The “caracole” was a 16th century tactic and seems to have gone out of fashion by the 1640s, even among armies which weren’t using Swedish tactics. There are only a couple of vague ambiguous examples from the Civil Wars and no explicit description of a full blown caracole as defined by modern historians. I think the dialectic between caracole and shock is misleading. ECW cavalry used a variety of tactics which didn’t quite fit either definition. Prince Rupert advocated charging into close combat but there’s no evidence that he believed in physical shock. His orders to reserve fire suggest that he was still expecting a fight at close quarters. It seems to me that the idea of horses crashing into each other belongs mostly to the 18th and 19th centuries and hadn’t yet come into fashion in the 1640s. Eyewitness accounts of ECW battles don’t describe anything which could be interpreted as shock. Either one side ran away before contact, or they fought hand to hand for a long time.

I’m a big fan of Wanklyn’s work, especially his anti-determinist view of the war, and his Decisive Battles book (see my review). I think the shock thing really comes from Frank Jones as it doesn’t appear in Wanklyn’s solo work.

I think things were different in the Boer War and First World War because the firepower of magazine rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery forced infantry into looser formations. Then cavalry could ride between them and stab them with lances or swords. Ironically I think this is the opposite of a metanarrative of progress: pike armed infantry were almost impossible to break with a cavalry charge; after the abandonment of the pike, musketeers in close formation could be broken if even one horse crashed into them; and by the early 20th century infantry in the open were perhaps more vulnerable to cavalry than ever before and relied on trenches and wire to keep them safe.

With regards to the idea of cavalry running down fleeing infantry; in the course of writing a recent paper, I’ve come across much evidence for such events, and for their usefulness in battle. Obviously such events are rare and impractical in a set-piece affair such as Waterloo; however, in a much more informal contest, such as those found during the Second Boer War, fleeing infantry, and indeed, fleeing dismounted horsemen, were regularly run-down (‘bagged’) by British lancers. The Boers had a justifiable terror of the appearance of Lancers, and these were men armed with quick-firing magazine rifles, usually fighting from cover.

Sorry if that all sounds a little like a gripe – I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your cavalry-related articles, it’s my pet-passion somewhat, so it’s nice to come across such good material on the internet that isn’t a century old !

In this follow-up post I suggested that there might be some trade-off between speed and tightness of formation, and that either might help to intimidate the enemy into running away before contact was made. But in this period if they got right up to each other it looks like they always stopped and went into hand to hand combat (Keegan found that cavalry might pass through each other in the Napoleonic wars but I haven’t found any definite examples in the English Civil War).

You should also see this post which includes more evidence of what actually happens when horses crash into each other. It ain’t pretty.

Horses are herd animals: they like to stay together and follow each other. You can see the herd mentality at work in horse races: horses often carry on running and jumping the fences even when they’ve lost their jockeys. Some people see this in sentimental anthropomorphic terms (the horses love racing) but a more realistic assessment is that they’re just following the rest of the horses.

All this can have big implications for cavalry. In Edgehill: The Battle Reinterpreted (2004, ISBN: 1844151336), Chris Scott and Alan Turton compared the cavalry charges to stampedes. This was at the start of the civil war, when men and horses on both sides had relatively little training or experience. This could well account for the difficulty of bringing cavalry back into a battle after a successful charge, which I’ll be talking about more in a later post.