Ros Beiaard

Every ten years the city of Dendermonde lifts a horse the size of a house onto the shoulders of twelve men and walks it through its own streets. The thing weighs close to a thousand kilos. Three teams of twelve take it in turns, and they train for months beforehand in a gym with a coach, because each man takes more than eighty kilos on his neck and there is no setting it down halfway along the route. Four brothers ride on its back in armour. On the Grote Markt the horse rears and stamps to a brass tune while a line of powder men fire volley after volley to drive it back, and it keeps coming, and at last it wins and goes, and the square smells of gunpowder long after.

The Dendermonde city accounts first mention this horse in 1460. It had a much older life before that, and a stranger one.

He begins as Bayart, in an Old French poem written toward the end of the twelfth century. Duke Aymon offers his four sons to Charlemagne, the young men are knighted, and the eldest, Renaut, is handed a wonder horse on the day of his knighting: so fast that nothing catches him, so strong that he can carry all four brothers at once. Within a few hundred lines the gift has curdled. Renaut quarrels over a chessboard with the king’s kinsman, kills him with the board, and rides out of Paris with his brothers and their cousin the enchanter Maugis. What follows is years of siege, ambush, hunger and broken truces, and through all of it the horse is the one thing Charlemagne cannot beat.

There is a moment in the middle of the poem that tells you exactly what the animal meant. The king, wanting a good mount for his nephew Roland, announces a race with a heap of treasure at the finish and his own gold crown on top of it. Renaut hears about it. Maugis works a spell so that neither man nor horse can be recognised, and the two of them go and win, and Renaut takes the crown, laughs off the king’s offer to buy it back, and disappears south with it. Charlemagne loses a crown to a horse he had given away.

The end of the rebellion is a negotiation, and the terms are ugly. Renaut is to make a penitential journey to the Holy Sepulchre. His brothers are folded back into the king’s household and his sons will serve at court. And Bayart is to be handed over and killed. The horse is taken to the water with a millstone hung round his neck and thrown in. In the French telling he breaks the stone, comes up on the far bank and goes into the forest, where he finds Maugis living as a hermit. Peace was bought with the horse.

The Flemish version, written in verse in the first quarter of the thirteenth century and known as the Renout van Montalbaen, does not let him off. In that poem Charlemagne succeeds. Only about a seventh of its fifteen thousand lines survives, in fragments from four manuscripts, and one of the things those fragments preserve is a drowning that works. The story went into print in Dutch as Dit is de historie vanden Vier Heemskinderen, published at Leiden in 1508, and stayed in print for four centuries through at least twenty-five editions, the cheap blue-covered chapbooks that Hendrik Conscience remembered spending every coin he had on as a boy in an Antwerp print shop. William Caxton put an English version on his press around 1489. During the Counter-Reformation the southern Netherlands took a knife to the text, cutting the episodes judged indecent or heretical, mostly the funny ones involving Maugis, and an approved version was licensed in 1619.

Nobody in the Ardennes accepted the drowning either. There, Bayart became the animal that could not be caught or killed, and the four brothers became a shorthand for anyone fighting a tyrant, so that the partisans who fought the Germans were compared to them. The tradition holds that he is still running loose in those woods, and that on the night of the twenty-fourth of June you can hear him going through the trees. Beside the Meuse at Dinant there is a crag called the Rocher Bayard, and the tradition says his hoof split it.

His powers are all of one piece, and so are his limits. He is fast, he is tireless, he carries four men where a horse should carry one, and he cannot be drowned by ordinary means. But he is property. He can be given, and what is given can be demanded back, and no amount of strength protects an animal whose owner has decided to trade him for a pardon. The millstone is not really the danger in the story. The treaty is.

What survives is mostly the image of the four of them up on one back. It is on a wax seal hanging from a Dutch charter of 1313. It is in Bruegel’s painting of children’s games from 1560, where four children stand in a line and a fifth shoves a stick between their legs, a game still played in Flanders in living memory. It is on gable stones in Amsterdam, Haarlem and Maastricht, on inn signs, on stamps, and cut into the wooden cake moulds that stamped out Saint Nicholas biscuits. The famous Dendermonde song, ‘t Ros Beyaert doet syn ronde, is not medieval: the poet Prudens van Duyse assembled it out of an old fragment into seven stanzas and a refrain and published it in 1835. It has been sung ever since, including by the neighbours in Aalst, who resent the whole business enough to have written parodies and, in 1952, to have tried to steal the horse outright.

The Dendermonde procession began as a church procession with worldly bits added on, and for centuries it went out irregularly, for coronations and jubilees and whatever else warranted it. Since 1990 it has run to a strict ten-year clock. Roughly two thousand costumed figures, a couple of hundred horses and twenty floats precede the horse itself; a jester called Kalleke Step turns two or three hundred handstands along the way. The four riders must be four brothers of one family living in Dendermonde, aged between seven and twenty-one, with no sister born in between them, which is a condition that has broken more than one family’s hopes. In 2008 UNESCO put the Ros Beiaard and the town’s guild giants on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The 2020 ride was pushed back two years by the pandemic and finally went out on a cold wet Sunday in May 2022, watched by about eighty-five thousand people. The next is in 2030.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ros Beiaard?

The Ros Beiaard is a magical bay warhorse from the medieval Charlemagne romances, best known today as the giant processional horse of Dendermonde in Belgium. In the stories he belongs to Renaut de Montauban and is strong enough to carry Renaut and his three brothers at the same time. In Dendermonde a Ros Beiaard weighing close to a thousand kilos is carried through the city once every ten years.

Who rides the Ros Beiaard?

In the legend he is ridden by Renaut de Montauban and his brothers Aalart, Richart and Guischart, the four sons of Duke Aymon, known in Dutch as the Vier Heemskinderen. In the Dendermonde procession the four riders must be four real brothers from one family living in Dendermonde, aged between seven and twenty-one, with no sister born between them.

How did the Ros Beiaard die?

It depends which version you read. In the traditional French poem Charlemagne has him thrown into the river with a millstone round his neck as the price of peace, but the horse shatters the stone, reaches the bank and escapes into the forest. In the Middle Dutch Renout van Montalbaen the drowning succeeds and the horse dies.

Why does Dendermonde parade the Ros Beiaard every ten years?

The Ros Beiaard first appears in the Dendermonde city accounts of 1460 and 1461 as one element among many in the town’s religious processions, and over the centuries it took over the procession entirely. For most of that history the ommegang went out at irregular intervals to mark special occasions; since 1990 it has been held once every ten years. The tradition was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Is the Ros Beiaard the same as Bayard?

Yes. Ros Beiaard is the Dutch name for the horse the Old French chansons de geste call Bayart or Bayard, and Italian poets call Baiardo. The Dutch and Flemish tradition kept the horse under its own name and gave the story its own ending, and it is the Dutch form that survives in the Dendermonde procession.

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