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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

A horse cemetery in London reveals medieval mounts’ distant origins

Horses buried near the royal complex of Westminster in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been imported from as far away as Scandinavia.
A colour drawing from the 1860's depicting Richard III riding a white horse in the Battle of Bosworth Field

A white charger carries Richard III into battle in this illustration from the 1860s. A horse graveyard in London was active around the time of his reign, which began in 1483. Credit: Heritage Images/Getty

Horses were central to life in medieval England as farm labour, in battle and for transport, and also served as status symbols. Alexander Pryor at the University of Exeter, UK, and his colleagues were able to glean information about the international reach of medieval horse-trading networks from an unusual source: a horse cemetery near Westminster, in what is now central London, that was the final resting place of what were probably elite animals owned by elite households1.

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Nature 628, 11 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00861-8

References

  1. Pryor, A. J. E. et al. Sci. Adv. 10, eadj5782 (2024).

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