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

Counting [on] Gaited Horses: Late Medieval Urban Account Books as Sources for Equine History
Fabienne Meiers, University of Luxembourg

     As primary means of transportation, horses played a constitutive role in official journeys and interurban communication during the late Middle Ages. Municipal authorities and their functionaries (messengers, bailiffs, foresters, and clerks) needed to be very mobile to meet their daily responsibilities; because the poor road conditions in many places throughout the medieval period impeded vehicular traffic, they depended on fast, sure-footed and comfortable mounts.

     Based on more than 3.000 records in late medieval account books from cities which were part of the Holy Roman Empire (Aachen, Cologne, Duisburg, Luxembourg, Metz, Trier), it could be demonstrated that for long-distance journeys, ambling horses (palfreys, zelder) were mostly used. Their smooth lateral gaits allowed travelers to move easily at intermediate speed over long periods of time and permitted even elder members of the urban ruling class to journey regularly. What is very intriguing on the other hand is that for administrative trips to the peri-urban areas, rentable gaited horses (hacks, hurepert) were widely used by city officials, even though they had their own horses.

     The paper not only aims to present the reasons for using gaited horses in official urban travels during the late Middle Ages. It also intends to display how frequently and under which circumstances they could or could not be employed, how their use affected horse tack, and how much was spent on purchasing and accommodating them. In this way, the importance of urban equestrian traffic for performing administrative tasks and maintaining communication with the outside world will be illuminated.