Horses

 These days most people do not see a horse on most days.  Riding lessons are for the well-to-do (or for actors appearing costume dramas).  But in the Middle Ages horses were everywhere.

Domestic horses, scientists have now determined, were first found sometime around 2000 BC, in the Steppes east of the Black Sea.  Such domestic animals as sheep, goats, and cattle had been around a lot longer, but until then horses were primarily a food item, hunted by being speared or run off a cliff.  The rock of Solutré in southern Burgundy, seen below, is believed to be one where horses were hunted in this way, as a lot of horse skeletons have been found there.  (Native Americans ran buffalo off cliffs in the same way.)

Domestic horses really change everything.  It is far easier to travel long distances on horseback than on foot.  The nomads of the steppes of Central Asia, who used domestic horses first, found them both a good way to travel and an important aid in herding their other domestic animals.  Cowboys in both North and South America followed in this tradition.

From Central Asia domestic horses spread east to China and west to Europe and the Mediterranean basin and Arabian peninsula.  Around the Mediterranean, horse transport primarily used chariots in antiquity.  Roman roads provided a fairly smooth surface along which horses could trot, pulling a lightweight chariot.  Armies however were primarily made up of foot soldiers, though their leaders rode on horseback.  (I have to wonder if the fact that Romans wore nothing under their togas reduced their enthusiasm for horseback riding.)

One challenge facing horseback riding is the danger of sliding off, if the horse goes too fast or suddenly plunges or rears.  Today that challenge is at least partially resolved by the use of stirrups, that stabilize the rider's perch.  Riders on the steppes seem to have developed the stirrup around the fifth century AD, although it took several hundred more years to reach western Europe.

The stirrup revolutionized warfare and made possible the appearance of knights, medieval fighters on horseback.  Although the majority of fighters in every war were still foot soldiers, one now had cavalry as well, fighters who could wield spear or sword from horseback, thanks to the stirrup.  Knights were primarily aristocratic or, at least in the eleventh century, employed by aristocrats, because horses were expensive.  Not only did they need rich food like oats, but iron horseshoes and iron stirrups were not cheap.

By the thirteenth century, horses were sometimes used in agriculture, although oxen remained the principal draft animal.  Because horses move faster than oxen, one could plow more acreage in the same amount of time, yielding more crops.  Of course this advantage was lessened by the fact that some of those more abundant crops had to be oats to feed the horses, and horses are inherently more skittish than oxen.

The use of horses in agriculture required the development of better horse collars that put the pressure on the chest, not the neck of the horse.  Chariots had harnessed horses in a way that could choke them if anything too heavy was pulled.  Better horse collars, like saddles and stirrups, came out of Central Asia.

Horses reached the Americas with the Spaniards.  Native Americans had either carried their possessions themselves or had had dogs pull sledges (no wheels in the Americas before Columbus).  But the Indians of the plains recognized the value of horses by the seventeenth century and established their own herds, either of horses that had escaped the Spaniards or ones stolen from them.  In South America, horses provided a new form of transportation, as the native llamas and alpacas cannot be ridden except perhaps by a very small child.

(Ironically, horses' ancestors had originally developed in the Americas and crossed the Bering landbridge into Asia, many tens of thousands of years before they were domesticated. But there were no horses around when white men reached the Americas.  The ancestral horses left behind in the Americas had either died out by themselves or were killed off (and doubtless eaten) by indigenous people.)

Horses continued to provide the major form of transportation through the nineteenth century.  New York City had serious problems with heaps of horse manure and the bodies of dead horses, who expired after long and arduous lives of pulling buggies and carts.  Armies as late as World War I employed horses.  Only with the invention and spread of internal combustion vehicles did horses cease to be the major way to travel.  The Amish still use buggies drawn by horses, and horses are still used for herding in parts of the American west, but horses are now primarily used for racing or for leisure activities.  But they still have their uses.  If someone breaks a leg hiking in the backwoods stretches of the Appalachian Trail, horses have to go in and pack the wounded hiker out.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Roman Villas

 Roman civilization was city-based.  Outside of Rome itself the cities were small, at most ten thousand people and maybe only a few thousand, but they were still the centers for religion, government, communication, and economic exchange, and these cities persisted into the Middle Ages.  The big Roman provinces were divided into smaller units, called pagi, and each was comprised of a central city and its surrounding countryside.

