354 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



Britain under its new occupants, yet they were well acquainted 

 with the various Teutonic tribes, and accordingly we may 

 place full credence in his description of the methods of war- 

 fare of the Angles and Varni, who are the same as the 

 Werini of the Leges Barharorum (p. 331). For though 

 so great an authority as Bede^ renders it certain in more 

 than one passage that the Angles had some saddle-horses 

 before the middle of the seventh century a.D., the statement 

 of Procopius is completely corroborated by the Anglo-Saxon 

 graves ; for although his weapons, shield, and other gear were 

 always buried with the warrior, be he Angle, Saxon, or Jute, 

 the occurrence of horse-bits and other horse-trappings is of 

 extreme rarity, a fact in strong contrast to the contents of the 

 Scandinavian barrows of Scotland, in which the bones of the 

 horse are found along with those of his master. It would thus 

 appear that the Anglo-Saxons chiefly used horses for carrying 

 goods on packs (for ploughing was still the province of the ox), 

 and if they did ride them, they simply employed them, as did the 

 German tribes in Caesar's day and the Norsemen of the Viking 

 period, for locomotion, and they never fought from horseback, 

 but always did battle on foot, a practice which lasted down to 

 the Battle of Hastings. Harold himself is represented on the 

 Bayeux tapestry as fighting on foot at the moment when he 

 was struck in the eye by the fatal Norman shaft. Indeed, 

 William's victory was due to the fact that he charged the 

 Saxon footmen with a large force of mail-clad warriors mounted 

 on stout horses of the same stock as those which three centuries 

 earlier had stood firm against the Moslem onslaught at Poictiers. 

 The Normans thus introduced into England that large and 

 heavy breed of horses which had been steadily developed for 

 twelve centuries in North-western Europe for the purpose of 

 carrying on their backs large men heavily armed. Moreover, 

 they are represented on the Bayeux tapestry as riding in deep- 

 curved saddles, such as those which, according to Giraldus 

 {infra, p. 389), they brought to Ireland a century later and 

 which were fitted with stirrups. They themselves were clad in 

 hauberks, and wore boots fitted with prickspurs. 

 ^ Ecclesiastical History, chaps, v. xiv. 



