“And I wot not how that kind of beast [speaking of cattle] hath specially a liking to these Southerly parts of the world above their horses, none of which I have seen by much so tall and goodly as ordinarily they are in England; they were well made and well mettled, and good store there are of them, but methinks there are many things wanting in them which are ordinary in our English light horses. They are all trotters, nor do I remember that I have seen above one ambler, and that was a little fiddling nag. But it may be if there were better breeders they would have better and more useful increase, yet they are good enough for hackneys, to which use only almost they are employed.”
The surprise of the Englishman at finding no pacers in South America seems to have been as great as that of the Italian at finding so many of them in England, one hundred years earlier. These horses were strictly Spanish, and probably were descended from those brought from Palos in 1493 by Columbus, the first horses that ever crossed the Atlantic. The “one little fiddling nag” that showed some kind of a pacing gait may have been of English blood and captured from some English expedition, several of which were unfortunate; or his failure to trot may have been the result of an injury. It should not be forgotten that in that period every sea captain was out for what he could capture, and this was especially the case as between the English and the Spanish. These are the outlines of the principal points of evidence that the pacing habit of action came from the North and not from the South. That there were pacers in both Greece and Rome before the Christian era, and perhaps later, there can be no doubt, for they were both overrun and devastated again and again by the hordes of Northern Barbarians, bringing their flocks and their herds and their families, as well as their horses, with them.
This question naturally suggests itself here: “If the English pacer had been the popular favorite of the English people for so many centuries, how did it come that he and his habit of action had been so completely wiped out in one century, the seventeenth?” This question might be answered in very few words, by saying the people thought they were getting something better to put in his place. In reaching this conclusion I will not pretend to say the judgment of the people was not right, that is, if they exercised any judgment in the case. “Jamie the Scotsman” when on the throne set the fashion in the direction of foreign blood by paying the enormous price of five hundred pounds for the Markham Arabian. The Duke of Newcastle, when he was young, had personally seen this horse, and while he thought he was a true Arabian, he described him as a very ordinary horse in his size and form, and an entire failure as a race horse. It seems that any average native pacer could outrun him, but he carried the badge of royalty, and that was sufficient to make him fashionable, as he was not only the king’s horse, but was himself a royal Arabian. The weak place in the character of James I., in addition to his intolerable pedantry, was his inordinate ambition to be considered the wisest sovereign who ever sat upon a throne since the days of Solomon. His courtiers, nobility, and all who approached him understood his weakness, and a little quiet praise of the great superiority of the Arabian blood in the horse, over all other breeds and varieties, was always grateful to the monarch, for he was the original discoverer and patentee of that blood. Then and there, in order to praise the wisdom of a foolish king, a foolish fashion grew into a foolish notion that has afflicted all England from that day to this. No humbug of either ancient or modern times has had so long a run and so wide a range as the miserable fallacy “that all excellence in the horse comes from the Arabian.” Notwithstanding the thousand tests that have been made and the thousand failures that have invariably followed, from the time of King James to the present day, there are still men writing books and magazine articles on the assumption that “all excellence in the horse comes from the Arabian,” without ever having devoted an honest hour to the study of the question as to whether this is a truth or a fallacy. This craze for Arabian blood was the primary cause of the extinction of the pacer, and this craze was so strong in its influence that when a foreign horse was brought in, no difference from what country, if he were of the lighter type he was called an Arabian and so advertised in order to secure the patronage of breeders. Horses brought from the African coast were invariably classed as Arabians, notwithstanding they and their ancestors were in Africa more than a thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia; and the same may be said of Spain. But as this line of inquiry has already been considered in another chapter, I will get back to the immediate topic.
The process of breeding out the pacer did not commence in real earnest until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Stuarts regained the sovereignty of Great Britain in the person of Charles II. Released from the restraints of Puritan rule, the Restoration brought with it a carnival of immorality and vice, for the court and the courtiers set the fashion and the people followed. As the breeding interest of the period of which we now speak has already been considered in the chapter on the English Race Horse, I will not further enlarge upon it. The light, or running and hunting, horses of England of that day were not all pacers, but they were all of the same type and the same blood, hence when I speak of the pacers I include their congeners. They were small—less than fourteen hands high—and not generally handsome and attractive. In general utility they were ahead of the importations, and doubtless many of them could run as fast and as far as the foreign horses, but the foreigners had the advantage in size, especially the Turks and the Neapolitans; besides this, they were more uniformly handsome and attractive in their form and carriage. It is also probable that the outcross from the strangers to invigorate the stock was needed and resulted in the increase of the size of the progeny. This latter suggestion is inferential and has been sustained by many similar experiences, but without this as a start it would be exceedingly difficult to account for the rapid increase in the height of the English race horse. It is certainly true that the chief aim of the English breeder of that day was to increase the size, without losing symmetry and style, and if he found that foreign upon native blood gave him a start in that direction, he was wise in the commingling. Another consideration, growing out of the rural economy of the people, doubtless had a very wide influence in the direction of wiping out the pacer, in this period of transition. Long journeys in the saddle became less frequent, good roads began to appear and vehicles on wheels took the place of the saddler and the pack horse. To get greater weight and strength for this service, recourse was had to crosses with the larger and courser breeds, and through these channels have come the giants and the pigmies of the modern race course. Under the changed conditions of travel and transportation it is not remarkable that the people should have been willing to see their long-time favorites disappear, for it is known to every man of experience that the pace is not a desirable gait for harness work. No doubt the pacer is as strong as the trotter of the same size and make-up, but in his smooth, gliding motion there is a suggestion of weakness communicated to his driver that is never suggested by the bold, bounding trotter. The antagonism between the pacers and the new horses of Saracenic origin was irreconcilable and one or the other had to yield. As the management of the contest was in the hands of the master the result could be easily foreseen, for if one cross failed, another followed and then another, till the Saracenic blood was completely dominant in eliminating the lateral and implanting the diagonal action in its stead.
