Between horse and rider
The Compleat Horse-Man and Expert Ferrier in Two Books, by Thomas De Grey. Printed in London for Thomas Harper and Nicholas Fussell, 1651. Lower Library, K.19.24
Even by the mid-seventeenth century, the Elizabethan golden age of horsemanship showed few signs of diminishing. It was at this time that some of the most influential texts on the subject were written, of which De Grey's The Compleat Horseman was central. Whilst riding had an enormously practical role in everyday life, there was also a great involvement in riding for sporting pleasure, extending to include an aesthetic concern for the quality of control and communication between rider and horse. It was De Grey’s view that the virtues of the rider could be readily visualised through the actions of the horse, and he defined the qualities of a good rider in explicitly moral terms, declaring: ‘A rider that is cholerick, rash, hasty, and soone provoked to impatience, can never make a good horseman.’
Despite being written during this so-called golden age, De Grey felt clearly the necessity of his book, despairing especially of the poor state of horsemanship in England:
It doth not a little trouble me that in places where I come here in England, I doe finde so few horse-men, (considering it is an Iland that doth abound in horses, whereof no kingdome under heaven more) and yet so many braggadochies there be, who will so crack and boast of their skill in this heroic science, and when I shall begin to discourse with them of horsemanship, they will talk so sillily, and so impertinently, as makes me blush to heare them.
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