Page:The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln Volume 2.pdf/445

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Lincolnshire has always been famous for its horses, both for home-bred ones and those purchased young and converted into hunters and steeplechase horses. This is what the 'Druid' says in The Post and the Paddock: 'The great nurseries of English hunters are the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, more especially on the wolds, and the whole of Lincolnshire and Shropshire. The Lincolnshire hunters are still first-rate, but they are bred in fewer numbers than they were in Dick Burton's hunting prime, owing principally to the improved system of cultivation which has caused much second-rate grass-land to be ploughed up. Hence the number of brood mares is rather limited, and the farmers have to resort to Howden Fair, which is the largest market in the world for unmade hunters and carriage horses. Scarcely any of them are tied in rows, but they are generally ridden or led about the town, whose long High Street is for four or five days one surging sea of animal life. Hosts of Lincolnshire farmers may be found there each September picking up four-year-old hunters at prices ranging from £80 to £100, but now more generally from £100 to £120. The hunting dealers also attend, not to buy, but to glean information about promising horses. They learn where they go, and occasionally, if they take a strong fancy, purchase contingent interest in some of them. The new owners aim at keeping them at least a year, but seldom more than two, and they frequently find them a temporary stable-mate at the great Lincoln Fair each April. The latter are expected to produce a profit of twenty-eight to twenty-five per cent, for their three months' strong keep up to Horncastle, or else they hardly realize their owner's "sole idea" of "praying for August."

'The Yarborough, Southwold, and Burton Hunts are the great public schools where the heads, hands, and heels of a legion of hard-riding Dicks are ever at work for five months of the year in transforming the raw one-hundred-guinea Howdenite into the finished two-hundred-guinea candidate for Horncastle. It is, however, to the dealers in this as in every other country that they have to look for purchasers, as hunting men will scarcely ever buy from farmers, however well they may ride, and have to pay a handsome sum extra for their whim. Horncastle Fair has long been the great Lincolnshire carnival of horse-flesh, and far the largest in England for made hunters. Sporting foreigners are pénétré with its fame and rush to see it and the sale of blood yearlings at Doncaster with as much energy as their agriculturists demand to be led to 'de beetroot' the instant they set foot from one of Ben Revett's chaises, on their Tiptree shrine. We have it in fact, on Scribbe's authority, that an elderly German baron not very long since assured his English visitor when they had drunk to the health and memory of their last wild boar, that if he could only visit Horncastle Fair he would die happy! Dealers and foreigners begin to be rife in its neighbourhood about 5 August, and there are still some lingerers on the 21st. Baron Rothschild's agent rarely comes, but purchases young horses at all prices from £40 to £300 out of the best stables of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.'

The most noted breeders in the past were Welfit of Louth, Fowler of Kirton Grange, Greetham of Stainfield Hall, the Slaters of Cammeringham