Horse

Horse appears throughout the narrative not as background scenery but as costly military equipment, transport, and a vulnerable participant in combat. The contrast between a trained warhorse and an ordinary workhorse measures the resources required for noble warfare; on the field, the loss of Jean de Carrouges’s mount changes the form of his fight with Jacques Le Gris.

Breeding, Value, and Military Use

The fourteenth-century warhorse was a specialized animal, described as a stallion rather than a mare and, in many cases, a great horse standing as tall as sixteen hands and weighing as much as fourteen hundred pounds. Its strength enabled it to carry roughly three hundred pounds of rider, armor, saddle, and weapons, while its training prepared it for rapid charges, sharp turns, jumps, and other battlefield maneuvers. Some were trained to attack with their hooves. These qualities made the warhorse a working instrument of mounted warfare, not simply a larger riding horse.

Such an animal represented a major investment. A good warhorse could cost several hundred times as much as a workhorse or modest riding horse. Normandy, long associated with horse breeding, had stud farms producing stallions known across Europe. The price and scarcity of suitable mounts made their loss a serious material setback, especially for a knight who had spent heavily preparing for a campaign.

Carrouges’s own career reflects the economic pressure behind military service. He sought booty and ransomable prisoners in campaigns, in part to improve his finances, and joined the expedition to Scotland hoping to bring back enough plunder to offset losses of land and revenue. Before the fleet sailed from Sluys in 1385, the army received two months’ pay in advance; Carrouges was paid 320 livres for himself and the nine squires under his command. His expectation of profit proved disastrously misplaced. The returning French force was short of supplies, and the horses suffered from hunger and fatigue. Some men came back so impoverished that they lacked the means to obtain new mounts; accounts describe others riding home on laboring animals normally used to pull carts or plows. Carrouges returned ill, financially depleted, and with five of his nine companions lost, though he had gained a knighthood.

Transport and the Risks of Travel

Horses also shaped the pace and security of civilian journeys. In the severe winter of 1385–86, Marguerite de Carrouges traveled with her husband from Fontaine-le-Sorel toward the estate of his widowed mother. The roads were muddy or slippery with snow and ice, and the journey likely took at least two days. Marguerite may have ridden a well-padded palfrey or traveled in an enclosed carriage; servants accompanied her, while other members of the household managed the baggage. The account leaves the precise means of her travel uncertain, but makes clear that weather, baggage, and the needs of a traveling household constrained progress.

Carrouges rode ahead, armed, while his men carried knives and cudgels. Their precautions addressed the risk of robbery and attack by routiers, armed bands that preyed on the countryside between campaigns. A mounted party could travel more effectively than people on foot, but a horse did not remove the dangers of bad roads or ambush. The animals, equipment, and servants all formed part of the household’s ability to move safely.

The same practical question of mounted speed later mattered to the competing accounts of the January 1386 assault on Marguerite. In his alibi, Le Gris argued that the distance between Argentan and Capomesnil was nine leagues over difficult winter roads, requiring at least a full day of travel. The account notes that he had excellent horses and considers the possibility of relays, while also stressing how strained the proposed round trip would have been during the short interval in which Marguerite’s mother-in-law was away. The horses thus enter not only as transport but as part of the book’s examination of whether a reported journey was feasible; they do not, by themselves, settle the conflicting claims.

The Warhorse in Judicial Combat

The judicial duel required mounts suited to a different and exceptionally dangerous task. The combatants’ horses were prepared while the men put on armor. A standard harness included a steel bridle and bit, a high-pommeled saddle secured with girth straps, and rings or chains for carrying weapons. Quilted coverings protected the body; a jointed metal headpiece, called a chanfrain, guarded the face, while plates or mail could cover the neck and flanks. Metal stirrups and spurs helped the rider control the mount, particularly when combat forced him to release the reins.

At the duel in Paris in 1386, each horse stood ready at a separate gate of the enclosed field. After the marshal gave the signal, attendants helped the knights mount and handed them their lances and shields. The men took their weapons, including the lances, from the horses’ equipment; once they were mounted and armed, attendants withdrew. Carrouges and Le Gris then charged through opposite gates, which were shut behind them. The horses carried the combatants into the opening lance encounter, where each mounted man and his equipment gathered speed across the field.

The mount’s role was not merely to deliver its rider to the opponent. A trained warhorse had to sustain the charge and respond to sudden changes of direction as the duel continued. Carrouges and Le Gris later fought with axes from horseback, and both were able to break away temporarily when exhausted. During one renewed attack, Le Gris’s axe struck Carrouges’s horse at the neck, killing it. Carrouges leapt clear while retaining his own axe. The loss transformed the contest: the knight was now on foot, while Le Gris remained mounted and pressed his attack. The animal’s death therefore altered the immediate balance of the duel without ending it.

Material and Narrative Significance

The book’s repeated attention to mounts connects large-scale military events with intimate personal danger. Horses had to be bought, fed, shipped, equipped, and kept alive; each requirement exposed the cost and fragility of a campaign. The French expedition’s collapse in Scotland is registered in part through starving or exhausted animals and the humiliating substitution of farm beasts for warhorses. In the duel, by contrast, a single mount’s death brings the larger burdens of armor and warfare into the confined space of the field and leaves Carrouges to continue on foot.

The animal also gives physical form to the difference between ordinary travel and combat. A palfrey or carriage could carry a noblewoman through a winter journey, while a costly stallion bore an armored knight into a charge. Neither use made the horse invulnerable: weather, hunger, road conditions, and weapons could defeat the advantages of breeding and training. The horse’s place in these episodes makes military power visible as a material system, dependent on living creatures whose endurance could determine what people were able to attempt—and, on the duel field, how they were forced to fight.