40 A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



and carding, especially if you play for any great sum of money, or spend or 

 use to come to meetings or dicing houses, where cheaters meet and cozen 

 young gentlemen of all their money." If this were all we knew of this 

 eccentric nobleman, we might well imagine that he only took his nose out of his 

 books to poke it into one of the heavy travelling carriages which had not long ago 

 been made fashionable by Fitzalan, a descendant of that famous Earl of Arunclel 

 whose match with the Prince 'of Wales I described in speaking of the fourteenth 

 century. 



As is well known, Elizabeth used a vast number of vehicles in her numerous 

 and costly Royal Progresses, and the demand thus created among all the upper 

 classes may have been one reason for that short supply of horses for her cavalry 

 which has been already noticed ; another may well have been that, as was reported 

 in 1584 by Lord Huntingdon, one of the Queen's visiting Commissioners on Horse- 

 breeding, very few men were ready either to produce for inspection or to enrol in a 

 muster-book, the full number of horses which they kept for their own use. So that 

 the apparent lack in the levies may not have implied so great an actual dearth in 

 days when a man who sent away his horse had no other means of locomotion. It is 

 very possible also that among the many paradoxical results to warfare which had 

 followed from the more general employment of gunpowder, that of a lighter breed of 

 horses was one that was realised the last. " Villanous saltpetre" had long ago 

 stripped the knight of that carapace of iron, which was powerless against a cannon- 

 ball, and cumbersome in the extreme for speedy evolutions. The art of Fence was 

 one corollary, for it was easier to search out the vitals of a man when he was less like 

 an armadillo, and the sword is a cleaner weapon than a cpalhammer. Another 

 corollary was the horse, which would give its rider all the benefit he deserved from 

 carrying so much less dead weight in the saddle. The Tournament died hard, and 

 while its last remains were lingering, the mistake of the " large horse," so dear to 

 King Henry VIII., was perpetuated. That hasty monarch seems to have forgotten 

 that his subjects were not all built upon lines so generous as those of his own Royal 

 bulk. Eor some time after his death, his legislation put a severe check upon the 

 small and handy breeds. Though hackney carriages were indeed almost invented 

 by the end of Elizabeth's reign and highly disgusted the Thames watermen must 

 have been to see them it was still the usual thing to do all long journeys in the 

 saddle, and every Englishman in comfortable circumstances did his best to keep a 

 horse, if not for military purposes, then for travelling. It was from these home-bred 



