Medieval Technology and Social Change Quotes

“For the long haul, a draught animal is only as good as its hooves. Oxen seem to have less hoof-breakage than either horses or mules. The feet of horses are particularly sensitive to moisture: it is said that whereas in dry lands like Spain their hooves remain so hard that they can gallop unshod over rocky terrain, in northern Europe the hoof becomes soft, and is quickly worn and easily damaged.”
― Lynn Townsend White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change

“The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup, which joined man and steed into a fighting organism. Antiquity imagined the Centaur; the early Middle Ages made him the master of Europe.”
― Lynn Townsend White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change

“However, even if the Benedictine missionaries had worked a bit faster in extinguishing horse-burials, and had thus deprived us of the spade’s testimony of the arrival of the stirrup in Germanic lands, we could have discovered by other means that it must have reached the Franks in the early eighth century. At that moment the verbs insilire and desilire, formerly used for getting on and off horses, began to be replaced by scandere equos and descendere,' showing that leaping was replaced by stepping when one mounted or dismounted. But a more explicit indication of the drastic shift from infantry to the new mode of mounted shock combat is the complete change in Frankish weapons which took place at that time.”
― Lynn Townsend White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change