Medieval warhorses: 5 moments horsepower changed the course of history

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was an era-defining event – and its centrepiece was the battle of Hastings. That clash is graphically represented on the Bayeux Tapestry, most memorably in the image of mounted Norman knights charging the line of Anglo-Saxon warriors on foot. It’s a powerful rendition of horses making history – and for William, Duke of Normandy, those animals proved critical in securing his victory.

William began the day of the pivotal action, 14 October, by ordering reconnaissance missions, receiving intelligence from returning mounted scouts on the whereabouts of Harold’s forces. When the two armies later closed in to do battle, the Bayeux Tapestry shows us, the duke mounted his warhorse and exhorted his knights to “prepare themselves manfully and wisely” as they cantered towards the forthcoming engagement. During the nine-hour struggle, William was in the thick of the fighting – and two, or possibly three, of his horses were killed beneath him.

The crucial part of the battle came when a rumour spread among the Normans that their commander had been killed. The duke hurriedly rode among his now-fleeing troops, his helmet raised to prove that he was alive, so preventing a rout. At this key moment it was the mobility provided by his mount that allowed William to be in the right place at the right time, averting disaster (for him).

Despite the oft-repeated tale of the ‘arrow in the eye’, Harold’s death probably came after a group of mounted Norman knights broke through his bodyguard and cut him down. On this most dramatic of days, it was the horse that was William’s enabler – for intelligence-gathering, command and control, helping save his army from defeat by allowing him to visibly lead from the front.

Yet though the horse helped cement the success of the Conqueror’s military career, it also played a part in its end. In 1087, the now-overweight William was characteristically urging on his troops as they set fire to the town of Mantes in France when his horse jumped a ditch – and “his stomach projected over the forward part of the saddle”, resulting in the rupture of the king’s internal organs. He died of his injuries some weeks later, his otherwise anonymous horse an unwitting participant in the death of one of England’s greatest warrior kings.

2. The Bruce's canny cavalry gambit

Faced with a mighty English mounted army, the Scottish king used both horsemanship and cunning strategy to rout the invaders

Robert the Bruce’s famous victory at the battle of Bannockburn, fought over two bloody days on 23–24 June 1314, was a landmark in the history of the British Isles, paving the way for Scottish independence from English rule. That outcome hinged on the inability of the English to effectively use their heavy cavalry in the face of tactics masterminded by the Scottish king.

Edward II had invaded Scotland with a vast army, aiming to raise the siege of the strategically vital castle of Stirling. The core of his army comprised men at arms – professional soldiers, knights and nobles – on warhorses that were the embodiment of English military power. Heavily armoured and emblazoned with arms, these were elite steeds, expensively bred and trained in a royal stud network. The English army of around 13,000 substantially outnumbered Robert’s force of perhaps 6,000.

A prelude to the battle known to every Scottish schoolchild proved an ill omen for the English. In a scene echoing the age-old clash of military champions in single combat, on the first day of action the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun spotted Robert the Bruce in front of his troops, and aimed to strike a decisive early blow by charging at the Scottish leader on his warhorse, lance in hand. Mounted on a smaller and more nimble mount, Robert skilfully manoeuvred to dodge his opponent and, standing up in his stirrups, in the words of the epic medieval poem The Brus, “Struck him such a great blow, That neither hat or helmet could stop”, cleaving Sir Henry’s “head to the brains” and smashing his battleaxe in the process.

Standing up in the stirrups of his nimble mount, Bruce cleaved the Englishman’s “head to the brains”

In preparation for the main action the following day, the Scots devised tactics to negate English cavalry strength. They chose for the battlefield a site where heavy horsemen could not operate easily – the area was marshy and intersected by a network of streams – and pockmarked the landscape with a minefield-like network of covered pits or ‘pots’ designed to trap horses. Fighting in compact formations known as schiltrons, the Bruce’s pike-armed foot soldiers were able to resist the disordered attacks of the English cavalry, which eventually disintegrated and broke.

As King Edward was led away from the field towards the security of Stirling, Scottish soldiers were able to get close enough to grab at the caparison (cloth covering) of his horse, which was wounded beneath him, forcing the king to remount in his humiliating flight.

3. Under his dead body

English rule in France was brought to a violent end when a renowned commander became trapped beneath the corpse of his own horse

In the summer of 1453, with the tide of the Hundred Years’ War having turned in France’s favour, the veteran English commander Sir John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, found himself at the head of an army attempting to relieve the beleaguered garrison at Castillon in Aquitaine. His target was the besieging French army’s fortified encampment outside the town and, encouraged by dust clouds from what he believed were retreating soldiers, he ordered his own troops to attack. Talbot was the only Englishman to remain mounted – on a white riding horse – and went into battle without armour, honouring a vow he had made to the French king while a prisoner some years earlier.

It soon transpired, though, that the French were not retreating – in fact, the dust had simply been raised by horses leaving the camp – and that Talbot’s men were facing the whole French army, dug in behind their fortifications and ready to fire more than 200 guns. Talbot, against the advice of some of his subordinates, pressed on with the assault, possibly because he believed that “his name alone would cause the enemy to flee”.

What followed was a disaster for his forces: they were cut down by swathes of cannon fire, with every shot from the French artillery taking out up to six English soldiers. After two hours of fighting, the English army was attacked in the flank by a group of Bretons – and, as Talbot sought to deal with the threat, the whole French army sallied out from their camp to complete the rout.

