Hepori on tin' JTorses ItJxJiihited at Whtdxor. 
perhaps we may now be permitted to wouder how it was that 
when increased attention came to be paid to the science the raw 
material was as good as it was. 
From time immemorial, England appears to have nourished 
a heavy and not altogether shapely black cart-horse, the lighter 
and more active specimens of which seem to have been told off 
for saddle-work, while the more lumbering ones worked on the 
land, and dragged heavy vehicles over the tracks which by 
courtesy were then termed roads. This powerful horse, if 
not the " Great Horse in all its purity, was doubtless a ver};- 
near relation. At any rate, we find cart- and plough-horses 
mentioned as being on sale at Smithfield as early as 1153 and 
1154 ; and sundry enactments were passed to ensure, as far as 
possible, the supply of big strong horses. A good deal of fact 
and a good deal of theory may be used in tracing the history of 
the heavy English horses ; but the truth remains that since the 
formation of the various Societies an almost incredible improve- 
ment has taken place. For this we have in great measure to 
thank a few breeders of a past generation who had the fore- 
thought to preserve records and pedigrees : consequently, when 
the different stud-books were compiled, there was a mass of 
voluntarily-kept matter to start upon. It is not, perhaps, a 
matter of very great importance to attempt to trace the origin 
of the term " kShire " hoi'se ; but in his book on "The War 
Horse " Mr. Walter Gilbey reminds his readers that the word 
" Shire " is first used in connection with horses as far back as 
the time of Henry VIII., when it occurs in a statute passed in 
the 32nd year of that monarch's reign. The typical black 
cart-horse seems to have been bred chiefly in Lincolnshire and 
Cambridgeshire and in the Midlands — that is to say, in Leices- 
tershire, Notts, AVarwick, Derby, Huntingdon, and right down 
to the banks of the Severn. This being for the most part flat 
country, much of it being on a level with the river-banks, it is 
not improbable that the term " Shire " was given to this breed 
because it was indigenous, as it were, to several shires, and to 
distinguish it from all hill varieties ; just as we employ the phrase 
" mountain ponies " to distinguish them from those varieties 
reared on the lower ground. 
When Arthur Young penned his reminiscences of his tours 
through England, undertaken at the latter part of the eighteenth 
century, he only gave prominence to two species of cart-horse, 
the old black and the Suffolk. That these were the promi- 
nent breeds is unquestionable ; but in two portions of England, 
widely distant fi'om each other, draught or agricultural horses 
were found which bore little or no resemblance to either of 
