THE HORSE IN HISTORY.*
Mu. BASIL Tozun writes as one who fears to be too late to record the influence of the horse on history at the striking moment when that influence ceases. He is enough of a pessimist, in fact, to think that the moment has arrived. We agree that the motor is bound to replace the horse speedily for all purposes of traffic in towns, and we do not hesitate to say that we are glad of it. No lover of horses likes to see them straining themselves and falling on slippery roads. We remember that an American writer was much impressed by the accomplished tricks of London horses in keeping their balance ; he remarked, for instance, that on a muddy day horses might be seen tobogganning most of the way down the greasy hill from St. Paul's to Ludgate Circus and preserving a steady eye through it all. Although that was an amiable exaggeration, the pity of a. horse's labour in towns oppresses most of us, and we look forward complacently • The Horse in History. By Basil Tozer. With S5 ITluetrationfit London : Methuen and Co. [6..]
to the day when mechanical traffic shall have replaced it. Let us even hope that in due course the streets will be rendered thereby quieter and cleaner. But we cannot agree with Mr. Tozer that in thirty years horses will be used in Britain only for hunting and racing. Driving, we hope and believe, will always remain a British sport; the type of man who would rather have his hand on the reins of a mettlesome horse than on the levers of a powerful car is not likely to die out. Then there will be the use of horses for agricultural purposes. We know our farmers well enough to think that if the horse be only regarded as an agricultural implement, it will not be replaced very quickly by something more scientific. The greatest difficulty ahead of us is the supply of horses for the Army. Statistics show that the number of horses foaled falls steadily every year. The point will soon be reached when the Government will have to consider the matter ; and we need only say that if horses are still necessary for war, as they assuredly will be for a long time to come, some way will be discovered for ensuring the supply. After all, horses can be bred to meet a demand as easily as guns can be manufactured and ships built. In our opinion, therefore, Mr. Tozer errs in his pessimism. But we are none the less under an obligation to his passing frame of mind, because it caused him to write this book. It may be described as a moat industrious work of reference. It might have been much more impressively written, for the subject is a great one ; but it was well worth doing, and Mr. Tozer is to be congratulated on his idea. Sir Walter Gilbey, it is true, has written about ancient and modern horses, and Professor W. Ridgeway has written learnedly on the origin of the domestic horse ; but Frenchmen and Germans have produced two historical books to our one. There is plenty of room for this one, with all its lack of skill.
Before 1000 B.C. probably no people except the Libyans rode on horseback, although chariots go back beyond history. When Homer wrote, however, horsemanship was familiar enough. The horses ofthe Achaeans are said to have been dun-coloured (iav66) or dapple (l3cuNick), unless the word taveds was used, as Mr. Tozer does not forget to suggest, in its well-known sense of gold-coloured. In that case it was perhaps a lyrically inaccurate epithet. Or possibly it was only a comprehensive epithet, for the Homeric Greeks did not exactly differentiate colours. It is perhaps useless to speculate, but we believe that East 6s when used of a horse was something brighter than dun-coloured. It is not till we come to Xenophon— although Simo wrote before him—that we find the horse treated scientifically. No man could have written as he did unless he was a good horseman, a good horsemaster, and a lover of horses. Xenophoh's definition of the desirable points in a horse still bolds in principle, though we should express ourselves rather differently. " The neck of the horse," he says, "as it proceeds from the chest, should not fall forward, like that of a boar, but should grow upward, like that of a cock, and should have an easy motion at the parts about the arch." As Mr. Tozer justly says, all the horses on the Parthenon frieze have heads like cocks. It is often asked how the ancients, who had not stirrups, used to mount. There were three ways : by vaulting, by vaulting with the help of a pole or spear, and by making the horse crouch. There was yet a fourth way, but much less common exoept in Persia, which was to mount by stepping on a slave's back. Sapor when he had conquered the Emperor Valerian mounted thus on Valerian's back. The cult of the horse in Greece set the model which has been imitated in modern countries, and every reader of Aristophanes remembers his satire at the expense of horse-racing and gambling. In The Clouds Strepsiades exclaims of his son Pheidippidee (whose name Mr. Tozer misspells) : " For what with debts and duns and stablekeepers' bills which this fine spark heaps on my back, I lie awake the whilst; and what cares he but to coil up his locks, ride, drive his horses, and dream of them all night."
