Hi. I’ve mostly been on hiatus from this blog for mumble mumble reasons, but I did want to reply to this because it felt like an earnest attempt to fact check and it’s an excellent teaching opportunity for me to explain a little more about why Friesians are generally anachronistic in films that depict a medieval time period.
The thing about the modern Friesian is that it is, in fact, modern. The breed characteristics we associate with it: solid black, minimal white, upright carriage, long flowing locks, baroque appearance, etc – were by and large developed circa the late 1800s (1879, to be exact), and the type was really calcified circa 1906-1907. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Wikipedia as your primary research point, it does provide an indicator that should make anyone’s eyebrows raise: “By the early 20th century, the number of available breeding stallions was down to three.” If you look at the the Friesian Horse Association of North America Website, it’ll tell you the name of the three stallions: Prins 109, Alva 113 and Friso 117.
As a pedigree nerd, the thing I found myself look at immediately was the available pedigree data, because a problem that plagues virtually all Western breeds as an artifact of Victorian-era breed codification practices is a limited founder pool and a relatively high level of consanguinity, owing to the fact that many traits that are stamped are done so through an increasing level of homozygosity. Prins and Friso are both paternal grandsons of the founder stallion Nemo 51. So, functionally – 2 sirelines.
Above: De Regent 32, sire of Alva 113
Above: Graf Adolf 21, damsire of Alva 113.
And they all pretty much funnel in through the stallion Paulus 151, dropping it down to a single sireline, because for whatever reason, Alva 113 failed to perpetuate his sireline. Friso 117 was the sire of Paulus 151 and Prins 109 was the damsire of Paulus 151. Paulus 151’s 2nd dam, Daisy, was also closely related to Alva 113.
Above: the stallion Paulus.
So, a genetic bottleneck in the late 1880s-1990s.
Also from the FHANA website:
1889: Radboud 67 became the last of only 5 brown Friesian stallions approved for the registry. The other four were David 11, Keizer 18, Minister Thorbecke 34 [one source includes Membrino] and Bruno 38.
1918: The studbook ended registration of brown Friesian mares.
A fascinating choice for a breed with an already extremely constricted genepool of sirelines as, if we choose to Ignore the fact that different colors are a form of genetic diversity in and of itself where we no longer have variation on the Agouti factor, this removed a significant % of the population of mares from the genepool, as well. Anyone with an exposure to the Friesian breed will also know that Friesians are not allowed to be Chestnut, which is similarly a fascinating choice because the Extension factor for chestnut is a recessive allele that requires both parents pass it on.
Take this really simple Punnett Square for the Extension.
Anytime you breed a Friesian with a copy of the recessive Extension factor (Ee) to another Friesian with a copy of the recessive Extension factor (Ee), you run a 25% chance of producing chestnut Friesian every mating. The only way to get rid of that is to completely eliminate that from the gene pool.
That’s also how they eliminated bay horses from the gene pool – so now every Friesian has two copies of the recessive Agouti factor (aa) and not one horse carries a dominant Agouti factor (AA or Aa).
The FHANA timeline also tells us this: they kicked another stallion horse out in 1935, named Cremer, because he threw too much white markings. Never mind that white spotting mutations are yet another form of genetic variation, never mind that they often spontaneously mutate and you will never be able to completely eliminate them because they will always be able to potentially recur.
The Friesian breed experienced a second genetic bottleneck in recent history in the 1960s, according to a 2007 paper by Marike Boer, who wrote on the genetics (and specifically the relationship between inbreeding and fertility) of the Friesian for her thesis. She was herself citing a 2004 paper that was studying the effects of inbreeding on mares and retained placentas during parturition. There are… oodles and sqoodles of papers on the lack of genetic diversity of the modern Friesian, and if you want to read some of them you can follow these links:
Genetic diversity in the dutch friesian horse
The Friesian horse breed: A clinical challenge to the equine veterinarian?
Evaluation of breeding strategies to reduce the inbreeding rate in the Friesian horse population: Looking back and moving forward
The Genomic Makeup of Nine Horse Populations Sampled in the Netherlands
The fact remains, the modern Friesian is not actually the Friesian of the early 1800s, or really even the last 1870s when the studbook was formally codified.
Dutch Friesian,“ in: M Czapski,“Atlas to the universal history of the horse,” Poznań 1876. Creator: Czapski Hutten, Marian (1816-1875). Date: 1876. Artwork mediumpen lithography; paper. [x]
Look at that white blaze and three white legs, including the high white on the nearside hind.
It would likely shock anyone with a passing familiarity with the breed to discover that this horse, Tello, (below) was a Friesian horse – back when the stubook also included the Warmblood types.
Sporthorsedata link, where the photos is sourced from.
Allbreedpedigree link, which calls him an Oldenburg (his sire is also a Friesian).
Check out Tello’s sire, Thor, and look at the white markings:
Check out Tello’s 2nd sire, Martin, who was “brown” aka a bay horse:
Not one of these stallions would be allowed in the modern Friesian studbook, because: a/ Tello is grey and b/ Thor has too much white and c/ Martin is bay, not black.
