Britain became a Roman province in the reign of Claudius, in the first part of the first century of the Christian era, and it continued under the Roman yoke until A.D. 426, when the troops were withdrawn to help Valentinian against the Huns, and never returned. When Julius Cæsar first invaded Britain, in the year B.C. 55, he found the inhabitants fierce and warlike and abundantly supplied with horses and war chariots. These chariots were driven with great daring and skill, and the fact was thus demonstrated that this kind of warfare was not a new thing to the Britons, and that they were not to be easily subdued. The next year he returned again, but the second seems to have been no more successful than the first expedition. But little is known of the extent of territory overrun or the result of these invasions beyond the fact that no settlement was made then, and none till about ninety years afterward, when under the reign of Claudius, a strong military colony was planted there and Britain became a Roman province. During these centuries of bondage we know practically nothing of the lives of the slaves and but little of their masters, except the remnants of military works for aggression and defence, and the magnificent roads they constructed where-ever they moved their armies. In relation to their horses, I will make a few extracts from a work published about the beginning of this century, by Mr. John Lawrence, a man of great research and intelligence, besides of a wide acquaintance with the practical affairs of the horse, and, I may add, altogether the most reliable writer of his period. He says: “In forming the paces, if the colt was not naturally of a proud and lofty action, like the Spanish or Persian horses, wooden rollers and weights were bound to their pastern joints, which gave them the habit of lifting up their feet. This method, also, was practiced in teaching them the ambulatura, or amble (pace), perhaps universally the common traveling pace of the Romans. “That natural and most excellent pace, the trot, seems to have been very little prized or attended to by the ancients, and was, indeed, by the Romans held in a kind of contempt, or aversion, as is demonstrated by the terms which served to describe it. A trotting horse was called by them _succussator_, or shaker, and sometimes _cruciator_, or tormentor, which bad terms, it may be presumed, were applied specially to those which in these days we dignify with the expressive appellation of ‘bone-setters.’”