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…)

Back in October 2006 I posted 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 about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).

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 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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The concept of the “Military Revolution” is the biggest idea to come out of early-modern military history, and also a major claim for the importance of military history. Over the years my attitude towards it has varied between excitement, boredom, and irritation. I sometimes wondered if it was time for military historians to move on and talk about something else. More recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between military changes and early-modern culture. Looking at the Military Revolution alongside the cultural concepts of “renaissance” and “medieval” gives an interesting perspective.

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This is a brief introduction to one of my more experimental works in progress. Most people seem to think it’s a bit strange, and it could easily be a complete failure. The idea is to combine my interests in military history, gender, and eco-criticism by looking at a subject I’m familiar with (horses in early-modern war) from an unfamiliar angle.

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