Cavalry Tactics: The physics of horse collisions
My arguments about cavalry charges are increasingly relying on physics. I briefly did this in my Journal of Military History article but here I’m going to explain it in much more detail. My main source...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cavalry Tactics: Lances
Cavalry charges and lances have gone together from ancient times into the 20th century. The lance usually depends on the momentum of the horse for effect, so lancers have to charge to be any use....
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: The Caracole?
The caracole is part of a familiar story of early-modern cavalry tactics. It traditionally refers to ranks of cavalry advancing, firing their pistols at the enemy, then going back to reload while...
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: Prince Rupert
Prince Rupert of the Rhine was, and still is, a controversial figure in the English Civil War. In 1643 he burnt down Birmingham, but he also did some bad things (see what I did there?). He’s often...
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: Cromwell
The anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death is on 3rd, 13th or 16th September, depending on how you want to define ‘anniversary’ and deal with the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars....
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: Dutch, Swedish or something else?
Behind every Great Man there’s another Great Man who is supposed to have inspired him, even though he’s a unique genius. Whiggish narratives of progress in cavalry tactics often say that Prince Rupert...
View ArticleWharton Letters: 30 September 1642
This post is part of a series of letters from parliamentary soldier Nehemiah Wharton during the English Civil War, which will be posted on the anniversary of the day they were written. For more...
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: La Noue’s theory of shock
Francois de La Noue (1531-91) was a protestant commander in the French Wars of Religion. He wrote a military treatise that was translated into English by Edward Aggas and published as The politicke and...
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: How close was close order?
Writing about cavalry charges often uses the phrases ‘close order’ or ‘knee-to-knee’. But what do these actually mean, and how close can you keep charging horses? This post won’t necessarily answer...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Early Modern Documents: Horse Casualties
In discussions about early-modern cavalry tactics, some people have asked me how many horses were killed in battles. This is the answer. Actually only a partial answer, but it’s the best one I’ve got....
View ArticleRevising Cavalry
[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...
View ArticleAcquisitions for October and November
Andrew Ayton and Sir Philip Preston, The Battle of Crécy, 1346, New Ed. (Boydell Press, 2007). Stephen Badsey, Doctrine and Reform in the British Cavalry 1880-1918 (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008)....
View ArticleClik here to view.
More First World War Photos
Just a few ebay acquisitions: Stereoview of British cavalry armed with lances crossing a bridge. The caption says they’re 1st Dragoon Guards but I can’t see the cap badge clearly enough to confirm...
View ArticleThe Mythical Markham
Academics know Gervase Markham as a prolific hack who would write about almost anything for money. In the early seventeenth century he published a huge number of books on various subjects (an EEBO...
View ArticleCavalry Tactics: How did I get here?
If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time you’ll have got the impression that I’m obsessed with cavalry. That impression would be more or less correct. This post is the start of yet another...
View ArticleCavalry Operations: Moving an army is difficult and dangerous
At last I’ve written the series of posts on cavalry operations that I’ve been promising for a long time. There are lots of details I haven’t gone into, especially to do with geography and fodder, but...
View ArticleCavalry Operations: A question of balance
In the previous post, we saw that having enough cavalry was vital for an army to be able to move safely. But how many is enough? It’s safe to say that the Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller didn’t...
View ArticleCavalry Operations: It’s a raid!
One of the many problems with concentrating only on big battles is that it distracts attention from small-scale operations that were more common and can tell us interesting things about how war worked...
View ArticleCavalry Operations: Why horse supply matters
Over the last three posts, I’ve shown that early modern armies couldn’t move without an adequate cavalry screen, that what was adequate depended on objectives and balance of forces, and that the...
View Article
