Rinaldo's horse, Bajardo, made famous in Ariosto's celebrated book, was a bright bay and very fast, and at one time it had belonged to Amadis of Gaul. When Malagigi, the wizard, found it in the cave guarded by “a dragon of great size,” he at once, at considerable personal risk, attacked the dragon, which in the end he succeeded in slaying.
According to the legend, Bajardo is still alive, but under no circumstances can man approach it, nor will any man ever do so. Though Bajardo figures in several stories, it occurs first in “Orlando Furioso.”
The original of Rinaldo was the son of the fourth Marquis d'Este, and Malagigi was Rinaldo's cousin. The habit of drawing fictitious characters to resemble closely living persons, or well-known persons of a previous period, was very prevalent among the writers of the sixteenth century, and therefore it often is difficult to disassociate the real from the fictitious character.
This may be said too of the horses that we come upon in some of the better-known of the old-world romances.
Indeed in several stories that could be named, the famous chargers of notable princes can be recognised under several assumed names.
With the close of Henry VIII.'s reign—that is, in 1547—we come to an end of what was without doubt a period in which the horse played a more conspicuous part than it had done since the Norman Conquest. Upon ascending the throne Henry had found the condition of horse breeding in this country in rather a bad way. With others, as we have seen, he had set to work in earnest to improve, to the best of his ability, the breed of English horses, and though some of the statutes that he enacted—also some of the methods to which he had recourse in order to accomplish his object—undoubtedly were drastic, directly and indirectly they helped to bring about the improvement he desired, and for this the nation still owes him a debt of gratitude.
Henry's fondness for the chase was equalled only by the keen interest he took in the rather primitive horse racing of his period, and trustworthy chroniclers tell us that one of his most cherished ambitions was to see established in England a stud of the fastest horses the world had ever known.
When we bear in mind his fondness for horses of all kinds it seems strange that he should not have been a first-rate judge of a horse. Of knowledge of a horse's anatomy he had practically none, for which reason his ignorance in this respect has been contrasted with the knowledge that Wolsey possessed. Once, indeed, when taxed with ignorance upon this point by one of his nobles he laughed heartily and admitted the impeachment.
The order, already referred to, that horses should not be sent across the border, or sold to Scotsmen, almost completely crippled the horse-breeding industry north of the Tweed. True, some of the more powerful of the Scottish clans still owned valuable breeding stock, yet so strictly were Henry's laws enforced that the chiefs even of those clans were, with but few exceptions, unable to buy English stallions or to obtain their services at any time during Henry's reign.