"Tails" of Masculinity: Knights, Clerics, and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval England

This paper explores the gendered implications of malevolent tail docking (cutting off the tail of a horse against its master’s will) in medieval England. This violent performance was apparently brought to England by the Normans—a culture that employed castration and blinding to emasculate an opponent or punish a transgressor—and quickly took on a life all its own. By the High Middle Ages, knights throughout Europe understood the public message of shame and enfeeblement associated with tail docking. Indeed, an animal borne without a tail in medieval heraldry indicated that one had been deprived of reputation. For example, knights docked the horses of a lay adversary to defame him, particularly in conflicts involving lands and the payment of ransoms. Yet, knights also docked horses belonging to churchmen—i.e., monks and secular clerics—to convey infamy, impotency, and illegitimacy during disputes with powerful ecclesiastics (Thomas Becket being a famous target in 1170). An analysis of chronicles, royal and legal records, and episcopal registers reveals that the laymen sometimes paraded the clerical (but not lay) victims around on their bloodied beasts—a degrading form of charivari more often associated with early-modern bawds and cuckolds than medieval churchmen. The laymen, wishing to avoid excessive violence against the clerics themselves, used the performance of equestrian mutilation as a sort of buffer zone between the human players, for violence against the animal is potential violence and humiliation against its master. That is, knights were able to shame, emasculate, and publicly ridicule the ecclesiastical body via their noble, masculine animals, for horses—like hawks and dogs—afforded their master great status because they traditionally accompanied him in the manly tasks of war and hunting. Therefore, by removing a phallic-like extension of the horse the aggressor rendered the animal’s owner symbolically less powerful.