Heporl on (he Horses Uxhihited ai Windso')'. 571 
good, if not actually super-excellent, shoulders, he should be 
worth following. 
The English hackney is indeed a horse with a history, and 
that history has been so fully given by Mr. Henry F. Euren 
(the secretary of the Hackney Society), in the first volume of 
the Ilaclcncii Stud-booJi, that there is little need to say much 
I about it now. It is, however, clear that in the distant past 
when gallopers were rare, and roads on which galloping could 
I be indulged in still rarer, a horse that could trot over open 
ground had a value of its own ; the " horse fit for plough and 
teams," as the old writer FitzStephen designates him, would, of 
course, not answer the purpose ; and so there has been, as Mr. 
Euren says, for " at least 700 years a breed of trotting horses." 
I The same writer also tells us that the oldest surviving appel- 
lation for the active riding horse in this country is "nag," 
derived from the Anglo-Saxon hnegan, to neigh. " When the 
Normans became our masters they introduced their own more 
familiar term haqiienee, or hacqnenee, the French word derived 
from the Latin equus" and it appears that in 1303 the word 
had been anglicised, as " Robert Mannynge, more commonly 
" known as Robert de Brunne, from his being a monk at Bourne, 
in Lincolnshire, who wrote in that year, uses it in the line ' Ilk 
on his hakneye.' " However, the trotter held his way, and 
became more valuable as pace increased and roads became better; 
but the introduction of railways and the running of " market 
trains " rather discounted the hackney, and farmers — at least, a 
great many of them — took to breeding hunters instead. The 
last link in the history of the hackney is that in 1878 a proposi- 
tion was made that a register for English trotting horses should 
be established ; the Hackney Society came into being in 1883, 
and has been of infinite service to hackney breeders. 
It is, perhaps, worthy of note, now that the expediency of 
breeding ponies from Arab sires is being eagerly discussed, that 
from time almost immemorial there has been more Eastern blood 
in the north and east of England than in any other district, 
and in both the Yorkshire and Norfolk horses there is a strain 
of Eastern blood, while some good judges are in favour of a 
further infusion ; and just as an exported thoroughbred was the 
j foundation of American trotting stock, so was the blood horse 
the father of English trotters, as either " Blaze" or " Blank" — Mr. 
Euren thinks the former — was the sire of " Shales's or Shield's 
horse," the first noteworthy trotting hackney stallion of the 
modem type. 
Although hackneys are now such an attractive feature at 
the Royal Agiicultural Society's Shows, there was no distinct 
