#48 The Stirrup

The stirrup is included in this book not because it is a great idea, though it may be that, but because of the power of a good story, and a bit of provocation.

Just under half a century ago, Stanford medieval history professor Lynn Townsend White wrote a groundbreaking book entitled Medieval Technology and Social Change. In it, he contended that technology played a key role in medieval society, and ever since then, no one seriously seeking to understand the Middle Ages has been able to ignore its technology.

The most attention-grabbing bit of White’s book, though, was the idea that it was the introduction of the stirrup that led to the development of the feudal system. Never one to understate his case, White asserted that: ‘Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history. The requirements of the new mode of warfare which it made possible found expression in a new form of western European society dominated by an aristocracy of warriors endowed with land so that they might fight in a new and highly specialized way.’

About a century ago, historians such as Heinrich Brunner had asserted that the key to the success of Frankish and Gothic invaders over the fading power of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries was its individualism. While the once legendary discipline and cohesion of the Roman infantry was breaking down, the individualism of the Franks and Goths spurred them on to become heroes, and what better way to become a hero than mounted on a horse? The hero horsemen of the Franks and Goths, the theory goes, developed into the famous knights of the Middle Ages. It was these horsemen that gave the Carolingian kingdom of the Franks in France – the kingdom of Charles Martel and Charlemagne – its strength and stability.

The Franks, it seemed, weren’t able to put great ranks of disciplined infantry into the field like the Romans. But what they could do was send out elite cavalry. Cavalry had been used on the battlefield for thousands of years before the Carolingian knights. But their role was fairly minor; simply harrying and chasing, while the victory centred on the ranks of infantry. There was something so new and so frightening about the new breed of Carolingian horsemen that they had the power to turn battles. These powerful horsemen were so firmly mounted on their big steeds that they could wear heavy armour and ride full tilt at the enemy with lances and swords in shock assaults so overwhelming that ranks of infantry crumbled before them. Heavy cavalry became like the tanks of the world wars.

White’s contention was that it was only the introduction of the stirrup that gave horsemen the firm platform to fight this way. Stirrups, he argued, gave horsemen the stability to fight from horseback with swords. They gave the support the rider needed to wear heavy armour. Above all, stirrups allowed the rider to channel the power of the horse into a lance thrust out in front like a deadly missile. Shock assault by heavy cavalry introduced a third phase for the horse in warfare, after chariots and then mounted horsemen.

Training knights, equipping them with horses and armour, swords, lances and shields and giving them a proper support team must have been an expensive business, however. Each one was a costly, specialist unit. This is why, White contends, the Carolingians in the eighth century and subsequently other Western European countries adopted the feudal system. The kings seized land and gave it to overlords who would have serfs to work it. Only such a system, in which serfs were obliged to provide the support for their lord, would provide the financial support for such elite fighters. The deal was that while the peasants were obliged to labour, the knight was obliged to provide protection. So, White contends, we owe class society, the aristocracy and the working class, to the stirrup.

It’s a fascinating thesis, and one so potent that it’s sunk into popular consciousness. Unfortunately, the evidence is not on White’s side, as many scholars have since pointed out. One of the problems is that White dates the arrival of the stirrup in France to about 700 AD. Yet there is plenty of evidence that heavy cavalry were in use without stirrups in other places long before this time. Indeed, heavy cavalry called cataphracts[1] were seen in battles against the Romans 1,000 years earlier. It’s the shape of the saddle that is the key to stability, it seems, and not the stirrup.

Another problem is that there is no evidence that the Carolingian kings won any of their key battles with shock assaults by heavy cavalry. A third is that stirrups aren’t mentioned in any of the documents or military manuals of the time, nor do they turn up in any eighth-century warriors’ graves. Finally, it seems the evolution of the feudal system and the seizure of land was far more complex and gradual than White’s theory implies.

The Great Stirrup Controversy as it became known has now been laid to rest by most scholars. So what is the history of stirrups? It seems that horsemen in India may have had a leather loop for the big toe of the barefoot rider as long ago as 500 BC. And Buddhist carvings from the first or second centuries BC show riders with their feet tucked into the saddle girth. Recognisable pairs of stirrups, though, seem to have first appeared in China as late as the fourth century AD. From there they spread east into Japan by the fifth century and west to Europe by the seventh century, particularly with horse-riding invaders from Central Asia such as the Avars. Over a hundred seventh-century cast-iron Avar stirrups have been found at various sites in Hungary.

There is no doubt that stirrups greatly aid a rider’s stability, and they have been almost universally adopted for leisure riding long after the days of the knights. They make riding much, much easier, not only helping the rider stay in the saddle, but increasing control. Indeed, they make riding so much easier that most people can learn to ride in a fairly short time. Without them, the balance required is beyond all but the most agile and dedicated.

So the greatness of the stirrup as an idea lies not in something as grand and world-changing as the creation of the knight and feudal society, but something far more down-to-earth. It was the stirrup, perhaps, that turned the horse from the mount of the soldier or specialist to everyday personal transport for millions of ordinary (well-enough off) people down through the ages until the coming of the automobile.

The impact of the horse as personal transport was huge, and is the reason why the horse looms so large in personal and social histories. It not only gave countless people the kind of personal freedom that we often associate with the coming of the car – but it did so many, many centuries earlier. It also gave many a personal relationship with an animal that is quite unique, special and thrilling. Listen to the Dauphin in Shakespeare’s Henry V:

When I sit astride him, I soar, I am a hawk. He trots on air. The earth sings when he touches it. The lowest part of his hoof is more musical than Pan’s pipe.

And many riders through the ages, most of who would never have ridden without the stirrup, would echo his words. Even today, it gives to many people a magical, transcendental experience. ‘A man on a horse,’ wrote John Steinbeck, ‘is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.’ That’s, of course, a tribute to the horse but maybe, without the stirrup, very few would ever have got to know.

[1] The cataphracts of Eurasia predate the medieval knights by a thousand years, yet they too were heavily armoured warriors on horseback. Like the knights, they rode big horses, with both horse and rider draped from head to foot in heavy scale and chain armour. Like the knights too, they rode into battle bearing a lance. Indeed, when the Roman general and historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes cataphracts riding against them in the fourth century, he could have been describing knights: ‘But no sooner had the first light of day appeared, than the glittering coats of mail, girt with bands of steel, and the gleaming cuirasses, seen from afar, showed that the king’s forces were at hand.’ Their origins lie in Persia, in the time of the Medes, perhaps 2,500 years ago, but they reached their apogee with the Parthians in the third century BC and the Sassanid Persians in the third and fourth centuries AD. They managed entirely without stirrups, though.