What audacity pushed a daredevil in animal skins to mount his capture and cling to it? We still don’t know. Having discovered this noble use of the horse, the man became a rider. Finding himself as secure as on firm ground, he felt his speed, mobility, and courage multiply by this extension of himself. The centaur was born, equitation began. How was academic horsemanship born? How did the art of riding develop? What was the evolution of horseback riding, from the first riders to today’s riding schools?
The beginnings of horse riding
The term academy must be taken in its original meaning, that of a college of talented riders gathered around recognized masters.
The academy works on the elaboration of a doctrine and the setting up of a teaching system to propagate it. It represents a technical and artistic reference through its public presentations and publications. It must preserve its founding principles, welcome new ideas and then spread. It will become an instrument at the cutting edge of research. Having to exist in a time and in the world that surrounds it, it will accept its requirements and integrate itself into its structures. The various stages of the evolution of high equitation accompany the flowering and blossoming of the arts, the elevation of thought and the cult of beauty. It was academic in the original and noble sense of the term each time it benefited from institutions which were vehicles of new ideas, instruments of research and the expression of the classicism of the time. As privileged means of knowledge, the academies were the main source of artistic training. Genius and talent were developed through lectures and training led by the best artists. The school reigned, it expressed the continuity of art, its enrichment, and the diffusion of its knowledge. A privilege of the princes because of the luxury of the necessary means, it contributed to the prestige of the State and enriched the military art.
It is the necessities of war and hunting but also the equestrian passion which, among certain primitive peoples such as the Scythians, the Parthians and the Numidians, will be the instruments of their conquests and will forge their psychology.
The equestrian art was born with the Hellenic golden age, it continued with the Roman riders without however reaching the highly refined spectacle of the masterpieces of dressage. It will continue with the development of horsemanship in Europe.
The absence of stirrups made the rider’s seat precarious. The ancient bits, simple snaffles, or brutal mouthpieces did not allow for the nuanced associations that the bridle and the bridle would make possible. Nevertheless, the Romans were keen on racing, acrobatics and all sorts of equestrian games which served as a basis for the first riding school tunes. This form of riding, empirical and natural, will develop in its practitioners a technical background and a skill which will allow a more rational evolution in the later riding.
Riding among the Greeks
The first elements of a methodical use of the horse for war, games and parades appeared in 370 BC with Xenophon’s on Riding. This work of concentrated knowledge and limpid clarity expresses the sum of the knowledge acquired at that time. It is inspired by the equestrian treatise of Simon of Athens dating from the previous century, of which a few fragments have survived. It is also the fruit of the culture and the experience of this “honest man” of his time.
Xenophon had a taste for science and action, an equestrian practice enriched during his wars and his travels that, back from Asia, he would teach to his sons and his students until the end of his life. He was the first author to consider the psychology of the horse, and he applied principles of instruction that considered its temperament and sensitivity. The education of the horse must be progressive and reasoned, carried out with patience and softness to be understood. “Never treat him with anger but chastise him for his own good as parents chastise their children. Don’t pull, look for regular gaits, keep the horse straight, give him rest. He also recommends working outdoors and in various terrains. Only spirited horses interest him; it is necessary “to start them gradually and by very soft aids, to hold them gently”.
To achieve brilliant gaits, “take the gaits he gives himself when he is doing well, raise the neck, bring it back and give in to the hand.” The recommended bits are hard at the beginning “to prevent him from leaning… Keep the hand low if he lifts his nose… You must not pull all at once but use the bridle softly. As soon as the horse has accomplished something to the liking of the rider, give him a moment of relaxation”. Xenophon advocates bringing back the horse by playing with the reins, he gives the delicate way to bend the hips of the horse in hand. “After placing him in this way, mark a time to stop, he will sit on his hocks and raise the forehand.” He describes the fundamental relaxation of high horsemanship because he refers to as the figure of “the hindrance”, that is, two volleys adjoining each other and drawing a figure eight. Of the practice of the circle: “I approve this movement; it teaches the horse to turn as in the lead rein”. It is practiced on both straight and curved lines.
Riding among the Romans
The Romans quickly adopted the Greek heritage without forgetting the foundations of horsemanship. The aristocracy of the Roman knights was the first order of the state after the senate but, despite the richness of Latin culture, no notable evolution of learned horsemanship and no treatise on horsemanship has come down to us. The bases of the training mark a return backward, as well using empirical methods as by that of severe mouthpieces. As the harness had not evolved since the Greeks, it is true that the precariousness of the saddle and the absence of stirrups remained obstacles to equestrian progress.
