Investigations of a Dog

More filler this week as I’m too busy to write anything intellectual. As it’s Remembrance Sunday, here’s a selection of WW1 pictures from my random ebay acquisitions. Click the thumbnails to see full size versions at Flickr. First of all I bought another photo of the frisky horse that I posted here. Not much need for an epic Errol Morris style investigation as I think it’s pretty obvious what order they go in.

Before:

After:

London Division horse show, Overath, Germany, 1919. Even during the war divisions and corps often held horse shows to encourage the men to look after their horses as well as possible. This was important because infantry and artillery depended very heavily on draught horses throughout the war. This one’s really worth viewing at full size as there’s so much detail.

This looks like two women in the uniform of the Scottish Horse. It apparently wasn’t unusual for women to dress up in men’s uniforms to have their photos taken.

A mounted artillery driver, photographed in Edinburgh. Photos like this cause lots of confusion because people get the idea that their ancestors were in the cavalry and then go off looking in the wrong places and asking the wrong questions.

Girls on ponies watching a Royal Artillery column. Not strictly WW1 as it looks like it was taken in the 1920s or 1930s. The Royal Field Artillery wasn’t fully mechanized until 1939. This photo captures the period when horses were making the transition from useful work in the army and economy to a hobby seen as mostly for girls.

The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World is a new collection of essays about early-modern horses edited by Peter Edwards, Karl Enenkel and Elspeth Graham, and published by Brill. It should be out next week and it’s already available for preorder on Amazon US (if you’ve got loads of money) but I can’t find it on Amazon UK yet.

I’ve got a chapter in it about the military and social value of horses, mostly in early-modern England but it also touches on the middle ages and the First World War. It’s basically exploring Bruce Boehrer’s idea that horses were socially devalued in early-modern England. It includes an alternative narrative of cavalry warfare, a discussion of how horse ownership and cavalry service were (or weren’t) related to elite social status, and a look at the cultural myths of cavalry and chivalry in literature.

The full contents are:

1. Greg Bankoff, ‘Big Men, Small Horses: Ridership, Social Standing and Environmental Adaptation in the Early Modern Philippines’, pp. 99-120.
2. Pia F. Cuneo, ‘Visual Aids: Equestrian Iconography and the Training of Horse, Rider and Reader’, pp. 71-97.
3. Louise Hill Curth, ‘‘The Most Excellent of Animal Creatures’: Health Care for Horses in Early Modern England’, in pp. 217-40.
4. Peter Edwards, ‘Image and Reality: Upper Class Perceptions of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 281-306.
5. Amanda Eisemann, ‘Forging Iron and Masculinity: Farrier Trade Identities in Early Modern Germany’, pp. 377-402.
6. Jennifer Flaherty, ‘‘Know Us by Our Horses’: Equine Imagery in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, pp. 307-25.
7. Elspeth Graham, ‘The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Love For Good Horses’: An Exploration of Meanings’, pp. 37-69.
8. Ian F. MacInnes, ‘Altering a Race of Jades: Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare’, pp. 175-89.
9. Richard Nash, ‘‘Beware a Bastard Breed’: Notes Towards a Revisionist History of the Thorough bred Racehorse’, pp. 191-216.
10. Gavin Robinson, ‘The Military Value of Horses and the Social Value of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 351-76.
11. Elizabeth Anne Socolow, ‘Letting Loose the Horses: Sir Philip Sidney’s Exordium to The Defence of Poesie’, pp. 121-42.
12. Sandra Swart, ‘‘Dark Horses’: The Horse in Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 241-60.
13. Elizabeth M. Tobey, ‘The Legacy of Federico Grisone’, pp. 143-71.
14. Andrea Tonni, ‘The Renaissance Studs of the Gonzagas of Mantua’, pp. 261-78.
15. Elaine Walker, ‘‘The Author of their Skill’: Human and Equine Understanding in the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘New Method’’, pp. 327-50.

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.

