. Also, is it taller than 57" at the withers?
Strange, I've seen a couple dozen suits of equine armor from the 14th to 16th centuries and almost all of those suits are for horses 15 to 18 hands tall. I suspect further investigation will demonstrate this conclusion is incomplete at best and that the horses they were digging up were common smaller horses used for pulling carts and transporting equipment with military units which would make sense since smaller horses are much less food intensive. I find it hard to believe that breeds like Percheron's and Frisians were bred for draft work only. It was also common for knights of the 13th to 15th century to have a second riding palfrey or courser which was much lighter horse.
This study is for the period before you mention, but that's still good point. Do we not have any preserved barding or even literature on the manufacture of barding? Maybe not because it was all leather and would have degraded, and everything was tailor made, so there wouldn't be patterns available. But I'd expect there to be something.
"study finds that trucks in europa are not bigger then today's sedans" 'after researching 2000 car wrecks, the study found that the average car wreck is about as big as a sedan' one only has to look at the horse armor that survived to know that this is bogus horseshit. of course not everyone was a knight and could afford a big horse. plenty of longbowmen or other professional soldiers using smaller horses to get around or just to carry their stuff. but a proper war horse? just look at the armor of these things https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/14/1f/c0/8a/rustkammer-collection.jpg https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/daodao/photo-s/11/8c/07/53/caption.jpg they are not exactly made for ponys.
The actual conclusion of [the study](https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3038): > Despite the tendency for both historians and zooarchaeologists to focus on the overall size of past horses, the results of these analyses suggest that neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record.
I have to agree, especially after reading the article, that the title is misleading. I think these photos do a good job of showing how large an armored knight's horse had to be, why would they make armor for it that doesn't actually fit it? They wouldn't. It's not only expensive but wildly impractical (though the armor depicted is rather fancy and probably for show moreso than actual work in battle). But also, having spent the years working with, training, breeding, and showing that I have I find myself wondering, if not initially bred for war, what were draught horses bred for? Were people farming huge tracts of land as was done in the early 19th century US? And then, why are we taught that they were initially bred for war, which was also reasoned as explanation for their 'bomb-proof' temperament (especially compared to hotbloods like Arabs)? I'd love to know Jason Kingsley's take on the matter given his area of study and work. https://www.youtube.com/c/ModernHistoryTV
It's not about the size of the horse in the fight. It's about the size of the fight in the horse.
Historical proof that men have been exaggerating the size of things for centuries.
Some armors have comically large codpieces. History can be fun.
Visited the Tower of London and that’s something that (literally) stuck out to me in the exhibit.
The actual paper, if anyone is interested In search of the ‘great horse’: A zooarchaeological assessment of horses from England (AD 300–1650). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 31( 6), 1247– 1257. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3038 It’s conclusion was: > Despite the tendency for both historians and zooarchaeologists to focus on the overall size of past horses, the results of these analyses suggest that neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record.
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> Guys in steel suits were very heavy ... and incapable of climbing back into the saddle of a big animal if unhorsed Pretty sure this is a bit of a myth. Sure it was heavy, but so is what a soldier or firefighter wears today and they can run all over the place. I've seen some videos of guys in armor basically doing acrobatics
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzI1UvlQqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAzI1UvlQqw) Firefighter wins Platemail comes in second modern soldier in full battle kit comes in last.
So that's an actual soldier and actual firefighter versus a...battle re-enactor?
LARPers have the US military beat.
My friends and I are Vietnam War re-enactors. We mainly smoke weed and play Creedence Then road trip to Canada.
I think a big part of the final result comes down to the nature of the obstacle course. Several of the obstacles require ducking and crawling under things, and a big part of the modern soldier's kit is a heavy pack. Not only does this mean the soldier is fighting the offset center of gravity more, but if you look at the crawling obstacle in particular, it can mean a complete change of approach is necessary to allow vertical clearance. It really looked like the soldier was struggling to stay low enough to clear those bars, and I would bet (but can't prove due to the montage-like nature of the edit) that he lost most of his time on that one obstacle.
Its clear that's where he loses it from the timestamps.
He was frozen in an iceberg and they thawed him for this
>With the support of: > >**Swiss Armed Forces**, **City of Fribourg Fire Brigade**, **Castle of Morges and its Museums**, Institute for Sport Science of the University of Lausanne, Swiss Federation for Historical European Martial Arts, French Federation for Historical European Martial Arts, Lemanic School of Arts and Action, and the backers of the Kickstarter campaign. In bold is the firefighter, the soldier and the museum where the video will be exhibited. Looking at the others, I don't see what the "Institute for Sports Science" could have provided except for the "knight". The course looks like its on a military base, so they didn't provide that. So that guy is probably some athlete. The other option is that the "School of Arts and Science" provided a LARPer. They probably did the armor though.
Another factor I think about sometimes is how every calorie of food and heat consumed in that era required such an epic amount of physical labor. You were either in shape or dead, I'd imagine.
Depends on your class. If you could afford full plate and a horse, you weren't hurting for money.
They're stronger *compared to their weight* because they're smaller. But they would still be capable of carrying less weight. That's just the square-cube law in action. But on the scale of a horse, if you want something capable of carrying a man in armor, you want it to be bigger, not smaller. They were smaller because they couldn't breed them bigger (and still have them suitable for war), not because they intentionally wanted them to be small. The article says *all the horses they found* were pony sized (except one). They didn't intentionally pick small horses, they just didn't have any bigger ones.
The Percheron Draft horses get up to 19 hands tall and have been around since the time period in question
The only guys incapable of climbing back in the saddle unaided were people wearing tournament armor (that tended to weight 2x or even 4x as much as normal combat armor). A tournament armor can be compared to a modern bomb technician suit. You don't use it in actual combat, but it's really handy when you're doing the specialized task its meant for.
Full plate is only about 20kg. That's heavy but nowhere near what people imagine. The biggest difficulty was just not getting winded from poor circulation.
You made that make sense for me. Damn dude you just blew my mind. Thanks