As no home-bred pacer, of any type or breed, has been seen in England for nearly two hundred years, it is not remarkable that Englishmen of good average intelligence, for the past two or three generations, have lived and died supposing they knew all about horses, and yet did not know there had ever been such a thing in England as a breed of pacing horses. When, some eighteen or twenty years ago, I called the attention of Mr. H. F. Euren, compiler of the Hackney Stud Book, to the early English pacers as a most inviting field in which to look for the origin of the “Norfolk Trotters,” he was surprised to learn that such horses had existed in England, but he went to work and gathered up many important facts that appear in the first volume of the Hackney compilation. Many of these facts, but in less detail, had already appeared, from time to time, in Wallace’s Monthly, but Mr. Euren’s was the first modern English publication to place them before English readers. From this prompting, Mr. Euren did well, but we must go back a little to see how this subject was treated by English writers of horse books, who wrote without any promptings from this side.
Mr. William Youatt was a voluminous writer on domestic animals, and at one time was looked upon as the highest authority on the horse, both in England and in this country. He seems to have been a practitioner of veterinary surgery, and from the number of volumes which he published successfully, he must have been a man of ability and education. There can be no question that he knew a great deal—quite too much to know anything well. The first edition of his work on the horse was published in 1831, and soon after its appearance several publishing houses in this country seized upon it as very valuable, and each one of them soon had an edition of it before the public. It purports to have been written at the instance of “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” This declaration was a good thing, in a commercial view, and no doubt it did much in extending the circulation of the book. Without tarrying to note several minor historical blunders, I will go direct to one relating to the gait of the horse, which is now under consideration. In his fourth edition, page 535, he incidentally discusses the mechanism of the pace, and after speaking of the Elgin Marbles, to which I have referred at the beginning of this chapter, and after conceding that two of the four horses are not galloping but pacing, he says:
“Whether this was then the mode of trotting or not, it is certain that it is never seen to occur in nature in the present day; and, indeed, it appears quite inconsistent with the necessary balancing of the body, and was, therefore, more probably an error of the artist.”
This remark is simply amazing in an author who pretentiously undertakes to instruct his countrymen in the history of the horse when he knows nothing about that history. If he had gone back only twenty-two years, “Old John Lawrence,” in his splendid quarto, would have told him about the pacer. If he had gone back one hundred and sixty years, the Duke of Newcastle would have explained to him the complete and perfect mechanism of the pacing gait. If he had gone still further back and examined Gervaise Markham, Blundeville, Polydore Virgil, and Fitz Stephen the Monk, of the twelfth century, any and all of them would have explained to him the pacing habit of action and shown him that for many successive centuries the pacing horse was the popular and fashionable horse of the realm. If Mr. Youatt had lived to see John R. Gentry pace a mile in 2:00½; Robert J. in 2:01½, and dozens of others in less than 2:10, he might have changed his mind and concluded that it was possible, after all, for a horse to travel at the lateral gait without toppling over. From Mr. Youatt and a few other modern English authors, most of our American writers on the horse have derived what little mental pabulum they thought they needed, and thus an error at the fountain has been carried into all the ramifications of our horse literature. Only two or three years ago a very intelligent gentleman, who had attained great eminence as a veterinary surgeon, especially for his knowledge and treatment of the horse’s foot, seriously and in good faith stoutly maintained that the pacing habit of action was merely the result of an abnormal condition of the foot, and that all pacers would trot just as soon as their feet were put in the right shape. We must not laugh at this wild notion, for it is really no worse than Mr. Youatt’s doubting whether it was possible for a horse to balance himself at the lateral motion. Neither gentleman seemed to know anything about the fact that it was a matter of inheritance, and that the lateral habit of action had come down by transmission through all the generations for a period of more than two thousand years. It is hardly necessary to say that the gentleman who was so confident that the pace was merely the result of the abnormal condition of the feet brought his notions about the pacer from across the water. He was an Anglo-American, and could make a pacer into a trotter in a jiffy, by using the paring-knife. He was an intelligent man and a skillful veterinarian, but there were no pacers in England and there should be none here. Toward the close of the chapter on The Colonial Horses of Virginia, will be found the observations of an English tourist in 1795-96 who is very certain that there is some mistake about the pacer, and will not be convinced there are any, unless they are artificially created. Having now completed what I had to say about the old English pacer, it is next in order to consider his descendants in this country and the relations they bear to the American trotter.