The Horse of America in His Derivation, History, and Development

by John Hankins Wallace

Mr. Markham, in his edition of 1607, then goes on in six or eight chapters acknowledging that many foals pace naturally, and to show how the foal may be trained to pace. His methods are very cruel, in many cases, and very crude throughout; but it clearly demonstrates the fact that in the sixteenth century the pace was a very general gait among English horses. In these chapters we find the toe weight first introduced as well as the trammels or hopples. The most striking fact brought out in these chapters is the discovery that more than three hundred years ago Englishmen were using the same devices to convert trotters into pacers that we are now using to convert pacers into trotters. He takes notice that Mr. Blundeville had advised those who wished to breed amblers to select a Spanish jennet or an Irish Hobbie, and objects to the former on the grounds that their paces are weak and uncertain. From this I conclude that the gait of the jennet, whatever it might have been, was not a habit of action fixed in the breed, and that its transmission was doubtful.

Mr. Markham then goes on further to explain the mechanism of the trot and the pace and incidentally introduces the rack or single-foot action, which, I think, is the first time I have found it in any English writer. He says:

“The nearer a horse taketh his limbs from the ground, the opener and evener and the shorter he treadeth, the better will be his pace, and the contrary declares much imperfection. If you buy a horse for pleasure the amble is the best, in which you observe that he moves both his legs on one side together neat with complete deliberation, for if he treads too short he is apt to stumble, if too large to cut and if shuffling or rowling he does it slovenly, and besides rids no ground. If your horse be designed for hunting, a racking pace is most expedient, which little differs from the amble, only is more active and nimble, whereby the horse observes due motion, but you must not force him too eagerly, lest being in confusion he lose all knowledge of what you design him to, and so handle his legs confusedly. The gallop is requisite for race horses.... If he gallop round and raise his fore legs he is then said to gallop strongly, but not capable of much speed, and is fitter for the war than racing.”

In 1667 the Duke of Newcastle published his famous work on the horse under the title, “A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, and Work them According to Nature and also To Perfect Nature by the Subtilty of Art which was Never Found Out, but by the Thrice Noble, High, and Puissant Prince, William Cavendish, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle, etc., etc.,” followed with twelve other titles and offices. The book was dedicated to “His Most Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second,” and is pretentious and magniloquent in its letter press and its make-up as it is in its title. In this work there is a great deal of bad English, some sense, and much nonsense, all mixed up with a strut of superiority that His Grace, no doubt, felt justified in enjoying after his long years of beggary in Antwerp. In giving the natural gaits of the horse he places the walk first, then the trot and next the amble, which he describes very minutely as follows:

“For an amble he removes both his legs of a side, as, for example, take the far side, he removes his fore leg and his hinder leg at one time, whilst the other two legs of the near side stand still; and when those legs are on the ground, which he first removed, at the same time they are upon the ground the other side, which is the nearer side, removes fore leg and hinder leg on that side, and the other legs of the far side stand still. Thus an amble removes both his legs of a side and every remove changes sides; two of a side in the air and two upon the ground at the same time. And this is a perfect amble.”

The duke seems to have been somewhat profuse in the use of words, and not very happy in his use of them, but after all we know just what he means. The description of the movement is that of the clean-cut pace, and our object in introducing it here is not only to show that the pace was then a well-known and natural gait in England, but also to show that the pace and the amble are one. In itself, the word “amble” is a better word than “pace,” for the latter is often used in referring to a rate of speed without regard to the particular gait taken by the horse, but in this country it is now universally understood to apply to the lateral motion, and it would not be wise at this day to attempt to change it. There is an undefined supposition in the mind of some people that the amble is something different from the pace, that it is a slower and less pronounced gait, and hence we are often told a given horse did not pace, but “he ambled off.” In all that we have found in the writings of the past, and in all that I have seen with my own eyes, I have not been able to discover that there is any distinction between the amble and the pace. The only distinction is not in the gait itself, but in the fact that our ancestors, four hundred years ago, used the word “amble” to express precisely the same thing that their descendants now express by the word “pace.” The only sense in which the word “amble” is used among the horsemen of this country is to describe a kind of slow, incipient pace that many horses, both runners and trotters, show when recalled for a fresh start in scoring for a race. This probably indicates, whether in the case of a runner or a trotter, that somewhere, not very far removed, there is a pacing inheritance, and this incipient amble, as it is sometimes called, comes from that inheritance. It is also possible that it may arise from the excitement of the start and the confusion consequent upon the contest.

