Investigations of a Dog

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics. (more…)

The 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell is coming up soon (even if you’re pedantic enough to commemorate it on 3rd September Old Style it’s not that far off!) so Ted Vallance is organizing a one-off Cromwell themed blog carnival. It’s probably no surprise that I’ve decided to look at Cromwell’s early career as a cavalry officer in the First Civil War. Cromwell is more famous for becoming commander of the New Model Army, and then Lord Protector. Although these things didn’t happen until much later they have seriously skewed perceptions of Cromwell’s military career from 1642-46. For a long time there was a strong Whiggish tendency to look for signs of future greatness in his earlier actions (much as I love C. H. Firth he was one of the major offenders here). This hasn’t been helped by Cromwell’s own self-mythologizing or parliamentarian/Independent propaganda in the Thomason Tracts. I’m going to try to disregard all that and compare Cromwell as a cavalry commander with one of his contemporaries, Sir William Balfour. By 1644 Cromwell and Balfour had similar rank and responsibilities, but Balfour didn’t go on to be Lord Protector and so has been largely forgotten.

[I wrote this off the top of my head and never got round to checking all the facts or putting in references. It doesn’t matter too much because it’s mostly just about my personal opinion, but be aware that some of it might be wrong. The best source for Balfour is Edward Furgol’s article in the DNB]

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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.

The word “Ironsides” is variously associated with Oliver Cromwell, his cavalry regiment, and even English Civil War cavalry in general. The consensus now seems to be that “Old Ironsides” was originally a nickname of Cromwell himself (I’m not sure why he was called that or when it started). It seems likely that “Ironsides” later spread to his regiment, then to all the cavalry under his command as Lieutenant-General of horse, then to parliamentarian cavalry in general, then to civil war cavalry in general. For example, “Ironsides” was used as the title of John Tincey’s book about civil war cavalry.

There was another folk etymology which suggested that Cromwell’s cavalry were known as “Ironsides” because they wore heavy armour. In the classic Cromwell’s Army, C. H. Firth took down T. S. Baldock for repeating the myth that Cromwell’s cavalry were heavily armoured cuirassiers in contrast to Prince Rupert’s supposedly unarmoured light cavalry. As Firth says, the vast majority of cavalry on both sides during the First Civil War were equipped as arquebusiers, and no new research in the last hundred years or so has changed that. I had assumed that the myth belonged to the 19th century but today I discovered that it was much older.

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Recently I linked to The Wapenshaw, a new early-modern military history blog. This is an exciting addition to an area which is under-represented in the history blogosphere (how I hate that word, but I cant think of anything better). There was a noticeable gap here in the first Military History Carnival. Although I found a reasonable number of early-modern posts, most of them focused on America, and only one covered Europe. Another reason why I’m pleased to see this blog is that Rich is paying a lot of attention to me (every blogger is a narcissist!). His first two posts comment on my posts from last year about cavalry charges and drill books. This is a useful coincidence, as I need to write a proposal for a conference paper on this topic by the end of this week, so in this post I’ll trying to get my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. Trying: the post itself is quite incoherent and probably contains some total nonsense, but that’s part of the value of a blog.

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I’d like to welcome The Wapenshaw to the military history blogosphere. Rich will be taking a critical look at late medieval and early modern warfare, and combining military history with his interest in philosophy. His first post debates some of the issues raised by my posts on cavalry charges and raises some more questions about the meaning of the word “shock”.

Previously in cavalry charges: I got as far as what happened when cavalry charged each other. In the English Civil War the two most common outcomes were: one side or the other ran away before they got near each other; or they stopped and fought hand to hand. Hand to hand combat usually resulted in one side giving up and running away sooner or later. This post is about what happened after one side had started running away.

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In the previous posts I discussed the historiography and theory of cavalry charges in the English Civil War. Now I’m going to try to get at what really happened. What did cavalry try to do in practice? How successful was it? How did it work, or why didn’t it work?

(Warning: this one is even longer than yesterday’s.)

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In the last post, I looked at “shock”, a common myth in the historiography of cavalry tactics. Having established that it’s unlikely that cavalrymen would have been able (or even willing) to crash their horses into the enemy, I now want to look at where the idea came from, and how common it was in seventeenth-century drill books.

(Warning: this post is very long and esoteric. Having managed to keep myself down to 1,000 words yesterday I’ve now come out with nearly 3,500, although a lot of that is blockquotes from the books.)

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This is the first part of an analysis of the way cavalry fought in battles. It mostly focuses on the English Civil War, but I’ll be drawing some examples from other places and periods. To start with, I’m going to discuss a concept known as “shock”, which is very frequently mentioned in histories of cavalry tactics.

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