Horse racing was the first and longest-lasting of Britain's national sports. This book explores the cultural world of racing and its relationship with British society in the long eighteenth century. It examines how and why race meetings changed from a marginal and informal interest for some of the elite to become the most significant leisure event of the summer season. Going beyond sports history, the book firmly places racing in its cultural, social, political and economic context. Racing's development was linked to the growth of commercialized leisure in the eighteenth century, a product of rising wealth amongst the middling group; changes in transport; the expansion of the newspaper press; and the new democratic and individualistic spirit of the age, especially the more flexible social codes of the late Georgian and Regency eras. In this book, horse racing emerges as the first 'proto-modern' sport, with links with the widespread popularity of gaming and betting which forced ever-increasing codification, regulation and event organization. Racing also gave expression to highly nuanced concepts of local, regional, national, class, gender (primarily male) and political identities. Drawing on the fields of social, cultural and sports history and utilizing many hitherto ignored or under-exploited sources, the book revises current histories of eighteenth-century leisure and sport, showing how horse racing links to debates about commercialization, consumer behaviour, the 'urban renaissance' and human-horse relationships. It also sheds new light not only on racehorse ownership, but also on the hitherto hidden world of racing's key professionals: jockeys, trainers, bloodstock breeders, stud grooms and stable hands. MIKE HUGGINS is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria.

In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.

English society in the eighteenth century was allegedly marked by a 'gambling mania'. Drawing on a vast range of new empirical evidence, Bob Harris explores the growth and prevalence of gambling across Britain and investigates who gambled, on what, and why.

Horses and horsemen played central roles in modern European warfare from the Renaissance to the Great War of 1914-1918, not only determining victory in battle, but also affecting the rise and fall of kingdoms and nations. When Shakespeare's Richard III cried, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" he attested to the importance of the warhorse in history and embedded the image of the warhorse in the cultural memory of the West. In Riding to Arms: A History of Horsemanship and Mounted Warfare, Charles Caramello examines the evolution of horsemanship—the training of horses and riders—and its relationship to the evolution of mounted warfare over four centuries. He explains how theories of horsemanship, navigating between art and utility, eventually settled on formal manège equitation merged with outdoor hunting equitation as the ideal combination for modern cavalry. He also addresses how the evolution of firepower and the advent of mechanized warfare eventually led to the end of horse cavalry. Riding to Arms tracks the history of horsemanship and cavalry through scores of primary texts ranging from Federico Grisone's Rules of Riding (1550) to Lt.-Colonel E.G. French's Good-Bye to Boot and Saddle (1951). It offers not only a history of horsemen, horse soldiers, and horses, but also a survey of the seminal texts that shaped that history.

2001 North American Society for Sports History Book of the Year This volume studies the formative period of racing between 1790 and 1914. This was a time when, despite the opposition of a respectable minority, attendance at horse races, betting on horses, or reading about racing increasingly became central leisure activities of much of British society.

Difference between Gaming and Gambling-Universality and Antiquity of Gambling-Isis and Osiris-Games and Dice of the Egyptians-China and India-The Jews-Among the Greeks and Romans-Among Mahometans-Early Dicing-Dicing in England in the 13th and 14th Centuries-In the 17th Century-Celebrated Gamblers-Bourchier-Swiss Anecdote-Dicing in the 18th Century. Gaming is derived from the Saxon word Gamen, meaning joy, pleasure, sports, or gaming-and is so interpreted by Bailey, in his Dictionary of 1736; whilst Johnson gives Gamble-to play extravagantly for money, and this distinction is to be borne in mind in the perusal of this book; although the older term was in use until the invention of the later-as we see in Cotton's Compleat Gamester (1674), in which he gives the following excellent definition of the word: -"Gaming is an enchanting witchery, gotten between Idleness and Avarice: an itching disease, that makes some scratch the head, whilst others, as if they were bitten by a Tarantula, are laughing themselves to death; or, lastly, it is a paralytical distemper, which, seizing the arm, the man cannot chuse but shake his elbow.