Before I began doing the research for this blog, I had assumed that Thoroughbred horses were similar to pedigreed dogs: pure-bred animals with a documented lineage. Wrong. As I began reading about breeds of horses to become familiar with the types hat might have been imported in the seventeenth century, I learned that a Thoroughbred is a specific breed of horse, defined by a pedigree that can be traced back to one of three foundation sires.
Having read and loved King of the Wind as a child, I knew about the Godolphin Arabian, the Byerley Turk, and the Darley Arabian. But I hadn’t realized quite how central they were to the development of the Thoroughbred. Up through the seventeenth century, British horses were bred for the strength and stamina to carry armored knights in battle, while Arabian horses were smaller and bred for speed and maneuverability. The smaller English breeds were ponies that could not match the qualities of the Arabians.
At the end of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, however, Turkish leaders sent gifts of Arabian horses to the heads of European nations and some Europeans privately acquired ownership of Arabian or Turkish horses. These included the Byerley Turk in 1683, the Darley Arabian in 1703, and the Godolphin Arabian in 1730. Breeding English mares to these three stallions formed the foundation of a new breed, the Thoroughbred, combining the strength of one with the speed of the other to produce a horse that could carry a rider at a sustained speed over a long distance. The result was an animal that gave new impetus to the sport of horse racing.
The introduction to James Weatherby’s General Stud Book, which began publication in 1791, recorded the pedigree of over 350 mares. Each could be traced back to Eclipse, a descendant of the Darley Arabian, Matchem, a grandson of the Godolphin Arabian, or Herod, a great-grandson of the Byerley Turk and to one of 74 foundation mares of English or North African/Middle Eastern origin (Arabian, Turkoman, or Barb [Barbary Coast of North Africa]). Weatherby and Sons still publishes the General Stud Book and only horses listed in it are considered Thoroughbreds and allowed to race professionally. Although used primarily for racing, Thoroughbreds are also bred for fox hunting, show jumping, dressage, and polo.
In May 1793, an advertisement appeared in the Maryland Gazette for “RUFFIAN, genuine country horse.” Ruffian had “but little to recommend him, except the excellence of the strain from which he was bred, and his ability to perform more riding with greater ease to the rider than any horse heretofore known in Maryland.” The Maryland race horses of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were country horses like Ruffian, but by the mid-eighteenth century some men wanted more than a genuine country horse. They began to bring Thoroughbred bloodstock into the Chesapeake, beginning with Bulle Rock, imported by Samuel Gist of Virginia in 1730.
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