Ancient British Cavalry

[eques]

Happy New Year All.

Army Lists and accompanying notes generally tell us that Ancient British cavalry "tended to be lighter than their Gallic counterparts", and then go on to give them the same stats as, say, Numidian mounted skirmishers.

What are the sources for this?

[Erpingham]

Well, we have Vindolanda tablet 164

http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/4DLink2/4DACTION/WebRequestQuery?searchTerm=164&searchType=number&searchField=TVII

[aligern]

Caesar, I think, but he is describing how a large guerilla force of Britons operates with chariots and cavalry.  I think it was argued that the Britons still had chariots because the horse stock was not big enough to happily support a rider and thus the cavalry would be on light ponies rather than the bigger Gallic horses. So it has logic and a degree of evidence.
Roy

[Andreas Johansson]

Caesar doesn't say much about the British cavalry's equipment or tactics, but he portrays them as decidedly secondary to the chariotry. The hit-and-run tactics seem to be ascribed to the British forces as a whole, so not in itself a reason to grade the horsemen as more skirmishy than the charioteers. That charioteers, but not riders, are described as dismounting to fight at close quarter does however give some license to class the former as heavier.

[Duncan Head]

Horsemen on British coins seem quite lightly equipped, mostly stripped to the waist; not decisive, but probably part of the story.

[Sharur]

An article by Richard Osgood, "Britain in the age of warrior heroes" in British Archaeology 46 for July 1999 suggested from archaeological findings that late Bronze Age British horses were the size of Exmoor ponies:

"Towards the end of the Bronze Age, horse trappings are increasingly common in the archaeological record. Some were deposited in hoards, such as those at Dinorben hillfort in North Wales, others in rivers, like the phalerae (small boss-like decorations) from the Avon at Melksham in Wiltshire, which had been ritually stabbed with a sword or rapier.

"Skeletal evidence suggests the horses of the period were more like a modern Exmoor pony than a strapping cavalry charger, suggesting that warriors fought as mounted infantry rather than as full cavalry in the modern sense."

There's a text-only version available via the WaybackMachine archive site here, as the British Archaeology website no longer seems to include this information as it once did - given the archived link is to that former Brit Arch website.

It's worth a look at this Wikipedia page as well, though you may need to dig around a bit to find the online references - the above WaybackMachine search was prompted by one from there, for example.

[Andreas Johansson]

Acc'd the Internet, an Exmoor pony is bigger than what a late Heian (or Early Samurai, to use army-list-speak) Japanese warhorse was, and the latter, while certainly not strapping chargers, where quite capable of being true cavalry mounts*, and their riders wore heavy armour. So, even granting that the typical ancient British horseman may have been a bigger fellow than the typical samurai of a millennium later, I doubt the horse's size constrained them over much.

Also, in Caesar it's the charioteers, not the cavalry, who dismount.

* OK, some might deny that early samurai were "true" cavalry because they weren't shock chargers; but whatever horse archers are, they're not mounted infantry in the wargamer sense.

[Sharur]

Andreas, where did you find your Japanese information? The best I've come up with so far suggests the native Japanese horses are all descended from Mongolian stock via Korea, which probably arrived in Japan sometime between the 4th and 5th centuries AD (I think this page is reasonably reliable, although some of its reference links are now broken).

That would suggest horses of c.12-14 hands (modernly, at least; so about 120-145 cm if Wikipedia is correct), as compared to the Exmoor pony's c.11-13 hands (110-135 cm or so; Wikipedia again, and also this PDF from the Exmoor Pony Society, albeit that offers "most" as being 11.2 to 12.3 hands tall).

Overall, either similar in size, or the Exmoors are a little smaller, from this it seems.

[Andreas Johansson]

My source is Karl Friday's Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, and by "larger" I was thinking in terms of weight (he cites about 280 kg for samurai horses; online I find 700-800 lbs for Exmoor ponies).

[Patrick Waterson]

The Plains Indians also rode ponies ("Our ponies were much smaller than the horses ridden by the soldiers, so we had to gallop most of the time to keep up," recalls White Man Runs Him, a Crow scout who accompanied Custer's Little Bighorn march in AD 1876) and Plains Indians were true cavalry, fighting from the saddle (or, in their case, saddle blanket).