In medieval thought, wilderness had a number of conflicting connotations. It was associated with deviance and liminality on the one hand, being conceived as the dwelling place of the Wild Man, teaming with demons, unclean spirits and the little folk, as well as the place where witches celebrated the sabbath. On the other hand, the wilderness was related to fleeing the world and its temptations, as the holy people, hermits and recluses, would withdraw into the desert or the woods, spending their life in solitude, among the wild beasts and in fighting the demons. The first religious houses were built in solitary places, such as islands and forests.
In the book I am writing about medieval wild horses, I am going to introduce wild horses and the people who interacted with them in all these settings and with all the range of positive and negative connotations. The story of St. Hippolytes features a saint who withdraws from the world, preferring the company of wild horses to that of pagan people. Untamed, wild horses were used to execute the worst of criminals, those thought to defy the existing social order, as did the early medieval queen of the Franks Brunhilde. Wild horses were also thought to possess magical or supernatural qualities: both Bucephalus, whose story was well known as part of the Aleksandre romance, and Bayard, the magical horse of the French chanson de geste, either originate in the wilderness or withdraw to the woods at the end of their careers - they will be the protagonists of the stories narrated in my upcoming posts!
Supernatural horses could also have more sinister, diabolic powers, as some folkloric accounts of horses associated with lakes, rivers and water sources show. These wild horses, found in the proximity of water sources, are likely to take the unwary riders mounting them into the water and drown them. The Celtic kelpie is only one of those horses, but other cultures also include references to these animals. Thus, in Slavic folklore, the horse is one of the guises in which the water spirit or vodyanoy appears.
These are The Kelpies, 30 metre high stainless steel sculptures guarding a new extension to the Forth & Clyde Canal. You can find them in The Helix, a new park located between Grangemouth and Falkirk in Scotland.
In the more practical terms, forests were often bred in the forests, as this method of breeding required less expenditure of resources and was less labour intensive. These “forest horses” would have been managed more or less intensively, involving at least annual roundups, where grown and adolescent male animals would have been removed to be trained for work, and to avoid the excess of stallions, which would have resulted in stallions fighting and injuring each other, as well as young stallions possibly harassing mares excessively.
But forest horses and other equids could also become pests, destroying peasants’ crops. This is the context in which an as-yet unidentified Portuguese equid, the enzebro, appears in medieval documents.
