Why didn't 18th- and 19th-century cavalry use shields?

The insidious thing about assumptions is precisely that you don't see that there's any opportunity for confusion.

In any case, it's extremely understandable that @Fabius Maximus thought you were talking about the lance, because you were responding to a post specifically about how the lance was reintroduced and specifically linked the uhlan and lance in the following statement,
In light of this, it would be completely reasonable to read the subsequent summary of the spread of the uhlans as intended to discuss the spread of the lance, either specifically or because there were parallels (i.e., because the lance was adopted as a matter of fashion). You specifically introduce this summary as having something to do with the "mass adoption of the lance as a shock weapon"; so does it or doesn't it? And if it does, what are we supposed to take away from it, in one sentence?

Thank you, that's a better summary than I could have managed myself.

There are plenty of examples where even non-experts, with the benefit of hindsight, can identify things that "experts" thought was a good idea or a bad idea which turned out to be a bad idea or a good idea; the Space Shuttle, for example, or the RBMK reactor.

Or indeed the use of the lance itself -- lancers didn't become common in Western European armies till the Napoleonic period, but there's no obvious technological or tactical reason why they'd have been ineffective before then. It just seems that generals didn't really think of the idea, or if they did, they didn't push for it.
 
Napoleon said that you need 2 years to train a good infantryman and 3 years to train a good cavalryman.

Your vision of cavalry in the Napoleonic era is rather "special".

You should read about the effect of poor cavalry training during the 1813 Campaign for the French while Napoléon won severals battles but couldn't exploit the victory by lack of good cavalry.

Napoleonic era is perhaps the time when cavalry recovered its "lettre de noblesse", and the heavy specialisation of each kind of units, heavy, line, light, dragoons was very important.

You should also look at the role of prussian cavalry during Frederick II time. He basically reorganised the entire prussian cavalry because he was dissapointed by what he inherited from his father.

Sure it would take years for anyone to be good at their job, but how much time did the typical cavalryman train before they were qualified for action? I doubt more than a few months. It would certainly take a lot longer than 3 years to train a good knight or horse archer. It’s unlikely the average non-guard infantryman had 2 years either.

The fact that cavalry was divided into specialist units implies they were trained for niche roles unlike earlier centuries when the mounted elites were universal warriors. The dragoons were originally only meant to fight on foot and rode to battle on cheap farm horses. In the Napoleonic era they took on traditional light cavalry roles probably because of long years of fighting giving plenty of opportunity for practice. Napoleonic cavalry undoubtedly had no shortage of experience compared to peacetime armies. Just as at the end of the America Civil War there were many skilled riflemen. But that does not change the fact that they were mostly used as cannon-fodder because they weren’t that hard to replace.
 
This is something I've been wondering about. Obviously a shield wouldn't be much good against a musket ball, but in hand-to-hand combat it would surely give you a decided advantage, especially since most soldiers during the period wore basically no armour. So why weren't shields a standard-issue piece of kit for 18th- and 19th-century European cavalry soldiers?

The thing that made the shield so usefull was that it could relialiby block misslefire, this is also the reason why it started to disappeared after the armor of knights became capable of doing the same.

In melee fighting the shield is not such a gamechanger and its mainbenefits are its defence against pikes and sperrs as well as allowing the shield-user to be agressive by giving him a easy defence and retreat option*.

Now in the 18th century and onwords cavalry dident face pikes anymore but muskets with bayonets, in a melee matchup the saber is already a better weapon than a musket and using the shield for deffence is liable to get you shot.
Because of this the shield, just like armor, disappered simple because in face of its weigh and mass its benefits are not worth it.

*I dont know how to properly explain it in english. People dont like putting their important bodyparts in dangerspots, but then you commit to a stab or a strike with a speer or sword you move forward placing your head and uperbody in range of a counterattack should you attack fail to incapacited your enemy. Because of this every attack has to be set up in such a way that you can retreat from or block said counterattack, while with a shield you have always something what you can put betwen you and your enemy.
But armor is in such a role much better because having a helmet and a curras also deffends your body while ceaping your second hand free giving you more avenues of attack.
But people dont ask why armor moved out of style after guns became a big thing.
 
