80 THE HORSE. 



of horse-racing, and so nnclianged are its characteristics, in all 

 but the existing gambling system, which has been incorpo- 

 rated with the efforts of the noble animal to reach the goal 

 first* 



" The crusades now followed," continues my author, and, in 

 what follows, I consider, and expect to show, that he is clearly 



* In Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, I find the following 

 curious note : — 



" In the Middle Ages there were certain seasons of the year, when the nobility 

 indulged themselves in running their horses, and especially in the Easter and Whit- 

 suntide Holydays." 



♦' In the old metrical romance of Sir Bevis of Southampton, it is said — 



" In summer at Whitsuntide, 

 When Knights must on horse ride, 

 A course let them make on a day, 

 Steedes and Palfraye for to assaye, 

 Which horse that best may ren. 

 Three miles the course was then, 

 Who that might ryde him shoulde 

 Have forty pounds of ready golde." 



Of this romance of " Sir Bevis of Southampton," it is impossible to verify the 

 date, but its antiquity is undoubted. " It is a translation from the Anglo-Norman. 

 Three MS. copies of this romance in English verse " — says Ellis, in his excellent 

 work on Early Metrical Romances — " are still extant in our pubUc hbraries ; viz., in 

 the Auchinleck MS. of the Advocates Library, Edinburgh ; in the Public Library, 

 Cambridge ; and in that of Cuius College." 



Sir Bevis is pretended to have been a Saxon Earl, who lived at, or about, the 

 time of the conquest — this, of course, being a fiction — as the whole romance is pure 

 imagination, without any, the slightest, historical foundation. There are, however, 

 strong reasons for assigning its composition to a very remote era, Mr. Elhs consider- 

 ing it, for bibUological reasons, as anterior to the Romance of Richard Coeur de 

 Lion, which he, elsewhere, from internal evidence, shows to have been nearly con- 

 temporaneous with the death of that prince. 



The poet is, it scarcely need be said, no authority for any practice, fashion, or 

 custom, which he attributes to Sir Bevis, having really existed in the time to which 

 he ascribes his hero ; but is excellent evidence to the fact that it existed in his 

 own days. 



Thus, when we find in the relation of the Trojan wars, in the Homeric poems, no 

 mention of cavalry or of the trumpet, we may well rest assured that they were not 

 known to the poet. When, in Virgil's account of the same war, we read of mounted 

 horsemen, of saddles, spurs, and clarions, we are convinced, not that these things 

 were used by the belligerents before Lion, but that they were so famihar to the 

 writer, that he knew nothing contrary to their use, from time immemorial. 



Here, therefore, we have an authentic record of something nearly resembling a 

 real race, with a hmited course and a valuable prize, in the latter part, at farthest, 

 of the twelfth century — the Smithfield runnings described above seeming to savor 

 more of horse-dealers' displays, in order to sell, than of real races. 



