Were medieval horsemen cruel to their animals?

Detail from Paris BnF Velins 618, fol. 29r (1494)
(c) Bibliothèque nationale de France

It can be easy to judge the attitude people had towards horses in the past: knowledge on equine cognition has progressed and goes on advancing and we, as a society, tend to be more sensitive to animal welfare and suffering. We also have shifted, in many parts of the world, from the perception of a useful animal to the perception of an animal destined to leisure, or even of a pet, which in turns influences our expectations from and treatment of horses.   

In medieval Europe, horses were essential to daily life. They played an essential role in the trade, agriculture, travel, warfare of the time. They were kept for a purpose. They were trained for a purpose. This didn’t stop people from wanting an emotional connection with them or even from loving their horses, but what they expected from their horses was different that what we do now. 

When I told people about my PhD topic, the breaking-in and training of horses in medieval France, some of the questions I was often asked were: how were the horses treated? how brutal was the training?  And indeed, it’s easy to assume that medieval horsemen were brutal: look at the type of equipment they used. Some of the bits used on medieval horses would necessarily be painful, even if the rider had the softest hands in the world (though I guess the contraptions used by some modern riders are just as terrible…). 

Detail from Paris BnF NAF 28881, fol. 5v (15th century)
(c) Bibliothèque nationale de France

However, it’s difficult to get the full picture from archaeological remains of equipment: we only know what we have found. For all we know, bitless bridles would have been a popular tool and the curb bits we see in museums were only used occasionally. Even when we look at the texts, we cannot know anything for sure.  For instance, there is only one known original written source for horse training in medieval Europe, contained in Jordanus Rufus’s De medicina equorum, and it cannot be considered to be representative of what was done all over Europe during the period. Many other training methods circulated orally and some may also have been written down though they have now been lost. Therefore, Rufus’s training method cannot be used to make blanket statements about medieval European horse training. 

However, I can definitely give my opinion on whether Rufus’s training method was brutal or not. And again, it’s not a straightforward answer. 

I have a lot of respect for the work of Jordanus Rufus and believe he was an extremely knowledgeable horseman with an intuitive awareness of the complexities of equine psychology. In his method, he understands the horse as a sentient being, capable of feeling pain and of having emotions. He is aware of the colt-in-training’s social needs, recommending he be kept in the company of another, already tame horse. He uses that other horse as a helper, as an active participant in the education of the colt, making it easier for the latter to transition from equine forms of communication to the ones used by humans. Much of Rufus method is still very relevant today, which is why I applied it to my ponies. It gives sound advice, grounded in empirical knowledge of the horse, and uses techniques such as positive conditioning, desensitisation, and habituation, all of which have a place in modern training methods. 

And it would be easy to stop there. To just look at the first half of Rufus’s training method and conclude that medieval horsemen treated their horses with compassion and sensitivity. Which they did, to an extent. That first half of the training involves taming the horse, accustoming him to the rider, the saddle, and then introducing the walk, trot, and canter. Several of the manuscripts I studied only include those parts which are universal and easily applicable. All the elements that I put into practice on my ponies come from those parts. 

But the original text, or at least, the text in the form believed to be original, has additional passages which are specifically meant for the training of warhorses. They include the use of hyperflexion, a very damaging head position where the horse’s neck is bent so that his nose touches his chest. Now, the thing is that Rufus was not aware that it was damaging. He recommends it because he thinks it will help the horse see the ground better (untrue because horses have a blind spot just in front of them) and will allow the rider to better control him. Because of this ignorance, it cannot be qualified as animal cruelty.

What can be qualified as cruelty is Rufus’s deliberate use of pain. In one passage, he recommends to extract some teeth and then to put the bit back in the horse’s mouth, before the wounds have had time to heal, so that the horse will learn to better respond to the rider’s cues, explicitly because of the pain. Here, Rufus knows he is inflicting pain and he deliberately uses the horse’s response to achieve his goal, which to have a perfectly responsive animal. Having a horse who would obey to every single command from his rider would be a matter of life or death on the battlefield. Rufus wanted to build a bond of trust with the horse and nurture mutual respect between him and the rider. But at the end of the day, the horse needed to submit to his rider and obey him, be that willingly — the ideal warhorse would choose his own master, as described in the literature of the time — or through coercion. 

Rufus’s decision to use pain cannot really be judged by our modern eyes. Though it may have been judged at the time: the passage is omitted from some of the manuscripts I studied, which could show some discomfort on the part of the copyists at the thought of deliberately inflicting pain to the horse. And it wouldn’t be surprising: individuals’ perceptions of the horse have always been very varied. Some people are more sensitive than others to equine welfare and that must have been the case, to some extent, in the Middle Ages as well. 

Medieval horsemanship as it can be glimpsed in Rufus’s De medicina equorum was full of complexities and sometimes contradictions. The attitude towards the horse that it reflects is full of gentleness, but also has a hint of brutality. That is what makes it interesting; it is a precious text that reflects a specific mindset, one that can be difficult to understand for a modern reader but needs to be embraced by the historian to better comprehend what it says about the human-horse relationship of the time.