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I wonder whether simple tradition might have had something to do with it. Western European cavalry had largely abandoned the shield by the late 15th century, so by the time armour fell out of use you'd have had to go back nearly two centuries to find cavalry with shields. I'm not sure how much difference having or not having a shield would make to a cavalryman's combat techniques, but if it's a significant one, then it might be that European combat techniques were optimised for not having a shield and that people would struggle to fight properly with a shield as well.

Alternatively, it might depend on what the shield was mostly used for. Lots of medieval manuscripts seem to show knights charging at each other holding their shields before their bodies to catch their enemy's lance (like in the second picture here); if this was the main use of (cavalry) shields, rather than for defending yourself in melee combat, it could well be that a shield wouldn't give you much of an advantage unless you were fighting enemy lancers, and that cavalry-on-lancer action was never common enough to justify making shields a piece of standard equipment.
 
Sure it would take years for anyone to be good at their job, but how much time did the typical cavalryman train before they were qualified for action? I doubt more than a few months. It would certainly take a lot longer than 3 years to train a good knight or horse archer. It’s unlikely the average non-guard infantryman had 2 years either.

The fact that cavalry was divided into specialist units implies they were trained for niche roles unlike earlier centuries when the mounted elites were universal warriors. The dragoons were originally only meant to fight on foot and rode to battle on cheap farm horses. In the Napoleonic era they took on traditional light cavalry roles probably because of long years of fighting giving plenty of opportunity for practice. Napoleonic cavalry undoubtedly had no shortage of experience compared to peacetime armies. Just as at the end of the America Civil War there were many skilled riflemen. But that does not change the fact that they were mostly used as cannon-fodder because they weren’t that hard to replace.

Well Napoleon seems to disagree with you, he doesn't used cavalry as cannon fodder but in a variety of different roles on the battlefield. Each type of cavalry had a specific range of missions, and each unit was heavily specialised.

He just doesn't sent his cavalry directly on the artillery of his ennemy.

When I wrote you that a cavalryman need an additionnal year to be trained than an infantryman, it show you that cavalry training was more complicate. You can quickly trained a guy to simply shoot and stay in line or others compact formation. It was far more easier for Napoleon to sent young recruits in infantry units, the famous Marie Louise, with some veterans NCO and officers. It was difficult for him to rebuild an efficient cavalry after the disaster of 1812.

I gave you historical exemples where lack of trained cavalry was decisive for the win or the lost of the entire campaign. And Napoleon Campaign of 1813 could be successful if he was able to use a trained cavalry during the decisive first battles of the Campaign.

Frederick II also seems to think that a good cavalry was important for his campaigns, and he built this cavalry, which had a high reputation. The prussian Cavalry was the elite arms of this army until its destruction on the battlefields of Auerstadt and Iena.

They don't use quickly trained cavalryman as simply cannon fodder as you supposed it.

And Dragoons in Napoleon Army were the Line Cavalry, and not used as light cavalry, which was the mission of the Hussards and the Chasseurs à Cheval...

When the heavy cavalry were used for rupture charge in the specific moment on the battlefield as a kind of armored punch, french Dragons charged in the second line to support the Elite Regiment of the Cuirassiers and Carabiniers.
 
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The Spanish mission soldiers in California, soldados de cuera, had a lance as one of their weapons (very convenient when you are chasing the fleeing "natives") and it seems that during the independence wars of the Latin America the lance was a relatively popular cavalry weapon.
And cavalry charges turned out critical at least in the battles of Riobamba, Ituzaingo and San Lorenzo (the latter more of a skirmish than an actual battle). But the armies involved weren't as well trained, led and equipped as the European armies, so maybe well trained and motivated cavalry could make a difference in South America which may have been harder to make against European armies?
 
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A shield would be excess weight, bogging you down.