Some more East Friesian horses:
We can see that the modern Friesian also pulled very heavily from draught type horses – horses that were designed not for the saddle as a riding mount, but for pulling a plow or pulling a carriage. In the 1700s and the 1800s, trotting harness racing became quite popular, and so in addition to being used for carriage work and plowing the fields, they were bred for trotting in a harness. I did read a paper that indicated that they were raced for shorter distances, for example, 325 meters, and that as of 1979, it was believed that between 1800 and 1850 over 2,800 newspaper advertisements were printed to promote races, but I don’t know how accurate that really is.
What I can say, is that there’s been something of a reinvention of the Friesian as a saddle breed. A lot of people credit the 1980s film LAKYHAWKE for popularizing the Friesian as a medieval horse type, and it certainly did generate a lot of interest in the breed that has propelled it to 2025. Some of this movement toward the breed as a saddle horse is selective breeding, and some of that is also that the Friesian does naturally lend itself well to modern dressage because of the history of dressage as a riding discipline and the way it has been codified specifically for the benefit of the taproot of modern Warmbloods, which stem from similar roots as the Friesian breed: heavy draught types with an emphasis on trot action.
That said, if we look at historical photos that the taproot studbook stock was pulled from:
^ Held 140, foaled in 1928. (He was, by the way, the product of a full-sibling mating.
Photo: Het Friese Paard It Fryske Hynder. M.J. Barones can Heemstra & F.C.D. Popken.
Here’s a gallery of approved stallions, including older historical stallions.
This is such a textbook example of the way the codification of breeds takes what was fundamentally a regional landrace type of horse – that is, a heavy cart horse type that used to pull carriages and the plow from the Friesland region of the Dutch Netherlands – and turned it into a pedigreed breed with a registry. Dog people in particular will understand what I am talking about here. Here’s an essay from 2015 discussing the historicity of the Friesian horse vs the Frisian horse, and the way that the Friesian as we know and understand it is a modern invention. Page 10 begins discussion on a breed vs a landrace type.
The author of the 2015 essay cites a lot of papers I’ve also read, but I’ll just throw some highlights up. Claims that the modern Friesian is effectively the same as the Frisian horse the Romans rode are at a genetic level patently false, but it goes even further – at the phenotypical level, there’s not even remotely comparable.
“It may be of note that a horse’s mature height is affected by genetics, selection and environment 29 A combination of selective breeding and rich fodder would have affected the size of horses 30 As a result, withers height in horses varied from one location to another Horses found in terp sites were small, but Roman finds in the Netherlands and Germany, particularly in romanised areas, often exceeded a withers height of 140 or even up to 150 cm in the Mid Roman Period 31 It would have been rare for a horse in Europe to have a height at the withers exceeding 150 cm during the Roman Period and Early Middle Ages.”
You can read the book author J Savelkouls is citing on Jstor, the book of which which at this time is open access – Animals in Ritual and Economy in a Roman Frontier Community: Excavations in Tiel-Passewaaij by Maaike Groot.
For a frame of reference: 140cm is roughly 13.3hh, and 150cm is roughly 14.3hh. Large pony size to very small horse size.
If we look at the FHANA website and their breed inspection requirements, we see the following: Stallions are required to be a minimum of 1.58m (15.2 1/4hh) as 3 year old and a minimum of 1.60m (15.3hh) as a 4 year old or older. Mares for all registration types are required to be taller than 1.54m (15hh). Geldings are required to be 1.56m (15hh) for the studbook and 1.58m (15.2 1/4hh) for the Ster (a registration predicate which is like… gold-star above average registration.)
The Friesian Horse Society registration criterion also offers these height requirements: Mares must be at least 1.54 meters (15.0 ¾ hands) at the withers; Geldings must be at least 1.56 meters (15.1½ hands); Stallions must be at least 1.58 meters (15.2¼ hands) at age 3 and at least 1.60 meters (15.3 hands) at age 4.
Behold, the Bayeux tapestry and William the Conqueror riding a Friesian. That’s definitely a Friesian. We know this for sure for real. Because the Friesian studbook, founded in 1879, certainly existed in circa the 1070s CE.
It just makes me laugh when people say, “oh, medieval knights rode Friesians” when no, we don’t actually know that, and no, they likely did not, because the Friesian as we know it literally did not exist. The evidence cited fundamentally boils down to “horses that look like Friesians” which is by definition a landrace type rather than a codified breed, and certainly wouldn’t have been the sole purview of the Friesland – after all, those genetics do come from somewhere.
This is the same level of evidence we see presented by proponents of the Straight Egyptian Arabian who look at horses from Ancient Egyptian artwork, see a landrace type with commonalities, and proclaim their horses an ancient breed, the daughters and sons of the pharaohs, which completely ignores the actual history of the breed as codified by Arabs and the specifically the Bedouins AND also ignores that the Straight Egyptian taproot genetics stem from Abbas Pasha’s collection, which he specifically pulled from the Bedouin tribes of the deserts.
But if that’s a comparison the Roman era, the medieval period, what if we go a little further ahead in time to the 1600s.
The Friesian horse. Origin: Netherlands. Date: 1652. Creator, Paulus Potter, mentioned on object, print maker, Noord-Nederlands (1625–1654). Artwork medium etching (paper). [x]
Ah, another heavy grey daught type, like Tello.
And what of John of Austria’s Frisian horse?
As a stallion, with a star? He wouldn’t even be allowed in the modern Friesian studbook.
I’ve actually run out of my limit for photos, so I am going to post this and then reblog with more historical photos and artwork of the Friesian horse.
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