The Romans, like the Greeks, used the horse as a means of warfare, sport and fun, but it does not seem that, despite the legend of the Sybarites and their dancing horses, Antiquity cultivated the equestrian art as we understand it today. The trepidium of the Romans was a trepigné ancestor of the piaffer, the am- bulatoria an ambled step and the canterius a small gallop. The known documents will reveal that it is between the IXth century and the XIIth century that will be accomplished the progress which will allow the equitation a definitive evolution. Harnessing of draft and saddle, stirrups, fittings: it is thanks to these inventions that will progress the methods of riding of the Latin Occident and that the horse will become the first element of combat and an object of art until the XIXth century.
The birth of academic art
From the ninth to the fifteenth century, the institution of chivalry will spread throughout Europe to reach its most key role with the crusades.
This virile order, whose bellicose tendencies were tempered by Christian principles, developed an ethic of loyalty, respect and pity for the miserable. The knight will also have to learn and demonstrate his aptitude for combat and the care of his horse. The Count of Aure wrote: “He received an education which consisted above all in learning to ride and one who was not afraid to admit that he was not able to sign his name would have blushed to say that he could not ride”.
The evolution of the armor of the knight and the horse towards a greater protection, but also towards a more constraining weight, the disappearance of the weapons of jet for the benefit of the weapons of shock, considered as more noble, will form a new tactic of equestrian combat with the use of the heavy horses: the steeds. This equitation of force and constraint will lead to a rigid posture, like the armors worn by the man and the horses and the complete loss of the virtuosity of the riders of the Antiquity. The fighting airs will be limited to half-volts, passades and other pirouettes executed with the flexibility allowed in this heavy apparatus. Few texts have come down to us on the equestrian technique of this time. It is true that printing had not yet been invented and the knights were often illiterate.
Portuguese and Spanish horsemanship
Apart from Lorenzo Rusio, an Italian hippiatrist who wrote a treatise on farriery at the end of the 13th century, the first attempts at a rational study of horsemanship came from the Iberian Peninsula. A manuscript of 1318 by the Portuguese Mestre Giraldo, the Book of the Hunt, contains principles of hippology and horsemanship, but still before the invention of printing (1453). Don Duarte, king of Portugal, wrote in 1434 “The book that teaches to ride well”. It is an astonishing work because, apart from excellent principles on the use of the horse, the position, and the aids of the rider, it describes a true pedagogical method for the teaching of riding, the mental and spiritual preparation, the indispensable physical and moral qualities, the cognitive, affective, and physical components which govern the motor act. If the general work of Don Duarte had been taken up again in the five hundred and fifty years that separate us from it, the equestrian art would have been transformed.
The evolution of academic equitation has been marked by a multitude of Portuguese equestrian authors up to the present day. We will mention only the most important ones.
Francisco de las Cespedes y Velasco – Treaty of the Gineta (1609), Pedro Galego – Treaty of Gineta (1629), Gregorio Zuniga – Doctrina del caballo (1705); the very important work of Manuel Carlos d’Andrade – Luz de liberal e noble Arte do Cavaleria (1790), the one who is called the Portuguese La Guérinière and who was inspired by the Marquis of Marialva, great horseman of the Alter stud farm; the restorer of the great academic equitation of the Lusitanian-French tradition, the most extraordinary horseman of the XXth century Master Nuno Oliveira and his written work that culminates in his Reflections on Equestrian Art (1955).
Spanish equitation is close to that of the Portuguese. They shared the same desire for independence, rejecting the Arab occupiers, whom they also faced on horseback for seven centuries. They used the same mounts: the Spanish or Andalusian broom, “considered as the first one for the merry-go-round… the pomp and the parade… the war” (La Guérinière), this horse with which was going to be forged throughout the civilized world the academic equitation. The Iberian equestrian literature, which will provide the bases of the data of the academic equitation, will flourish from the 15th to the 19th century. To the Portuguese authors are added the Spanish authors: Pedro de Aguilar – Tratado de cavaleria (1572), Fernandez de Andrada – De la naturaleza del cavallo (1580), Suarez de Peralta – Tratado e la gineta y brida (1580), Manuel Alvarez – Manejo Real (1733) and fifty others of various importance.
