Made in 2000 by Papo, this Knight’s horse looks like he is cartoon characterized. He has a playful or startled or?? Look on his face.
The horse is a common figure in medieval realms. This is especially the case within the context of military representations, among which one often finds the figure of the knight riding his noble steed. Indeed, the horse cannot be dissociated from knighthood, a new military form of nobility that arose in the eleventh century. Yet, at its beginning, chivalry represented above all a function: knights were elite horse-riding warriors who subsequently elaborated ethical rules for themselves that became the framework of their identity. Their warhorses played a crucial part in this.
Unlike today, husbandry in the Middle Ages largely ignored specific breeds of horses. Horses were designated with regards to their geographical origin or their function, the latter according to their natural qualities or their training. For example, the palfrey was a costly civilian horse capable of a marching amble, a more comfortable gait for travelling. But the most expensive horse in the medieval stable was the destrier, or great horse, the stallion trained for war and tournament. Physically, the perfect destrier was tall (the tallest of medieval horses, between 1.50 and 1.60 metres) with thin legs but a compact and muscular body.
The word destrier, meaning “right handed”, seems to appear in Old French texts at the beginning of the twelfth century, with the spread of the most well-known knightly form of combat: the charge with a couched lance. This technique, first observed among the Norman riders on the Bayeux tapestry, consists of holding a lance under the right armpit, and passing it over the horse’s neck, on its left side (protected by the great shield) in order to hit another fighter on the knight’s left; and all of this on the back of a galloping horse (Gillmor, ed. 1992, p. 15). It could deliver a powerful blow (even piercing chain mail armour), but the charge was also meant to disorganise the enemy’s ranks and to have a pronounced psychological impact upon them.