Nick Poyntz is right about the serendipity of digital searches. This weekend chasing up a fairly minor point for my book took me on a web search adventure with lots of interesting tangents. It all started with an entry in the lists of people who contributed horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, dated 16 August 1642 (TNA: PRO SP 28/131 part 3 f. 55r):

Valentine Stuckly of the white Beare in Cornwall vint[ner] listed one browne bay geldinge, his rider John Courtnye armed wth Carabine a Case of pistolls a buffe Coate and a sword valued in all at £21

I’ve always assumed that it means Cornhill in London, not the county of Cornwall, but some proof would be nice. These days names like the White Bear are associated with pubs, but in the seventeenth century pretty much any kind of business premises could be identified with a sign like this. Kathleen M. O’Brien has compiled a list of sign names from seventeenth century tradesmen’s tokens, including ones which combine a colour and an animal. The list mentions three White Bears, but not in Cornhill. It seems to be a very common name: the horse lists also include White Bears in Bread Street, Fenchurch Street, Distaff Lane and Lombard Street. The one in Lombard Street apparently later became the famous Lloyd’s coffee house.

The earliest record I can find of a White Bear in Cornhill is in the early 1620s, when the printer Thomas Jenner was based there (and he sometimes spelt it Cornewall). By 1624 he had moved to the Royal Exchange, at the west end of Cornhill on the north side of the street. The exchange was destroyed by fire in 1666 and 1838 but the current version was rebuilt on the same site and with the same layout. Jenner still sometimes called his new premises the White Bear, or sometimes just gave his address as the ‘South Entrance of the Royal Exchange’ (perhaps it was on the very spot where Agent Provocateur now stands). Jenner stayed at the exchange until his death in 1673, after which John Garrett took over the business and premises.

The idea that Jenner moved out of the original White Bear could be supported by an Ordinance of Parliament passed in 1649, which lists property confiscated from the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. Under Birchin Lane in the parish of St Michael Cornhill it lists:

George Dawson, for the White Bear, Two shillings six pence.

Birchen Lane runs from Lombard street in the south to Cornhill in the north, coming out just to the east of the exchange. Even if this building wasn’t actually on the street called Cornhill, it was in the parish of St Michael Cornhill and in Cornhill ward, so could plausibly be described as ‘the White Bear in Cornhill’. And as I found with George Willingham, early-modern London addresses could be quite fuzzy. The entrance of the exchange would probably have been a more desirable location, which could explain why Thomas Jenner would want to move his business around the corner.

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for Saturday 8 October 1664, ‘after dinner abroad, and among other things contracted with one Mr. Bridges, at the White Bear on Cornhill, for 100 pieces of Callico to make flaggs’. From internal evidence it’s not clear whether Bridges had his premises there or whether they met in a tavern to discuss the deal, but it doesn’t seem to be Thomas Jenner’s print shop. Specifying ‘on Cornhill’ could imply that it’s not the same as the White Bear in Birchen Lane (unless it was on the corner), or it could be referring to the actual hill rather than the street named after it.

A collection of documents in the Buckingamshire archives includes a marriage settlement from 1781 which mentions the ‘Pensilvania and Carolina Coffee House (formerly the White Bear) in Birchin Lane, Cornhill, London’.

That’s all I’ve found so far. There could be up to three buildings called the White Bear in the same parish at the same time, and there was almost certainly one other than Jenner’s new address at the exchange. If only they’d had geocoding in the seventeenth century…

Coming soon: a brief biography of Valentine Stuckly, which will raise as many questions as it answers. Also on Sunday 10 July I’ll be posting an interview with Andrew Hickey about his experiences with self-publishing.

