Buy this expecting a complete riding manual and you will be two thirds of a book short. The description states it plainly: School of Horsemanship is divided into three parts, and this audiobook carries only Part Two, the section on training and riding. Part One, on the horse's physical structure, tack and feeding, and Part Three, on treating illness, are simply not in the recording.
Only Part Two, and a Period Document
What remains is the part that made the book matter. Published in 1733 as Ecole de Cavalerie, this is where the shoulder-in is introduced, and the description makes the standard claim without hedging: the theories here provide the basis for all modern equitation, and this is probably the most important work on the subject ever written. Confining the recording to the riding section is defensible, even if the title never mentions it.
Ruth Keeling-Holt's five-star notice from 2013 sets expectations usefully. That reader had hoped the book would cover more dressage theory and did not get it, but still found it "very interesting to see how students of horsemanship were taught 200 years ago." This is a period document first and a training system second, and anybody who reverses that order will be frustrated within the hour.
Still Used at the Spanish Riding School
Borrowed authority supplies the strongest claim on the page. Paul Belasik's foreword quotes Alois Podhajsky, the late director of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, to the effect that a detailed discussion of Gueriniere's teachings was unnecessary in The Complete Training of Horse and Rider, not because they lacked interest, but because they were applied unaltered at the Spanish Riding School and could be seen there in daily use. A method still in service centuries later is a rare thing to be able to assert.
Everything you hear passes through Tracy Boucher's English translation of an eighteenth-century French text, and that matters more than it usually would. Technical riding vocabulary from 1733 has no exact modern equivalent, and every decision the translator made about whether to modernize a term or preserve it changes what a listener understands the instruction to mean.
Morsey Holds Long Clauses Steady for You
Johan Hambraeus, five stars back in 2003, had been searching for this book since the late seventies and lays out the translator's dilemma precisely: modern English terminology that might not mirror the meaning the original author had, or something "somewhat frenglish" that leaves the original author to explain the terms. That is the right question to ask of any classical text in translation, and it is the one that decides whether this recording works for you.
Audio suits this better than it suits most technical instruction, for an unexpected reason. Gueriniere writes in continuous prose rather than in numbered steps, so the instruction arrives as explanation with the reasoning attached, which survives being spoken aloud. A modern training manual built from diagrams and bulleted sequences would not survive the same treatment.
Sara Morsey has the reading credit, and the material sets the terms of the job. Eighteenth-century sentence construction in translation runs long, subordinate clauses stack up, and technical nouns arrive without warning. Holding that shape steady for the length of the recording, so a listener can follow where each qualification attaches, is essentially the whole assignment.
One reason outranks all the others: the description's central claim is supported inside the book's own pages. The shoulder-in that originates in these pages is still taught, and the foreword places the method in unaltered use at the Spanish Riding School within living memory. Hearing the original reasoning rather than a modern paraphrase of it is a genuinely different experience, and not many books of any age allow that comparison at all.
Illustrations Lost, Reviews from Before This Recording
B. King's five-star notice praises "the art work included" as beautiful, which is exactly the element a recording cannot carry. Eighteenth-century equestrian plates are instructional rather than ornamental: they show position, angle and footfall. A listener gets the description of a movement without the picture of it, on a subject where the picture was doing a substantial share of the work.
One reader, posting under a handle that reads like a publication, spends an entire five-star notice recommending a different edition. That reading calls this text excellent but out of print, hard to find and expensive, and points buyers toward a paperback of Part Two published by Xenophon Press instead, for thirty dollars. It is a fair warning that several distinct objects are stacked behind one product name.
Only one notice in the record postdates the recording. The audio edition dates from June 2014, while the readers standing behind it posted in 2003, 2009, 2010 and 2013. Those readers are describing printed editions of a text that has been reissued repeatedly, so the 4.8 average across fifteen ratings is measuring the reputation of a book rather than the quality of this production of it.
Housekeeping on the listing is careless in two separate ways. A foundational dressage treatise sits under home and garden and under sports and outdoors, tagged Pets and Animal Care, which will not put it in front of the people who want it. And the byline strips the accents from the author's name, printing Francois Robichon de la Gueriniere where the description itself writes it correctly, so a search on the proper spelling may never reach this page.
Quotable Reasons for Riders Who Teach
The shortest notice in the record is also the most representative. Five stars, one line from VICTOR ROMAN G. SANTOS: the book gives better understanding and insight into equitation and horsemanship. That is what this delivers. Not a program, not a schedule, not a set of drills with counts attached, but a way of thinking about what you are asking a horse to do and why you are asking it.
Serious riders working inside a classical tradition are the obvious audience, and so is anyone who teaches. Gueriniere explains reasons rather than issuing commands, which makes the text unusually quotable in a lesson, and hearing it straight through gives you the shape of an argument that most riders only ever meet as scattered citations in other people's books.
Come to this for a complete training system and you will leave short, because only one of the three parts made it into the recording and that one is a period document rather than a curriculum. Approach it as a rider curious about where the modern vocabulary originated, and six hours in the company of the person who assembled it is time exceptionally well spent.
