Certainly we do not find allusion made to such common modern ailments in horses as spavins, navicular, ringbones and splints. Cracked heels may have been a common frequent source of lameness, for the shoes ordinarily used were clumsy, crude things knocked into shape in a rudimentary way, even those with which the most valuable of horses were commonly shod. The horse breakers and trainers of the early part of the sixteenth century seem to have been of one opinion as to the most effectual way of, so to speak, bringing a horse to his senses, and that was the simplest way of all—namely, by starving him! That so barbarous, and, let it be added so wholly ineffectual a method should have been resorted to where horses were concerned is perhaps hardly to be wondered at when we bear in mind that only a little over a century ago the same method was employed with lunatics who showed signs of insubordination. For the idea used to be—and it has not yet quite died out—that a high temper must primarily be the outcome of high feeding. We read that upon one occasion Henry VII. commanded that a horse he was to ride in a public procession be left unfed for twenty-four hours, and as no reason is assigned for the order we are justified in conjecturing that he must have felt inwardly nervous, possibly that he feared the animal might, if fed as usual, prove to be what we call to-day “a handful”! In other respects the horses of some four hundred years ago would seem to have been treated at any rate with ordinary humanity. CHAPTER III Inauguration and development of the Royal Stud—Exportation of horses declared by Henry VIII. to be illegal—Sale of horses to Scotsmen pronounced to be an act of felony—Riding matches become popular—Ferdinand of Arragon's gift of horses to Henry VIII.—Henry's love of hunting—King Henry stakes the bells of St Paul's on a throw of the dice—Some horses of romance—Horse-breeding industry crippled in Scotland The accession of Henry VIII. to the throne, in 1509, marked the beginning of a great development in the breeding and rearing of valuable horses, for that erratic monarch, whatever his failings may have been—and that he had a few failings we have reason to know—was at heart a sportsman in the true meaning of the now frequently misused term.