Hello everyone.

I was browsing around when i found a shocking article in the web in wich i found this:

Quote:

The Knights themselves, though, had no love of their horse. Some tales have been told of Knights cutting of the head of their horse and sending it to the stable master they bought it from only because they had fallen from their horse while riding or in battle.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=knight

Knights and other soldiers maybe used to be brutish people in the batlefield, but Cutting his horse´s head for such thing? Can anyone corroborate that statement?

Truly, i don´t know how accurate that site is and it smells like sh :!: t, since they used to ride expensive stallions, i know that during a battle, soldiers used to steal or kill enemy´s horses, but killing their own comrades?

Thanks.

I don't buy that. The thing is, a good horse was EXPENCIVE. You do not waste that kind of money.

That statement looks almost certainly incorrect. Horses were extremely valuable possessions. If someone is going to make such an extravagant claim, they need to back it up with credible sources in order to even start believing it.

Max

Sounds a bit like the story of the (apocryphal?) man who set his polo pony on fire because he lost a match.

really i fell off my horse so i killed it and packed my sorry butt and all my gear home on foot. they may have been brutes but idiots i think not. the travel and cost of a action would be high. even if they did not like the horse i would think they would peddle it to some other knight.

"I stubbed my toe on my brand new handmade mahogany desk, so I dragged it outside and burned it to ashes, then mailed them to the carpenter."

Just doesn't make since. I call shenanigans!

I am reading viking sagas, and a man was called an "unbearable showoff" for cutting a WHOLE HANDS WIDTH of fine cloth off the bottom of his garment ,and throwing it away for being 'dirty.'

Not shocking, just silly,.

Read the book written in 1438 by Dom Duarte. It is by far the best book on horse-riding that I know of (and I have a library full of them) has been translated in english, is availeable from Amazon.

Peter

As shocking i was refering to the fact that a man-at-arms would have killed his horse for such silly reason, or like in some movies where an enemy soldier defeat a horse and the downed horsed is finished off while in the ground instead of killing tha rider. Weren´t horse armour made to fit the animal like human armours? What would the knight do with the animal´s armour after cutting his head off? And all aditional bargain? I think in some, if not most cases, those horses recieved better care than ordinary soldiers.

I just don't think it would happen normally but I guess anything is possible in a state of irrational rage or mental illness.

No reason to rule out a warrior becoming unbalanced after some brain injury, a brain tumour affecting his rationality, a psychotic episode of hearing voices telling him that his horse is the devil etc .....

Good war horses would be much to valuable and even an " bad " horse with good genetics might still be used as breeding stock if wounded in a way to be unusable for war.

Killing the opponents horse as the only way to survive / win a fight would be a last resort and very different than killing a horse during a hissy fit. :lol:

In any case the stupid killing of a horse like this might have ended up in some period records because it was so rare, unusual, barbaric, stupid ? Also, what was the source of this story ? ( Not from a computer game or Dragons and Dungeon blurb in a play instruction manual passing itself off as historical background ? )

Maybe the reason the knights ‘fell off’ their horses was because they had been killed under them, and it was the corpses that were decapitated.

Alternatively, I don’t consider it particularly farfetched that a knight who was thrown from what he had been assured was a well trained mount, and as a consequence nearly died, would kill the guilty horse in a fit of rage, and then send the head back to the stable master who sold it to him. He might regret killing it later when he had calmed down, but that wouldn’t change the facts.

I think it is somewhat ridiculous. It could be based on the old way to recieve compensation as a knght with a dead horse killed during campaign. You present the ears and tail to the kings accountant and he pays a reimbursement for its death. Hardly to do with fits of rage and much less than a head cut off but as we know the horse was expensive.

I am also sure someone ate the horse afterwards as well if possible------- :D

RPM

I don't buy that at all. :wtf: :mad:

While having horse was considered highly beneficial, it was also expensive -- much like owning a car today. Horses were meticulously trained, depending on what the owner/rider was going to do with the animal which also depended on the breed of the horse (use in battle, agriculture, pulling a cart, or transportation). In some periods and cultures (Medieval/Renaissance Europe being no exception), horses were very highly revered, even worshipped.

As an animal lover, I'll say that the only time I would deliberately end my horse's life would be if it was suffering from some sort of incurable pain (old age / disease / injury from battle). -Ted

well looking at the link this is nothing more than a wiki type site. and the post is trying to dispute the chivalry idea of knights. he is saying they were evil
( rape laddies and lasses and even little ladds. killed horses. turtored their subjects and such. this is nothing more than a persons twisted post with no historical reference to back up his claims. while i don't believe in the whole knight in shinny armor. i don't think they were any worse than other people of the era. some good some bad but most in the middle.

And some men-at-arms seemed to have cared more for their horse than they did for their families. ;P

Now that, I would buy.