THE HORSE IN ENGLAND TO BG/.\.\7.YG Of SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 13 



Silchester, and Caerleon ; and the presence of imported stock undoubtedly had a 

 considerable influence upon domestic product;. 1 have reproduced two contemporary 

 can-ings of the breed of horse most probably brought into this country by the 

 Romans, and the Eastern type is as clearly observable in them as in the sculpture 

 of the Parthenon. The Venerable Bede himself is not without an unmistakable 

 reference to the inevitable results, in the description he gives of a rough and ready 

 match which was made and ridden in the dominions of East Anglia during the reign 

 of King Edmund the Martyr. The legions had tramped out of Britain ; but the 

 racing tastes of their officers rrmaim-d. The great King Alfred had a M;isier of the 

 Horse named Ecquef. It is not loo much 10 say lhal the Anglo-Saxon was already 

 billen wilh ihe passion for ihe Turf. 



By ihe reign of Athelstan, ihis facl had become so far apprecialed abroad, that 

 when the father of Hugh Capet was courting the daughter of the British King, he 

 could find no more appropriale gifl for so important an occasion than some " running- 

 horses" ; and the will of this tenth-century English monarch is equal evidence of an 

 affection for Racing, which had been recognised as much by his foreign friends as by 

 his courtiers at home. An even stronger indication is to be found in the Royal order 

 of ihe same period perhaps the faint beginnings of future prohibitive legislation 

 thai no horses should be senl abroad for any purpose save by ihe King's desire and 

 knowledge. 



There is no record of an Arab horse being brought to these islands by a Briton 

 until Alexander, King of Scotland, is known to have pn M-ntcd one to a church in 

 1 121 ; and his companion, who was a gift from Eastern Europe with some Turkish 

 Armour, was kept at the Royal stud at Gillingham. But we need not imagine that 

 the importations of the Conquest were limited either to the large, and apparently 

 very seasick war chargers depicted in ihe Bayeux Tapestry, or to the hacks which 

 accompanied the great Duke in considerable numbers. At Hastings he rode a small 

 stallion of 14 hands, given him by Alfonso of Spain. By thai lime ihe Crusades had 

 begun already. An acquaintance with the East, so fruitful in many other luxuries, 

 was not likely to have been barren in the one thing on which the Oriental has 

 always prided himself ; Sir Walter is as correct as usual in his description of tin- 

 tournament in " Ivanhoe." The ancient poem quoted by Strutl, provides no proof of 

 ihe ancestry of Favcll and Lyard, said to be ihe favourile steeds of Richard Coeurde 

 Lion, and valued at the rhetorically exaggerated sum of a thousand pounds in gold. 

 But the fondness of that otherwise apparently useless monarch, King John, for im- 



