All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters. Register now!

If Wishes Were Horses: Building a Picture of Late Anglo-Saxon Equine Management and Care
Chelsea Shields-Más, SUNY Old Westbury

   The history and fates of men and horses have been inextricably intertwined for millennia. Civilizations have risen and fallen on the backs of horses.  Arguably no other animal has had such a profound impact on humanity’s history.  These animals have been our companions, carried us into  battle,  ploughed our fields and captured our  imaginations. The Anglo-Saxons were no different, with horses and their tack appearing richly described in both prose and poetry. There were numerous Old English terms employed to denote “horse” – among  them hors, wicg, stéda, hengest and mearh – which occur upwards of three hundred times within the Old English corpus. Not only were these highly valued animals the  trusted companions of men in times of war, but they also feature prominently in Anglo-Saxon poetry and art. 

   But what do we know of the horse care and management practiced by the Anglo-Saxons? Sarah Larratt Keefer and Jennifer Neville have argued for the existence of selective breeding programs in England by the tenth and eleventh centuries, in which kings, princes, ecclesiastics and the nobility seem to have vigorously participated. However, our understanding of how these horses were managed and cared for remains a question mark. This paper will attempt to address that question and in doing so to build a picture of Anglo-Saxon equine care and management in tenth- and eleventh-century England, through the use of estate memoranda, charters, the corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills, law codes and archaeological remains. 

Read our Member Monday profile of Chelsea Shields-Más here.