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Upcomming webstite

Because this blog has been rather inactive, it does not mean that the Scholae have been inactive. Rather to the contrary. Much work, next to training and analyzing, has been put in a new website that will be launched shortly. The website will not only contain valuable information as to what Traditional Western Horsemanship entails, it will contain specific sections on modern horsemanship and its relation to the tradition, as well as sections on the history of the variable traditions of the horsemanship practices of the Western World. Most importantly, a lot of work has gone into the Bibliotheca Equestris, that entails a repertory on all source material for the different traditions, including links to fully digitized versions of authentic manuscripts and works of the masters. I am still working hard to get this immensive project online in a presentable form, but as for the moment it already contains some eighty pages, containing about 150 authors (often masters) on horsemanship. In

Earliest depiction of knighthood

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Contrary to popular perception, the Middle Ages were not always filled with knights. In fact, about half the period we consider the Middle Ages (6-15th century CE) had no knights in it, nor had a distinguished concept of knighthood. In fact, the Western Germanic culture which dominated the first centuries of the Middle Ages was noticeable for its lack of mounted warriors. It was not untill Charles Martel (ca. 688-741) that horses became an important characteristic of the warrior aristocracy, although actual mounted combat was rare and horses were mostly used as a form of rapid transportation, whereafter the warriors dismounted to engage in their martial activities. The use of horses in actual combat only gradually increased in the subsequent centuries and especially the tenth and eleventh centuries were pivotal in developping a new style of combat, centrered on the use of horses. Traditionally, historians such as Maurice Keen in his Chivalry have assumed that this new developmen

Horse Training Impressions: The Vaquero / Buckaroo Way

This video contains an impression of some of the training I did in the past years, especially focussing on advancing my skills in the vaquero school.

1. The matter of Groundwork and why groundwork matters

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  Groundwork exercises by Antoine de Pluvinel in L'instruction du roy en l'exercise de monter à cheval Many people nowadays are convinced that groundwork is an obsolete and useless activity in the training of horses. They claim that a horse can be perfectly educated under the saddle. You probably expect me to falsify this claim entirely, but there is some truth in that very statement, since many riders have indeed trained their horses with little if any groundwork at all. This mere fact already proves their point. But surely, you might think, groundwork is conditional to training green horses, which have not seen, smelled or touched a saddle in their lives. Again reality proves the contrary. Practitioners of the Texas Cowboy method, for instance, took great pride in breaking a colt by mounting horses which were never saddled in their lives. A tradition that was glorified as an element of the Rodeos of the United States and which is still practiced today.             

First Post

I designed this page specifically to deal with the Art of Rossfechten (the medieval art of fighting on horseback) and to deal with Good horsemanship, which will play a pivotal role in any succesfull endeavour to reconstruct Rossfechten. However, sources about how medieval horsemen went about their training are limited at best. In fact, only two actual medieval manuscripts survive which deal specifically with training a horse, and those are rather vague and concise. Nonetheless, the fighting manuscripts, when analyzed with an eye for detail, reveal that refined horsemanship was of the utmost importance. We must therefore undertake the task of educating our horses to our best abilites, so he is up to the tasks required for medieval horsemanship. The main question thus concerns how to train a horse. Luckily medieval horsemanship did not just dissapear. Rather, it was gradually transformed in the two dominant traditional forms of horsemanship known in the Western world. On the one hand,