Investigations of a Dog

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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This week I’ve been looking at early seventeenth-century cavalry manuals. Although many drill books and treatises on military theory were written in the first half of the seventeenth-century, very few of them covered cavalry. Only four English authors wrote on the subject. Their works are all prescriptive: they claim to tell cavalrymen what they should be doing. They don’t necessarily reflect what was actually being done. Since I was an undergraduate I’ve been aware of the potential difference between theory and practice, but I used to think that if theory didn’t agree with practice, it could simply be discounted as “wrong”. Now I’m approaching these texts from a cultural perspective and reading them very differently. Even the physical process of reading feels different. In my empirical days I developed a useful habit of skimming through text and picking out relevant information, but now I’m reading slowly and carefully, thinking about the choice of words, what isn’t there as well as what is there, how the text relates to other texts and to early-modern culture in general. I’m mostly looking for traces of gender ideology (see my previous post about Horses, War, and Gender) but I’m also picking up a lot of Renaissance culture (see Military Revolution or Military Renaissance?). This post examines what military theorists thought were the criteria for a good war horse.

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