I’ve just finished writing an essay for a collection called The Horse as Cultural Icon: the Real and Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World, edited by Peter Edwards and Elspeth Graham, which will be published by Brill (I’m not sure exactly when, but probably within the next twelve months). My chapter is called ‘The military value of horses and the social value of the horse in early-modern England’. It’s quite eclectic, mixing numbers from empirical research with words like semiotics and simulacrum, ranging from Milton and Shakespeare to anonymous scatological poems and cheap woodcuts. I took Bruce Boehrer’s essay ‘Shakespeare and the Social Devaluation of the Horse’ as a starting point and worked outwards, looking at how the middling sort appropriated the horse and how the elite tried to make it more exclusive. Although it’s mostly about the 16th and 17th centuries I went back into the middle ages and forward to the First World War to show how the social and cultural roles of horses aren’t necessarily related to the reality of war. I’ve cited Stephen Badsey and David Kenyon for proof that cavalry were still useful in the 20th century and that there was and is an awful lot of prejudice against them; and I’ve cited Michael Prestwich and Anne Curry to show that 14th and 15th century men-at-arms were flexible all-rounders and that only a minority of them were knights. By taking a longer view than most previous works on early-modern horses I’m trying to break out of a vaguely Marxist master narrative in which The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism and the increasing use of gunpowder doomed the knight on his charger and gave the aristocracy an identity crisis, and in which social, economic and military base determines cultural superstructure. Rather than marking a turning point, Shakespeare’s treatment of horses and chivalry in Henry V seems to be part of a debate which was already going on in the 14th century, was still going on throughout the 17th century, and is perhaps still going on now. Cultural beliefs that cavalry were useless seem to be independent of how useful cavalry actually were.

The best thing is that I’ve used the phrase “order of magnitude” correctly and appropriately. I shouldn’t feel so pleased about this, but I get so annoyed by other historians misusing it to mean “quite a lot”.

Meanwhile I’m taking a break from posting here for a month or two (or maybe three) while I finish the first draft of my book. Before too long I’ll have made the inevitable transition from “oh no, I won’t be able to write enough” to “oh no, I’ve written too much”.

1. Bruce Boehrer, “Shakespeare and the social devaluation of the horse,” in The Culture of the Horse, ed. Karen L. Raber and Treva J. Tucker (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 
   

1. Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston, The Battle of Crécy, 1346, New Ed. (Boydell Press, 2007).
2. Stephen Badsey, Doctrine and Reform in the British Cavalry 1880-1918 (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008).
3. Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman: Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts, New ed. (London: Merlin, 1960).
4. Ian Gadd, John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past, illustrated edition. (British Library Publishing Division, 2004).
5. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner, eds., Londinopolis : essays in the social and cultural history of early modern London (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000).
6. Julia F. Merritt, ed., Imagining early modern London: perceptions and portrayals of the city from Stow to Strype, 1598-1720 (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). 
   

Believe it or not, these are all somehow related to an essay about cavalry, horses and social status that I’m writing for an edited collection. Overambitious? Moi?

[Cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

Over the summer I read two PhD theses which challenge a lot of preconceptions about cavalry in warfare, one on the Anglo-Saxon period and the other on the First World War.

1. Kerry Cathers, “An examination of the horse in Anglo-Saxon England” (PhD, Reading University, 2002).
2. David Kenyon, “British Cavalry on the Western Front 1916-1918” (PhD, Cranfield, 2008). 
   

(Both of these can be downloaded free from EthOS, although you’ll need to log in and search for them as there are no direct links. Kenyon’s can also be downloaded directly from Cranfield, which is much easier.)

