Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/499

 breed previous to the law of 1686, was due to the cause which has been touched upon already. It was hardly practicable for the owners to devote much attention to their horses as long as they were compelled to allow them to run at large in the woods, under which circumstances the finest live stock in the world would have rapidly degenerated, not only because there was a promiscuous intercourse among the animals, the basest and purest blood being indiscriminately mingled, but also because the precariousness of subsistence in the forests was calculated in itself to dwarf their size. In this struggle for sufficient food, only the staunchest and most hardy specimens survived. When the law of 1686 was passed, the horses of the Colony, however defective in size, were remarkable for their fleetness and their powers of endurance. The disadvantage attending their smallness in stature seems to have been so great that the House of Burgesses considered it necessary to adopt some measure which would either remove the drawback entirely, or diminish it very materially. It was through the influence of this feeling that the law of 1686 was enacted, which provided that no stallion under thirteen and a half hands in height, and not yet two years old, should be suffered to range at liberty in the woods or in the marshes where they might have access to mares. Loss of the animal was the penalty for the violation of this Act, it becoming the property of the informer, provided the owner did not appear and pay four hundred pounds of tobacco in the course of two months. The law was to be in operation during seven years from the date of its passage.

So numerous had the wild horses grown to be at the close of the century that one of the principal sports of the