Certainly the English had horses and bred them. We hear on occasions of the Vikings taking English horses for their own use during their campaigns. But the Vikings used them as the English did, not for battle. The Normans needed their own specially bred horses, such as they took with them to Sicily, such as they transported across the Channel in 1066. The young Norman warrior learned to fight from horseback as a noble pursuit. The idea of a mounted élite was already forming in Norman and northern French minds in a way that was yet to happen in England. The heroes of English poetry were warriors who fought on foot. The warfare of Normandy, like most of north-western continental Europe, relied heavily on development from the Frankish Carolingian Empire. Fortified strongholds or castles, and warriors trained to fight on horseback had developed over a century or so.
Kitap: The Battle of Hastings
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Cavalry, with its capacity to ride off to safety, was not an admired kind of troop. A telling phrase in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates to the flight of the English under Earl Ralph at Hereford in 1055, ‘because they were on horseback’. In the poem of the battle of Maldon, Byrhtnoth told his men each to let go of his horse, ‘to drive it far off and to march forwards’. This attitude lasted well into the age of cavalry, when it could often be a mark of courage to abandon the horse and its promise of escape, and to stand alongside your men.
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The axe was a fearsome and devastating weapon, but not easily wielded and less flexible than a sword. An axeman required a good deal of space around him in order to be effective, and this could leave the line vulnerable to charging cavalry. It must also have been a particularly tiring weapon to wield through a long day of battle. Nevertheless, it was favoured by some of the English.