Historians used to assume without question that horses played little part in Anglo-Saxon warfare and society. Kerry Cathers has challenged these assumptions, showing that they are based on very little evidence. The lack of evidence makes it difficult to be certain, but there is enough to suggest that horses were widely used and known by the Anglo-Saxons. Horses were conventionally associated with warriors in Anglo-Saxon culture (Cathers, 181, 306). Although their most well known battles were fought on foot, Anglo-Saxon armies used horses for raiding and for transporting soldiers to battlefields (Cathers, 288-9, 383). The Aberlemno stone probably represents a battle between the Northumbrians and the Picts, and shows both sides using cavalry (Cathers, 276-82). Cathers also discusses the development of the stirrup and its influence (or not) on medieval warfare. She sides with critics of Lynn White’s view that the stirrup was the fundamental basis of feudalism. Ann Hyland found that Roman cavalry saddles provided a secure seat even without stirrups, and Littauer argued that the stirrup was developed to support the feet and avoid cramp on long journeys (Cathers, 189-90, 267-9). R.H.C. Davis attributed the couched lance to the great horse more than the stirrup, but still ended up privileging cavalry over non-military uses of horses, and deriving feudalism from a fairly narrow technological development. Cathers shows that Anglo-Saxon horses were no smaller than horses in other parts of Europe but that this fact has tended to be covered up by historians’ linguistic biases: referring to Anglo-Saxon horses as “ponies” signifies the idea of a small animal. She was also an early advocate of the idea that there is no such thing as native breeds, and that the idea was invented much later: “Though, as noted, some horse enthusiasts like to push the date of certain breeds back into the furthest reaches of the past, the claim that breeds existed during this period is entirely false and without substantiation ” (Cathers, 160). The spurious idea that the Exmoor pony is an authentic native breed led some historians to assume that Anglo-Saxon horses were similar. I don’t think a big horse would have been necessary for shock charges with the couched lance, because even the mass of a small horse could put a lot of momentum behind the lance. One particularly weird result of historians’ prejudice against the idea of Anglo-Saxon horses is that one place name study assumed that places including the element “wig” must be named after earwigs, and failed to mention the possibility that they could be derived from “wicgela”, an Old English word for stallion! (Cathers, 67-8)

If cavalry played a role in English/British warfare earlier than most people thought, they also remained important long after most people think they became obsolete. It might appear that the Western Front from 1916 to 1918 is not a very promising area for studying cavalry, but David Kenyon confounds expectations in even more detail than Stephen Badsey has done. The key to the argument is that although new technology created problems for cavalry it also created opportunities. Barbed wire was as much an obstacle to infantry as it was to cavalry. Neither could attack effectively unless the wire was removed by artillery, tanks or engineers. Machine guns and breech loading magazine rifles increased the firepower of cavalry as well as infantry. Between the Second Anglo-Boer War and the First World War, British cavalry were retrained to fight primarily as mounted infantry, although they were still trained and equipped to charge into close combat when the opportunity arose. In the early years of the First World War, every cavalry regiment had a machine gun section armed with Vickers heavy machine guns, which were transported on pack horses. In 1916 these were replaced with Hotchkiss light machine guns, and the Vickers guns were reorganized into Machine Gun Corps (Cavalry) squadrons (Kenyon, 33). This mobile firepower allowed cavalry to engage enemy machine guns in firefights. For example, when the 7th Dragoon Guards came under fire from German machine guns near Longueval on 14th July 1916, their own machine gun section knocked out the German guns (Kenyon, 60).

Although cavalry regiments mostly depended on firepower, changes in technology and tactics made cavalry charges more viable in some circumstances. From the medieval period into the nineteenth century the best way for infantry to resist a cavalry charge was to stand still in a very tight formation, because the horses would usually stop or turn away from an apparently solid object as long as the infantry had the confidence to stand firm. The massive firepower on early twentieth century battlefields made such close formations suicidal. When infantry dispersed to protect themselves from artillery and machine guns, they also made themselves more vulnerable to cavalry charges. On 14 July 1916 some German infantry were dispersed in a field near High Wood, sheltering in shell craters. This was the best way to protect themselves from artillery, which was the most likely threat, but they were charged by a squadron of the 7th Dragoon Guards, which had pushed through a gap in the German front line. Of these German infantry, 16 were killed by lances, 32 captured and the rest ran away (Kenyon, 60).

