30 Breeds of Horses 



figured in battlefield and tourney. The suggestion is an ingenious 

 one, and judging from what we see of the Cleveland Bay in these 

 days, he would seem to be an ideal horse to carry a knight in 

 armour. But the writer is not inclined to accept the theory. In 

 the first place, the Cleveland Bay of to-day is very unlike his 

 ancestor in the days of King Richard or King John. In those days 

 his ancestor was undoubtedly on a much smaller scale, and I should 

 feel inclined to look for him in the ranks of the Pack Horses rather 

 than of the Great Horses. Then in contemporary pictures of war 

 horses we find the plain, rather heavy head of the Shire and the 

 feather on the legs, which the Cleveland Bay has not, and Sir 

 Walter Gilbey seems to have fairly established his theory that the 

 Shire Horse is the descendant of the Great Horse. It is highly 

 probable that if we saw the much-vaunted war horses of that 

 period we should be greatly disappointed in them, and should 

 consider them common and clumsy. The writer has an idea that 

 the best of them would not make much at Tattersall's. 



The late Mr. Lumley Hodgson, a well-known breeder and fine 

 judge of all horses, said that the Cleveland Bay or Chapman Horse 

 was a pure breed before the days of the Godolphin Barb or the 

 Darley Arabian. There is, I think, every indication of the soundness 

 of Mr. Hodgson's theory, which receives some confirmation from 

 the Notebook of Sir Walter Calverley, who flourished in the time of 

 Charles II. In this notebook Sir Walter tells us that they took 

 the lighter draught mares to horse the coaches which were then 

 becoming more common in the country. It is, from this, pretty 

 clear that, at any rate in Yorkshire and in some of the neighbouring 

 counties, where horses were used on the land — it must be remem- 

 bered that cattle were also largely used — those horses were some- 

 thing of the type of the Cleveland Bay, or Chapman Horse as was 

 the older name. Long after the time of Sir Walter Calverley we find 

 this state of things prevailing. In the latter half of the eighteenth 

 century, when Marshall wrote his Rural Economy of Yorkshire, he 

 wrote in very trenchant language against the introduction of the 

 Holderness cart horse into the North Riding, insisting that his 

 neighbours had a much better horse for their purpose. Yet the 

 Holderness cart horse was a much lighter horse than the Shire, 

 and was of the type which is spoken of in the section on Hunters 

 (p. 42). 



This fairly seems to establish the position of the Cleveland Bay 

 as the draught horse of, at any rate, a considerable section of the 

 country, and we have now to consider the question of his develop- 

 ment into the horse we see him to be in these days. All over 



