570 Report upon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilhum. 
last century, Arthur Young made his agricultural tours, he onlv 
mentioned two kinds of plough-horses — the first being the great 
black dray-horse, bred in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, North- 
amptonshire, and the midland counties, and the second being 
the Suffolk Punch. At this point we come across the track of 
Bakewell of Dishlev — clarum ac venerahile nomen — who took in 
hand the old black cart-horse, called in the fen country " the 
Shire horse," and brought to bear upon his improvement the 
same energy and intelligence which had created the breed of 
Leicester sheep, which had so refined the ancient long-horned 
ox that his immensely bony fabric has practically been im- 
proved off the face of the earth, and which finally achieved not 
a little towards the production of a respectable farm-yard pig. 
Xevertheless, it is certain that Bakewell's black horse, even 
with the infiltration of fresh Dutch blood into his veins, was, 
although an improvement, far from being a success. Thus we 
find that, writing in 1800, Parkinson — the ancestor of the late 
^Ir. Milward, of Thurgarton — pronounced sentence upon this 
animal, declaring that " Mr. Bakewell was thinking too much 
of a fat ox when he selected the breeding stock for his black 
horse." 
It is not without interest here to remark, that " the old 
Norman cart-horse, " as we profanely call him, owed his origin 
to that " age of chivalry which has so largely affected most ol 
our British institutions, and which, despite the epitaph pro- 
nounced over its grave in the last century bv Edmund Burke, 
still survives among us in many of its fairest features. V\ hen 
every man who was " armiger," or " esquire," was bound, after 
the Xorman conquest, to find horses equal to carrying a knight 
in full armour, and proportional in number to the amount of 
acres that he held, it was natural that animals should abound 
as colossal in their dimensions as the pair which dragged the 
Speaker's state-coach to St. Paul's Cathedral upon the day of 
public thanksgiving for the recovery of the Prince of Wales 
from desperate sickness in the February of 1872. It has been 
estimated that the feudatories in Doomsday Book kept at least 
100,000 stallions of cart-horse proportions, and it is , indis- 
putable that these massive animals, whether raised in the mid- 
land fens or imported from Xormandv, must have produced a 
marked effect upon the native breeds jf the country. Up to the 
end of the seventeenth century, draught agricultural operations 
were in the main carried on bv oxen ; but after that date the 
substitution of equine for bovine labour was rapid and pro- 
gressive, although men of such different temperament as Arthur 
Young and William Cobbett never ceased to protest against the 
change. Now-a-days, enlightened British farmers would as soon 