But how about the countryside beyond the city, the pagus that the city governed?  There were small groupings of people in what we might consider a village, a vicus as it was called, an administrative sub-unit.  But the rural population was scattered thinly, most involved in agriculture.  The countryside was dotted with villas, homes of wealthy Romans who oversaw the big plantation-style agriculture of the time.

 

The term villa could mean either an elegant home or the property attached to it, usually both.  Villas were the country estates of wealthy aristocrats, places they went when they wanted to relax, though they also maintained city dwellings, where the excitement and action took place.  Villas were high-status homes, large, full of atriums, flowering shrubs, mosaics, and bath houses.  They were not a single structure but a collection of structures.  A great many people lived there, under the kindly or not so kindly direction of the head of the household.  Villas also functioned as the centers of the plantation agriculture that marked the Roman Empire.  The slow disappearance of these villas between the third and sixth centuries (it happened at different times in different places) was an indication that the civilization was changing.

A big part of it was the end of plantation-based agriculture.  The Romans had used slaves, not worrying if they were worked to death because new ones were always being captured as the Empire expanded.  But once the Empire stopped conquering new territories and bringing home new slaves, this became a much less viable way to raise crops.  The new Germanic peoples setting in the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries (Goths around the Mediterranean, Angles and Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul) had never used plantation agriculture.  The climate disasters and Black Death of the sixth century, leading to rapid population loss and shrinking of cities (where the produce of the plantations had been bought and sold), meant that people turned to small-scale agriculture.

But what about the villas?  With their economic purpose gone, they became much less viable.  Some of the wealthy Romans instead moved to much smaller, semi-fortified structures on hilltops, feeling the times were much too dangerous for the open villa layout.  But most of the aristocrats who survived moved to the cities with their walls, which were rebuilt around a much smaller population center.

The elegant villa structures themselves fell into disuse.  Because they had been founded in places that were chosen because they were quiet, bucolic, and good for large scale agriculture, rather than at strategically important spots as the cities had been, there was no incentive to maintain them.  Fields once worked by slaves became overgrown with first shrubs, then trees.  

The land attached to villas increasingly became the property of the bishops.  Early medieval bishops in Gaul were mostly from the old aristocracy (and centered in cities), and if they inherited or acquired villas, that land now belonged to the church.  Wealthy families who had moved permanently to the cities considered it an act of piety to give bishops land they no longer wanted, and for which there was no buyer.

In some cases rural monasteries, which really first appeared in Gaul in the seventh century (earlier monasteries had been primarily built in or near the cities), took up the lands and sometimes even the remains of the buildings of the old villas.

 

From the sixth-century population collapse to the first signs of population growth in the late eighth century stretches a little-documented period in which the pattern of rural settlement thoroughly changed.  The cities were still there, but the little rural hamlets of the Empire, the vici, disappeared.  Archaeology suggests that much of the reduced rural population lived in isolated farms.

New villages began appearing in the late eighth century, but they were usually not in the same locations as the old villas, even though the villages (farming communities) were called by the same name in Latin (villa).  The old Gallo-Roman aristocracy had mostly died out, and the new aristocrats established new manor houses for a new form of agricultural organization.  A few old villa structures became repurposed as palaces for the wealthy, but for the most part their mosaics (as seen above) and their pillars were something discovered by accident.

Alexandra Chavarría Arnau discusses the evidence for the decline of late Roman villas in in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Roman-medieval transition, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.