When horses collide
Back in December 2006 I posted about cavalry charges. Inspired by John Keegan and Frank Tallett, I argued that the idea that cavalry horses crashed into each other in a “shock” charge was completely spurious because horses won’t willingly crash into a solid object, and if they could be made to the outcome would be disastrous because they would be killed or seriously injured by the impact. Physics and common sense are both on my side, but empirical evidence of horse collisions is very difficult to get. The best I could do back then was the footage of Anmer hitting Emily Davison in the 1913 Derby.
Now Peter at That’s Pretty Lame has found exactly what I needed: YouTube footage of two horses colliding head-on at a full gallop. According to the commentary this happened at Prescott Downs, Arizona on 26 August 2000. Both horses were killed and jockey Stacy Burton suffered severe brain injury. I shouldn’t be pleased about such a tragedy, but it’s the perfect empirical evidence to prove my point.
If only I’d thought of searching YouTube for horse collisions, but I assumed they were so rare that I wouldn’t find one. In fact that isn’t the only one. This is another - it looks like the collision is at a slower speed than the Prescott Downs accident but both horses are brought down. In this one the collision is at a very slow canter - looks like no-one was hurt but the riders only just stayed on. This is about as close as you can get to knocking the enemy out of the way with your momentum, but I think it supports my point that the effects of a collision are equally bad for both parties (just as Isaac Newton predicted - who’d have thought it?). So the bay barged past the grey and kept going, but if this was a cavalry charge I don’t think you could really say that the bay won. Both sides would be disordered and neither would have gained an advantage.
Comment by Alex — 11:54 am, 8 July 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
As an English Civil War re-enactor of some 20 years (Royalist Cavalry), I can without doubt confirm that collisions between two opposing cavalry horses (individually or a whole troop) is very likely. Personally I have been involved in such collisions, at a good fast charge, and generally this has happened when one troop has been intercepting another i;e stopping the opposing troop from attacking their infantry ( or vice versa) and has also occurred in cavalry to cavalry charges. Once the troop is tightly formed, knee to knee, the momentum of moving that troop forward into the oncoming charge of another will mean that a good percentage of those horses will crash into one another. Some of the less brave or forward going horses will back off before impact. I was involved in a one to one collision with an opposing rider – both of us trying to intercept the other and unfortunately I was mounted on the smaller horse and therefore took the full force of the larger horses’ head as it hit me side on – not very pleasant for me or the horses for that matter, I managed to stay mounted on the horse but he was knocked nearly off his feet – obviously we are only re-enacting! And therefore do our utmost to ride in a way which minimises any danger to horse and rider – but accidents do happen. The shock tactics you discuss, in my experiences from re-enacting, would have been a distinct possibility – certainly in the thick of the battlefield.Yes, both sides would be in some disorder – however – depending on the formation of the body of horse, the disabling of a few front ranks may enable rear ranks, or indeed a second troop to wheel or take a slightly altered line to advance onto the enemy?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:03 am, 9 July 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks for your comment. It’s good to get input from someone with your experience. I’ve done a lot of riding but never any re-enacting. It seems that what you’re describing is quite different from what Frank Jones wrote (quoted at length here). I think the footage of Stacy Burton proves his “equine battering ram” theory wrong.
As more evidence has come to light, from YouTube and re-enactors, I’m getting more convinced that collisions could be quite common (at least when one side didn’t run away first). Although I’ve been heavily influenced by John Keegan and Frank Tallett, maybe their positions were too extreme in the other direction in saying that knee-to-knee formations and head-on collisions could never happen at all. However, I still don’t think that a fast close-order charge to contact gave the decisive advantage that Frank Jones argued for. In most cases a collision would either have a negligible effect or be counter-productive (at the speeds he described it would be very counter-productive).
From what you’ve described I’d guess that your experience of collisions is somewhere between the second and third videos I linked to above. In that case there might be an advantage if one side were all very good horsemen with deep seats who could stay on while the other side were poor horsemen who fell off very easily. But that seems like a bit of a gamble when you don’t know the enemy’s capabilities. Presumably using the disorder to fix and flank the enemy depends on outnumbering them so you have some spare troopers to take advantage of the disorder.
As I’ve said before, I think the most important thing here is psychology. The fear of being hit by an enemy horse probably overrides the knowledge that the collision is likely to be equally bad for both parties. I need to look more closely at folk physics to see how people think/thought about collisions between horses. At the time of the civil wars Newton hadn’t even written his laws of motion, and highly educated people believed all sorts of strange things about the humoural body and the chain of being. Even now the implications of Newton’s third law for cavalry charges don’t seem to be very widely understood.