Several writers tell us that Nicolle Dex had trained his horse on white wine, but the truth would seem to be that he himself trained on white wine. We are informed, in addition, that the horse was not given any hay.
“Le dit Seigneur Nicolle n'avoit point donne de foin a son chevaulx, ne n'avoit beu aultre chose que du vin blanc.”
What the horses of four hundred years ago were chiefly fed on is uncertain. We know that usually they were given hay, but we find mention made repeatedly of “horse bread.” Probably this horse bread resembled the modern oil cake upon which cattle is fed, for we read that it tended to make the horses' coats “soft and glossy,” an attribute of oil cake of which horse dealers are well aware.
It seems hardly necessary to mention in this connection that in Henry VIII.'s time, and indeed down to a much later period, the art of training horses, as we understand it to-day, was practically in its infancy. Also we are able to infer that it was quite a common practice to give a horse a drink of water just before running him in a race, and that what we to-day allude to as the art of judging pace in connection with race riding probably had never been even thought of.
In Henry VIII.'s reign the habit of naming horses after their breeder on their previous owner would appear to have come into vogue rather largely, and from that time onward, for some three centuries and a half, to have remained in vogue. After that it became customary to name race horses in rather a grotesque manner.
I have by me a list of names of race horses almost all of which must have been animals well known in their time. It would be interesting to hear what Messrs Weatherby would say if we asked them to-day to enter a mare to run under the name “Pretty Harlot” or, better still, “Sweetest when Naked”!
Among Henry VIII.'s famous barbs we find several mentioned by name, and we read incidentally that “during four or six days the king rode both Altobello and Governatore, but preferred Governatore.”
The Marquis of Mantua had been renowned for his skill in horsemanship, as well as for the famous stud of horses that he possessed, for some years before Henry VIII. came to the throne, and this stud is said to have reached the acme of its excellence about the year 1517, when Gonzaga, as the Marquis was generally called, received many more requests for the service of his stallions than he was able to accede to.
Many, if not actually the majority of the horses that proved most successful upon the turf during the sixteenth century are said to have been descendants of the stock bred so carefully and with so much discrimination by Gonzaga or by King Henry, from which we may conclude that the assertion made often that until the reign of Queen Anne there were no race horses in this country worth speaking of is erroneous.
It is said, apparently with truth, that Gonzaga became extremely angry when, in the year 1515—only a few months after he had presented Henry with the valuable horses already referred to—Ferdinand of Arragon sent Henry “a gift of two most excellent horses,” with the message that he, Ferdinand, believed they would be found to outclass even the fine horses already in the royal stables at Hampton Court.