Regency Travel Part 1 - the Horses by Victoria Chatham

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I was once asked if I could write a story without horses in it. As I write historical, and specifically Regency, romance, the answer was a resounding no. From the smallest child’s pony to the largest draught horse, the horse was a necessity of life.

Just as now, a horse was an expense that many families could not afford. To this end, job masters hired out horses at twelve guineas a month, a carriage and pair plus a coachman for about forty guineas a month. Those that could afford their own horses would pay anything from one-hundred guineas for a well-trained carriage horse up to one-thousand guineas for a matched pair and four-thousand or more for a team of four.

The best carriage horses were good to look at, had showy action, were even-tempered and sound. Any reader of Regency romance may be familiar with Georgette Heyer’s description of ‘sixteen-mile-an-hour tits’ in several of her novels. Basically, this is a horse that can cover sixteen miles in an hour. Thanks to an edict by Henry VIII requiring the wealthy to keep good trotting stallions, which made better war horses capable of carrying a heavy man, the likes of the Yorkshire and Norfolk Trotters had been around for centuries.

In the fourteenth century, the Norfolk Trotter influenced the development of the Hackney horse in that county. Great flexion in their knees and hocks produced an exaggerated high, showy and very popular leg action.

Hackney horse Killearn Magician foaled in 1925

The Cleveland Bay, developed in the Cleveland area of Yorkshire in the seventeenth century was a sturdy well-muscled horse and, as its name suggests, always bay in colour. A typical bay will have a black mane and tail, and black legs which made them very popular amongst the driving fraternity for being the same colour and height.

Cleveland Bay

But then along came Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam, who developed a road-building system that so improved the diabolical highways and byways linking villages, towns and cities in Great Britain, that faster travel was possible. Breeders began looking at the qualities of existing breeds to see how the Roadster, or trotting horse, could be improved. The Cleveland Bays, with relatively short legs in comparison to their body size, were not considered fast enough but nor were the Trotters and Hackneys. Their sharp up/down action actually inhibits speed because their legs do not swing far enough forward from the shoulder with each stride.  

Thoroughbred lines were introduced into breeding and cross-breeding Trotters and Cleveland Bays until a taller, longer-legged horse standing up to seventeen and a half hands high (17.5 hh) but consistently about sixteen and a half hands (16.5 hh) was produced. It was strong, even-tempered, had the classic bay colour, with hard blue-black hooves and became known as the Yorkshire Coach Horse. This horse was the Ferrari of its era and it was popular up until 1936 when declining numbers forced the closure of the studbook.

Yorkshire Coach Horse

In July 1800, a horse called Phenomenon bred by Robert and Philip Ramsdale covered seventeen miles in fifty-three minutes. The journey from London to York could be travelled in twenty hours, with stops every ten to fifteen miles to change horses and, according to Georgette Heyer in Devil’s Cub, the sixty-six miles between London and Newmarket was covered in under four hours.  

The horse, then as now, generated a huge industry as it required grooms and coachmen, farriers and feed merchants, harness makers and carriages - which I will cover in my next post.

Photographs: Pinterest

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