Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Robert Vermaat]

Agreed, with both you and Vortigern Studies,
He could have used Alans, the perfect cavalry force.

Ah, hold your horses! We are purely hypothesizing here - all we HAVE is a description of one named nobleman (Ecdicius) with 18 other men. We could be talking about 19 guys on horseback armed with swords and pure gusto, keep that in mind!

We do not know what the emerging independent powers in Gaul looked like. from the later warfare between Merovingians and Burgundians I think we can extrapolate that later 5th c. warfare was all about the control of the towns (civitates). The continuous attempts of the Goths to take cities by siege is proof of that, as is the very action taken by Ecdicius. We’re therefore probably looking at landed gentry moving into cities and armed townsfolk. The Alans are pure guesswork.

These men, described by Sidonius, had all the good stuff, armor and helmets. He even mentions them sweating in the pommels of their saddles.

The Alans were employed by the Roman state from the start, so their equipment was provided by the fabricate and/or by subsidies.

I've always felt that the Britons had a similar situation, only with the Alans replaced by second-generation horsemen from the Equites Taifali. Strange that most things "legendary" in a Geoffrey-Layamon way, can be easier traced to the Alans and Taifali than to the Britons or New Britons. :?

Those Taifali are, compared to the evidence we get about Alans, only a very small group. After Sarmatians (the Lucius Artorius Castus craze) it’s now Taifali all the way, but we tend to forget that the Alans were settled and used almost throughout the Western Empire (they still exist - their descendants - in the Caucasus today), whereas we only hear a few times about Taifali. It’s always been my guess that the ‘Sarmatians’ in Britain and their supposed legacy as told by Layamon and others is really about Alans who entered Britain a century after the Sarmatians.