"Where did cavalry recruits come from?" Topic

Did cavalry recruits come from a particular class of people -- wealthier people who owned horses and thus already knew how to ride? Or was part of training teaching recruits how to ride a horse.
Are there any books about what soldiers learned during training during this time period (though I'm sure training declined as the wars went on).

I don't know with any authority but I imagine they would recruit from agricultural workers / farmers / blacksmiths or rural communities who were more familiar with horses?

Conversely, I used to be a police officer and for their mounted section they would rather recruit people who had never ridden before so they could learn from scratch and be taught in a certain way

J

recycled cruits?

the same place all recruits came from with the same recruiting methods for most nations. Once recruits were gathered in, the artillery, infantry and cavalry got their picks.

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much …

I imagine it varied by country. I have read that the Russians liked to recruit Poles for cavalry, and the Austrian like Hungarians for their hussars. I really don't have any idea how the various branches got their share of the district levy.

G'Day Gents

They also came from the infantry arms as well…there is a section in the French Regulations on what is needed for an infantryman to change arms. This also applies for an artilleryman or cavalryman who wishes to change arms as well.

There are a few French manuals on what a new cavalryman will learn in his first days of training.

Best Regards
Art

I'm not sure but I didn't think it was any differece in recruiting infantry or cavalry.

Would vary quite a bit from nation to nation.

Great Britain would draw from volunteers who could afford the uniforms and horses.

Russia, any would-be commander who was willing to pay for it. One wealthy land-owner equipped an entire squadron of 100 raised from his own serfs. Count Dmitriev-Mamanov raised and funded an entire regiment; which was later disbanded due to complete lack of training and discipline, but the troopers were dispersed to other cavalry regiments. The Cossacks of course just raised battalions and battalions of light cavalry who pretty well knew how to ride and plunder at the very least.

France, the Aristocracy defected early and the army had to pretty much raise and train a cavalry force from scratch after their departure. Their massive cavalry needs would by necessity be coming from non-horsey classes of people.

The Dutch cavalry in '15 came from wealthy folks who brought their own horses. Did not perform quite as well as others…

Hi Tshryock,

The 1960s film The Charge of the Light Brigade starts with a lot of training for the new recruits. Most of them come from the poor disadvantaged classes and with what happened at Balaclava it seems pretty certain that the rank and file cavalry were expendable.

OK so the Crimea is 1850s, but the training regimen was about the same I imagine.

If the cavalry were volunteers--think Britain especially--they were generally a notch or two above infantry recruits socially. It paid better, or one thing. Same is true and possibly more so everywhere the cavalryman is expected to provide his own mount. The various French "Honor Guards" the Prussian mounted "Freiwilliger Jaeger" and the British Yeomanry are good examples. And old regime guard units usually have a socially superior class of enlisted men, and more so in mounted units.

Ethnicity was mostly a central European thing. Everyone seems to prefer Poles for lancers when they can be had, and as noted above there were no Hungarian heavy cavalry regiments. Conversely, the only Austrian "German" light regiments were the fairly uncommon light dragoons.

What I don't know is whether there is evidence--in period and not from movies, please!--of sorting draftees so those who knew their way around a horse went to the cavalry or artillery. You'd like to think someone would try, if only for the horses' sake.

Aside from officers, British regular cavalry recruits were not expected to supply their own uniforms or mounts. They were volunteers (as well as the usual batch of 'volunteered' men sent by the magistrate) and each regiment would usually be given a region from which to recruit, in the same way as the infantry regiments.

Fencible Cavalry Regiments were recruited on much the same terms as the regulars, though they were only required to serve within Great Britain and Ireland.

Yeomanry cavalry (i.e. part-time volunteer reservists with no requirement to serve outside the home country) were however, expected to supply their own mount and uniform (though some wealthy colonels supplied uniforms and/or mounts), while the army supplied the weapons and equipment. I think it might be these regiments that people are thinking of when they describe British cavalry as having to supply their own horse and uniform.

The short-lived Provisional Cavalry Regiments (which existed from 1796ish to 1803ish) were raised in an unusual manner. Each gentleman in the country with a certain level of wealth and/or land was required to supply the regiment with a man and horse. Their terms of service were much the same as the Militia – to serve for five years or until the end of hostilities, which ever came first. These were despised – particularly by the gentry who had to supply the man and horse.

To add to Jemima's reply, from 1806, a form of short-term service was introduced into the British Army, with infantry serving for a minimum of 7 years, and cavalry and artillery for 10 years (to reflect their more extensive – and expensive – training).

It's worth bearing in mind that horses were not just a form of transport, they also did a lot of the work in society prior to the advent of the steam engine, and later the internal combustion engine. Even "townies" would have been familiar with horses, in terms of behaviour etc, whether or not they owned one or knew how to ride. The armies that went to war in 1914, were almost entirely horse-powered.

Great Britain would draw from volunteers who could afford the uniforms and horses.

Are you thinking of the officers, or the troopers? All British soldiers had a 'uniform fee' which came out of their salary.

Cavalry did attract the more wealthy/upper crust candidates for officers, but like the infantry, cavalry recruited by regiment, each regiment responsible for the recruiting.

It is well to remember that in Napoleonic times, a far larger proportion of the population was acquainted with horses than would be the case even a century later. Country kids usually made better cavalrymen than city kids (a fact brought home with force to the Union Army in 1861-2), but recruiting only from the upper strata who could provide their own mounts was very limiting (as brought home with equal force to the Confederate Army in 1864-5). City kids with equine training were usually more useful to an army as artillery and train drivers.