We cannot ignore the Arab riding discovered by the Spaniards during their age-old confrontations against the Muslim invaders and by the Westerners during the crusades. El Naceri by Abu Bekr, equerry of the Sultan of Egypt, is a monument of equestrian literature. It is a treatise of hippology and hippiatry remarkable by its poetry, but also by the part that it grants to the psychology of the horse. Its interest in the training of horses is however less than that of Xenophon.
It is paradoxical to note that the true beginnings of classical combat riding coincide with the use of gunpowder (Crécy, 1340). It is in fact the use of “javelin-throwing” cavalry, archers and crossbowmen, light riders intended to harass artillerymen and other users of heavy machines, which will provoke the refinement of horsemanship. The skirmishes and battles against the Moors and the extraordinary quality of the Andalusian horse will generate a form of horsemanship that will continue to evolve into an art that, from martial, will become choreographic in the eighteenth century.
Riding in Italy
When the Granada war ended in 1492, the Spanish knights were among the finest riders in the world. It was then that the king of Aragon, Ferdinand – pretender to the kingdom of Naples – set out to conquer southern Italy. The agility of the Spanish cavalry will triumph over the heavy armor of the French knights of Charles VIII, and the spectacle of the lords of the suite of Ferdinand will offer to the Neapolitan squires an equitation whose beauty equals the effectiveness.
At the same time, it is still in Italy, under the protection of the courts of Tuscany, Mantoue and Este, that the Italian experts will discover the talents of these artists that were the Genets of Spain. The Neapolitan horses were heavy and soft. Pluvinel writes that “the race was entirely spoiled and bastardized” inducing a brutal and even cruel riding. One understands the reasons which brought the first Neapolitan academicians to make an abusive use of the stick, the cudgel and other “estrapades” with mounts which were far from the brilliant Thoroughbreds Andalusian of the court of the viceroy.
Fiaschi in 1541, Grisone, Pignatelli, with their academies of Ferrara and Naples, were the first leaders of the school and preluded the theories that allowed horsemanship to reach further heights in the 18th century. Their principles are however a set of eccentricities, of obscure precepts in the middle of which excellent revelations are discerned. Seriousness rubs shoulders with fantasy, and gentleness with abominable cruelties.
Riding in France
From the second half of the 16th century, the reputation of the Neapolitan and Florentine academies will influence Europe and will attract many enthusiasts who, back in their country, will propose new ideas. Thus, Salomon de La Broue, future squire of Henri II and Pluvinel, future squire of Louis XIII, studied the teachings of the Italian experts and, returning to their country, “filled France with French squires who were previously full of Italians”. In 1593, La Broue wrote the first treatise in French on the art of riding and Pluvinel, who became the king’s first squire, created the first riding academy in Paris and left the manuscript of Instruction of roi at his death in 1620. The precepts of these two masters will take the riding out of the mists. It will not cease to be perfected until the XIXth century and will reach its apogee at the royal riding school of Versailles to radiate on all Europe. High horsemanship contributed to the prestige of the State, enriched the military art, and served the pleasure and taste of princes and great men. If it was the almost exclusive privilege, it was because of the luxury of the means necessary for the selection of men and horses and the importance of the cost of their maintenance and the development of their talent.
Riding in Europe
In the 17th century, influenced by Pluvinel’s work, equestrian art centers were developed in Europe, in the form of imperial and royal academies and riding schools, where the teachings of the experts were cultivated.
In England, with the Duke of Newcastle in 1658, in the principalities that made up Germany at the time: Prussia, Hanover, Mecklenburg, whose princes were often great lovers of horses and riding, supporting equestrians and authors of quality such as the Count of Paar, M. de Reghental, the baron of Sind, M. de Weyrôther; all of them developed with more formalism and requirement the principles of the old Italian school and the first French masters.
These new equestrian ideas were to spread to Denmark and Sweden, but it was at the Austrian court that a great equestrian activity was to develop in the outbuildings of the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg. The inspiration for dressage was first Spanish (creation of the first riding school in 1572), then Neapolitan and finally French, with the theories of Pluvinel and, in the 18th century, those of La Guérinière. Little by little, the common lines of an art that will fascinate the monarchs from the 17th to the 19th century are taking shape. Basic doctrine and identical objectives, always similar instrument: the Spanish horse.
In France, the organization of the royal stables had begun in the 6th century with the Merovingian kings. Under Charlemagne, a structure had appeared which became the prerogative of the first officers of the palace: squires of the body, heads of the stables. In the 15th century, the office of Grand Ecuyer de France was created for four hundred and fifty years. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Grande and Petite Ecurie brought together all the specialists necessary for an organization that lasted until the Restoration and the Empire.
