Weight question ? Knight in shining armour ?

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mulledwhine

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This horse is a fresian ( just in case you wondered :) ) he was a small ' knight' the other one was a lot bigger and wearing a lot more armour !!!

I am guessing this one , saddle and all must have been 18 stone the other one well over 20!!!!

I don't know the weights so just wondering what weight would you say, oh and forgot the lances they were carrying!!!

This horse was sweaty and hot and was not happy about going towards the target, the bigger mans horse ( same breed ) was fine with it.

It just got me thinking that these horses are carrying weights that we think happened years ago
 
Only thing I have to add is that years ago horses were a means to an end as well as a form of entertainment.

Now they're for leisure, we don't NEED them anymore. We care much more about their well-being now than they did 100 years ago.

My point being, those days i'm pretty sure they didn't care all that much about what the horse was being asked to carry, as long as it didn't buckle beneath them.
 
I always thought that these suits of armour and lances would be replicas made from lightweight modern materials and just made to look the part...Cant be sure of course but it would seem plausible
 
Watched a programme about the horses doing Trooping of the Colour etc, and with rider and kit they carry up to 22 stones. The big drum horses often carry more.

They use ID's, I don't know much about Fresians so can't comment on their weight carrying capabilities.
 
Weight? Lots! I had to wear a full set of armour for a couple of hours, and I collapsed when I got off. The weight and the lack of flexibility and visibility were pretty scary actually!

I seem to recall reading that they were more likely to be riding 14 handers into battle in 'the olden days' too.
 
They were heavy suits of armour , made in the same way and the same materials as the originals ( I asked the question :) )

To be honest I found it fascinating to watch, the armour was surprisingly mobile , and he said other than the head gear, quite comfortable, no winching needed to get him on board :)

I just found after the weight debate ( see what I did there :) )

What people thought the weight of these fully laden up horses would be :)
 
I doubt very much that horses lived anywhere near as long as they do now and they were probably much more expendable, bit of lameness and offski to be a village plough horse or whatever.
 
Men were a lot smaller in those days weren't they? At 5"2 I fit comfortably in some local listed beamed houses with minute doorways that are 15 th - 18 th C , and have been told folks were a lot smaller back then as those around me are bent double admiring the original features.
I can't imagine they were that heavy if they fitted into the armour I have seen of the era eIther.
 
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The armour was made to measure , clearly not original :)

The saddles were at least 3 times as heavy as a modern day one ( took 2 people to get it on )

I am not saying it is cruel, by no means, infact I loved it :)

Just that we go by weight to leisure ride, but would you allow a 25 stone man gallop your similar sized horse ? That is what the other one must have weighed !!

I am only playing devils advocate btw
 
We also sent children down mines and locked them in woollen mills over night to ensure they completed their night shift! We have a local memorial to an
umber of girls between the ages of9 and14 who burned to death as a result of
this happening. My point being that our thoughts on such things have changed Thank Goodness
 
I did give a heads up on the other thread :D

Not wanting a debate, just wondering how much everyone thought these men weighed warts and all :)

Just as a comparison , I loved every minute of the 6 hours I spent there today, except when we went to the top of the castle steps and I was hanging onto the wall clearly terrified and people kept pushing in and would not let me go back down :(
 
YorksG said:
We also sent children down mines and locked them in woollen mills over night to ensure they completed their night shift! We have a local memorial to an
umber of girls between the ages of9 and14 who burned to death as a result of
this happening. My point being that our thoughts on such things have changed Thank Goodness
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I suppose in a small way that is my point, some horses do STILL have to do this!!!!

But not in the same way :) they still have to carry the weight, but not in long bloody battles, thank goodness
 
Well the horses in the OP are not leisure horses, but the tools of some ones trade. It would be interesting to know what age they retire them at. Our first horse had pulled a landau in Blackpool and retired to a life of hacking aged 12
 
As far as i understand it, the destriers would be the ones carrying the armoured chaps into battle, and they were wheeled out specifically for the purpose, and knights who could afford more than one would swap horses too. The rest of the time it was all divided out and carried by packhorses, and the knight would ride his normal travelling horse.
 
There are still jousting competitions. Crazy sport. Some guys who did it gave a talk at my college equestrian center. There's jousting-light, if you will, where you just try to tag the other guy with the pole, which is what you see in demos at Renaissance Fairs and stuff like that, and serious scary jousting, where the aim is indeed to knock the other guy off the horse. Ouch. Horses are probably okay. But riders, deliberately putting themselves in a position to get knocked off a galloping horse by a guy with a long pole on another galloping horse, well, weight is the least of their problems!
 
