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SIDELIGHTS ON THE PAST OF THE CLEVELAND BAY Evidence about the time at which the Cleveland Bay assumed its present form is mainly negative, and mainly military. The modern type of Cleveland would have provided the ideal warhorse according to the specifications of the 16th and 17th centuries-exactly the kind of horse "apt for service in the wars" which Tudor monarchs tried to make their subjects produce (on the cheap, of course) by passing, over and over again, a series of acts about running stallions on common grazings, with no noticeable results. Down to 1603, a special situation existed in the four Northern counties, in parts of Lancashire and in the North Riding. All freeholders were bound either to serve in the militia, or provide someone else to serve, in the event of hostilities on the Scottish border. They were not liable for service either in Ireland or on the continent, as people in the South and the Midlands were. Each township had to provide, in addition to so many archers, musketeers and pike-men, one "able man with horse and harneys" for the levy. These "able men" were not the fully-armoured, lance-carrying men-at-arms such as still, under Henry VIII at least, formed part of the royal forces but "semi-lances" with a "horseman staff" or spear a mere ten feet long, and a sword. Their "harneys" consisted only of a "pot" helmet, a breastplate and a backplate. Their all-up weight was rather less than that of the modern Life Guards. Such horsemen were much more useful, in conditions of border warfare, than heavy cavalry in full armour on great lumbering warhorses which were all too soft and needed a supply train of other horses to carry their rations. North of the Tees, and in Richmondshire, militia horsemen were mounted on what we now call Fell ponies. What we now call Dales ponies went to horse the supply train and the artillery limbers. The militia of the "Marches against Scotland" was mobilised, for the last time before the Union, in 1586. At that muster the Wapentake of Langbaurgh, which had the same boundaries as the modern parliamentary division of Cleveland, furnished 22 horsemen and 333 footmen. This was exactly the same proportion of infantry to cavalry as turned out in Richmond-shire. If what we now know as the Cleveland had been avail-able at that time, then obviously the proportion of horse to foot would have been much higher than 15 to one, and higher than the proportion in, say, Swaledale. After the Union of Crowns, our charming neighbours, formerly subjects of the sister-kingdom but henceforth our fellow-citizens, chiefly made their presence felt by intervening in our civil wars, thereby rendering them more bitter, protracted and bloody than would otherwise have been the case. Among those who suffered in the cause of the half-Scottish King Charles I was Sir Hugh Cholmondely, whose descendants built Whitby Old Market House and Hays Mill at Ruswarp, both still in use. Sir Hugh won great renown for his defence of Scarborough against the Cromwellians. At the end of that siege his garrison marched out with the honours of war, and he himself went into exile. He was imprudent enough to return to Whitby in 1649, but was recognised and arrested. An escort of six Commonwealth troopers was detailed to take him to Malton for trial, mounted in the words of his Memoirs "on common country horses . . . and myself on a little galloway." Somewhere along the Pickering road, apparently about Saltersgate, "I leaped over the ditch on my right hand and bid the soldiers adieu, and the pretty beast carried me clean away from them." Now whereas the "common country horses" on the other side of the Vale of Pickering were usually at that time Old Blacks, imported from Lincolnshire via Howden Fair, I do not think that this side of it the "common country" horse can mean anything but the ancestors-or one set of ancestors-of the Cleveland Bay: in this opinion Major Blakeborough concurs. Not only could they not catch the little galloway, but we are to understand they could not leap the ditch which he cleared. So the great change must have taken place after 1650, which is what other evidence and tradition leads us to suppose, anyhow. In last year's Journal I ventured the opinion that the principal hot-blooded addition to the Cleveland stock, after the Civil Wars, was probably the Andalusian. But there may have been others. The possibilities are few. As Major Blakeborough has shown, we can rule out the possibility, in effect, of the Thoroughbred because at this early stage it did not exist in the form we know today. The remaining candidates are, therefore, the oriental breeds mentioned by writers of the period such as Gervase Markham: the Turk, the Arab and the Barb. The first is a somewhat confusing term. Since every port and every horse market in the Near East and in large parts of North Africa at that time was part of the Turkish Empire, any horse imported from these sources was liable to be called a Turk in England (e.g. Place's White Turk). But the true Turk came from much further East, not from the country we now know as Turkey but from Turkestan, the backside of Persia, Tashkent way. Its most typical colour was a bright golden-dun; but like the purebred Cleveland Bay it had a jet-black mane and tail and prenounced black points. However it was so rare, and so expensive that few specimens are likely to have found their way up here. It is represented today by the Karabakh breed, of which there are only two stallions now in England, the Queen's Kele Kush and Zaman. The Arab we may dismiss in a line. Neither the friends nor the enemies of the Arab would maintain that traces of its conformation are to be found in the modern Cleveland. That leaves the Barb. What happened to that tough old cavalier, Sir Hugh Cholmondely, when the King came to his own again? He came home, but not for long. In 1661 the King acquired, as his new Queen Catherine of Braganza's dowry, the only North African colony Britain has ever had, Tangier in Morocco where the best Barbs come from. In order to build the Mole of Tangier harbour, master masons from Whltby with much experience of such work were engaged, and Sir Hugh was given the contract for the whole works. Once built, the mole required constant repair, and for twenty-three years many Whitby families lived in Tangier. Many more were sent out in 1684 when the place was abandoned and the Mole had to be demolished. Now besides the Royal Dragoon Guards, three hundred strong, who supplied the cavalry element of the garrison, and who like the Portuguese cavalry from whom they took over were mounted on locally-bred Barb horses, the next most likely to acquire such were Sir Hugh and the engineers, all North Riding men, who formed his staff. "Not a trace of Black Blood" is still true. That hot-blooded element which, in the second part of the seventeenth century, transformed the Chapman Horse into the Cleveland Bay must have been compounded, in what proportion we shall never know, of Andalusian and Barb. A. A. DENT. 1970
Cleveland Bay Magazine No.3 |