ROYAL ASCOT 



CHAPTER I 



A BRIEF SKETCH OF HORSE RACING IN ENGLAND 



HORSE racing Is a sport of very great antiquity, and 

 from very earliest times has been a favourite and 

 popular pastime. With the ancient Greeks all kinds of 

 sport were received with favour, and it may be assumed 

 that horse racing was introduced into the Olympic Games 

 about B.C. 648, while there are records of a race called 

 Calpe which was instituted a hundred and fifty years later 

 and was confined to mares only, just as are the races for 

 the Oaks and the One Thousand Guineas at the present 

 time. Although we have no records of the training of the 

 competing horses for the Olympian festivals, we do know 

 that they had to be entered at Elis thirty days before the 

 celebration of the games, and the riders themselves had to 

 go into training for at least a month prior. Moreover, 

 it would appear from Grote's " History of Greece," that 

 in course of time the Greeks made some classification and 

 conditions whereby only colts of an equal age raced 

 together, and were not therefore always out-distanced by 

 older horses carrying similar weight. 



The Romans were very fond of the sport, and probably 

 learned the fascinations of horse racing from the Greeks, 



