Furthermore he could ride Carman over country no matter how rough, and the horse would never slip or stumble. It may in addition have been a clever fencer, for we read that the knight “rode with reckless daring at many obstacles” when mounted on his favourite steed.
In at least one work of fiction the Chevalier Bayard has been rather amusingly confounded with the mythological steed of the four sons of Aymon that bore the name Bayard and that used so conveniently to grow larger when more than one of the four sons wanted to mount it at the same time. The name is said to signify the colour of bright bay, and the legend still obtains that a hoof mark of this mythical horse remains to this day in the forest of Soignes, while another of its hoof marks may be seen on a rock near Dinant. It was of this horse that Sir Walter Scott wrote in The Lady of the Lake the following lines:—
“Stand, Bayard, stand! The steed obeyed
With arching neck, and bended head,
And glaring eye and quivering ear,
As if he loved his lord to hear.”
The Earl of Warwick's coal-black charger, Black Saladin, is eulogised in almost every history of the Wars of the Roses; yet, when all is said, Black Saladin does not appear to have done anything sufficiently remarkable to have justified his earning the immortal reputation that he undoubtedly has obtained. A big, powerful animal, it must in justice be said of him that he carried his master creditably through several rather bloody encounters before man and horse were killed in the great conflict at Barnet.
According to Hume's “History of England”—and probably no history extant is more accurate in detail—Warwick, when he received the fatal thrust, was fighting on foot.
No trustworthy description is obtainable of the horse that Joan of Arc rode when she led the French army so successfully against the previously victorious troops of Henry VI. Only one indisputable statement relating to her leadership upon that famous occasion has been handed down to us, and that is that she rode astride.
Pictures innumerable have been painted that depict her as she is supposed to have appeared in the heat of the fray, and others that show her to us as she ought to have looked when the engagement was over. By basing our impressions solely upon such pictures we might well conclude that the Pucelle went into action riding a white horse; that in the thick of the fight she changed first on to a dun-coloured mare and then on to a bright bay mare; and that when the engagement was over she once more changed horses in order to ride back triumphant on a stallion as black as Black Saladin himself!