I made an addition a few weeks back that is having major repercussions. I added a new minor character: Uptar, a Hunnic warrior who wandered across Europe and ended up appearing at Camelot because he had heard that Arthur was a great warrior. Uptar astonishes the Britons with his archery skills on horseback, but the real shock comes when Arthur realizes that Uptar is using stirrups, which Arthur calls ‘footrings’. Stirrups permit a great improvement in cavalry tactics. They were invented somewhere in the east, most likely by the horse peoples on the eastern steppes. Knowledge of them drifted westward and became the basis for the heavily armored knights of medieval Europe. I am positing that there was an early instantiation of them in Arthur’s Camelot, but the innovation died with Arthur. It’s a plausible historical speculation.
This in turn justifies the ‘katerfaks’, Arthur’s elite cavalry unit consisting of just a dozen specially trained and equipped horsemen. The term is Lancelot’s mispronunciation of ‘cataphracts’, a later Byzantine unit of heavily armored cavalry. However, I have not specifically addressed their different tactics in my encounters, so I must rewrite the sequence of encounters to show the development of the unit.