Even an all-steel shield isn't terribly heavy. And you could make it pistol-proof quite easily without making it weigh more than 3 lbs, depending on diameter.

Plus, soldiers like to fob off pieces of equipment they view as excess.

True! Soldiers ditched gas masks, bulletproof breastplates, and even swords, all the time. They are all decidedly useful items that can save a life and not even overly situational by any means, but lots of people didn't like carrying them all day.

A shield, useless against musketry, would be the first piece of equipment ditched by a cavalryman on the march, unless it could be used as a cooking pot.

In fact that's probably completely the reverse for all cultures that happened to retain the shield through the 17th c. which I regard as a pivotal period. The steel shield was literally the last piece of personal defensive equipment retained in India, Persia and the Caucasus, outliving the mail and mirror armours. Possibly China and Africa too. Indian officers in British service often kept the shield, in fact, until the skills required to use it were no longer widespread.

The first thing everyone definitely ditches is leg and arm protection. And closed helms. Once again, those are very useful, a huge % of people die to leg and arm wounds, judging by surgeons' records, and getting hit in the face by pretty much anything probably means you're dead, something a visor could have prevented...and yet all those things make you tired and feel uncomfortable and what's the risk of bleeding out through the ulnar artery on the off-chance you get into combat, compared to everyday habitual discomfort?

Aaaand they also needed the entire social & economic system to be structured around funding them, while again making horseback training an integral part of their existence from childhood.

Just as a really minor point: horseback training, yes. Arms training? Not really. We do have some evidence of when young gentlemen of the late medieval/early modern era began training with arms, and it's surprisingly late in life, around 12-13 years old or even later. So they were trained to be riders since childhood, but not necessarily knights.

When I wrote you that a cavalryman need an additionnal year to be trained than an infantryman, it show you that cavalry training was more complicate. You can quickly trained a guy to simply shoot and stay in line or others compact formation. It was far more easier for Napoleon to sent young recruits in infantry units, the famous Marie Louise, with some veterans NCO and officers. It was difficult for him to rebuild an efficient cavalry after the disaster of 1812.

Right. All line and heavy cavalry, and in fact regular light cavalry sometimes, were at first trained as infantrymen first, to make (universal) soldiers out of them. Parade grounds, marching, bayonets, entrenching, the whole works, basically. And THEN they were trained to be useful on horseback.

A lot of them couldn't ride at all, actually, when the training began.
 
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And cavalry charges turned out critical at least in the battles of Riobamba, Ituzaingo and San Lorenzo (the latter most of a skirmish than an actual battle). But the armies involved weren't as well trained, led and equipped as the European army, so maybe well trained and motivated cavalry could make a difference in South America which may have been harder to make against European armies?

My point was simple: the lance never had been truly abandoned by a cavalry prior to the time frame defined in OP so some kind of tradition always was there and it was just an issue of “how many” rather then starting something from the scratch. As far as the continental Europe was concerned the “source” of the post-medieval tradition was rather localized, the PLC (Cossacks also had it but did not have too much impact outside the Russian borders), with most of the lancers in France, Saxony and Austria being, initially, Polish. The Polish uhkans, when created, did not have shields and none of the countries adopting that type of a cavalry considered them necessary, which leaves one of two main options: (a) all these military in Europe and Latin America were idiots who could not see the obvious for a couple centuries or (b) the idea was not considered practical.

To address your point, I’d expect (not being a specialist I can hardly say something definite) that a lower level of discipline and training would result in more of melee-style situations than in the case of the European armies where the regular cavalry was trained (with a various degree of success) to act in the dense formations rather then as the individual riders. The same goes for a lesser trained infantry: there would a greater chance of it breaking the formation, thus making situation better for an attacking cavalry.
 
To address your point, I’d expect (not being a specialist I can hardly say something definite) that a lower level of discipline and training would result in more of melee-style situations than in the case of the European armies where the regular cavalry was trained (with a various degree of success) to act in the dense formations rather then as the individual riders. The same goes for a lesser trained infantry: there would a greater chance of it breaking the formation, thus making situation better for an attacking cavalry.