Rapid firing artillery was a much bigger threat than the machine gun. The worst combat casualties for British cavalry horses happened when their riders had dismounted to defend positions which were then shelled by the Germans, as at Monchy-le-Preux in April 1917 (Kenyon, 136). The increasing quantity and quality of allied artillery forced the Germans to abandon linear trenches and switch to defence in depth by the spring of 1917. In this system the front line consisted of a network of outposts rather than continuous trenches, designed to break up attacks gradually and funnel them into killing zones where they could be counter-attacked by reserves. Because the defences were more dispersed there was more room for cavalry to manoeuvre. Cavalry and infantry were able to employ fire and movement tactics which involved one unit suppressing an enemy position with its fire while another unit moved around its flank. Kenyon points out that these tactics had been in the Cavalry Training manual since 1912 (Kenyon, 109-10). When the allies broke through the Hindenburg Line in the autumn of 1918 and began advancing more rapidly, cavalry played a vital role in maintaining contact with the retreating Germans (Kenyon, 269).

Opportunities to use cavalry effectively in set-piece attacks were often missed because of failures in command, control and communication. While Kenyon rehabilitates the cavalry, he is critical of Cavalry Corps and its commander, Kavanagh. Having the cavalry divisions in their own Corps under GHQ complicated the chain of command, delayed the transmission of orders and intelligence, and made it hard to co-ordinate cavalry attacks with infantry and artillery. Cavalry divisions worked better when they were integrated into infantry corps attack plans but with the divisional commander free to use his own initiative to reach his objectives. There was also a pressing need for more cavalry squadrons to be attached to infantry divisions and corps for reconnaissance. Kavanagh was perhaps not well suited to command of a corps. His aggressive tendencies served him well as a brigade commander, but were directed at his subordinates more than the enemy once he was a lieutenant-general. The chain of command through Cavalry Corps HQ gave him too many opportunities to interfere with plans and overrule his divisional commanders, who were better placed to know what was going on at the front. Cavalry Corps also lacked the logistical infrastructure and heavy artillery which were found in infantry corps.

Despite all the problems, when cavalry were used effectively they were able to double the depth of “bite and hold” operations. Unfortunately, cavalry tended to be wrongly perceived as obsolete by people who didn’t understand them. The prejudiced opinions of a few tank officers have had a disproportionate influence on historians of the First World War. Tanks played a useful role in some battles, but they were much slower than cavalry. Wheeled armoured cars could move faster than tanks on good going but often got stuck in the mud. These problems weren’t effectively solved until the 1930s, when the British Army rapidly mechanized because horses genuinely were becoming obsolete. Erik Lund continues the story over at Bench Grass, with a look at mounted warfare and the development of the armoured division…

Nehemiah Wharton was a servant from London who joined the Earl of Essex’s army at the start of the English Civil War. From August to October 1642 he sent a series of letters addressed to his master, George Willingham, a merchant at the Golden Anchor in St Swithin’s Lane. These letters have survived (although how they ended up in the State Papers is anyone’s guess) and were published in the 19th century (no free online version available, but the British Library has published a reprint as part of their digitization project). I’ve been looking at them for evidence of horses and social status. Wharton mentions another of Willingham’s servants, usually referred to as Davy (or Barry in one place, but I’ve assumed it’s the same man), who was serving in the army with a horse. The letters don’t give any further details of the man and horse, but it seems likely that Willingham had voluntarily contributed a cavalry horse under the scheme known as the Propositions and sent his servant to ride it. The UK National Archives have an account book of cavalry horses listed on the Propositions (SP 28/131 part 3), and as it’s a very important source for my work on horses, I’ve made a transcript of it. There is an entry for George Willingham, on 15 July 1642 (folio 19):

George Willingham of Londonstone painter stainer entred one gray horse, his rider David Avyes armed wth a Carbine, a case of pistolls a buffe coate and a sword all valued by the Commissaryes at 27 – 00 – 00

This is close but there are a couple of potential problems because the address and occupation don’t quite match. This doesn’t rule him out completely. London stone was just around the corner from St Swithin’s Lane in Cannon Street, so they could be referring to the same place (see the Agas map). Although London citizens tended to be identified by occupations, their trades could change, and the company through which they were admitted to the freedom of the city didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the trade they were pursuing. George Willingham could be a freeman of the Painter Stainers Company and trading as a merchant. What we need is another source to confirm or deny the link between Wharton’s letters and the Propositions list.

