Comments on: Which War Horse?

By: Investigations of a Dog » Horses and Gendered Language

Investigations of a Dog » Horses and Gendered Language — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:05:10 +0000

[...] about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said [...]

By: Investigations of a Dog » Writing the cavalry charge

Investigations of a Dog » Writing the cavalry charge — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:56:14 +0000

[...] the cavalry charge in early Stuart England”, and is likely to combine bits of my posts on Which War Horse and Cavalry Charges: Theory along with some new material. I’m going to concentrate on the [...]

By: Investigations of a Dog » Cavalry Charges: Theory

Investigations of a Dog » Cavalry Charges: Theory — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:44:19 +0000

[...] I’ll be referring to books written by Gervase Markham (1625), John Cruso (1632), Robert Ward (1639), and John Vernon (1644). You can find more background on the authors and some observations about their styles and influences in my previous post Which War Horse. The most important things to remember are that these are prescriptive books which claimed to set out how things should be done, and that they are not necessarily based on any practical experience. In the next post I’ll be trying to get at what really happened in practice and whether it was influenced by any of these books, but for this post I’ll be taking a more literary and intellectual approach. This is about the idea of “shock”, more than the reality. [...]

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:56:19 +0000

Just checked the Oxford DNB and it looks like I’ve mixed up father and son with the same name. It was John Cruso the younger who was at Cambridge in 1632, and John the elder who wrote Militarie instructions for the cavallrie. Although he was a captain in the Norwich militia, he doesn’t seem to have had any combat experience.

Also Gervase Markham probably served in the army in Ireland in the late 16th century.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 12:31:00 +0000

That is quite likely. As I said, John Cruso was probably a student who had never been near a battle. I’ll be posting some more on this topic in the future, which should show even more clearly that what actually went on in battles could be very different from what the books said should happen. This post was more about where their (probably spurious) ideas came from and what sources of legitimation they appealed to in order to justify themselves.

By: Clanger

Clanger — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:36:04 +0000

Today, if you wish to do anything that requires practical skill, there are an enormous pile of ‘how to’ guides out there to instruct you. But if you ask anyone who already has those skills, they will tell you the same thing. Sure, you can buy a manual, but you’ll only really learn how to do something by practising and being shown. The same would have held true in the EM period. Always a bad idea to learn things like The Art of War, Self Defence, or even Plumbing from a manual or a correspondence course. Sure in the 17thC you could buy the equivalent of ‘The Big Dummies Guide’ to almost anything from alchemy to horse riding, but it was no substitute. Its possible that the people who read the manuals and the people who actually did it for a living were two entirely different groups.