To restate the point; the more likely you as an individual soldier are to end up fighting alone instead of shoulder to shoulder or knee to knee with someone, the more versatility, variety of weapons, and individual skill you need. Which to me could maybe explain why some cultures kept the shield and other personalized weapons very late, and why some cultures didn't.

The only difficulty with this explanation is light cavalry who were never meant to be brigaded with the line cavalry, i.e. hussars (or cossacks, potentially, though cossacks basically didn't fight very differently from other cavalry by the 1800s). You'd think, being that they could end up alone, they'd actually like a shield to go with the pistols and sabre, but European ones in the 18th c. didn't opt to use one.
 
In fact that's probably completely the reverse for all cultures that happened to retain the shield through the 17th c. which I regard as a pivotal period. The steel shield was literally the last piece of personal defensive equipment retained in India, Persia and the Caucasus, outliving the mail and mirror armours. Possibly China and Africa too. Indian officers in British service often kept the shield, in fact, until the skills required to use it were no longer widespread.

Right. All line and heavy cavalry, and in fact regular light cavalry sometimes, were at first trained as infantrymen first, to make (universal) soldiers out of them. Parade grounds, marching, bayonets, entrenching, the whole works, basically. And THEN they were trained to be useful on horseback.

A lot of them couldn't ride at all, actually, when the training began.

Probably it is relevant to notice that by the time of their contact with the Cossacks (mid-/late-XVIII) the tribes of the Caucasus mostly abandoned the shields and it looks like they were completely out of usage by the early XIX. The Cossacks of Kuban adopted Circassian national dress and weaponry (with the exception of the firearms) and even discarded their traditional lances but there is no traces of the shield (seemingly on both sides) even if the border warfare was heavily relying upon the individual fighting skills.

AFAIK, the Ukrainian Cossacks already were not using shields during the ToT and probably even earlier and the same goes for their Polish counterparts (most of whom were not the armored hussars but many of whom had been using some kind of a protective armor :) ).

But you got me curious about the training routines: never heard about cavalry being trained in the fortification or bayonet charges (unless for the dragoons and even then depending upon the period; Jomini was quite skeptical about attempt of NI restore dragoons in their initial form): at least neither Marbot nor “dragoon Sans-Jene” (Maria-Therese Figueur) mention that type of an education (and if the famous dragoon could boast some artillery experience, it was a single lucky shot on an early stage of her military career; well, it was enough to rub a nose of Major Bonaparte into it :) ). Some parade ground training on foot, most probably, especially in the elite units like Russian cavalerguards with part of the duties being guarding the royal/imperial palaces. Russian “equivalent” to M-T Figueur also did not leave anything (IIRC) about the extensive infantry training: she just came into an army as a volunteer who knew how to ride a horse and to fence and was accepted into the upland regiment. Taking into an account that she joined an army in 1806 and participated in campaign of 1807, quite definitely 3 years (or any considerable time) were not available for her training.
And if we can rely upon the literature, none of the Rostov brothers passed through any noticeable non-cavalry training and neither did Rafal Olbromski from Zeromski’s “Popioly”. :)

Anyway, if the curriculum you described was really used on a broad scale, those responsible would spend the recruits time much better teaching them how to take care of their horses: in 1812 the French cavalry lost up to 20% of the horses before the 1st serious encounter and both Caulaincourt and Zamoiski provide rather scary description of the horses’ condition well before the French retreat (and it looks like not just the French but the Germans and even Poles were quite bad in that regard).
 
To restate the point; the more likely you as an individual soldier are to end up fighting alone instead of shoulder to shoulder or knee to knee with someone, the more versatility, variety of weapons, and individual skill you need. Which to me could maybe explain why some cultures kept the shield and other personalized weapons very late, and why some cultures didn't.

The only difficulty with this explanation is light cavalry who were never meant to be brigaded with the line cavalry, i.e. hussars (or cossacks, potentially, though cossacks basically didn't fight very differently from other cavalry by the 1800s). You'd think, being that they could end up alone, they'd actually like a shield to go with the pistols and sabre, but European ones in the 18th c. didn't opt to use one.

