330 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



viously held, and rendered it subject to tribute*. When later 

 on the Franks invaded Italy, it is not improbable that the 

 inconsiderable body of cavalry which accompanied them may 

 have been furnished in part at least by the Thuringians and 

 Burgundians, for the use of cavalry seems at that time to have 

 been quite alien to their national method of warfare. This 

 small body of horse alone carried spears. All the rest were 

 footmen, who had neither bows nor spears, but each had a 

 sword, a round shield (aspis) and a double-axe (pelekys), which 

 had a thick iron head very sharp at each end, and a short 

 wooden helve. This they hurled against the enemy at the 

 first onset, and then fell upon them with their swords ^ 



After their return from Italy, where numbers of them 

 through climatic conditions unfavourable to their race had died 

 of dysentery, they occupied Provence, captured Marseilles and 

 other places on the seaboard, and got control of the sea in that 

 quarter. Their chiefs settled at Arelate (Aries), and there 

 presided at horse-races and issued gold solidi from the proceeds 

 of the Gaulish mines, stamped with the effigy of the Frankish 

 king instead of the head of a Roman emperor^. 



The race-horses viewed by the Franks at Aries were pro- 

 bably of the light, swift stock bred by the Ligurians from at 

 least the second century B.C., descendants of which we have 

 recognised in the grey Camargues of to-day. Thus by the sixth 

 century the Franks had got possession not only of the war- 

 horses of the Thuringians and Burgundians, but also of the light 

 fast horses of Provence, and the good geldings of Northern 

 France commended by St Jerome two centuries earlier. It was 

 but natural that the Franks and other tribes like them, who 

 had been slow to adopt cavalry, should from that time forth 

 begin to employ the new arm. We know from Bede that the 

 Angles began to use saddle-horses in the seventh century, and, 

 if the island-dwellers took thus to riding, it is probable that 

 their kinsfolk on the Continent had begun to ride and to breed 

 horses of the Burgundian, Thuringiau, and Frisian stocks at 

 a still earlier date. It is from these that the large black 



^ Procop. de hello Gothico, i. 13. '^ Ibid. ii. 25. 



3 Ibid. III. 33. 



