Perhaps the undeniable superiority of the British thoroughbred over the horses of other nations to-day may in a measure be due to the time and attention the Romans of that era devoted to the importation of horses of Eastern blood. This seems more likely still to be the case when we remember that the majority of the best of the English mares were crossed with Arabian stallions in the years that followed, and that a succession of such stallions was imported throughout the early and the Middle Ages, and from that time onward right down through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we shall see presently. By the beginning of the era of the Saxon kings an Arab steed had come to be looked upon as a recognised royal gift. According to one authority, indeed, Boadicea, the intrepid queen who led the Iceni against the Roman invaders, was greatly attached to her horses. Most likely she was attached to them, however, only because they helped her so materially in her raids upon her enemies. To pretend that “the sturdy queen,” as one historian nicknames her, harboured anything in the least approaching a sympathetic or a sentimental affection for any particular horse would be the acme of all that is grotesque. Haydn has the misplaced gallantry to allude to Boadicea as “the heroic queen.” That her good fortune in possessing horses with considerable staying power enabled her to win her great victory at Verulam is now common history. Therefore we read with the more interest that “this relentless queen destroyed London and other places, slaughtering many Romans, but at last she was overcome near London, by Suetonius, and she ended by committing suicide.” In the second century A.D. the Arabs probably had not begun to breed horses, for at that time we do not hear of Arab horses being held in the high esteem with which they later came to be regarded by the British nation. Yet even before this, or towards the middle of the first century A.D., the sport of chariot racing had become immensely popular, and the sums spent upon organising the races, training the horses that were to be entered for competition, and in purchasing prizes to be bestowed upon the victors, may justly be said to have been enormous if we bear in mind the purchasing value of the coinage of the period. That the Romans were given to sacrificing horses to their gods, Pliny the elder has made plain to us. He is said to have written an exhaustive work upon steeds of a certain stamp, but unfortunately the book must have been destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried, and some 200,000 human beings killed, among them Pliny. As he points out in his “Natural History,” however, the sacrifices of horses took place frequently, especially upon occasions of public solemnity, and he mentions that horses to be immolated were not allowed to be touched even by the Flamen.