We're lucky in the UK. There is a yard run by a woman called Janet Rogers which specialises in providing horses for film & TV work and to re-enactors.

She has approx 20 horses, some with specialist skills eg jousting or being part of a gun-team. Most UK equestrian re-enactors use her horses.

Her yard has a small ash school, a tiltyard with quintain and tilt rail, and a big feild that can be used for drill when it isn't waterlogged to hell.

Hiring horses for training at her yard costs about £25/day, and units organise their own instructors, training programmes etc. This is a ridiculously cheap price - less than you'd pay for hacking out in that area of the UK - since Janet is effectively selling at cost to pay the bills and ensure there are people who are used to riding her horses at shows.

Hire for shows costs approx double that, plus transport and Janet requires you to take and pay for one of her grooms per 4 horses.

I don't know of anyone else in the UK running a comparable operation - I know there are a couple of people doing the same sort of thing, and I'm actively tracking them down, but not much joy to date, and nothing on the same scale.

One of my big concerns is that Janet is getting on, and when she eventually decides to retire, most cavalry units in the UK are going to be in a world of hurt when it comes to getting horses.

My suggestion is that you search out rental stables near to areas where you frequently particpate in LH events. Be prepared to show the horse owners what you would like to do with their horses, not just talk about it because many rental wrangler types are going to think you are a little bit strange. If they accept or agree to what you would like to try, be prepared to spend some time desensitizing the horses as well.

In the US, be prepred to ofen "pay through the nose" for a rental. Even bad hack lines with poorly taken care of horses charge $20.00 plus an hour for trail rides and if you want a horse for a day or weekend you might be looking at over a $100 to $150 for the use use of a horse.

A viable option might also be to hunt up a barn where you can take a few riding lessons, get to know the school horses and then talk to the owner about "using/renting" one for an LH event. You might even find a suitable horse for a partial or full lease that would allow you to brush up on your riding skills at times other than an LH event.

its taken a couple years of gentle introduction to get the folks at Langs Pony Ranch to trust us.

rates are about $50 a day (which is dirt cheap....stables closer in can run $50 an hour...). We arent to the point yet where we can ask about transportation, but we know they do "pony rides" for birthday parties, etc, so the concept wouldnt be totally foreign.

They also do winter feed leases, etc.

Come out for a visit and we can go riding .

--AM

--------------------

When you get to the point of asking about transportation, a note of "caution" , just because they rent the horse/pony, doesn't mean that they will give you horse transport "gratis" to your destination, it can get up there in $$ value depending on how far it is to get there and back. Follows is a small bit of info for the uninitiated.

Trucks consume gas and lots of it, especially when hauling a trailer with 900-1600lb critters in them. Then there's the per/mile fee. When we transported Phantom and Normandie down to PA last November for horsie boot camp, we got an acceptable deal. It cost us about $350 for the pair (1 way), but only because the horse transport service had other pickups and deliveries in the same area. It is usually less expensive if you go in on a transport with 2 or more people.

If you have equestrian oriented friends with trailers...all the better. If they aren't using it for the weekend, ask if you can borrow it, though you will need a vehicle capable of pulling it, or if you don't ask if they would be willing to give you and your equine buddy a lift to and from the site and offer to pay for gas.

If they let you utilize the trailer, someone in the group should know about safety and loading procedures for horses and what papers would be necessary and how often various tests, like coggins and such would be for transport across state lines (if you are going across state lines).

Various states have different laws. In MA the coggins test is good for a year. However, we had to have one that was less than 30 days old in order to cross into PA. Last minute scramble, last minute expense. We have very cool vets!

Just some thoughts...

Jenn

--------------------

You're luckier than most. You don't find many lease deals like that. Next it's location and who you know. Where we live in NH isn't exactly known as horse country. So getting to know people who have horses and allow you to take care of them are few and far between. Now if I still lived in NJ, it would be a different story.