At the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, the pacing horse of England was at the highest point of his utility and fame. He was the horse for the race course, he was the horse for the hunting field, and he was the horse for the saddle. He was able to beat King James’ Arabian, and with the few Barbs that had then been brought in, the historian informs us, he was able to hold his own. There were two tribes of his congeners, the Galloway and the Irish Hobbie, the former from Southwestern Scotland and the north of England, and the latter from Ireland. These tribes were chiefly pacers, and not a few of them were distinguished as running horses. The Bald Galloway, as he was called, was a grand representative of his tribe. He was simply a native pony with a bald face, and he was a capital runner for his day, and a number of his get were distinguished runners. True, he is tricked out in the Stud Book with a pedigree, wholly fictitious, and that nobody ever heard of for a hundred years after he was foaled, but that did not prevent his daughter Roxana, when bred to Godolphin Arabian, from producing two of his greatest sons, Lath and Cade. This topic, however, has already been considered in the chapter on the English Race Horse. The Galloways were very famous as pacers in their day, and it seems they were about the last remnants of the pacing tribes to be found in England. It seems, also, that long after they had ceased to be known on the other side their descendants were still known by the same designation in Virginia. From the history of the times, it appears that a wealthy Irish gentleman invested quite largely in shipping live stock to Virginia, and there can hardly be a doubt that his shipments included some of the Irish Hobbies.

While the opening of the seventeenth century witnessed the supremacy of the English pacer, in the uses and enjoyments of the lives of the people, during the whole course of its succeeding years he was battling for his existence, and at its close he was nearly extinct. At the close of Queen Anne’s reign there were still a few Galloways left, but in the early Georges there were no longer any survivors, and Great Britain was without a pacer in the whole realm. The extinction of a race of horses that had been the delight of the kings, queens, nobility, and gentry of a great nation for many centuries is, perhaps, without a precedent in the history of any civilized people, and the causes which produced this wonderful result are well worthy of careful study. In looking into these causes we must consider the facts as we find them.

As we have no guide, either historic, linguistic or ethnographic, by which we can certainly determine the blood of the original inhabitants of the British Isles, it is not remarkable that we should be in profound ignorance as to the blood of their horses. They were, doubtless, like their masters, of mixed origin, and through all the centuries their appearance would indicate that they have been bred and reared in a nomadic or semi-wild state, in which only the toughest and fleetest had survived. A good many years ago I met with a theory, advanced by somebody, that the original horse stock of Britain came from the North, but there were no reasons given to support it. I have no hesitation in accepting this theory, as far as it distinguishes between the North and the South, for some Northern countries produce vast numbers of natural pacers, as Russia, for instance, but I have never learned that any Southern country produced pacers. Certainly the shaft horse of the Russian drosky has been a flying pacer for generations, and great numbers of them are produced in Russia, especially in the eastern part of the empire. As these pacers are produced in a natural and semi-wild state, it must be conceded that habits of action have been inherited from their ancestors in the remote past. Historically, we know that the Phœnicians, when they ruled the trade of the world, supplied the whole of the northern coast of Africa, from Egypt to Algiers, and the southern coast of Spain, with horses, about a thousand years before the Christian era. Now, the horses of those regions are the descendants of the original stock carried there by the Phœnicians, and we know their habit of action is not that of the pacer. Hence the conclusion that the English pacer came from the North and not from the South. In speaking of the difference in the gaits of Northern and Southern horses, Mr. John Lawrence specifies the horses of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., and says: “They are round made, but with clean heads and limbs; their best pace is the trot (or pace), which indeed is the characteristic pace of the Northern, as the gallop is of the Southern horse.” Other writers speak of the trot (or pace) as common to Northern horses, but as not common to Southern horses. Now, as all Southern horses do trot, and as these writers could not fail to know that they trotted, at some rate of speed, we must construe their terms so as to be consistent with plain, common sense. There was something in the “trot” of the Northern horse altogether different from the “trot” of the Southern horse that rendered his habit of action more conspicuous, probably by his higher rate of speed, but still more probably by the peculiar mechanism of his lateral action. If we insert the word “pace” instead of the word “trot,” the meaning of these old writers becomes very plain and in harmony with other known facts. Neither does it militate against the theory that the inhabitants of Britain may have secured their original horse stock from the Phœnician merchants; but if they did, it seems quite evident that at a later date they supplemented their supply from the pacing element from the North.

At the close of the fifteenth century Polydore Virgil, an Italian ecclesiastic, came to England and wrote a descriptive history of the British Islands in Latin, which was published about 1509. Part of this history was very clumsily translated about the time the English language began to assume its present form in literature and learning. In speaking of the horses of the country, he seems to have been greatly surprised with the pacers, and treats them as a curiosity. He says: “A great company of their horses do not trot, but amble, and yet neither trotters nor amblers are strongest, as strength is not always incident to that which is most gentle or less courageous.” It will be observed that these observations were made nearly four hundred years ago, and that the surprise of the Italian was not at merely seeing a few pacers which he had never seen in his own country, but that “the great company” of English horses were pacers. As I have here given an instance showing the surprise of an Italian at finding pacers, I will follow it with another showing the surprise of an Englishman at not finding any pacers. The chaplain of the Earl of Cumberland, on his several voyages of discovery in South America and the West India Islands, about 1596, made elaborate note of what he saw and learned of the new countries which the English then visited for the first time. These notes passed into the hands of that wonderfully prolific writer, or rather compiler, Samuel Purchas, from whose fourth volume, page 1171, the following paragraph is taken: