War Horse Buttock Width

[David KUIJT <kuijt@umiacs.UMD.EDU>]

Poster: David KUIJT <kuijt@umiacs.UMD.EDU>


Hey, all, this is Dafydd.

I've been following the debate on the width of medieval horse butts,
which was triggered by that MilSpec post that is going around, which
gives the standard rut distance on Roman roads as 4' 8.5".  Since
these ruts were created by Roman cart teams, a large number of
people have been commenting on the small size of Roman horses (since
that would be a pair of horses).

Don't be mislead by the two-horse datum.  A rut is positioned right
under the tail of the horse.  As any physicist will tell you, the
distance from the center top of one wave (or horse's butt) to the center 
top of the next one is ONE wavelength, not two.  So if you count from the 
tail of one horse to the tail of its partner in carting, you get 1/2 
horse plus the small space between them plus another 1/2 horse.  In other 
words, 4' 8.5" is the width of one horse (plus some small space), not two.
An ASCII diagram illustrating this point is left as an exercise
to the reader.

Although I don't have two horses convenient to experiment on, I
assure you all with some confidence that it is no great trick to
hook up modern (putatively bigger than Roman) horses so that they
are 4'8.5" between the tails, as a single horse is much less wide
than that.

Whether Roman horses were smaller or larger than modern ones is beside
the point.  Also, I suspect that the vast majority of traffic on Roman
roads (creating ruts) was hitches of oxen, not horses.  As any student
of Roman technology will tell you, proper harness for hitching horses
as draft animals did not reach Europe until after the fall of the
Western Roman Empire, and the vast majority of draft animals in Rome
were oxen.  I suspect that the percentage of horse-pulled carts or
chariots on Roman roads was very small, with the bulk of traffic (and
the heaviest traffic, thus creating the most ruts) made up of oxen-
pulled wagons.

Sincerely
Dafydd
(widely known as smarter than a horse's butt)

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