Horse Racing

From Artifacts of Capitalism

Introduction

Anthony van Dyck: A Man Mounting a Horse

Horse racing in England evolved from medieval military exercises and civic pageantry into a defining cultural institution by the seventeenth century. Its roots reached back to the Roman ludi circenses, where chariot races symbolized imperial order and public spectacle. As Kevin De Ornellas notes, the horse in English thought was “urged into cultural work” and “troped into opposing positions,” representing both control and chaos, sovereignty and rebellion.[1]

From Rome to the Tudors

By the sixteenth century, horses had become “highly visible instruments of transport and trade,” their prominence transforming them into symbols of mobility and progress.[2] Tudor monarchs exploited this symbolism: civic races at York (Forest of Galtres, c. 1530) and Chester (c. 1539) offered silver bells as prizes, combining local celebration with elite display.[3] By 1600, at least forty towns across England and Scotland hosted annual races, organized by subscriptions that mirrored the expanding credit economy.[4]

For De Ornellas, the Renaissance horse was already “a tool used in the gallop toward modernity,” its economic utility blurring distinctions between noble sport and common labor.[5] Riding masters such as William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, in A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses (1667), re-asserted class difference through disciplined horsemanship—“the art of control made flesh.”[6]

Royal Patronage and Political Performance

Charles II on horse (Peter Lelly)

The Restoration transformed racing into a theater of royal identity. Charles II—an accomplished rider and breeder—personally raced at Newmarket, turning it into “the epicentre of political power.”[7] His biannual “race weeks,” beginning 1666, drew courtiers, petitioners, and foreign envoys. As Huggins observes, they were “as much political as sporting,” exemplifying “the politics of performance—the common touch and the magic of monarchy.”[8]

John Evelyn’s Diary captures the spectacle: in 1671 he found Newmarket “more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian court.”[9] Yet Charles’s participation projected vitality and openness in contrast to Puritan austerity. After the 1683 fire, he patronized courses at Burford Down and Winchester, maintaining the royal stud at Hampton Court. William III continued the practice, establishing “Royal Plates” with fixed weights and purses to encourage breeding and signal dynastic stability.[10]

De Ornellas interprets these displays through equine metaphor: the horse became an emblem of “bridled sovereignty,” simultaneously disciplined and volatile—a living allegory of political restoration.[11]

Breeding, Bloodlines, and Cultural Exchange

Byerley Turk by Thomas Spencer

Civil War confiscations had devastated England’s studs, dispersing royalist horses.[12] Charles II revived the system by appointing James Darcy of Sedbury as royal studmaster (with salary of £200 a year). At Helmsley, the Duke of Buckingham bred the Helmsley Turk and Fairfax Morocco Barb—bloodlines foundational to the modern Thoroughbred.[13] Cavendish praised Arabian horses for their recorded genealogies: “as careful and diligent in keeping the genealogies of their Horses as any Princes can be in keeping their own Pedigrees.”[14]

These imports from North Africa and the Ottoman world tied England’s turf to global exchange. Huggins remarks that possession of such horses became “a symbolic way of participating in Middle Eastern power, wealth and status.”[15] De Ornellas similarly calls the Eastern horse “an exotic other that embodied England’s anxieties and aspirations in an age of exploration.”[16]

Newmarket: From Royal Retreat to Racing Capital

Newmarket, Suffolk, UK.

Charles II's chief racing venue became Newmarket, which sits on the border between Suffolk and Cambridgeshire in eastern England--about 14 miles (23 km) northeast of Cambridge and 65 miles (105 km) from London. Geographically, it is perched on Newmarket Heath, a stretch of chalk downland optimal for racing: firm, dry soil, open expanses, and natural gradients ideal for galloping.[17]

Newmarket’s transformation from a rural hamlet on the Suffolk–Cambridgeshire border to the symbolic “headquarters” of English racing began under the Stuarts. As Kevin De Ornellas notes, by 1632 Newmarket had become “synonymous with monarchical leisure,” a place where James I and Charles I combined sport, diplomacy, and display.[18] James I’s enthusiasm for the races led him to build a palace near the course, turning the heath into what one later chronicler called “the royal village.”[19] Even before the Civil War, the site hosted regular matches; Charles I himself rode competitively there, and his courtiers placed wagers on “the King’s gelding against the Lord of Pembroke’s mare.”[20]

During the Commonwealth, Puritan authorities suppressed racing as “heathenish and unchristian,” and the royal palace fell into decay.[21] When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, Newmarket lay half in ruins—“the ghost of its former self,” as Hore puts it.[22] Yet within a decade it was restored to prominence. The king’s first post-Restoration visit came in March 1666, when he attended the spring meeting and personally supported the Twelve-Stone Plate, a formal race requiring all riders to carry twelve stone at fourteen pounds to the stone, “besides bridle and saddle.”[23] The surviving rules—kept in the Jockey Club’s archives—also required riders to contribute stakes, appoint a judge from among the gentry, and pay winnings to local poor on both sides of Newmarket.[24]

