Mavi Boncuk |Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture by Donna landry
Hardcover: 248 pages Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (December 23, 2008) ISBN-10: 0801890284 ISBN-13: 978-0801890284
Prof. Donna Landry has published widely on the politics and aesthetics of the countryside, Anglo-Ottoman and East-West relations, the horse in history, imperialism, Orientalism, the Black Atlantic, labouring-class and women’s writing, travel writing, and on animals as simultaneously cultural agents and commodities.
With Gerald MacLean and Caroline Finkel, she is one of the organisers of a project of historical re-enactment, The Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way, which commenced in autumn 2009 with a horseback expedition to establish a sustainable tourism route in western Turkey. Following in the hoofprints of the great seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, the expedition and its outgrowths – a documentary film with the Istanbul company www.ajans21.com, a guidebook to the route, a scholarly collaborative volume, and a future ‘Evliya Çelebi Turkey and Syria Friendship Ride’ – are revealing hidden traces of rural worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown.
"His lordship’s Arabian," a phrase often heard in eighteenth-century England, described a new kind of horse imported into the British Isles from the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States of North Africa. Noble Brutes traces how the introduction of these Eastern blood horses transformed early modern culture and revolutionized England’s racing and equestrian tradition.
More than two hundred Oriental horses were imported into the British Isles between 1650 and 1750[1]. Some of these, like the Bloody Shouldered Arabian, became cultural icons in their own right; the others spawned a whole industry of horse traders and trainers, breeders and riders- a whole equestrian sub-culture, in fact, one that was moreover celebrated in art and verse, and not just in the racing hubs of Newmarket and the far off outposts of Empire, where enthusiasts plotted how to get hold of the best the local equine stock had to offer.
With the horses came Eastern ideas about horsemanship and the relationship between horses and humans. Landry’s groundbreaking archival research reveals how these Eastern imports profoundly influenced riding and racing styles, as well as literature and sporting art.
After only a generation of crossbreeding on British soil, the English Thoroughbred was born, and with it the gentlemanly ideal of free forward movement over a country as an enactment of English liberties.
This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Stubbs's portrait of Whistlejacket.[2]
Over two hundred horses were imported into the British Isles from the Orient between 1650 and 1750.
So it was more than just genetic strains and riding styles that were affected by this influx from the East; these horses in fact helped create a way of life that is now seen as quintessentially English.
[1] Oxford Dun Arabian (bu c 1710c). Sire Line Oxford Dun Arabian. A high quality Arabian imported from Aleppo in 1715, he was owned by Robert Harley (1661-1724), the first Earl of Oxford and Mortimer of Brampton Bryan and Wigmore, Herefordshire. Nathaniel Harley, a merchant in Turkey (Aleppo) from 1686 until his death in 17 July 1720, had purchased the horse and shipped him to his nephew Edward, Lord Harley. Nathaniel Harley spoke of the difficulties he faced: "Three Expresses have been sent after him, and all the passes of the Mountains between this and Scanderone ordered to be watched, and ye marine strictly guarded to prevent his being shipped off.
[2] Whistlejacket is an oil-on-canvas painting from about 1762 by British artist George Stubbs showing the Marquess of Rockingham's racehorse, rearing up against a blank background. The huge canvas, lack of other features, and Stubbs' attention to the minute details of the horse's appearance give the portrait a powerful physical presence. It has been described in The Independent as "a paradigm of the flawless beauty of an Arabian thoroughbred".