Great Stirrup Controversy | Hacker News Reader

Great Stirrup Controversy

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40 pointsraviparikh34 comments

Interestingly, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and huscarls, a mounted infantry but infantry nonetheless, were crushed at Hastings (1066) by proper Norman cavalry, even though the same troops under the same commander Harold Godwinson had won a very significant battle (Stamford Bridge) against the (unhorsed) Vikings just a few weeks before that.

They put up a great fight and the initial Norman attempts were unsuccessful, but at the end, the cavalry prevailed.

We’re they indeed crushed? I thought the Anglo-Saxons had the upper hand until Harold caught an arrow in his eye, which may have distracted and disheartened his soldiers.

I’m also not sure there were many horses involved, though tbh it’s been a couple of decades since I cared about this battle and my memory may be poor.

Harold Godwinson was an extraordinary commander. To permanently throw the Vikings out of Britain and then march and almost repel the Normans (though basically also Vikings) shows terrific determination. And he chose his territory well: he had the upland position boxed in at the sides and with the Normans having only the sea at their back — he should have won. His troops were incredibly tough guys.

Had he carried the day I think he would have been a good leader. His case was stronger than subsequent propaganda has portrayed.

I admire Harold as well. Too bad that his brothers insisted on taking part in the battle and fell too. Either of them could have become a new king of England, continuing the hostilities against the Normans.

IIRC the Norman cavalry played a decisive role in routing the fyrd at least, but it has been some years since I looked into that as well, so my memory may be faulty.

Harold might or might not have caught an arrow in his eye. There is a great deal of symbolism in that narrative, because an arrow in an eye would be a divine punishment for oathbreakers, and William insisted that Harold previously took an oath on holy relics to be his liege.

So it is not impossible that the detail about the arrow in eye is a latter embellishment to make the story more righteous from the Norman side.

Years ago the alarm code at my office was set to 1066 and for some reason I needed to tell my then 10 yo the code.

He immediately said “arrow to the eye”! So for his sake at least I hope the story is true.

What's the difference between mounted infantry and cavalry? I thought the mounting of soldiers on horses made it a cavalry automatically...

Mounted infantry did not fight on horseback but rather traveled by horse and dismounted to fight on foot. They had access to horses but did not develop coordinated horse-mounted combat tactics or armament.

Edit: Wikipedia has a good overview if you Google the term. My guess is that proper horse mounted combat requires far more intensive and consistent training that could typically only be undertaken by a noble or knightly class with no other real responsibilities. Whereas anyone with access to a horse could fulfill their (rarely exercised) martial duties as infantry.

Basically the same as between parachutists and pilots. They both use a plane to get to the battlefield, but only one of those stays in.

I think it might depend on the period, but mounted infantry uses horses for travel but fights on foot, while cavalry fights mounted.

In modern terms, mounted infantry typically are in Humvee-type vehicles, whereas cavalry are in things more like tanks.

IMO the attack helicopter is a better modern equivalent to cavalry than the tank. Hard to make a direct comparison since increased firepower and command-and-control have made military forces incredibly dispersed.

I've often wondered how much the journey to Hastings in such a rapid fashion wore out Godwinson's troops prior to that battle.

Oh, it definitely did, but worse problem was the undisciplined fyrd that was fresher but fell for the Normans' feint. (They pretended to be retreating and the fyrd broke their ranks in pursuit.)

This is yet another example of humanity's silly tendency to demand a "reason" for things, as if history were a spherical core in a vacuum. History deals less in "because" than it does in "and then".

The stirrup was a great innovation, though. It is hard to say that innovations such as gunpowder, ocean-going vessels, the printing press, antibiotics etc. didn't have a significant impact on history. And stirrups probably belong in that category; they made a certain type of warfare much more efficient and probably led to breeding of much heavier horses than before.

The Wikipedia article mentions this is debatable as well - there are scholars claiming that in experiments stirrups don't make a major difference, and that there is evidence of armored cavalry before stirrups were invented.

