A couple people commented on my high heel origin story post that they thought everybody knew that high heels originated with horseback riding. And it’s true. I did know that. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Horse Girl, endlessly obsessed with the topic. I absolutely knew that.
What snarled me up was that I could not believe that it happened circa 1580. I simply could not fathom the idea that nobody in Europe or its immediate neighbours wore high heels on horses until the 1500s. That is more than a thousand years after the invention of the stirrup! Wearing sturdy, closed-toe shoes with at least an inch of heel is and always has been the universal rule for being around horses… isn’t it?
Tumblr, you know the answer from the way I phrased the question. No, it hasn’t. This is from a 1556 manual of horsemanship:
(That type of form-fitting shoe they’re wearing is called a “turnshoe”, which means they have the protective value of a bedroom slipper or a soft leather glove. Because I’m such a nice person, you can get a better look here in this carefully-chosen detail from a 1459 fresco of attendants walking in a mounted procession:)
Also, you know how riders in medieval art always look like the artists are just drunk and out to lunch with foot and leg position?
NO REALLY THAT’S A REAL TECHNIQUE THEY DID ON PURPOSE. Armored foot protectors (”sabatons”) were genuinely jointed to let them do that super droopy toe thing! Even pointing down!
This is the same kind of betrayal I experienced when learning that there are approximately dozens of types of distinct regional and/or utility styles of saddle still being used and manufactured, today, all over the world. And that actually, my entire frame ofknowledge around horses had been carefully molded through a highly specific cultural lens and there was a ton I didn’t know squat about.
When I was young and I’d read big books from the library with titles like Horses: The Absolutely Complete Book of All Human Knowledge About Equitation and they would earnestly assure me that there were exactly two types of saddles in the world: English, and Western. Perhaps three; the Australians were gauche enough to use… some hybrid of the two? And did the different types of English saddle count? Wait, are we counting sidesaddles? But in conclusion, there were exactly three types of saddle in the world. Anything else left must be a rustic relic from premodern times.
Which is… just its own miniature class in ethnocentrism and the limits of the British colonial lens. Part of it is because people get raised inside an echo chamber never learn of the existence of alternatives; part of it is that they learn to privilege some information more than others, so what’s considered a “real saddle” worth teaching children about is skewed; and part of it is because for centuries, Europeans in general and the English in particular have been extremely evangelical in telling the entire world that their way of approaching horsemanship (and everything else) is the Best, Rightest, Most Correct Way of Doing Things.
I’d been preparing to go all primary source on this topic, which would have delayed this post’s public appearance considerably, but today I actually found someone else who’d done it all for me. Over at The Works of Chivalry, Giovanni Battista Tomassini says:
[I]n spite of the crucial role that the horse has played in the history of civilization, historians have so far rather neglected the study of these kind of works and, more generally, have paid little, or no systematic attention, to the equestrian practices, the study of which has been mainly confined to the scope of enthusiasts and equestrian professionals.
That’s been changing a lotin the last decade or two, and I applaud him deeply for making his findings accessible to an international lay audience, in English and Italian. I have a few posts I found most interesting:
“A la brida” and “a la gineta.”:Different styles of riding from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, at least as different as modern “English” and “Western” schools
Anglomania&Anglomania Part 2: How English styles of equitation became popular throughout continental Europe during the 18th century
“Maneggi and Jumps”: Gently debunks the idea that many of the classical “airs above the ground” performed by the Lipizanners of the Spanish Riding School originated for medieval combat, since the earliest texts we see them in say, “These are rad as hell, but this is a SEPARATE SCHOOL OF HORSEMANSHIP, do not teach your warhorse these.”
That last one is especially funny because Hollywood always thinks that the epitome of a Historical Horse being Fearsome is them rearing up on their hindlegs! This is not actually what horses look like when they’re scary, but horses are not good actors, so that’s the closest thing we can train them to do. (It’s called “making a pesade”). And a 1562 manual on equitation actually says this:
Young horses learn pesades easily, and once they have learned them they make them willingly, as they think that once they have done them they do not have to do anything else. For this reason if they are [given the cue] they think they should not do anything else than stop and make a pesade. So they stop very often to rear against the will of the rider, and in a place where it is not required, and they do it even higher than what it is appropriate
