Mounts as Social Identifiers: Describing Knights and Ladies through Their Horses

The idea that a knight in the Middle Ages somehow blended with his mount, creating nothing less than a composite, an assemblage, has recently gained considerable currency in academic circles.10 Naturally, the rise of chivalry is not contemporaneous with the rise of the mounted warrior: in the early medieval period, mounted warriors were not knights, as they came to be known to us through the so-called “code of chivalry.” In fact, Latin texts of the period distinguish between “milites” and “pedites,” and the milites in question are not knights: they are simply mounted soldiers; another term used in early sources is equites or equestres, which was interchangeable with milites.11 A horse, thus, is only one of characteristics making a knight: the