barr7430 wrote:The other thing of course is that the horses could be considered rather tall for Swedish cavalry. I am currently sourcing mounts for the LoA dragoons and it may be that we go for smaller beasts than these.
That depends on which time period you are aiming at. After the battle of Poltava the quality of Swedish horses did indeed decline as they were forced to accept the much smaller domestic horse breed "klippare" as cavalry horses. But before that I do not think Swedish horses were any smaller than in other armies.
When the war started the Swedish cavalry was mounted on horses of good quality. Some of the regiments that were raised after the outbreak of the war (and intended to stay home) were however equipped with '"klippare" since Sweden's stud farms had a limited capacity to breed suitable cavalry horses. But this was of a lesser problem during the period 1700-1709 since the Swedish army mostly replaced their horses on location.
As a matter of fact the Life regiment lost 2 391 horses during the years 1700-1707 and only 116 of the replacement horses came from Sweden. The Scanian regiments had however a larger share of
Swedish replacement horses, but that province had the oldest stud farms in Sweden and thus much greater access to suitable cavalry horses.
And do not forget that even if the "klippare" became a common sight after Poltava the Swedish army still had a large portion of good quality horses in their cavalry.