The Horse in History

by Basil Tozer

From about this period onward the horse may be said to have entered upon the third phase of its career in the history of all nations, but more especially in the history of our own nation. For, as we have seen, from very early times down to the period of the Norman Conquest the nations that had not horses had almost without exception been forced to take a secondary place in the world's progress.

From the period of the Norman Conquest down to the beginning of the accession of the House of Stuart—indeed, as we shall see presently, almost down to the period of the Commonwealth—the improvement and development of the horse as an “arm” in warfare had gone practically hand in hand with the improvement in the training of men to fight in battle. And from then onward, that is to say from the beginning of the period of the Stuarts and the Commonwealth, down to the present day, the horse has been connected with history in the capacity of charger or war horse, hunter or pleasure horse, and thoroughbred or race horse.

Let me state at once, then, that it is not my intention to describe at length, or even to mention by name, all the more or less famous, horses that have been owned by the more prominent or distinguished men at any time within the last three hundred years, for such a collection of names, or of descriptions, would not be likely to prove of interest to the modern reader. In addition comparatively few of the records concerning these animals bear the impress of truth.

As we come to the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries historical records increase enormously in volume, so that now we find ourselves confronted by a mass of reports, many of which bear directly upon horses that are of no interest whatever, though they may have belonged to famous men whose names are still household words.

Thus in a single history of Napoleon I. we find two pages of descriptive matter to do with a horse of his called Wagram; two pages about Cyrus, another of his horses; a page about his horse named Emir; half-a-page about his Coco; three pages about Gongalve; two about Coquet; three about Tausis, and so on all the way through, while everything that is said about them could quite easily be condensed into three or four short sentences.

Indeed the biographers of the majority of our great military leaders have deemed it necessary to write long and verbose descriptions of the animals that were owned by these historical celebrities, apparently for no other reason than that they did belong to celebrities.

When all is said, it is difficult to imagine how or whence they can have obtained such circumstantial information. Granting, however, the truth of all the statements—and one cannot say definitely that any one of them is not true in every detail—was it worth while to tell us that Piers Gaveston owned a grey, or that Blucher remarked upon some uninteresting occasion that he had a horse that used to jib?

Yet trivial points of this sort are to be found mentioned in plenty of the so-called popular biographies of our great men.

Of more interest it would have been had the biographers succeeded in discovering, and then told us, what sort of bits Napoleon liked to ride his chargers in, and his reason or reasons for preferring them, or whether Blucher ever tried his grey in blinkers. Then the horses described at such weary length might possibly have taught us a lesson or two worth learning.