Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 282

A rum sort of world, that of the bloodstock breeder. Some years ago I listened to a group of Thoroughbred owners discussing bloodlines, and as the port circulated for the second time I made so bold as to raise the issue of meiosis and gene segregation. My interjection was greeted with a stony silence until one particularly choleric old gentleman snorted that while it was all very well to talk about meiosis in respect of mice (he emphasized the world contemptuously), horses were different! And it was ever thus. Noble beast or noble brute; the horse has long been perceived as being somehow superior to other creatures and therefore deserving of special treatment. If ignorance of and indifference to the basic facts of biology may pervade some sectors of today’s bloodstock world, students of the history of the Thoroughbred horse have to wade through a miasma of lies, half truths and terminological confusion. It is a tale of mercantilist thuggery, thieving, appropriation, imperialist bullying, danger, huge expense, and excitement. But however controversial the precise genetic origins of the Thoroughbred, the creation of the breed itself was a very British affair, leaving in its wake a powerful and profound influence not only on art and connoisseurship, but upon the way in which the British, or more particularly the English, saw themselves.

Noble brutes, which is at once scholarly, original and provocative, reviews in some detail the changes in English riding styles and training methods as the manege gave way to the growing popularity of racing and hunting from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. As time went by, training methods came increasingly to emphasize the notion of partnership rather than forced submission which Professor Landry sees as a metaphor for the governance of the post-Restoration state. Moreover, as racing and hunting demanded free forward movement and all that that implied for the riding seat, saddle and bridle, another powerful metaphor was forged. Freed from the shackles of manège riding with its ‘foreign’ show and trickery, the Englishman sped across country, controlling his mount with the lightest of hand. Consonant with contemporary developments in landscape gardening which emphasized the natural against the formal, free forward movement of horse and man stood for the liberty of the English gentleman and even, perhaps, for the flexibility of the constitution. The paintings of John Wootton, Sawtrey Gilpin and the great international masterpieces of Stubbs, not only celebrate the great horses of the day, but carry about them powerful political messages.

To achieve the necessary combination of speed, elegance and strength required for hard riding across country, the English needed horses of rather better stamp than the somewhat lumpen seventeenth-century native animals. Since the time of the Crusaders they had admired the desert Arab horse, which had originated in the Central Asian steppe and had been developed in various shapes and forms in the sprawling reaches of the decaying Ottoman Empire. These fast, thrifty and biddable animals had long been important elements in gift exchange, but between 1650 and 1750, numerous stallions were purchased or purloined by English merchants engaged in the Levant trade and shipped to the British Isles and the stables of aristocratic horse breeders. A dodgy and dangerous business, often carried out under the threat of arrest by the Ottoman authorities, the accumulation of oriental stallions allowed for the eventual creation of the Thoroughbred. Precisely how this was achieved is a matter of some controversy and is discussed in detail by Professor Landry, but the fact remains that the English Thoroughbred, that ultimate symbol of authority and power, was forged essentially from alien elements. What was to become an imperial icon and a symbol of British splendour arose from a blending of the blood of a bunch of naturalized foreigners! The lordly representatives of a fledgling empire had appropriated animals from an ancient and decaying Oriental empire to create their own icon and, incidentally, to found an entirely new and original school of landscape and animal painting.

The saga of the creation of the English Thoroughbred is underpinned by a single glorious irony. For all the talk of the ‘purity’ of the desert Arab horses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of the sacrosanct nature of bloodlines today, the Darley Arabian was probably one of the few genuine desert horses to have found his way to these shores, and even his ancestry was known only to a few Bedouins sipping tea in their tents. The fact was that the many stallions shipped from the various ports in Ottoman territory were just as likely to have been bred from Turkic steppe bloodlines in Anatolia as from the deserts of Syria and elsewhere. No one really knew the true origin of many, if not most, of the early stallions in what was to become the General Stud Book. Molecular biology might eventually settle the issue, but, for the present, the origin, or even the breed, of the root mares in the Stud Book is shrouded in obscurity. It could even be argued (perish the thought!) that English Thoroughbred horses, rather like the English themselves, are a mongrel race with the good fortune to have been nourished on the wholesome fare of this happy isle!

Donna Landry has produced a brilliant book. It is beautifully written, mercifully free of all but the slightest whiff of cultural theory, and includes a valuable critical essay on source material. She can occasionally be accused of stretching a metaphor too far, and I get slightly worried when she celebrates the ‘rationality’ of horses. I spend part of each day in the company of horses – Thoroughbreds to boot – and I am less than impressed by their rationality or, for that matter by ‘… a confidence in their own superiority, founded on myths of blood’. But none of this matters. Professor Landry has given us a fine contribution to equine, imperial and cultural history.