A letter from Thomas Ross, written 11 March 1663 from Newmarket, paints the Restoration racecourse as a riotous scene “of cursed noise, matches, and wagers, boldly asserted with horrible oaths,” where the Duke of Monmouth narrowly survived a fall but “went after dinner to see his horse run.”[25] By 1669, when Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, visited, Newmarket had regained its splendour: Charles II, accompanied by the Duke of York and courtiers, staged races expressly to honour him, “great numbers of ladies and gentlemen crowding thither from London and from their country-houses.”[26] The town itself remained modest—“about two hundred houses”—but its seasonal influx of nobles, gamblers, and spectators gave it national prominence.[27]

As Mike Huggins observes, such royal patronage made Newmarket the prototype of later English racecourses—an early blend of sport, spectacle, and politics that “helped define the cultural geography of Restoration power.”[28] Its combination of regulated races, noble oversight, and public access established patterns that endured long after Charles’s death, securing Newmarket’s title as “the capital of the turf.”

Gambling, Fair Play, and the Culture of Risk

From the Tudor bell races onward, betting financed and animated competition. The 1664 Act against Deceitful, Disorderly, and Excessive Gaming capped recoverable debts at £100 but was rarely enforced.[29] Between 1680 and 1710, courts heard numerous suits over “fair play,” revealing racing’s embeddedness in a new speculative ethos.[30] As Huggins notes, “royal and court indulgence in gaming gave it status,” linking the racecourse to the credit markets and lotteries of Restoration finance.[31]

Racing thus served as both mirror and engine of England’s early capitalist imagination: wagers rehearsed the logic of investment—risking present capital for uncertain future gain.

Pageantry, Politics, and the Public

Royal meetings blurred class boundaries. Huggins describes a “politics of access” in which commoners and courtiers mingled on the heath to witness the king’s mastery of horse and state.[32] Prints such as Francis Barlow’s The Last Horse Race Run Before Charles II of Blessed Memory (1687) aligned the monarch with Roman charioteers and Olympic heroes.[33] Yet racing could also channel dissent: the Duke of Monmouth’s appearance at Chester in 1681 provoked rival Whig and Tory gatherings of hundreds of mounted supporters.[34] These contradictions made the turf a perfect emblem of Restoration politics—at once orderly and unruly, inclusive and exclusive.

From Symbol to Institution

The Jockey Club, Newmarket.

By 1700, racing had moved from pastime to institution. William III’s “Royal Plates” and Queen Anne’s continued patronage laid foundations for the Jockey Club of the next century.[35] De Ornellas concludes that the horse, “bridled and tamed yet still capable of eruption,” encapsulated the fissures in early modern nationhood—between hierarchy and mobility, discipline and desire.[36]

References

  1. ↑ Kevin De Ornellas, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture: Bridled, Curbed, and Tamed (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 8–9.
  2. ↑ De Ornellas, Horse in Early Modern English Culture, 16.  
  3. ↑ Mike Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 24–28.
  4. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 44–51.
  5. ↑ De Ornellas, Horse in Early Modern English Culture, 25–31.
  6. ↑ William Cavendish, A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses and Work Them according to Nature (London, 1667), preface.
  7. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 12–25.
  8. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 46–47.
  9. ↑ John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, vol. 2 (London: Colburn, 1870), 72.
  10. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 127–132.
  11. ↑ De Ornellas, Horse in Early Modern English Culture, 15–20.
  12. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 28–31.  
  13. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 52–55.
  14. ↑ Cavendish, New Method, 45.
  15. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 38–41.
  16. ↑ De Ornellas, Horse in Early Modern English Culture, 47–52.
  17. ↑ William Camden, Britannia, or a Chorographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1637), quoted in C. T. Hore, The History of Newmarket and the Annals of the Turf, vol. 2 (London: H. A. Allen, 1886), 104.
  18. ↑ Kevin De Ornellas, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture: Bridled, Curbed, and Tamed (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 25–29.
  19. ↑ J.P. Hore, The History of Newmarket and the Annals of the Turf, vol. 2 (London: H. A. Allen, 1886), Book VII, p. 34.
  20. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book VII, p. 57.
  21. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book X, p. 216.
  22. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, p. 249.
  23. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, pp. 219–220.
  24. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, pp. 219–221.
  25. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, p. 240; State Papers Domestic, Charles II, vol. LXIX, No. 56 (Public Record Office).
  26. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, pp. 279–281.
  27. ↑ Hore, History of Newmarket, Book XI, p. 287.
  28. ↑ Mike Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 12–25.
  29. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 11–26.
  30. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 51–53.
  31. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 3–8.
  32. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 12–14.
  33. ↑ Antony Griffiths. The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603-1689. (London: British Museum Press), 1998), p. 248.
  34. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 5–7.
  35. ↑ Huggins, Horse Racing and British Society, 156–162.
  36. ↑ De Ornellas, Horse in Early Modern English Culture, 33–41.
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