While attempting to steady his retreating forces, Talbot’s horse was struck by a cannonball. As the earl lay powerless beneath his steed, a French soldier dispatched him with an axe blow. Talbot’s smashed body was identified by his herald the following day, the telltale feature being a missing tooth in his lower jaw. An examination of his skeleton in the 19th century found evidence of a 7 x 1.6cm hole in his skull, confirming the violent manner of his death.

Though described by his adversaries at the time as France’s “dread and terror”, the old earl was held in such respect by the French commanders that they founded a chapel on the spot where he had been killed – a fitting tribute to a veteran campaigner of the chivalric age. His horse received no such monument, though it had played a vital part in the first battle in which artillery proved to be the decisive weapon – and which was also the clash that ultimately led to the end of English rule in France.

4. Did a lost horse doom a dynasty?

As the battle of Bosworth raged, Richard III launched a cavalry charge at Henry Tudor but ended up losing the throne – and his life

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Richard III’s final words before his death at the battle of Bosworth, as imagined by Shakespeare, have a special place in English memory. Tudor propaganda has, famously, coloured popular views of that king’s character and reign, but we have a good understanding of the demise of England’s last Yorkist king – and it was an event in which horses played a central role, if not quite as portrayed by Shakespeare.

On 22 August 1485, Richard’s army clashed with the forces of Henry Tudor in the Leicestershire countryside in what’s often considered to have been the final battle in the Wars of the Roses. Following an infantry engagement between the vanguards of the opposing forces, Richard – spotting that his rival was protected by only a small lifeguard – mounted a heavy cavalry charge at Henry. This was not necessarily the desperate act of a doomed monarch, as has been argued; it could have been a carefully calculated attempted decapitation of the rebel leader that would end the battle there and then.

In the words of the prime Tudor source for the battle, Polydore Vergil, the king “strick his horse with the spurres” and charged, accompanied by a small body of capable and loyal knights. The gambit almost succeeded: Henry’s standard bearer was killed in the melee, but the charge was stopped and driven towards a marshy area.

Richard’s actions were all the more remarkable given that previous battles in the Wars of the Roses had seen little in the way of cavalry action; most of the clashes had been brutal slugfests in which leaders as well as soldiers fought mainly on foot. The king’s attack ultimately proved to be a brief last hurrah for the fabled heavy cavalry charge by medieval knights.

In a final indignity, Richard’s dead, naked body was hung over a horse to be taken back to Leicester for burial

The grim reality of exactly how Richard met his end has become clearer since his remains, discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, were subjected to scientific analysis. The concentration of multiple wounds on his head shows that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, and must have been dismounted when he suffered these blows. This accords with the account of Molinet, the only contemporary source detailing Richard’s final moments, who said that the king was killed by a Welsh halberdier after his horse became stuck in marshy ground.

In a final indignity, Richard’s dead, naked body was hung over a horse to be taken back to Leicester for burial. A wound through the buttocks, revealed by analysis of the skeleton, suggests this was when a “humiliation injury” was inflicted on the royal corpse.

What might have happened had Richard’s cavalry charge broken through and killed Henry Tudor? This is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of English history. In the event, that failure of horse-powered warfare proved the turning point of the battle that heralded the end of the Middle Ages – and tipped England into a new Tudor future.

5. How the mighty have fallen

When Henry VIII took a tumble during a joust, he suffered an injury that may have transformed the Tudor dynasty

Bosworth may have witnessed the last hurrah for the mounted knight charging across the battlefield, but the knightly tournament lost none of its importance. It remained the pre-eminent vehicle for displays of aristocratic masculinity well into the 16th century.

Henry VIII took particular enjoyment in jousting, and constructed a series of purpose-built tiltyards at his lavish homes. It was at his palace and equestrian centre at Greenwich on 24 January 1536 that the 44-year-old Henry suffered a famous accident while jousting with his courtier and friend Sir Henry Norris. During a tilt, Henry’s lance hit Norris’s saddle – and the force of the impact toppled the king from his own saddle, with his horse landing on top of him.

Some accounts detailing the severity of Henry’s injuries state that he was knocked unconscious for two hours. Others glossed over the episode, but there seems little doubt that the incident was serious. At the very least, the fall seems to have opened up an older leg injury that plagued the king for the rest of his life, and which also curtailed his ability to take part in hunting. Certainly, Henry never jousted again, and historians have speculated that this accident sparked a turning point in his reign and character. Over the years that followed, the once-athletic king became an increasingly unhealthy, unpredictable and despotic tyrant.

Following his jousting accident, the king became an increasingly unpredictable and despotic tyrant

While the horse in question may not have been wholly responsible for a sea change in the personality of the king, it may unwittingly have had a hand in the royal succession.

Not long after Henry’s fall, Anne Boleyn miscarried his unborn son – a misfortune that, the queen and others believed, had been brought on by worry following the king’s accident. The exact cause of that tragic episode remains unknowable, of course – but if the pregnancy had gone to full term, and if Anne had given birth to a male heir, then the history of the Tudor dynasty could have been very different.

Oliver H Creighton is professor of archaeology at the University of Exeter. Robert Liddiard is professor of history at the University of East Anglia. They are co-editors of Medieval Warhorse: Equestrian Landscapes, Material Culture and Zooarchaeology in Britain, AD 800–1550 (Liverpool University Press, 2025)

This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine