Ranulph Lord Dacre of Gilsland – The Lord who was buried with his horse.

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri @sparkypus.com The monument in All Saints Church, Saxby over the grave of Ranulph Lord Dacre and his horse. Photo Mary Emma1@Flkir Ranulph/Ranulf/Randolph/Ralph, Lord Dacre of Gilsland’s precise date of birth is lost to us – as is his exact Christian name it would seem -but has been suggested as c.1412 although…

Whose horse once wore this item of chest harness….?

In 2011/2012 a hoard of medieval artefacts was discovered down a well at the remains of castle of Caherduggan, near Doneraile, Co Cork. It included a complete peytrel/peytral/poitrel for a horse, which names derive from pectoral. Peytrels were worn around the horse’s chest, and although I’d never heard the name before, I recognised what it…

How big were the horses of medieval knights….?

Well, I had heard before that medieval horses were much smaller than we imagine, and now it seems  proof may may have been found.   It’s a fact that for journeys medieval folk who could afford more than Shanks’ pony used small horses that could keep up a fast trot for a l-o-n-g time. They…

A Skipton ghost walk followed by a good meal at Richard’s Black Horse….

  “….THERE will be thrills and spills of a distinctly ghostly type in Skipton this month as stroke survivor Malcolm Hanson conducts his once-famous ghost walks around the town’s supernatural hot spots on Friday evenings….” The above extract is from the Craven Herald and I hope most sincerely that Malcolm’s ghost walks are a spooky…

Humpty-Dumpty and his wall were Richard III and his horse….!

Well, we’ve all heard versions of the true meaning of Humpty-Dumpty, including that it was a reference to a 17th-century cannon used in the Siege of Colchester. Oh and Humpty may also have been a drink of brandy boiled with ale. All nursery rhymes had beginnings somewhere, and also have some wild notions about their…

Chaucer’s Horse of Fame….

Oh, dear, sometimes typos are inadvertently funny. I’ve just been looking through a serious book on the history of English literature (I won’t identify it further, because it wouldn’t be fair – the work is serious). Anyway, we come to Chaucer‘s, um, Horse of Fame. Yes, you read it correctly. Horse, not House!

All you need to know about medieval warhorses….

When I read this article, I thought I must have written it in my sleep, because it opens with a very accurate description of me as a seven-year-old. Horse mad, but at the same time I was actually terrified of them. Oh well, there’s no accounting for folk. Anyway, I hadn’t heard of this 1996…

Get it right about medieval horses….!

We definitely do have set beliefs about medieval horses, mostly incorrect. Just because we see illustrations of medieval lords riding what look like ponies too small for them, we think it must be the fault of the illustrator. But no, for journeys they really did have small trotting horses that could keep going on and…

A list of names for medieval horses….

There have been posts about medieval horses before, including some about how these animals were named, but the image above shows another list of such names. I have a book on my shelf that I haven’t dipped into for….um, longer than I care to remember! It’s called Chivalry by Léon Gauthier and was first published…

Hooray Henry & his Horse

And here it is, folks.  Proof at last. We are told by some that apparently Henry “Tudor” really, really wanted to fling himself into  the fray at Bosworth (instead of lurking behind his bodyguard), and here finally is the proof of that intent. Henry,  waving his trusty sword Cash-Bringer in defiance of the foe, spurs…