310

HISTORY OR ENGLAND.

CHAP.

III.

and under Charles the Second it was not till the beginning ofNovember that families laid in their stock of salt provisions,then called Martinmas beef. *

The sheep and the ox of that Ijme were diminutive whencompared with the sheep and oxen which are now driven toour markets.** Our native horses, though serviceable, wereheld in small esteem, and fetched low prices. They werevalued, one with another, by the ablest of those who computedthe national wealth, at not more than fifty shillings each.Foreign breeds were greatly preferred. Spanish j ennets wereregarded as the finest chargers, and were imported for pur-poses of pageantry and war. The coaches of the aristocracywere drawn by grey Flemish mares, which trotted, as it wasthought, with a peculiar grace, and endured better than anycattle reared in our island the work of dragging a ponderousequipage over the rugged pavement of London. Neither themodern dray horse nor the modern race horse was thenknown. At a much later period the ancestors of the giganticquadrupeds, which all foreigners now class among the chiefwonders of London, were brought from the marshes ofWalcheren; the ancestors of Childers and Eclipse from thesands of Arabia. Already, however, there was among our no-bility and gentry a passion for the amusements of the turf.The importance of improving our studs by an infusion of newblood was strongly felt; and with this view a considerablenumber of barbs had lately been brought into the country.Two men whose authority on such subjects was held in greatesteem, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir John Fenwick, pro-nounced that the meanest hack ever imported from Tangierwould produce a finer progeny than could be expected fromthe best sire of our native breed. They would not readily

* See the Almanacks of 1684 and 1685.

** See Mr. M'Culloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire,part III. chap. i. sec. 6.