British History Online has a published list of London citizens from 1638, but it doesn’t cover St Swithin’s parish, which is where St Swithin’s Lane and London stone were. But the National Archives do have a will for a George Willingham, Painter Stainer of Saint Swithin, City of London, proved in 1651. That looked very promising, so I downloaded it (if I’d known I was going to need this last time I was at Kew I could’ve printed out there and saved £3.10). I’ve put a transcript of the whole thing on the Your Archives wiki. In the will, Willingham describes himself as “Cittizen and Paynter stayner of London”, so he was free of the Painter Stainers Company, but not necessarily following that trade. He mentions having children called John, Samuel, Ebenezer, Hannah and an unnamed daughter married to John Colyer. Wharton mentions Elizabeth, Anne, John, and Samuel in his letters, which roughly coincides with the children in the will. According to IGI, George Willingham married Anne Eaton at St Dunstan, Stepney, on 21 September 1624. They had these children baptised at St Swithin’s London Stone:

• John Willingham, 28 February 1629

• Ana Willingham, 24 June 1627
• Ebenezer Willingham,11 October 1642

Therefore Ebenezer wasn’t mentioned in Wharton’s letters because he hadn’t been born yet (the last letter is dated 7 October 1642). I can’t find a baptism for Samuel, but IGI isn’t complete. Given the wild variations in 17th century spelling, Ana and Hannah are probably the same person. The will also includes a bequest to “Mr Abraham Moline my deere and approved freind”, who could be the Mr Molloyne mentioned in Wharton’s letters.

The details in the will are enough to link the letters to the Propositions list and resolve the ambiguities. On the balance of probabilities, all three documents relate to the same person. Without the will it would be hard to link the other two documents together and reconcile the differences between them. This all adds up to proof that David Avyes was a servant and that his horse and arms were supplied by his master. (It doesn’t prove that he was decayed, or that royalist cavalry were any different. See my post about Cromwell and Balfour for some problems with the “decayed serving men and tapsters” myth.) Willingham must have been very rich. He bequeathed £700 to each of his three sons and left the residue of his estate to his daughter Hannah, explicitly stating that he intended her to have at least as much as the boys. That kind of wealth is consistent with trading as a merchant. He could easily afford to give away a horse and arms worth £27. The value of his contribution and the early date (July was a long time before contributions became compulsory) suggests that he was quite enthusiastic about the parliamentary cause. His will has some strong hints of puritanism. He asked for his body to be “decently buried without pompe and ringeing”, and bequeathed a book of sermons and a confession of his faith to his daughter. There’s no mention of any servants in the will, so it doesn’t help to solve the mystery of what happened to Nehemiah Wharton. Since his letters stopped in October 1642 he could have been killed at the battle of Edgehill, but as far as I know there isn’t any definite proof.

After yet more digging for evidence of horse collisions I’ve found some new examples and more sources for some that I already knew about. Maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to do this because everyone would just accept that shock charges are a stupid idea (as I’ve argued in lots of blog posts before, although I’ve changed my mind about some of the details), but maybe a world in which everyone accepted things without evidence wouldn’t really be all that perfect. I’m increasingly aware that old arguments against shock (eg John Keegan in The Face of Battle) are just as prone to woolly thinking, special pleading and vague appeals to “common sense” as the arguments for it. Instead of appealing to the authority of one historian’s common sense to disprove another historian’s common sense I need to appeal to the authority of science and real-world examples. Speculation about what “would” happen looks pretty worthless next to video footage of what did happen. In any case I find this research interesting and fun (despite the fact that it focuses on horrible things happening to horses and people!).

