Bret Devereaux

First world-war era cavalry drills are a useful source of evidence (you will note I cite some in my blog post), but not the only useful sort, or the most important. One need only briefly survey 19th century historiography to find quite a lot of men - often military men...

...who assumed their experience of a given kind of warfare in the 1800s equipped them to understand the same 'sort' of warfare in the 1500s or 1000s. They were quite frequently very badly wrong. Assumptions about the wielding and weight of weapons...

...tactics in fencing and even the handling of cavalry all got built on that assumption that they were doing it how it had always been done. Again that is not to say experience with horses is useless, but that it is not the only kind of evidence or even necessarily the best kind

Consider, after all, sport rapier and sabre fencing can make all of the same claims of lineage that modern equestrianism can. They too are modern sport variants inspired by military arts which passed out of common military use in the first decades of the 20th century.

But compare them to the actual late medieval treatises and you realize that modern sport and ancient martial art do not necessarily coincide.

And of course sabre fencing as taught in 1910 as a combat art for officers and cavalrymen was not the same as fencing as learned by a 15th century man-at-arms.

Again, don't mistake me: experimental archaeology and modern practice have an important role to play in illuminating ancient or medieval practice. But it is not the paramount role: that role goes to the primary sources themselves.