CHAPTER VI.
À LA CAVALIÈRE.
Much of late has been said and written against and in favour of cross-saddle riding for girls and women. A lady at my elbow has just given her emphatic opinion that it is neither graceful nor modest, and she predicts that the system will never come into vogue or meet the approval of the finer sense of women. The riding-masters are against it to a man, and so are the saddlers, who argue that the change would somewhat militate against their business. We are very conservative in our ideas, and perhaps it is asking too much of women, who have ridden and hunted in a habit on a side-saddle for years, to all at once, or at all, accept and patronize the innovation.
Travellers notice the fact that women never ride sideways, as with us, but astride, like men. It has generally been supposed that the custom now prevailing in Europe and North America dates back only to the Middle Ages. As a fact, the side-saddle was first introduced here by Anne of Luxembourg, Richard II.'s queen, and so far back as 1341, according to Knighton, it had become general among ladies of first rank at tournaments and in public. But the system must have prevailed to some extent in far earlier times, for Rawlinson discovered a picture of two Assyrian women riding sideways on a mule, and on Etruscan vases, older than the founding of Rome, are several representations of women so seated.
There were no horses in Mexico prior to the advent of the Spaniards; indeed, from the progeny of one Andalusian horse and mare, shipped to Paraguay in 1535, were bred those countless mobs which have since spread over the whole southern part of the new Western world, and, passing the Isthmus of Darien or Panama, have wandered into North America. In the great plains of South America, where the inhabitants, all more or less with Spanish blood pulsing through their veins, may be said to live on horseback, it is strange that, without some good cause, the side-saddle should have been discarded for the "Pisana" fashion—the lady riding in front of her cavalier. In Edward I.'s time our fair dames jogged behind their lords, or behind somebody else's lords, in the conventional pillion: then
"This riding double was no crime
In the first good Edward's time;
No brave man thought himself disgraced
By two fair arms around his waist;