“We have a large and strong breed in the more fertile and luxuriant parts of the island; and there is no country can bring a parallel to the strength and size of our horses destined for the draught, as there are instances of single horses that are able to draw the weight of three tons.”
The roads in England had been vastly improved since Holinshed described the drawing powers of a team of horses in the latter half of the sixteenth century; but we cannot doubt that the horse itself had also improved, more especially during the eighteenth century when the Great Horse was gradually becoming the servant of the farmer rather than that of the soldier. The Statutes to which reference has been made unquestionably did much to promote the building up of the Great Horse breed and establish it as national; the counties and districts enumerated in 32 of Henry VIII. quoted on p. 24 show very clearly how wide was the area over which the breed was distributed three and a half centuries ago; and it would be superfluous to lay stress upon the increase of the area over which the Shire horse has been bred since that remote day.
It would seem that the action which our forefathers sought to develop in the Great Horse was still characteristic, in some degree at least, of the Shire at the end of the last century; this engraving, published at the time, shows a horse named Elephant, whose portrait was painted in 1792 by an artist whose name is unknown. An inscription on the frame tells us that this horse was “supposed to be one of the most boney horses ever seen;” at four years old he “is said to have stood 16’2” and to have girthed 8 feet, while he measured round the knee-joint 16½ inches. He was plainly a horse of great muscular development and big bone, while his attitude suggests the activity and spirit that distinguished the War Horse from which he was descended.
From one of Garrard’s pictures now hanging in the Council Room of the Shire Horse Society, we take our engraving of this gelding which was in use at Whitehead’s Brewery in 1792, and was therefore a contemporary of the horse painted by George Morland, and of Elephant. This picture served as an illustration in Garrard’s series of engravings of British Farm Stock. It is the likeness of an excellent horse—“type perfect, flat bone, with good hocks, pasterns and feet.” Apparently this is a fen-bred horse; a chestnut with the white face and
SHIRE HORSE, ELEPHANT (about 1792).
PORTRAIT OF A SHIRE GELDING IN USE AT MESSRS. WHITBREAD’S BREWERY IN 1792; after the Picture by Geo. Garrard, A.R.A.
markings which we have, of late years, learned to associate with the stock of the Rutlandshire Champions. High prices were paid for Shires in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hambleton of Callon Moor sold to Mr. Summerland in 1778 a brown stallion for 350 guineas; and in 1791 a two-year-old stallion named Marston was sold by Mr. Handley for 500 guineas; these would be good prices for pedigree stock at the present day.