We chose to get youngsters, so where you didn't have to have Merlin schooled, we did. We could only take their training so far on our own, when we needed to hire a professional for the more advanced work. As Dirty Harry says, "a man's got to know his limitations" and we knew where the line was. We had no desire to "ruin" our horses and as a result, we think they are coming along well.

Most of the horse folk we know don't own trailers. The one person we know, it would have ended up costing us as much after the vehicle tuneup and the gas. I would much rather hand it off to a professional trailering company with a reference list a mile long (and horse owners to boot) for long trips. Hopefully by next spring we will have our own trailer and the vehicle to pull it.

I can't imagine taking care of and working with a horse for 2-3-4-5 however many years and then having to give it back. If the owner hadn't been around in forever and then suddenly reappeared and reclaimed the horse it would be worse.

If finances turned bad I would sell my house and live in my car before I got rid of Bella. Jeff and I have talked about it, and we'll own her until the day she dies, no matter what. We may be part of her herd, but more importantly she's part of ours, and I can't imagine her not being there.

As for a trailer, when your beloved horse colics at 9PM and you have to get her to the vet 2 hours ago, you learn how vital it is to have a trailer and a way to pull it. That happened with us and thank God we have wonderful neighbors who dropped everything and came to her rescue.

She came home in someone else's trailer, but we had our own shortly thereafter.

--------------------

up here it breaks into several possibilities:

1. buy a horse and keep it on your own property. I know of only a couple people who have the land to do that, and none of them live or work within an hour or two of Seattle.
2. buy a horse and board it. Cheapest around is about $350 a month (that's a stall and pasture), which is half of what most places charge. The stable is about an hour from my house in Seattle proper.
3. Feed Lease. This is where you "borrow" a horse from the rental ranch for the winter. You are responsible for upkeep over the winter and get sole use of said horse. You need to return the horse in time for the summer rental season. There are probably rules about transportation, etc.
4. Rent a horse. A setup like Langs Pony Ranch has enough horses that if I request ahead of time I can usually get the same horse each time. $50 gets you the horse for the day.

there's probably other clever ways to work this, but with my time schedule and budget it makes the most sense to just rent each time. I wish I could figure out how to borrow my favorite horses Annabelle or Tristan and take them places, but that might be asking a lot for $50 .

--AM

--------------------

And yeah, the house goes before the horses do, we can always "downsize". Life just got more complicated when my wife just bought a dark dapple grey Highland at the w/e. (Rising 4, 14h2, short coupled, brick out-house (V sturdy cannon bones).

Do you have a contact number for Janet?

The only tjhing that struck me about (I believe) her horses was that were not particularly of period type ... size etc.

Also, and sorry to go off topic and into period stuff ... but renting a horse was a far more common practice in the C15th than you'd believe if you read most books. I've never seen it discussed in academia but just reading accounts you see day rentals all the time ... the efficiency still amazes me ... Hertz/Avis etc. are nothing new it would seem!

Janet's number is 07831 629 662.

Regarding period size, breed etc - well, we can go all round on this, since we'd need to establish what we thought the medieval norm was etc. However, it's really rather a case of those are the horses available, take 'em or leave 'em - neither of the other two UK horse supplies (Sue Clarke or Joan Bomford) offer anything significantly different in that respect - it's worth remembering that Janet covers a lot of periods other than medieval, eg Napoleonic, ECW and even WW1.

There's actually a reasonable amount information about horse rentals in the literature, down to costs and the individuals who provide such services - cart hire seems to be routine, and there are regular carrier services running between the main towns, while rates for riding horse hire between london and dover are actually set by law, for example.

I admit it's less visible than purchase - largely because it's often happening lower down the social scale, but I'd agree it is ubiquitous.

I also think that we'd be seeing a lot more "part exchange" in horse purchase if we had more data from lower social strata - it is extremely common once we start getting that data from Elizabethan toll books, and we occasionally see it earlier, but we hust don't have the data prior to about 1500.

--------------------