A Country Fair.
The picture by Jacques Laurent Agasse, from which the illustration has been taken, affords us a glimpse of an ancient English institution which is fast passing away. The work was painted in the year 1819, when the country fair or market held a very important place in the economy of rural England, and this picture has special interest for stock breeders, since its most conspicuous figure is a grand example of the old English breed of Black Shire horses.
In Sir Walter Gilbey’s work on “The Great Horse,” a letter is quoted from Oliver Cromwell offering “sixty pieces for that Black you won (in battle) at Horncastle, for my son has a mind to him.” In those days the “Black” was before all things a war horse, and there is ample evidence to prove that it was regarded as the best strain among the heavy breeds. Agasse’s picture refers to a more peaceful era; but the Black Shire horse was still the breed most prized in England. William Marshall, writing in 1790, tells us that the Black Carthorse in his day was extensively bred in the Midlands; and though he personally preferred a smaller and more compact horse, on short, clean legs, and was, moreover, a convinced advocate of the ox-team for the plough and draught work, he could not deny that the breeding of Black Shires was profitable. As showing how the best authorities differ, it is worth noticing that Arthur Young, at about the same period, mentions the “large Black old English horse” as one of the only two varieties of carthorse deserving of mention. The other was the sorrel-coloured Suffolk Punch.
A COUNTRY FAIR IN 1819.
J. L. Agasse
The Black Shire, according to Wm. Marshall, had a somewhat chequered working career. The breeders brought their yearlings to certain markets or fairs—Ashby, Loughborough, Burton-on-Trent, Rugby, and Ashbourne—where they were sold to graziers, the prices ranging from £10 to £20. The graziers kept them until they were about two years and a half, and then brought them to the fairs to sell to the farmers and dealers; the markets at Rugby and Stafford being noted for this business. Their purchasers now were farmers. At two years old or two off heavy horses are capable of doing gentle work, and the object of the buyer being to prepare them for the London market, he took good care not to overtax the youngsters. They were not expected to do more than earn their keep, and it was very usual in the home counties to see a team of four drawing a plough which was easily within the strength of two much lighter animals; but the object of the farmer was thus accomplished. The young horses learned to pull steadily, and the light plough work was, in point of fact, their education for the career before them. At four, or four off, they were sent to London, fully developed, conditioned, and ready for the brewer’s dray or the heavy waggon. The brewers of those days took peculiar pride in their dray horses, and spared neither pains nor money to procure the largest and finest Shires for the purposes of their trade.
The Ashby Black Stallion Show, which enjoyed the distinction of being the only event of its kind in England, still flourished in George III.’s time. It took place at Eastertide, and was the occasion for selling and letting stallions of this breed. The word “show,” it should be added, is a complete misnomer; there was no show or anything remotely resembling one. The breeders brought in their stallions and stabled them at the inns, and when a possible purchaser or hirer appeared a horse was pulled out and shown off in some convenient back street or open space. Such an incident we need not doubt afforded Agasse the idea for his picture; the lad in the smock frock has been running the great stallion up and down to show off his paces and carriage before the well-to-do farmer who stands under the tree on the left, and the other critics who stand on the near side of the horse. Marshall was present at the Ashby Black Stallion Show of 1785, when some thirty horses—two, three, and four-year-olds, for the most part—were offered for sale or hire. The prices paid for Black Shire stallions at this so-called “show” ranged from fifty to two hundred guineas; the hire for a season ranged from forty to eighty guineas. Breeders sometimes held private shows of stallions where similar business was transacted.
These horses were largely bred in Lincolnshire: they were, indeed, so closely identified with the county that they were locally known as “Black Lincolnshires.” In the fens they grew to their greatest size; few of them at two and a half, says Youatt, were under seventeen hands. Neither the soil nor the pasture of these districts is better calculated to meet the horse-breeder’s needs than the soil and pasture of other regions of England; but the situation, climate, and conditions of life were in some way peculiarly favourable to the growth of horses, and the Blacks grew bigger there than they did anywhere else. Marshall refers to them disparagingly as the “elephants of Lincolnshire.” All the brood mares seen by Arthur Young on his tour in this county (“General View of the Agriculture of Lincolnshire, 1799”) were Blacks. They were regularly worked in the farm teams by the “arable yeoman,” who kept them for stud purposes.
It was popularly believed in the Midlands that the Black horse originated from half a dozen Zealand mares, which Lord Chesterfield, when ambassador at the Hague, sent over to England. These mares were stabled at Bretby, in Derbyshire, about 1755 or 1760, and no doubt were instrumental in improving the breed. It is stated that for some time after Lord Chesterfield imported these mares Derbyshire “took the lead” among the counties in which Blacks were bred. But while we need not doubt that these mares were the best of their kind, and as such did much in the way of improvement, it is impossible, by the light of the historical evidence, to which reference has been made, to regard them as the foundation stock.
Whatever Marshall’s opinion of the Black, it certainly found great favour all over England, even in Norfolk, a county famous for the small, active carthorses, with which the farmers, as the author points out in “The Harness Horse,” used to run their curious “team races.” The greater popularity which the Black enjoyed a century ago seems to have contributed to the disappearance of the brown-muzzled Norfolk horses. Farmers in those days were not more governed by sentiment in the management of their business than they are now, and we may rest assured that if they turned their attention to the breeding of Blacks, it was because they proved the more profitable stock. Their great weight would suffice to recommend them for heavy draught work on the deep and miry country roads of a past generation. A writer in the Sporting Magazine of 1796, says that “there are instances of single horses that are able to draw a weight of three tons.”
Not the least interesting fact concerning the picture which furnishes occasion for these remarks is the fact that the painter of a scene so typically English in subject, so purely English in spirit and in mode of treatment, should have been a foreigner. Jacques Laurent Agasse was a Swiss by birth; he came to this country when about twenty years of age, and his works show how completely he became imbued with a love of the land of his adoption.