Report on tho Horses Exhibited at Windsor. 567 
whole shiploads went to Germany, until the Americans became 
buyers ; and I have heard it stated by competent authorities that, 
before the inauguration of the stud-book, the foreign demand did 
much to keep the breed alive. 
That Clevelands had not honour outside their own country 
sixty years ago seems plain from a letter written by Mr. J. 
' Floyd Baker, a Gloucestershire agriculturist of some note, to 
Mr. Thomas Eaymond Barker. The first-named gentleman, 
having a fancy to have his farm- work done by a somewhat 
lighter and more active animal than the draught horse in com- 
mon use, bought a Cleveland stallion to cross with Gloucester- 
shire mares, as clean-legged as he could get them. The produce 
he liked, but none of the farmers in the district would put their 
mares to the Cleveland horse, though he stood 16-^ hands high, 
measured 9f inches at the pastern, 10 inches below the knee, 
21 inches round the arm, 15f inches round the knee, and 
girthed 6 feet 10 inches. This was in the year 1827 ; but on 
looking through a back number of this Journal, I find that a 
hostility to Clevelands was entertained by some people in 1860, 
as, in writing on the Canterbury Show, one of the Judges thus 
expresses himself: "For hunters the worst cross is that with 
the soft and specious Cleveland bay. Even Ireland ... is now 
debased and half-ruined by this flat-catching strain." Could the 
writer, however, be confounding Clevelands with Clydesdales ? 
Against this we have the dictum of Mr. T. Parrington, one of 
the first authorities, that " the Cleveland is the foundation of 
half-bred breeding," and it is a fact — sometimes unknown to 
the owners — that a certain number of the best hunters known 
have Clevelands for their dams. At any rate, for the present 
he is, and in the future will be, well cared for, as the outcome 
of a meeting held at Stockton-on-Tees on January 16, 1884, 
under the presidency of Mr. Thomas Parrington, was the esta- 
blishment of the Cleveland Bay Horse Society, of which Mr. H. 
Scarth Dixon, whose recent work, the North Goimtree, contains 
a good deal of gossip and information anent the Cleveland bay, 
is secretary. 
A near relation of the Cleveland bay is the Yorkshire coach- 
horse, which, in spite of its Society, of which Lord Wenlock was 
the first President, can scarcely be deemed a distinct breed, 
inasmuch as it is admitted that a strain of fresh blood is required 
every now and again to counteract the natural tendency to be- 
come leggy. The opinions of a Southerner are obviously of little 
worth, but I confess to being unable to quite understand where 
Cleveland bays and Yorkshire coach-horses begin and end. Mr. 
Burdett-Coutts, M.P., has recently published an elaborate cata- 
