Gelding

♦ A castrated horse. So far as warhorses and good riding horses were concerned, it is broadly true to say that though geldings were used by the Arabs and Tukrs and in Eastern Europe generally, they were little used in the West until the sixteenth century. That is why the French call a gelding a "Hungarian" (hongre) horse, and the Germans call it a Wallachian (Wallach). Marx Fugger (Von der Gestiiterey, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1584, p. 37) quoted Albertus Magnus to the effect that castration made horses timid and therefore unsuited for war, but added that the Turks, Muscovites and Tartars did use geldings and continued to defeat the Christians. Jordanus Ruffus (c. 1256) knew about castration but recommended it only when medically necessary. In medieval England geldings seem to have been used in a lowly way. At the end of the fourteenth century Chaucer disdainfully likened the pardoner to a "geldyng or a mare". In the sixteenth century there was a change; Thomas Blundeville stated that in England light horsemen used geldings in the wars, but added that they were used "partly for their servants to ride on and to craie their male [i.e. trunk] and cloke bagges after them" (Blundeville (1580), bk i, f. 19).

(Davis, R.H.C. The Medieval Warhorse: Origin, Development and Redevelopment, 135)