First, a new one that I haven’t mentioned before. Thursday 16 June 1994 (ladies’ day) at Royal Ascot. In the fifth race (the Ribblesdale Stakes), Papago ridden by Mick Kinane was trailing the field at the furlong post when a drunk spectator (James Florey) ran across course. The horse ran into him, knocked him down and rolled over, unseating the jockey. Although horse and jockey ended up on the floor they weren’t injured. Florey was taken to hospital. Initial reports said that his condition was serious, and he was later said to have suffered cuts and bruises, but apparently the only long-term result of the incident was that he was warned off British racecourses for five years by the Jockey Club.

YouTube has BBC footage of the accident in slow motion looking down the course, which gives a good view of what happened. It looks like the horse saw the spectator coming in from his right and tried to duck out to the left but this just kept him going towards the spectator who hadn’t seen the horse and carried on running straight across the track. The horse hit him and tripped over head first. There are also a couple of reports in The Independent from 17 June and 9 September.

A weird thing about this one is that I must have known about it at the time but I’d completely forgotten about it. I was really into racing at that time, watched it on TV whenever I could, and bought the Racing Post quite frequently. I even went to Ascot the day after the accident – I was there when Lochsong won the King’s Stand Stakes. And this was just after I’d started work on my undergraduate dissertation, which was all about cavalry, so it’s not like I wasn’t primed to look out for collisions. It just shows that memories are unreliable.

Churchill Downs, Kentucky, 26 April 2009. During an exercise period at the Kentucky Derby meeting, Doctor Rap unseated his rider and galloped into Raspberry Kiss, who was standing on the track. Raspberry Kiss was knocked over and was later put down because of a broken pelvis (or possibly died of shock just before she was due to be put down – reports are contradictory); Doctor Rap fell on top of her and suffered a bone bruise which will probably stop him from racing again. I tried to find out about this accident last year but things got confusing because many news reports got the names of one or both horses wrong! Thanks to the Thoroughbred Database, which gives pedigrees for thoroughbred horses, I’ve confirmed the correct names of the horses:

• Raspberry Kiss (USA) foaled 2007, by Champali (USA), out of Lucky Sheikh (USA)
• Doctor Rap (USA) foaled 2006, by Smarty Jones (USA), out of Carly’s Crown (USA)

Some sources gave the names as Dr Rap and Raspberry Miss, but there are no records of any thoroughbred racehorses with these names.

NBC Chicago has a video of the accident which gives a good view of what happened. Doctor Rap approached Raspberry Kiss from behind and hit her left side. She fell and rolled over, throwing her jockey off. Doctor Rap came down on top of her and neither horse could get up. They are still lying on the ground at the end of the video, over 30 seconds after the impact. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) and New York Daily News give reports of the accident which seem to have the facts straight.

Prescott Downs, Arizona, 26 August 2000. I’ve written about this one before but now I have some reports from the Prescott Daily Courier from 30 November 2000 and16 July 2003 giving reliable details. This is the one where Pacific Wind unseated his rider, galloped the wrong way around the track, and collided head on with Lot O Love, ridden by Stacey Burton. Both horses were knocked over and killed, and Burton was in coma for 23 days and suffered permanent brain damage. That’s what happens when you maximize the shock of impact.

Finally, I came across a YouTube video of an accident in Turkey. I haven’t been able to find any background information about this, and it’s not likely that I will because there isn’t much to go on. It seems to be some kind of display related to the history of the Ottomans. The grey horse gallops into the black horse which is standing still. The grey is knocked over and doesn’t get up. I’d guess it probably had to be put down. The video shows horse and rider lying on the ground for nearly two minutes after the collision, and at the end they don’t look like they’re going to get up and walk away. The black horse did walk away and doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt. Because the accident is a long way from the camera, and the quality of the video isn’t too good, it’s hard to see exactly what happened. It looks like the black horse probably regained its balance, but it’s very clear that its rider was knocked off very suddenly. I don’t think anyone could have sat on through that.

So, more proof that crashing horses into each other, or into people, is a bad idea. Don’t do it kids…

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…)