encumber our subject with ancient lore, by continuing these classic references. Enough has, perhaps, been already adduced to establish this point--that we possess more knowledge of the condition of racing three thousand years ago, than we do of the state it was in three hundred years since in our native land. [78] The crown given to the victors in the Olympic games. But because we are in possession of such scanty materials, it by no means follows that the little we do know should be withheld. The reader will therefore have the courtesy to look back with me to the tenth century, and I promise to bring him again into the nineteenth with all convenient speed. As far back, then, as the reign of Athelstan (925), we read that a present of “running horses” was sent to that monarch from France, the gift of Hugh Capet. As nothing however is known of the character of those animals, we will pass on to the reign of William, which affords better data. At that period a nobleman (the Earl of Shrewsbury) appears to have imported several Spanish horses for his own use. Now, as the Moors had had a footing in Spain for several centuries prior to the Norman conquest, there is little doubt that the blood of the Barb was, in the eleventh century, extensively diffused through that country, and that a highly improved breed of the horse was at the time extant there. Here we have a reasonable era from which to date an amelioration of the indigenous race in our island. A little more than a century later, in the reign of Henry the Second (1154), we come to, as far as I have been able to discover, the earliest mention of racing to be found in our national records. This refers to a barbarous sort of running practised upon the plain now occupied by Smithfield, which does not appear to have been subjected to any regulations of time or method. Smithfield, indeed, was then the great horse-mart, and very probably the contests, exalted by their chronicler (Fitzstephen the monk), to Olympic honours, were nothing more than exhibitions, by rival horse-croupers, of the mettle, speed, and action of their respective “palfreys, hackneys, and charging-steeds.”