14 November: Rome reviews its horses, and two riders marry at Westminster

Overqualified Sweatshirt

On 14 November the Roman calendar was in the middle of a long holiday, and modern reconstructions of the festival put a parade of horses on this very day. On 14 November 1973 the horse world had its own day out, when two of Britain's leading event riders married at Westminster Abbey.

AD 354: A day of games, and a look at the horses

The Plebeian Games, the ludi Plebeii, were presented by the plebeian aediles and are known from 220 BC, though they may be older. They ran from 4 to 17 November: stage plays first, then the feast of Jupiter on the Ides, then racing in the circus. They were a theatre festival as much as a sporting one: Plautus' comedy Stichus was first staged at the Plebeian Games in 200 BC.

We can watch the festival survive into the Christian empire. The illuminated calendar made in Rome in AD 354, usually credited to the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus, marks 14 November simply LVDI, games. The date is in the Julian calendar, the one the Romans used.

For the Republic, modern scholars place the equorum probatio on this day: a review of the horses, with the knights riding past in procession. Rome's knights were, quite literally, horsemen: the Latin word for them, equites, comes from equus, horse. A festival that ended with chariot racing paused first to inspect the animals.

1973: Two eventers at the Abbey

Princess Anne was not a decorative rider. In 1971 she won the individual title at the European Eventing Championship at Burghley on her horse Doublet, and the BBC voted her its Sports Personality of the Year.

Her bridegroom, Captain Mark Phillips, had won team eventing gold for Great Britain at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and he won the Badminton Horse Trials four times between 1971 and 1981. They married at Westminster Abbey on 14 November 1973.

Three years later Anne rode Goodwill at the Montreal Olympics as part of the British three-day event team, the first member of the British royal family to compete in the Games. She later became President of the British Olympic Association. In 2012 her daughter Zara won an Olympic silver medal in eventing in London, and it was her mother who presented it.

The thread

Nothing connects the two events but the animal, and the animal is enough. Rome set aside part of a November festival to look at its cavalry horses and the men who rode them; the knights' very name said what they were. Many centuries later, on the same date, a wedding put two equestrians in the modern sense at the centre of a national occasion.

It is an echo, not a descent. But it is a reminder that for most of European history the horse was the measure of rank, and that the people who are good with horses tend to attract a crowd.

Wear the story

  • Overqualified Sweatshirt: a tribute to Incitatus, the horse Suetonius says Caligula planned to make consul, and proof that Rome's horses were always being reviewed for higher office.

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