athelstan's importations. 77 



period aftenvards, in great request in various parts of the 

 Roman empire." 



I regret that, owing to the omission of giving authority, I 

 have been unable to verify the latter statement ; I have failed 

 to discover any allusion to the facts stated, in the writino-g of 

 Caesar himself; nor can I recall to mind any mention of British 

 horses, in any of the classical authorities, whether in prose or 

 poetry; nevertheless, I presume, from the general care and 

 truthfulness of this able writer, that there is no doubt as to the 

 accuracy of his assertion. 



" Daring the occupation of England by the Eomans, the 

 British horse was crossed to a considerable extent by the Ro- 

 man horse" — continues the author in the volume first quoted ; 

 for whicli I would myself, for reasons above stated^ prefer to sub- 

 stitute lij the foreign horses of the Roman mercenary or allied 

 cavalry—^^ and yet, strange to say, no opinion is given by any 

 historian, Roman or British, as to the effect of this. After the 

 evacuation of England by the Romans and its conquest by the 

 Saxons, considerable attention was paid to the English breed of 

 horses, and we know that after the reign of Alfred, running 

 horses were imported from Germany ;* this being the first his- 

 torical intimation we have of running horses in England. It is 

 scarcely to be doubted that this importation produced a marked 

 effect on the character of the native breed, but here, as before, 

 no historian has thought it worth his while to record the fact of 

 either improvement or deterioration. 



"English horses, after this, appear to have been highly 

 prized on the continent, so that the German horses which were 

 presented by Hugh Capet to Athelstan had been turned to good 

 account. The English themselves were, however, anxious to 



* After this date, we have frequent mention of running horses in history, 

 although the meaning of the term is not distinctly comprehensible. It certainly 

 did not mean that which we now signify by the term, horses kept exclusively for the 

 purpose of racing, as nothing of the sort is traceable in England, previous to the 

 reign of Charles 1st. Probably it meant a horse of hght and speedy action for the 

 road or the chase, as opposed to the heavy destriera or war-horses, capable of carry- 

 ing a man-at-arms in complete panoply, whose weight, added to that of the horse's 

 own armor, could not have fallen far short of twenty-five horseman's stone, or 350 

 pounds, as we reckon in America. 



