From what can be ascertained at this date, the pure Arabian steed seldom, if ever, stood higher than fourteen and a half hands, and rarely or never became a roarer. In all probability many even of the finest Arabian horses stood but fourteen hands high, while plenty must have been smaller still—say thirteen two or even thirteen one.
This is worth remembering when we know that nearly every horse that has established a reputation on the English Turf has been of Eastern descent.
Probably the best of the Turkish horses were descended from the horses of Arabia and of Persia, though the former were for the most part taller, and generally “bigger built,” besides being world renowned for their remarkable docility.
At last the Commonwealth came to an end, and with the accession of Charles II. to the throne “the whole of England,” to quote the sentence of a contemporary chronicler, “seemed to open its lungs and breathe again.”
For during the ten years of the great Commonwealth the Turf had to all intents become extinct in England. The racecourses were “overgrown and choked,” some had been built upon, others had been converted into what purported to be pleasure grounds—“spaces for the recreation of the multitude.”
But apparently the multitude preferred the spaces as they had been in the time of Charles I., for no sooner did it become known that the more important of the race meetings that had been abandoned were about to be revived than “the people rejoiced greatly and gave vent to demonstration.”
In a surprisingly short time race horses seemed to spring up out of nowhere, some in such good fettle, comparatively—when it is borne in mind that the race horse was supposed to have become practically extinct during the Commonwealth's régime—that, as one historian has it, the severity of the laws that had been passed for the suppression of horse racing, and indirectly of race horses, must clearly have been evaded in several parts of this country.
Thus it comes that soon after the Restoration we read of races being run for silver bells and other prizes at Croydon, at Theobald's, at Chester and many other places that had been important racing centres before the Commonwealth.
“Though race horses were few at the time of Charles II.'s accession,” observes one writer, “and none had eaten bread for years” (about the middle of the seventeenth century race horses were trained largely on bread), “and these had languished in neglect, at the Restoration they emerged from their obscurity when the penal disabilities collapsed to which the Turf was subjected by the Puritans.