Renaissance Italy was the beacon of a culture that had fascinated Charles VIII, Louis XIII and François I, and that Catherine and Marie de Médicis carried with them. The education of youth consisted not only of the study of books and the liberal arts but also of physical exercises such as fencing, dancing and horseback riding. The education given to the pages during the next three centuries was modelled on that of the Italian princely houses: academic instruction and service to the king.
The academic basis of French equitation
The first academic principles of La Broue and Pluvinel: they disapprove “the big and very sharp spurs for the young horses”. They consider that “softness is more necessary for horses that are surprised and rebuffed”. Caress and reward but also “big whips on the buttocks” in case of resistance. “The good hand must resist and yield when appropriate and control the action of the legs. Perfection comes from the plate.” They advocate neck bends in place and on the move, handing on the spur. The relaxations are already based on circles, straight lines, backward steps, transitions.
The position is stiff with the hollowed kidney, the legs in front and the seat on the straddle.
The evolution throughout the XVIIth century will be carried out towards less violent processes where one will end up admitting that if the horse resists, it is not because it is “cowardly, malicious, obstinate” but because it does not understand, from where the abandonment of the hard mouthpieces and the wild punishments.
The pillars – single and double – became a basic element of the training, “very excellent means” which prefigured the shoulder inside. In 1657, Newcastle, repudiating the pillars and their excesses, imagined a flexion of the neck with the help of the bridle and the pommel, which realized a first step of the shoulder in.
The Golden Age
In 1682, horseback riding moved from the Tuileries to Versailles with the king himself. Louis XIV reorganized the Grande and Petite Ecurie with all the splendor that the Sun King brought to everything he touched. He placed at their head the one who was to be the expert in the royal academies: M. le Grand Ecuyer de France. He will have authority over the School of Pages, over all the provincial academies, some of which will remain famous, over those of Paris and over the prestigious School of Versailles which will be his permanent residence.
The book written by François Robichon de la Guérinière, “l’École de cavalerie”, still contains the tables of the law of high equitation (B. N. -© Roger-Viollet, Paris)
The definitive foundations of the equestrian art were laid in these privileged places, such as the Tuileries Academy, over which La Guérinière reigned and where he created a distinctly French school, without borrowing from English and Germanic methods. La Guérinière, in his work The Cavalry School, left a description of the school and its means. This remarkable work still contains the tables of the law of high equitation.
It is a natural and reasoned practice. It is based on the softening without force and in a constant lightness, an impulse without slackening, the whole in a musical and brilliant cadence.
The lines of force of the equestrian bible are:
- a free and clear position of the rider;
- the primacy of the trot in education and gymnastics;
- the shoulder in, the fundamental softening;
- the ultimate finish in the pillars which will be the last common use at the end of the 18th century. They will be replaced by the work on foot of the bau- chériste school.
The annihilation
The Revolution will destroy the sanctuary and disperse its artists. Monsieur le Grand, a German prince, had a price put on his head. He will leave in 1789, followed by the best masters of Versailles who will then enrich the academies of Eastern Europe.
France will miss its squires in battle and the prowess of the Empire’s horsemen will owe more to courage than to talent. The revolutionary turmoil had suppressed the Royal Riding Academies and dispersed their cadres. The shortage of instructors in the imperial cavalry had caused an enormous waste of horses. An attempt to re-establish the Academy of Versailles was made under the Restoration. It was without success. A decree of Napoleon I established in 1809 the Cavalry School of Saint-Germain; its existence was brief and an order of Louis XVIII transferred it on December 23, 1814 to Saumur.
The spirit and organization of the Training school for mounted troops was initially like that of Versailles. Civilian squires such as Cordier, Ducroc de Chabannes, Rousselet, all bearers of the great academic tradition will teach there, sometimes with difficulty in front of the military, from 1815 to 1855. The last civilian squire was the Count of Aure, whose riding style was more instinctive than academic, and more military and sporting.
The interventions in Saumur of the innovative rider François Baucher were more about the preparation of the horse for arms than the horse for high school.
General L’Hotte, Chief Squire in 1864, personally made an excellent synthesis of French equitation, but he forbade it at the school, which, he wrote, “must only consider the use of the war horse”. This was the end of the renaissance of the equestrian art in Saumur.
The successive structures of the school – whose executives were always subject to military imperatives, training, and equestrian sports – prohibited any continuous and coherent effort at the highest level of the art.