Alexander the Great's horse, the famous Bucephalus,' would not have satisfied Xenophon, if we may judge from the meaning of its name (" bull-headed ") ; but Alexander at least understood the invaluable secret of setting up sympathy between himself and his animal, unless Plutarch misleads us more than usual. Virgil gives us in the " Georgics" a noble description of a well-looking horse, and the modern could add little to it as an appreciation of the right points.
The breeding of horses has depended so much on the
intervention of man that it is quite possible that we have been breeding away from the early type not only in appearance, but also in character. We quote Mr. Tozer's words on this very interesting question
"The physical strength of horses in the very early centuries must have been prodigious. If the details we have of the way in which the early war chariots were constructed are accurate, then at least three of our twentieth-century horses would be needed to accomplish the work, one might almost say perform the feats, that a pair of horses could do twelve or thirteen centuries ago. Even as late in the world's history as the period of Julius Caesar the staying power of some of the war horses in Britain was amazing. Men who have been in action in our own times will tell you that a wounded horse gives in at once, that he seems to have no heart. Yet in Julius Caesar's time, and in earlier epochs, an arrow or a javelin wound, if not too severe, apparently had the effect of setting a war horse upon his mettle rather than of causing him to give in. Can the horse's temperament, then, have changed within the last ten centuries? Is he a less courageous animal than he was ? Is he more highly strung, less intelligent, less strong physically, and of a weaker constitution ? Such problems have to do with the history of the horse rather than with the horse in history, and, so far as I am aware, they have not as yet been solved."
We fancy that in ancient and mediaeval times convention attributed more ferocity, and even more nobility, to the horse than be possessed. In Leonardo da Vinci's battle frieze, for example (part of which has been preserved, and might very well have been reproduced among the illustrations of this book), the horses were represented as tearing one another with their teeth, and yet we know well enough that that was but a painter's trick to heighten the effect of the human fury. We must refer the reader to the book for the gradual rise in importance of the horse in England,—the military introduction of it by the Normans, the encouragement of horse-racing by Richard I., the discouragement of it under the Commonwealth, the famous ride of Wolsey from London to Paris (which brought him back before the King even guessed that he had started), and so on. Let us turn rather to the determining factor in the breeding of racehorses,—the
introduction of Arab blood. Mr. T. A. Cook in his History of the Turf has said that the finest breed of horse ever pro- duced was the result of the cross between the pure Arab and the English animal as it was towards the close of the seven-
teenth century. Some experts, who have pretty good reason for their faith, tell us that all modern racehorses can be traced back to one of the three famous Arab sires,—' Byerley Turk,' the Darley Arabian,' and the Godolphin Arabian.' At all events, famous winners mostly belong to one family, forming a kind of close corporation. Mr. Cook tells us that out of a hundred and twenty-seven races for the Derby, the descendants of ' Eclipse' have won no fewer than eighty-two times. Our last quotation must give a specimen of Mr. Tozer's confident
interpretations of the influence of the horse on the turning- points of history:— "Coming to what has been termed the Arabian period, history proves beyond all doubt that the spread of Islam was due partly to the Arabians having at about that time become possessors of many horses. Indeed had the Franks not owned a great number of exceptionally fine horses by about the beginning of the sixth century A.D., who can say that the Saracens would not, after the year 732 A.D., have vanquished the larger portion of Western Europe ? Again, what chance of victory would the Normans have had at Hastings had Harold's forces been mounted on horse- back ? For when we remember the valiant way that Harold and his men fought it is easy to believe that the Normans would have been completely routed had they too been fighting on foot and not on horseback, in which case the entire history of this country would very likely have been different."
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