That’s exactly the point I was trying to make: in these cases the choice of the most suitable weaponry was pretty much up to the individual but the Cossacks of Kuban adopted shahka, dagger and even a dress of their opponents but not a shield. And I don’t remember any mention of the Circassians, who were not bound by any governmental regulations, using the shields themselves by the early XIX. Neither was shield common among the Ukrainian Cossacks of the XVII or, as far as I can tell, Polish shliahta of that period.
 
The Polish uhkans, when created, did not have shields and none of the countries adopting that type of a cavalry considered them necessary, which leaves one of two main options: (a) all these military in Europe and Latin America were idiots who could not see the obvious for a couple centuries or (b) the idea was not considered practical.

That's not really an explanation, though, because it still gives us no indication as to why the shield wasn't considered practical. (Or why the soldiers were all idiots, I suppose, but that's probably the less likely of the two options.)
 
That's not really an explanation, though, because it still gives us no indication as to why the shield wasn't considered practical. (Or why the soldiers were all idiots, I suppose, but that's probably the less likely of the two options.)

Practicality as I think some posters above have made clear is only one possible explanation. It is worth noting that the Companion cavalry of Alexander do not appear from the records to have used shields though later companion cavalries in the service of the descendants of the Diadochi do seem to have readopted the shield. Later still we see cavalry employing the konto which being two handed precluded shields and so on.

It may simply have been the case the that the style favoured by Western European trained cavalries was a shieldless one and being adequate to the task at hand the need for a shield was simply not there, rather than shields and shield using styles being somehow inferior. Of course if you can save on a piece of kit and stay effective and ideally alive then there is a lot of pressure both from soldiers and depending on who pays, exchequers to do without it.
 
That's not really an explanation, though, because it still gives us no indication as to why the shield wasn't considered practical. (Or why the soldiers were all idiots, I suppose, but that's probably the less likely of the two options.)

I listed the options without pretending to know an answer to the question which the contemporaries seemingly not even considered seriously. To say why exactly they did not, you need to be an expert in a cavalry warfare. And not only a general area but specifically in using the uhlan/Cossack style lances, which was an area with its own specifics (reading list of the methods in “The Ashes” just gives an idea that the issue was quite complicated ). I doubt that there are too many of such specialists in the group so how are you go to distinguish the correct answer from a wrong one? How about, just off the top of my head, because shields were not considered useful for attacks in the dense formations? Or because the available experience of dealing with the Cossacks taught the Poles (or Lithuanian Tatars) that a shield is not very useful in the lancer to lancer confrontation? Or perhaps shield would make it more difficult to switch from lance to a sword?

Or, question to your question, why the Poles abandoned shields even before the Cossack wars? Wouldn’t they be useful in a sword fight?

These troops were not created for attacking the infantry formations so the shields as protection against the musket fire probably can be discounted as a significant factor and, anyway, the European cavalry shields of the last period of their usage had been too small for an adequate protection.
 
I listed the options without pretending to know an answer to the question which the contemporaries seemingly not even considered seriously. To say why exactly they did not, you need to be an expert in a cavalry warfare.

I must confess that I'm a bit baffled as to why you keep implying that there's something unreasonable about wondering why contemporaries didn't consider the question. "Why is this the case?" is a perfectly legitimate question, and one that's very useful to ask if you're trying to understand something.

I doubt that there are too many of such specialists in the group so how are you go to distinguish the correct answer from a wrong one?

By looking at the cogency of the reasons given, and also for whether they prove too much. For example--

How about, just off the top of my head, because shields were not considered useful for attacks in the dense formations? Or because the available experience of dealing with the Cossacks taught the Poles (or Lithuanian Tatars) that a shield is not very useful in the lancer to lancer confrontation? Or perhaps shield would make it more difficult to switch from lance to a sword?