Equitation was academic in the noble sense if it benefited from institutions which were receptacles of new ideas, instruments of research and the expression of the classicism of the time. As privileged means of knowledge, the Academies were the source of artistic culture. Talent and genius were developed through lectures and training by the best artists. The school reigned, preserving the continuity, the enrichment, and the diffusion of knowledge.
The individualistic romanticism of the 19th century, for which thought no longer conformed to the rules of art but to invention according to its own standards, marked with Baucher the end of the great academic era.
The modern and academic equitation
The equitation of our time is deeply stigmatized by the requirements of the permanent competition which marks the life of the rider and the horse. It would be useful if, as in dance, violin or piano, competitions were limited to highlighting the qualities of the best and then letting them express their talent freely. Repeated competition is, for 95% of riders, a factor of degradation.
At the beginning of the 21st century, a hope for a renaissance of the equestrian art remains thanks to the talent and faith of a few. The Vienna School+B14, after more than four hundred and fifty years of glory and dramas is still there. Still a bit of an academy and already too much of a museum, it remains a conservatory which permanently shelters some talented artists, creators of “masterpiece” horses. It is one of the last places where one can be sure to discover some horses, products of this natural and reasoned equitation that characterized the baroque period, in this state of grace that is called “gathering”.
The Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art was born in 1972, from three elements, each one unique: a bimillennial equestrian tradition; an exceptional man, Don Alvaro Domecq y Diez; a precious horse, the Spanish Pure Race. His presentations reach the most moving and successful level of equestrian spectacle. Some of its riders also participate successfully in high-level international competitions.
This symbiosis of academic equitation and competitive dressage equitation proves that respect for the art does not exclude the domination of the rigorous rules of competition.
The Portuguese National School of Equestrian Art began training its first Alter Real horses under the direction of Dr. Guilherme Borba in 1979. A brilliant student of Master Oliveira, he had already successfully assumed the technical direction of the School of Don Alvaro Domecq at its creation. Despite limited material resources, the Portuguese School has continued to develop. Installed in the gardens of the castle of Queluz, it should soon be able to present itself within the framework of the superb Royal Armoury of Belem, the current carriage museum.
In France, the Big Stable of the Château de Versailles, restored to its original splendor, is the ideal place to reinstall the academy that the world envied.
Since 1793, the sanctuary has been there, inanimate but still superb, ready to resound with the pounding of hooves and the clanking of bits. There is a serious hope that a long prepared official project will succeed thanks to the general consent of the equestrian, cultural and political spheres.
While the French equestrian tradition, swept away by the revolutionary turmoil, fell into disrepair in the 19th century, the great Germanic schools continued to teach it with the rigor proper to these nations. Despite the alterations made to their Latin sources, they imposed themselves with victory in the three disciplines at the Olympic Games of 1936.
Our cavalry school, whose only mission was military, will contribute to the development of sport riding and only a few personalities will pursue classical riding on a personal basis. One will speak with condescension about the “constrained submission” and the “heaviness of the equitation from the other side of the Rhine” which will be opposed to the memory of the “brilliance of the Roman school”; unfortunately, the “mechanical precision” opposed to the “Latin inspiration” will turn to the confusion of the latter. Two representatives of the academic culture, the generals Decarpentry (France) and Von Holzing (Germany), will write the excellent rules of the F.E.I., still in force, in the spirit of protecting the competition from degradation and making it a model. Unfortunately, the tendency of the juries was to privilege the rigid and constrained aspect of the exercises and little the brilliance and the lightness.
The competition then lost its power of emulation and exemplarity by institutionalizing a new equestrian way in which our neighbors triumph. However, we will reserve our criticisms if we are not able to add to the seriousness of their work that grace and lightness which marked our tradition. The roots of the evil are to be found in our institutions, in the insufficiency of our training, in a generalist pedagogy which considers that it is no longer necessary for teachers to be more competent than students and which asks instructors to be “more animators than technicians”. The exams are a cramming which means that a mediocre rider who knows how to express himself will succeed better than one with the opposite characteristics.
The most far-sighted will try – but where? – to fill their gaps, the majority teaching what they do not know to aspiring riders who want to know well!
The body of doctrine still exists, but one will look in vain for the expert likely to demonstrate it by reviving it. The sterility of the system will remain, if, following the example of the great musical and choreographic ensembles, one will not have the lucidity to call upon a masterly authority that, alas, one does not see elsewhere than abroad.
However, one should not forget the history of horseback riding in the East, where many peoples have been drivers of horses.
