But there must be a way to save hobelars in the cultural memory right? Can we reprint the document that has the poem?
Just yesterday, i had heard my friend say something along the lines of war is rock paper scissors and i accepted that without a second thought and your post about hobelars came at the right time to add delightful nuance. And i want to remember and share about hobelars
References: this post where I note, on a post about medieval mounted warfare that articulated this as knights and horses in armour charging pikemen, that the overlooked mounted unit of the “Irish” hobelar - a lightweight cavalry skirmisher, mounted nearly-bareback on pony-horses called hobbies - would have neatly fitted into the gaps in that narrative. Here’s another post about hobbies i wrote too.
By asking, you are doing the work. Thank you./.
In their time, hobelars were a useful unit of medieval warfare; originally in defending themselves against the English, and then used abroad against others. A contemporary poem, which describes the Siege of Calais, mentions a hobelar on a hobby, describing their fighting style; but the only copy of this poem on the internet is a single badly scanned document of a book from the 1840s that will be reasonably difficult (but not impossible!) to source on paper.
There have been a total two books written about hobelars - one in 1914, and one in 1954 - and they are mentioned in passages of two or three out-of-print books about medieval warfare. They have a Wikipedia article which contains incorrect information like claiming that the hobby is the same horse as the Connemara Pony (it isn’t.) There is one single medievalist who has published recently and sparsely on hobelars, and necessarily he does this by arguing with The 1914 and 1954 Guys. He has not brought in any horse knowledge or political connectedness to his theses, but he’s all I’ve got, so I cling to him like he clings to the other two guys.
Irish Hobbies, the hobelar’s little horses, fare a bit better. Before going extinct, they gave their name to “hobbies,” activities done for pleasure, and we still use “my hobbyhorse” to describe our personal passions. @mylittlehony , a Horse Expert, produced an incredible list of mentions of hobbies in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, including in other languages, which is literally an advancement on the internet’s collective knowledge of hobbies. Any piece of work you’re doing here is a contribution.
Still, without any in-print documentation, or active scholars, or any interest in them at all, they’re a very niche hobby! As I said in the post you’re asking about, a well-placed EMP could destroy all of our knowledge of hobelars and prevent us from making connections to recover them. .
To answer your question? That’s what PhDs are for. That’s what they’re supposed to give to humanity. Spending three years of dedicated research time, learning and gathering all the sources available, and collecting every lost scrap of data about hobbies and hobelars that has been scattered and lost. We know they’re in the quartermasters’ receipts, where they were described as cheap units without special equipment; we know that an English king specifically prevented hobbies being exported to Scotland fight against him, because they would have granted the Scottish an advantage. There are documents that mention them sidelong and sideways and misspelled, and a PhD could delightfully be spent fossicking about in libraries and archives and museums, working out exactly what their “darts” were like, and whether hobbies ambled or paced, and what social class hobelars had been in Ireland, and how far they made it in Wales, and whether they WERE the missing piece of European horse archers, and whether hobbies DID come from Spain, and maybe even whether the Thoroughbred racehorse has any hobby in them at all. The person doing this PhD could probably recover the shape of the extinct horse, the fighting style of the rider, and so on.
And they’d publish their papers, and their thesis, and on the Internet and in the backups and in the journals and in the great library of their Alma Mater and in their own home, that knowledge would be stored and connected, networked and made accessible, known and signposted, forever. Resilient to loss, resistant to disruption, a piece of work to add to humanity’s grain store - designed and destined to outlive you.
That’s what a PhD is. That’s why they’re meant to be done.
Why haven’t they already? Obscurity, probably; and as I’ve written, medievalists tend to take the tone of English and French kings to dismiss Celtic influence as primitive and negligible. There have to be intersecting spheres of nerdery to make the person who will take this on. They will probably have to be a horsegirl first, a medievalist second, and probably from a Celtic culture themselves, to better pierce through the political layerings; they ought to be the kind of nerd who gladly takes on the case of the underdog; and, ideally, be someone with a lot of hobbies. Just as you can see the missing shape of the hobelar, you can see this person and know that someday they may answer the call.
(Possibly even because of these posts. That’s, secretly, part of why I write them like I do. They’re not ragebait or clickbait; they’re go-to-grad-school-about-it-bait. I hope to catch someone someday.)
But in the absence of some person taking on this PhD, here’s how I’m doing my part.
The reason I am tumblr’s biggest hobelar apologist is because I have a character in a larger writing project who is a time-ghost of a hobelar and his hobby. They appear in a pattern in the story, which is called Throw Your Heart Over, based on the saying for jumping: throw your heart over the hurdle and your horse will follow it.
I toy with the idea of The Hobelar being the originator of the saying, after jumping a notable hurdle on his hobby.
But it won’t be enough to just self-publish an ebook about it, especially since it won’t break containment. The best way to get a correct answer on the Internet is to post a slightly wrong answer, in a tone of authority, and have everyone pile in on you for the joy of being the one to correct you.
So I’m going to write something provocative and tantalisingly incorrect-sounding about hobelars, just to provoke and annoy. It will have to be ragebait of unparalleled mastery. I will have to construct a scene that is SO WRONG, and somehow get the story SO IMPOSSIBLY POPULAR, that hopefully someone will be forced to do, like, a YouTube essay to horsesplain my sins to me, and THEN they’ll discover that first they must do a PhD.
And when they call me out, after four years of study, and tell me I have no idea what I’m talking about, I will lower my eyelashes demurely 🫦 and say oh dear what a shame if people started acting like they’d always known about hobelars because of all this, and a breeding project started trying to recreate the extinct Irish Hobby, and a video game came out about them or something, or anything. if I fuck it up again will you do more? Do you prommy??
So I’ll say: once upon a time, Killie’s ancestor was a hobelar. And he fucked up - or something, I don’t know what yet - and he asked his hobby to jump a pike-wall -
And the people will be jumping up and down saying THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT- he wasn’t there, he wasn’t wearing that, he didn’t ride that way, he probably wasn’t barefoot, NOBODY CAN JUMP A PIKEWALL, that can’t be right!!
And i said: none of this was right-! It’s a story about generational trauma. Nobody should have been there. And he grabbed mane, and asked for the jump, and the horse didn’t want to, but she trusted him -
And it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen like that -
And it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen like that -
And people will say: it never could have happened, and CERTAINLY not like that -
And I’ll say - and everyone else should say this too - make an OC or tell a story or find some way to hang on: some of what our ancestors gave us was garbage!! Some is useful!! Some should be lost and some should be kept!! And if academia won’t keep it then we will! Until they come and do it better!
We’ll all say together: he threw his heart over and she follows it still; and they’ll never land! and they’ll never land!!!!