Medieval knights generally fought in dense formations, against other knights equipped with lances, and made use of both lance and sword in combat, so it seems that your reasons would lead us to expect that medieval knights would also go without shields. And yet this clearly wasn't the case, so it's likely that the correct answer is something different.
 
I must confess that I'm a bit baffled as to why you keep implying that there's something unreasonable about wondering why contemporaries didn't consider the question. "Why is this the case?" is a perfectly legitimate question, and one that's very useful to ask if you're trying to understand something.



By looking at the cogency of the reasons given, and also for whether they prove too much. For example--

Medieval knights generally fought in dense formations, against other knights equipped with lances, and made use of both lance and sword in combat, so it seems that your reasons would lead us to expect that medieval knights would also go without shields. And yet this clearly wasn't the case, so it's likely that the correct answer is something different.

There is nothing unreasonable in wondering why the contemporaries did not think about something. I just keep trying to explain that I have no idea how any of us can give a correct answer (except by chance) and how the rest of us can figure out that this specific answer is correct.

Now, the medieval knights, as much as analogy is tempting, have little to do with the modern cavalry and this specific subject had been discussed by Delbruck at some length. The part of them fighting in the dense formations is highly questionable and opinions are varying. Verbruggen gave a number of examples in favor of the dense formations but many of them, IIRC, are describing parading in front of a king or emperor and the rest is highly questionable if one takes into an account that, as often as not the Knight was actually a “lance” and that knee to knee formation of the knights would not leave space for knight’s followers (there were no administrative/tactical arrangements for these followers fighting separately and most of a reason for having them would be lost).

The same goes for the training in the close formations: feudal militia was not a regular army so who, how and when would be doing that training? Situation became somewhat different after the 100YW with introduction of the ordonance companies but it seems that by this time the shields were pretty much abandoned on the battlefields or became very small and mostly useful as a support for a lance. Even then it seems that well into the Italian wars the French gendarmes too often had trouble with executing the elementary maneuvers in formation. So the picture is varying between knight (as a “lance”) being almost independent tactical unit (Delbruck) or knight (as an individual with his band being lost in space) being a tightly controlled part of a military system which looks quite modern in the terms of general organization and tactical control (Verbruggen). Taking into an account that both were highly reputable military historians you can pick whatever option you prefer and anything in between without a risk of looking foolish. :)

Contemporary paintings and descriptions are often more confusing then helpful. The medieval pictures always showing a dense mass just because this was a contemporary way of showing the things (just as on the XVIII paintings you often see the ideally straight formations in the midst of a battle). Medieval chronicles mostly had been written by the people who were not there and it is not obvious if in each specific case we have to take them literally (Keagan in his description of Agincourt went to some length to squeeze the alleged numbers into the limited space but some authors are questioning these numbers so who is correct?). The obvious (to me) question is how the knight fighting in the knee to knee formations would be able to pick up a worthy opponent and engage him? You are charging with a lance and then, unlike a tournament, you are hitting an opposing wall of the enemies who are also fighting side by side. How can you move forward? How are you taking a prisoner (which was pretty much a point of the whole exercise) and transporting him to a rear? How are you turning back if the things went the wrong way? You simply don’t have space.

Not sure how exactly did you came to a conclusion about my logic denying shields for the knights. As I clearly said, the “reasons” I gave where just some arbitrary possibilities (off the top of my head) to indicate difficulty of finding the right one. My main point is that people were selecting whatever they considered the most reasonable but we can’t necessary be sure why.

Then, of course, knight’s lance was not exactly the same thing as uhlan’s lance. Lance of the Polish hussar was 4.5 - 5.5 meters long, knightly lances of the late MA were 3 - 5 meters. Uhlan lance of the XIX century was typically under 3 meters (in 1914 German cavalry lance was a hollow steel tube 3.18 m long) and while the knights had been a heavy cavalry, the uhlans were light, which implies seriously different tactics and place in a military system. And, of course, the uhlans also had the sabers so should we get back to the option of considering them fools just based on the fact that the knights had swords ? :)
 
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