THE TURF.
It is singular that no portion of our domestic annals should be so obscure as that which relates to the early history of our first of National Sports. In the remotest ages of civilization (so far at least as any existing records carry us back), a taste for horse-racing was fostered and promoted as a social engine peculiarly adapted to rural and political purposes. The Greeks—the wisest and most polished people that the world has ever seen—carried their estimate of its importance so far, that their chiefs not only took part in the sports of the hippodrome, but acted as officials in the regulation of its details. Philip of Macedon thought it not unbecoming the imperial crown, that he who wore it should discharge the office of judge at the Pythian Games, and his son repaid in gold every line written by Pindar in honour of the chaplet of wild olive.[78] The verse of Pindar, and the prose of Pausanias, have immortalized the names of Olympia and Elis. The latter has left us the minutest particulars of the economy of racing in his day. He describes the Olympian Hippodrome at Elis, and all its gorgeous display of splendid embellishments and ingenious machinery, with a care and prodigality of narrative that give assurance of the importance which attached to the matter delineated. Of the perfection to which, in that era, the science of the course had attained, we need no better proof than the classification observed in the Olympic Games—where horses were matched according to their ages, and prizes instituted for races between mares only (called Calpe). It is needless, however, to encumber our subject with ancient lore, by continuing these classic references. Enough has, perhaps, been already adduced to establish this point—that we possess more knowledge of the condition of racing three thousand years ago, than we do of the state it was in three hundred years since in our native land.
[78] The crown given to the victors in the Olympic games.
But because we are in possession of such scanty materials, it by no means follows that the little we do know should be withheld. The reader will therefore have the courtesy to look back with me to the tenth century, and I promise to bring him again into the nineteenth with all convenient speed. As far back, then, as the reign of Athelstan (925), we read that a present of “running horses” was sent to that monarch from France, the gift of Hugh Capet. As nothing however is known of the character of those animals, we will pass on to the reign of William, which affords better data. At that period a nobleman (the Earl of Shrewsbury) appears to have imported several Spanish horses for his own use. Now, as the Moors had had a footing in Spain for several centuries prior to the Norman conquest, there is little doubt that the blood of the Barb was, in the eleventh century, extensively diffused through that country, and that a highly improved breed of the horse was at the time extant there. Here we have a reasonable era from which to date an amelioration of the indigenous race in our island. A little more than a century later, in the reign of Henry the Second (1154), we come to, as far as I have been able to discover, the earliest mention of racing to be found in our national records. This refers to a barbarous sort of running practised upon the plain now occupied by Smithfield, which does not appear to have been subjected to any regulations of time or method. Smithfield, indeed, was then the great horse-mart, and very probably the contests, exalted by their chronicler (Fitzstephen the monk), to Olympic honours, were nothing more than exhibitions, by rival horse-croupers, of the mettle, speed, and action of their respective “palfreys, hackneys, and charging-steeds.”
Still, that horse-racing was about this time a popular pastime, and one in which the nobles of the land were wont to take pride, is fully established by the allusions to it that abound in the many metrical legends, yet in existence, composed in honour of Richard of the Lion Heart. These preserve the names of the coursers, and speak of them as being valued at sums that, allowing for the difference in the worth of money, quite exceed any prices known in our day. The domestic troubles which marked the reign of John, and the succession of wars in which we were subsequently engaged, probably interrupted the progress of this sport materially—at all events, we do not find any of our sovereigns giving their countenance to it from Richard to the bluff Harry. Henry VIII. was constitutionally disposed for manly occupations and amusements—of his moral tendencies we speak not. We have it on the authority of Challoner that he was much disposed to improve the breed of horses, for which purpose he imported various descriptions from Spain and Turkey. Fortune, too, enabled his daughter Elizabeth to do much for our native breed; the destruction of the Spanish Armada having supplied us with many barbs and Spanish-bred horses, their descendants, found in the vessels of that fleet which fell into the hands of Lord Howard of Effingham.
We now come to her successor, James I.,[79] who must be considered as the founder of legitimate racing in this country. He introduced the first Arab into England of which we have any knowledge—that purchased by Mr. Markham, and known as the Markham Arabian. The training system, which has now reached such perfection, was then practised in its various divisions of physic, work, sweating, and the etcetera of stable economy; and the weight to be carried for public prizes arranged by authority. The Roodee, at Chester, was an established course in this reign, one of the prizes being a silver bell, of the value of ten pounds or thereabouts, run for in five-mile heats. Similar prizes were also given at Theobald’s on Enfield Chase, at Croydon, and Gatherly, in Yorkshire, whence the popular term “bearing the bell,” no doubt, had its origin. His unfortunate son Charles I. had little opportunity of forwarding the social concerns of himself or others. In his reign, however, the first races on record at Newmarket were held, and, by a singular fatality, to Newmarket was he borne a prisoner to the parliamentary forces. The “civil dudgeon” of the Protectorate of course was not friendly to the amusements of the turf, but, though suspended, they were not lost sight of. Mr. Place, the stud-master to Oliver Cromwell, imported the celebrated horse known as the White Turk. He was also the owner of some very capital mares, one of which, during the search after Cromwell’s property at the Restoration, he saved from destruction by hiding in a vault, whence she took the name of the “Coffin Mare.”