THE FAMOUS WELSH STALLION GREYLIGHT
What in the history of the Welsh pony will explain this union of hardy wilderness qualities with a form as perfect as that produced in Arabia after two thousand years of jealous breeding? I asked the question of dealers and breeders and oldest inhabitants. I went to the hills to ask it of the pony himself; and to the British Museum to ask it of relics and tomes; following my "Why" to Arabia, to Libya, and back to the "elephant bed" of the Brighton Pleistocene, where I stopped; for there, it seemed to me, the Welsh pony began, so far as research permits him to have a beginning. To follow him beyond neolithic man into the paleozoic ages, when he was merely an old father Hipparion puzzling as to whether he should remain in his bog and unenterprisingly evolve into a tapir, or go into deeper and wetter regions and be a spiritless rhino, or step bravely onto dry land, turn his five flabby toes into a fleet and solid hoof, and become the noble equus caballus,—to pursue him thus far would keep me wandering in a region of timorous conjecture where he was neither Welsh nor a pony. So I begin with the Brighton deposit, where was found the skeleton of a small horse supposed, without successful contradiction, to be an ancestor of a species which Professor James Cossar Ewart has named the Pony Celticus, and which once overspread Western Europe. The tribe was gradually driven to the wall, meaning in this case the sea, and their descendants, certainly considerably modified, are even now to be found in the outer Hebrides and the Faroes. They lingered long in North Wales, that little nest of undisturbed peaks, and it was with the descendants of this species that the Romans mated their military animals and produced the packhorse so necessary in rugged West Britain. This packhorse was not the heavy creature that his name suggests, but a sure-footed, light-bodied animal, capable, however burdened, of going nimbly up and down the hills. In East Britain and the midlands there was no incentive to breed him, as the numerous heavier types sprung from the Forest horse were more serviceable there. But in Wales at this time we have the first authentic infiltration of alien blood, and this blood was undoubtedly of the Orient. The Romans, we know, were patrons of the East in matters equestrian, and in their files of leadership there could have been "no lack
Of a proud rider on so proud a back"
as that of the Arabian courser. But of more importance than such occasionally distinguished pedigrees was the fact that their army horses in general were Gallic; and the Gallic horse was of Eastern origin. So the Romans left to Wales not only a heritage of legendary stone, such as the old camp, Y Caer Bannau, which is shown you in Breconshire, but a far more valued legacy which is yet animate in the veins of the Welsh pony. The invaders were busy in Wales for four hundred years, during which time the packhorse became a domestic type, and gradually the acclimated Arabian blood crept up the hills and among the wildest herds—a slow infusion that left the pony still a pony, retaining all the hardihood that made life possible on the scanty-herbaged peaks.
A FULL BROTHER OF DAYLIGHT
Taken At Llandilo
The ponies of the southern moors, no doubt, were also marked by this early cross; and they, too, still held at the time something of their heritage from the Pony Celticus; but their position had left them liable to mixture with the Forest Horse, or what represented him in the low-countries, and it was by just that mixture that the packhorse of Wessex, which was the "gentleman's horse" in Devon down to two hundred years ago, became different from that of Wales. It is very unlikely that the Forest Horse was ever in the Cambrian hills, and the active little Pony Celticus on his remote slopes escaped any alliance with that phlegmatic blood. For this reason, in the Welsh descendants of the species, the Eastern horse found a comparatively unmixed strain which was probably as old as his own. The frequent absence of ergots and callossities (those vestigial signs, near knee and fetlock, of vanished digits) would indicate in the Pony Celticus a development as ancient at least as that of the Libyan ancestors of the Arabian horse. Professor Ridgeway, of Cambridge University, thinks that he may even be a related northern branch of the horse of Libya, and that both the North African species and the Pony Celticus may claim the bones of the small horse found in the Brighton Pleistocene as ancestral. If this be true, then when Roman met Welsh in equine society, the two oldest breeds of the world were united, and, as you know, the older the breed the more ineradicable are its characteristics. If originally congeneric, that too would be in favor of the type produced by such a union, and may be a key to the persistence and potency of the Welsh mountain stock. In the Pony Celticus, wherever his modified posterity is least changed, the dorsal and lateral marks indicating equatorial origin are reproduced with little difficulty.
LONGMYND FAVORITE AND HER FOAL MANOMET WHITE STAR
The mare was imported in 1911 and shows her remarkable breeding in every way
And we have another reason for suspecting the pony ancestor of our Welsh variety to be of North African kinship rather than allied to the Asiatic horse, with large ergots and heavy callossities, which came by the northern route into Scandinavia. This horse, by tradition and record, was of an intractable disposition. It was in upper Asia that the bit originated, while the Libyan horse was of so gentle a nature that his descendant is yet ridden on the Arabian plains with no more guidance than can be given by a simple noseband. Of this horse Mohammed could say, "God made him of a condensation of the southwest wind"; the consummate simile for fleetness and mildness. But I don't accuse the Asiatic horse of being the first sinner. Though the callossities are against his being as old as the Libyan, he may have originally possessed as gentle a temper, which became lost through association with brutal races (see Herodotus) who insisted on being masters instead of friends. The horse resents mastery, as you know, and resentment is peculiarly poisonous to his character. Make him a comrade or nothing. His ascent may have been more dignified than our own, and in one way at least he prehistorically showed more gentle intentions; 'twas we who kept the claws! But while I leave the question of responsibility open in the case of the Asiatic horse, I am glad to think that our pony did not come by way of his blood, whether corrupted by man or tainted with original sin. Certain it is that the Pony Celticus possessed a docility and fair-mindedness that indicated a blameless descent, and there is no evidence that his Welsh offspring were ever handled by man in a way to warp his character. It is true that in his wild state, after the sheep-dog was introduced into Wales (which was comparatively late), the pony was much harried, and driven to the more barren regions; but whenever brought down to the farms he was at once admitted to family privileges that gave him confidence in humanity. As early as the days of the good king, Howell Dha, laws for his care and protection were recorded, and these seem to have been but a codification of rules that had long been in general practice. We read that if a man borrowed a horse and fretted the hair on his back he was to pay a fine to the owner; but such a law as we find among the ancient statutes of Ireland, "Quhasoever sall be tryet or fund to stow or cut ane uther man's hors tail sall be pwunschit as a thief," seems to have had no call for existence in Welshland.