Medieval Warhorses, Repost + additions!
Since people loved my “Preindustrial travel times” post so much, I decided to repost my “Realistic warhorses” info separately from the original link, where it was a response to “how to get the feel of realistic combat.”
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The “Warhorse” post on my blog, plus a recent addition, is here.
And here’s the text for people who want to go down my “grown up horse-girl” rabbit hole right away!
Medieval Warhorses:
First of all: DESTRIERS WERE NOT DRAFT HORSES. Horse/military historians are begging people to stop putting their fantasy knights on Shires, Belgians, and other massive, chunky farm-horses! The best known instance of “a knight needs to get lifted onto their 18-hand draft horse” is a SATIRE (A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, if I remember right), but somehow laymen decided to take it seriously.
Hell, I think the film’s historians knew that this was extremely inaccurate and begged the director not to do it.
My post got cut off, so I added the rest of it today! The rabbit-hole of preindustrial horsemanship deepens!
#op you are an ABSOLUTE GEM #i work in genre fiction (specifically sf/f) and i do NOT know a lot about horses #but i keep needing to be SURPRISE GOOD AT HORSES
Thank you for the hilarious tags!
Also as a “thing that you should avoid in period works:”
The common modern requirement of “X breed of horse must only be X, Y, and Z color” was most likely not a thing in medieval times, as I’ve noted with “modern-type breeds didn’t actually EXIST back then” to start with.
You had: “Farm/work horses,” and “riding horses,” and “warhorses,” or maybe you had “Spanish / Dutch / English horses.”
You didn’t know what modern horse-folks know about GENETICS, and not too much of an idea of how their coat-colors get passed down. You just knew that your mare with high white socks USUALLY has solid-colored foals with high socks (duh), but this one time you bred her to a stallion with only one white sock and a smudge on his chin, and THAT baby had patches like nobody’s ever seen.
People are people; you had individuals who loved horses with spots or patches or really flashy high socks, and those who wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. Wealthy nobles/royals with their favorite horses may well spark “fads” for horses with certain coats, but horses in general were a lot more colorful in older times.
“Spanish horses” are currently solid-colored or gray today, but they were known to have spotted or patchy coats in medieval times, and the foundation mare for the Knabstrupper breed is a snowflake-patterned horse who is said to be “Spanish.” This means as late at the 1800s, Iberian breeds or “breeds that can believably pass for Spanish” still had leopard-type spotting genes! https://horse-canada.com/breeds/knabstrupper/
Personally I love spotted and patchy horses, so I will have as many spotted or patchy horses in my works as I can.
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Also, my sympathies for being in a field that you need More Knowledge Of, lol.
The series I’m working on that has all this horse-knowledge? Is ALSO the series where I went, “Man, I would love to see what happens when your average Asian-American woman Alima Song accidentally wins a Gaelic Irish petty-kingdom, and SHE ACTUALLY HAS TO RULE! How do Folk taxes work? How do the Folk handle illness/injury if they’ve got preindustrial technology but ALSO a different kind of magic than humans? …Great, now I have to learn about medicine AND accounting, like my mom kept telling me to!”
And then I realized that despite my hatred of math in school, I accidentally found out that logistics/statistics is fun for me. So fun that instead of finishing the proper story, I got distracted and wrote notes about Folk society and economy for months. Lmao.