King Richard I. is said to have been a good judge of a horse and to have owned a number of swift-running steeds. Upon one or two occasions he endeavoured to establish horse racing as a national pastime, but the country was not yet ripe for it, and his attempts met with but scant encouragement.
It is said that his courtiers strove to serve their royal master by having recourse to threats in those districts where the introduction of horse racing was opposed, but all to no purpose.
King John, upon ascending the throne, devoted much time to hunting and similar sports, and valued good horses so greatly that in some instances he insisted that the fines he was so fond of extorting should be paid in horses instead of in money.
Then, following in the footsteps of William the Conqueror, he imported a number of stallions, among them many of the Eastern breed, and on the pastures in Kent where the town of Eltham and the village of Mottingham now stand he established the famous stud from which so many of the horses owned in after years by Queen Elizabeth were directly descended.
Worthy of mention here is the coincidence that the early days of some of the most celebrated thoroughbreds of recent times were spent in the very paddocks where King John's foals and imported horses were disporting themselves some seven centuries earlier.
On the subject of the great horses of the Middle Ages it is interesting to read that while British rulers were striving to breed animals which would be both bigger and stronger than their predecessors, the Persians in their country were endeavouring to breed and rear horses on lines precisely similar, and with the same objects in view.
How successful the attempts of the latter proved may be gathered from the fact that, in the centuries that followed, the Persian horses became renowned the world over for their immense strength, though the animals of this particular breed never became famous for their speed.
Indeed the chief victories won by the Persians in their terrific encounters with the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were due in a great measure to the superior size and strength of the Persian war horses, though, of course, the fact that the Turks had only their shields with which to protect themselves must have helped the Persians materially.
Perhaps some of the most interesting and accurate representations of the horses of about this period are those to be found in parts of Ireland among the remains of Irish art. These remains, rather let us call them relics, are almost matchless, and they represent horses driven in chariots, and some mounted by riders.
Thus three horsemen in addition to two chariots with horses harnessed are to be seen on the two panels of the plinth of the historic North Cross at Clonmacnoise in King's County. The wheels of these chariots have eight spokes, and the relic is believed by the foremost of our antiquaries to date back to the tenth century.