Caol Ila said:
There are still jousting competitions. Crazy sport. Some guys who did it gave a talk at my college equestrian center. There's jousting-light, if you will, where you just try to tag the other guy with the pole, which is what you see in demos at Renaissance Fairs and stuff like that, and serious scary jousting, where the aim is indeed to knock the other guy off the horse. Ouch. Horses are probably okay. But riders, deliberately putting themselves in a position to get knocked off a galloping horse by a guy with a long pole on another galloping horse, well, weight is the least of their problems!
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You want to try tilting at the ring. Great fun, minimal risk (apart from nearly exploding with frustration at complete lack of hand/eye co-ordination!) :)

Ok have looked out geeky book. 'A Knight And His Armour' R. Ewart Oakeshott (1961)

The most serious and stupid error is the old one about the weight of armour. Men never had to be hoisted into their saddles with cranes; the regular weight and composition of armour is widely known and appreciated, yet this piece of ancient idiocy appears in book after book and film after film. Recently some extremely thorough tests have been made, by men wearing real armour, not light tin or aluminium stage armour. Some of the best of these tests were sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and were filmed. They show how easily a man armed in full plate can run, jump into the air, lie down on his front or back and get up again without help, jump onto his horse and off again. Naturally a man - even a very fit one - would soon get exhausted if he carried on in this way for long. Our ancestors were trained from an early age to wear armour and fight in it, but they didn't expect to have to walk or run in it; full armour was for wearing on horseback, where the horse carried the weight and supplied the motive power. Even so, a proper warrior was expected to be able to leap into his saddle from ground level, without touching the stirrup, with all his armour on.
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Armour was never as heavy as you might imagine. A full plate-harness of about 1470 was no heavier - indeed, it was sometimes lighter - than the full marching kit of a 1914-18 infantryman; its average weight was about fifty-seven pounds, and this weight wasn't hung from the shoulders like the foot-slogger's kit, it was distributed all over the wearer's body. Also, it fitted, so it was easy to wear.
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This sword looks pretty heavy; its blade is nearly forty inches long, yet it really is comparitively light, for it weighs a little under four pounds, and its splendid poise and balance make it feel even lighter. (We are always hearing tales of how heavy these medievel swords were, that a modern man can scarcely lift them up, and so on. This is as nonsensical as the stuff about lifting armoured men on to their horses with cranes)
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^^now talking about Kunz Schott of Hellingen - a knight who died in 1526 but whose armour is still in existence in good condition

Re: the height of knights, there is an old study by Ohio University. IIRC, between C9 and C11 the average male height was something like 5'7"/5'8". This then decreased to about 5'5" which was about C17/18 before increasing again to today's heights :)
 
Guess I must be even more of a weakling than I thought - because it felt unpleasantly heavy to me, though I'm not sure which period it was from. Will need to find out :D

The bit about the sword I get; when I first started fencing even a foil felt heavy. Fair enough I was about 8 and it was longer than I was tall, but still...
 
It's all well and good to say "back in the day, the horses carried this much weight...."

a couple of points I'd like to make on that.

1 - modern men are much taller and heavier than they were back then. If you look at a full size armour, you'll see that it's not that "tall" or that "wide".

2 - horses back then did not have to work for as long as they do today, and they were a tool - which when it wore out, it was shot. We generally would like our horses to carry on working til their late teens, even early 20's - sometimes longer. Longevity was considerably less then.
 
Was this one of the big jousting tournaments run by English Heritage?
We have a family membership and intend to get to one of them this summer. Also the classical dressage at Bolsover castle. Anyone been? Any good?
 
Plus they wouldn't be carrying a knight "in shining armour" every day of its life, mostly it would just be the knight, horse would be really fit and as said, expendable.
 
FfionWinnie said:
Plus they wouldn't be carrying a knight "in shining armour" every day of its life, mostly it would just be the knight, horse would be really fit and as said, expendable.
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As far as I've seen the rest of the time it wasn't used at all, it would have been led by a squire on a 'rouncy' (cob) while the knight rode a different horse for the purpose and the pack horses carried the kit....was bloody expensive being a knight!? Destriers were meant to be mean, violent things suitable only for battle and they trotted rather than paced/ambled/racked which people didn't want to sit day after day, hence the poor squire being put on a rouncy, which also trotted to keep pace with the destrier.
 
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