The Hard School: Grisone, the Riding Academies and the Long Argument About Force
The first printed riding manual of the Renaissance recommended punishments that read today as cruelty. The masters who came after it spent two centuries arguing their way back to gentleness.
A history of horsemanship that only tells the good parts is not a history. For most of the time people have ridden horses, the usual way to get one to obey was to hurt it until it did. The interesting part is how often, and how early, some of the best riders said so and tried something else.
Naples, 1550
In 1550 a Neapolitan nobleman, Federico Grisone, published Gli ordini di cavalcare, the rules of riding. It was the first printed manual of the new school riding of the Renaissance, and it was a success across Europe, reprinted many times and translated into several languages.
Grisone was a serious horseman, and much in the book is about exercises that riders still use. It is also a hard book. For the horse that resisted, he prescribed severe bits and punishments that a modern reader finds difficult to get through. He was writing for a world in which the horse was a weapon, and a horse that did not obey in battle could get its rider killed. That explains the book. It does not make the methods kind.
Pluvinel and the king
The Italian academies drew students from all over Europe. One of them was a Frenchman, Antoine de Pluvinel, born in 1555, who went home and opened an academy in Paris and became riding master to the young Louis XIII. His teaching was published after his death in 1620.
Pluvinel turned away from his teachers on one point above all. He argued that a horse should be brought along with patience and reward, that the rider should ask little and praise much, and that a horse worked through fear loses the willingness that makes it worth riding. He is one of the first masters in print to treat the horse's state of mind as the thing being trained.
La Gueriniere
A century later, Francois Robichon de La Gueriniere brought the French school to its classical form. His Ecole de Cavalerie, published in 1733, is still read. He is credited with the shoulder-in, an exercise that supples the horse without force, and his insistence on a calm, balanced horse working in lightness became the foundation of what the Spanish Riding School in Vienna has taught ever since.
The argument did not end
It would be tidy to say that kindness won. It did not. In the same centuries, outside the academies, ordinary horses were broken by ordinary force, and they would be for a long time to come, on farms, in armies and on the ranches of the American West. The nineteenth century had public horse tamers who preached gentleness and others who sold cruelty with a gentle name on it.
What the riding masters left was the argument itself, written down, so that it could be picked up again. When Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt asked riders to consider what the horse understood, they were, whether they knew the books or not, on Pluvinel's side of a very old dispute.
