I’ve got a really stupid question about horses in ye olden days

[CmonBobby]

I don’t know anything about horses or riding and I’m just asking this out of curiosity.

I have read and seen lots about weight limits to ride horses of about 14stone. However surely in the olden days when knights rode horses, these were big men wearing armour carrying shields and jousts etc and they would have weighed far more? And in the films etc these horses aren’t drays or shire horses are they.
So my questions are were they just being cruel to horses then OR are there actually massive war horses that can take huge amounts of weight and be agile etc in battle? Do they still exist? Does anyone ride one? Do people still train horses to do this stuff?

Where I work we have some armour from the War of the Roses. It's surprising how small it is compared to the size of adult men today.

Where I live the draft horses are 'race boulonnais' big grey buggers and according to the man in the village who has several they are close to what an armoured knights horse would have been.

Sure an ordinary cavalry horse was small but an armoured knight , of later middle ages fame weighed a lot more than a bayeux tapestry era knight and the horses were bigger .

It's also worth considering that a trained war horse was fantastically expensive and good for nothing else so would have been well looked after.

Pics here, apparently they are nice to ride but I haven't yet had the pleasure...

https://www.le-boulonnais.com/fr/photos/concours-des-etalons-par-crrg,14.html

I was listening to a fascinating podcast talking about how a knight riding to battle would not dream of riding his war horse to get to battles, as you see in films. The knight would ride lighter horses, the war horse would be led with pack horses carrying the armour and other supplies including grain so they didn't have to graze on the way. So the amount of time a warhorse spent galloping while heavily laden was very short, which I am sure helped keep them healthy.

Super interesting thank you everyone! It’s kind of a shame (in a “cool animals are cool” way) that no one seems to still be breeding or training war horses although I know there are men that do the pretend jousting. Not sure if they wear the full rig though.

i also wonder how you train a horse for war, presumably there were experts who had whole pretend war set ups and they trained them and sold them or liveried/war trained horses who already had owners.

Bret Devereaux's blog (he's the expert I mentioned from the podcast) sounds right up your street. He's an expert in ancient military history who, among other things, reviews Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings battle scenes from a historical perspective and has lots to say about some of the blunders modern film makers commit.

Here's a link to a post with lots about cavalry to get you started:

acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-iv-the-cavalry-arrives/

Some specifics on horse and rider weights here (and GoT spoilers) https://acoup.blog/2019/05/04/new-acquisitions-that-dothraki-charge/

"Horses are fairly fragile animals. This is in part a product of selective breeding: modern domesticated horses have been bred to be larger, heavier and stronger, increasing the strain on those thin legs at high speed. Steppe ponies, much closer to pre-domesticated horses, are a lot lighter and smaller; a modern domesticated horse can weigh anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000lbs, whereas Steppe ponies are often as light as 600lbs. When you take a creature with legs designed to hold up 600lbs of weight, and instead breed it to be a 1,300lbs warhorse and then put 200lbs of rider, armor and tack on it – and pull the center of gravity of all of that up 20-25 inches or so there are consequences."