That once stirrups came into use anywhere, they never fell out of use, demonstrates utility. It is then the historian's work to explicate and bound that utility, not to dispute it.

Not saying factors don't exist, but this is not a X therefore Y situation. Millions of factors combined to tip history in a certain direction, over and over.

I like to think of these sorts of things as enabling various courses of history, rather than as strictly causing one or another. Maybe the stirrup made these things possible; the choices of the Carolingians, and of everyone else at the time, might be more like 'causes'.

IMO anthropomorphizing crowds is just as faulty as anthropomorphizing history

And yet some things do have causes.

This isn't saying much without examples. We're wired to look for cause and effect, and to seek levers of control over our environment, even when they don't exist. Of course some things have causes, or at least it's easiest to focus on a single cause.

Same way that Newtonian physics is all you really need for your day. That doesn't make it perfectly accurate.

The Stirrup Theory is the kind of nonsense I'd buy when I was 11 and believed in Civilization 2's technology tree.

There's a thousand years of highly effective heavy cavalry predating the purported introduction of stirrups to Europe, for one thing. For another, the supposed military revolution around mounted knights is far messier than the just-so story that is packaged. The chronological correlation between archeological finds of metal stirrups and the development of the feudal knight isn't even very strong.

Past related threads:

Great Stirrup Controversy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181137 - Feb 2019 (16 comments)

The Great Stirrup Controversy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226572 - Dec 2016 (13 comments)

How about climate change, the warming/drying in Europe which allowed for heavy cavalry to operate sussessfully starting not surprisingly at the driest place in Europe at the time - in the Spain with Reconquista. Not surprisingly heavy cavalry quickly sunsets starting around Agincourt, beginning of the wet Little Ice Age, when heavy French couldn't operate in the rain soaked fields. About the same time of the last Crusade when heavy European knights couldn't dominate lighter forces anymore.

Cal Newport talked about this as an example of technological determinism in his book A World Without Email!

I'm not familiar enough with early medieval military history to know the ins and outs of this debate, but theory seems obviously falsified by the fact that chariot technology in other time periods did not result in such a feudal system.

If it were obviously falsified by evidence a random fact that reasonably well-educated but non-specialist knows off the top of their head, it wouldn’t be a controversy and hardly of note.

Scholars have written scores of papers and spilled gallons of ink on both sides of the topic. What do you know that they don’t?

I think the theory is wrong, or at least incomplete, but the evidence against isn’t as clear as all that.

That’s not necessarily true. Often, a lack of interdisciplinary engagement can result in easily in theories or debates lasting far longer than they should. In this case, the debate seems to have been confined to medievalists not military historians, and going by the way Wikipedia article it appears that once experimental archeologists weighed in, they were rather critical of the theory.

For a similar example from another field, observe the decades long contention in epidemiology about droplet sizes and viruses like the flu and Covid not being airborne, in contradiction to basic aerosol physics.

Not necessarily, sure. But the odds that you just happen to know some fact that "obviously falsifies" a decades old scientific controversy are very close to zero.

In fact, if you are right, you should write up a paper. There are numerous journals that would be thrilled to resolve this controversy once and for all.

Given that there are only six citations in the Wikipedia article, I don’t think the debate is nearly as noteworthy as you think it is.

The paper you write which puts it all to bed with the obvious refutation that somehow all those sources missed could be the seventh.

Yeah, none of that is true. Chariots were the deciding factor in many battles from the point they were invented by the people of the Sintashta culture until the last few centuries BCE and spread everywhere from Egypt to India to China. Chariots did not need roads, but they were certainly less effective in broken terrain - but so is mounted cavalry.

The reason they spread so quickly from the Eurasian steppes to throughout most of Europe and Asia was precisely because they were so dominant. As a matter of fact, not only did the chariot spread, but the horses the Sintashta culture and its immediate daughter cultures bred to best PULL the chariots spread with the chariot to the extent they are the ancestors of every single domestic horse in the world.

Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.

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