For the UK.
A cavalry recruit was recruited like the infantry. From common working people. Though rural recruits were favored this didn't stop townsmen and city dwellers also being taken in. The exception being Yoemanry units who would often need to pay for their own equipment and therefore tend to be drawn from wealthy working class tradesmen and middle class proffesionals and gentry.

As mentioned above, the army would normally supply Yeomanry equipment (belts, cartouches, sabres, carbines and pistols, as well was tack and saddlery in some cases). Quite a lot of Yeomanry were actually drawn from estate workers, whose horse and uniform would be provided by the colonel.

Maybe I'm confused …. I'm sure I read somewhere about the most violent unit at Peterloo being the yoemanry who were mostly wealthy tradesmen. Maybe I'm confusing them with a volunteer unit?

It's also worth bearing in mind that British officers moved between infantry and cavalry regiments as they moved, usually by purchase, up through the successive commissioned ranks, which is to say that, in this period there was little distinction made between cavalry and infantry in terms of professional expertise. Ability to ride was a given. For the common man that was not the case but, as others have said, the horse, be it saddle or draught, was part of daily life. The opportunity to mount and learn to ride was available to all.

Edwulf,

No, you're quite correct and I should have been clearer. :)

What I meant was that while Yeomanry were MEANT to comprise relatively wealthy volunteers from the 'merchant classes' (wealthy enough to own a horse, anyway), quite a few units were padded out with estate workers/tenant farmers and their horses and uniforms supplied by their colonel/employer/landlord.

Six months' service in the Yeomanry (or a Volunteer Infantry unit) meant that a man's name would be removed from the hated Militia Ballot (which was the only official form of army conscription in Britain), so men were quite keen to join.

The fact that most British cavalrymen could not ride (or certainly not ride to military standards) when they enlisted, is why British Cavalry Regiments each left an entire Squadron (normally one quarter of the Regiment) behind as a depot whenever they were sent overseas. It took a long time to train cavalrymen so the part-trained recruits were all left in that Squadron.

Rod

The British cavalry enjoyed a surge of trained recruits with the disbandment of the Fencibles by early 1802.

I thought they would recruit stable boys, servants who followed their masters on fox hunts. British had a very good pool of riders. the officers might have been on fox hunts before they joined the army

It was an era when 90% of the population lived rurally and would be familiar with horses. That would apply for any of the arms of service. OTOH, knowing how to ride Dobbin the cart-horse wouldn't give you the wherewithal to ride a cavalry charger over a hedge in a formation, with French dragoons about to get up to their usual "foreigner tricks" a couple of hundred yards ahead.

Gentry might be able to ride to hounds and steeple-chase, but that was their prerogative. The miller's lad wouldn't get the chance.

Of 50 recruits taken by one cavalry regiment only 4 had riding experience. The rest were labouerers.

Indeed. Familiarity with a horse didn't necessarily mean that you could ride (or ride well). My grandfather was one of the last ploughmen in the UK to work with horse teams during the 1930s and 40s, before mechanising with a surplus Universal Carrier after WW2. However, despite his total familiarity and affinity with horses, he couldn't ride worth a damn! :)

Perhaps where this paid off was in the care of horses, perhaps? The British cavalry anecdotally had the advantage when it came to looking after their mounts.

Anecdotal evidence from family history: In 1808 one ancestor from the French-occupied Rhineland was conscripted straight into Napoleon's Carabiniers, probably more for his height than any particular experience with horses, let alone riding skills.
A couple of generations later, and from a diferent branch of the family, two men were drafted from their Pomeranian farms into the Prussian Gardes du Corps and Uhlans, in the 1880s and 1905 respectively; they wouldn't have known how to ride, but sure knew how to care for a horse, and from their stories as passed on, their fellow recruits were from a similar background. So by the late 19th C., there may have been some sort of screening in place along the lines suggested by Robert Piepenbrink above.

Height and weight: I seem to remember that in the French army – from Napoleonic period till well into the 19thc – the really big men went to the cuirassiers. Whether a conscript could ride or not was immaterial.

Of course, alongside regular regiments there were also fancy ones: chevaulegers polonais (later Guard lancers) – all nobles who brought the horse; chevaulegers belges raised same time in 1807 (less successful – later 27th Chasseurs) pretty much like that but the Duc d'Arenburg kitted out many; 1813: Gardes d'honneurs raised from well-to do youth from France and Italy, etc to provide the Grande Armée with some cavalry in addition to dragoons recalled from from Spain, Russian Chevalier Guard. I'm sure their were others.

The Yeomanry thing is a red herring. British yeomanry (= mounted militia) were until WW1 or maybe Boer war just parade ground soldiers who occasionally had the opportunity to police the masses – though Peterloo (demonstration of quasi-socialist reformers called Chartists at St Peter's fields, Manchester 1817??) was, I think, the only time the yeomanry were ordered to charge a crowd. I don't think British or Indian cavalry ever charged a crown on the subcontinent either. It was, even then, politically and constitutionally a bad idea that just strengthened the movement(s) concerned and shortened politicians' careers.

In terms of riding skill, as opposed to mounted drill, recruiting from Yeomanry and other mounted volunteer regiments is hardly a red herring!