Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

open ground, but would lead them on long chases across rough country, just the sort
of thing that a hunting horse excelled at. Alternatively, Ayton suggests, the English
knights might have felt the need to push the boat out in terms of status and display
against a foe considered the pinnacle of European chivalry by bringing their finest
and most expensive mounts.
HORSE ARMOUR
Such investments needed to be protected, and it is unsurprising that there should be
a development in horse armour that parallels that of armour for the knight. It was
by no means a total innovation; the late Roman army had used horses wholly covered
in mail or lamellar armour for the cataphracti (literally 'completely enclosed ) or
kLibanophoroi (meaning camp oven'; a humorous reference to how quickly these fully
armoured men and horses would heat up!), both of which were adopted from their
Sassanid Persian neighbours who spanned the Middle East between the second and
seventh centuries. Whilst such armour continued to be used in small numbers in the
Byzantine East, this practice had died out in Western Europe long before.
The Rule of the Templars makes no reference to either bards or horse armour
(although it does specify that no brother should have an ornate and decorated bridle),
which might suggest that at the time of its writing (between 1135 and 1187) horse
armour was not used. When interpreting the visual sources, the same problem exists
for identifying horse armour as it does for spotting early 13th-century plate armour.
Just as a pair of plates might be hidden beneath a flowing surcoat, so horse armour
might lie beneath an emblazoned bard', 'caparison' or 'hoarding' — cloth covers that
need not be armour themselves. Such bardings appear in illustrations from around the
first decade of the 13th century, but this need not mean that the horse was armoured
at this point. By the end of the 13th century the term miLited cum equud coopertiu,
'warriors with covered horses', was betng used to differentiate between the knight and
man-at-arms and the less well equipped and socially inferior sergeants, squires,
hobelars and the like, who were referred to as milited cum equM du)coopertud.
A clear indication of armour is to be found in a manuscript of Thomas of Kent's
Roman