The true Story of Horse Power; The History of a Gentle Giant.

To many people the term horsepower conjures up images of powerful cars or huge smelly diesel trucks hauling heavy loads. While true petrol-heads will see, in their minds eye, images of sleek powerful Formula One or Indy racing cars screaming endlessly and meaninglessly around a circuit at 200 plus miles per hour.

Yet a few others such as myself something much more majestic springs to mind, the original owner of the title; the horse itself. Surely for centuries one of man’s closest and most enduring friends, ally and work colleague, without whom we most certainly would not be where we are today.

Yet how many among us either appreciate or even acknowledge that simple statement of fact?

In the mad modern, high technological world of today where all minds are on progress at all costs; cheaper, bigger, better, faster it is so easy to forget our history. This is assuming it is still taught in schools, which to me seems doubtful, however for those who are interested we do not have to turn the clock back too far to realise that the fever pitch pace of living today is a fairly modern invention.

A mere two hundred years ago, if any of our ancestors had returned to pay us a visit I doubt they would have felt too out of place. If the Romans, Vikings, Saxons or even the mighty Normans returned to our shores they would have found the pace of life little changed.

In an early Hub; http://hubpages.com/hub/Fresh-n-Local-Farmers-Markets I touched upon the business of Logistics, or the art of moving anything from ‘A’ to ‘B’ as quickly and economically as possible and until fairly recently this was the job of the horse.

As a child born and raised in a city I can vividly remember horse drawn carts as part of daily city life. In fact on weekends and school holidays I was part of a small gang of kids who helped deliver milk to the doorsteps of hundreds of homes, our reward, a drink of fresh milk and the slim chance to drive the cart. Not that it need driving of course, so accustomed to the route the horse would move on and stop without any instructions from us. Except, that is, on Fridays; Friday was the day the money was collected making the milk rounds-man much slower. This meant that without a little guidance his horse and cart would be well up the next street before he caught up.

On one very special occasion I was sent to retrieve the horse and cart and drive it back round the city block, I must have been about six years old. I remember running excitedly all the way to catch up with the milk cart. Climbing up into the lofty seat I confidently took charge and all went well until we reached the end of the street. I tried to pull the horse round to the right as required to get back to the previous street, it on the other hand knew better and turned left as usual. Now we were two blocks away from where we need to be and not a pint of milk delivered. Imagine the shame of having to climb down and lead the beast back to point ‘A’ by the head lead.

I think the lesson I should have learnt that day was that all species of animal have an inbuilt sense of fun and humour. I had no idea then but that mighty Clydesdale Horse, known to all as Big Wullie, (Scottish abbreviation of William), weighed in at about a ton, had feet the size of drain covers and followed me, a mere child, because he wanted to and for no other reason.

As a family we moved south into England shortly after and when I went back on holiday two years later Big Wullie was gone, replaced by a near silent battery powered milk float. Little did I realise that what I was witnessing was the passing of an era, one that had begun well over four thousand years previously, because that is how far back the relationship between man and horse can be traced.

As far back as the Stone-age we know from cave paintings that our ancient ancestors were aware of and hunted horses, as well as many other wild animals, as a source of food and for their hide. However, at what point in time man and horse came together as a team is a little uncertain. Perhaps one possible explanation could simply be the adoption of a young foal as a sort of pet after its mother was killed for food. Horses are after all herd animals and require company so the young animal would readily stay close to the human herd for protection, food and companionship.

From ancient drawings we first see the horse used in Mesopotamia about 3000BC pulling chariots. From there the use of the horse drawn chariot spread throughout the entire Euro/Asian landscape and around the Mediterranean and was a popular Egyptian weapon of war in use through the bronze and Iron ages.

By that time horse breeding was starting to develop and the animal was deliberately being bred larger, large enough to ride into battle or large and strong enough to mount a soldier or knight with both weapon and armour.

It is widely believed that Egypt had the first regular mounted cavalry troops around 600 BC and with the rising Empire in Persia the horse was coming into its own as a weapon of war. The one notable exception was Greece, where horses were not plentiful a fact that undoubtedly led to them not taking advantage of this wonderfully new development.

This, however, was not the case in Macedonia where King Phillip II and later his more famous son Alexander the Great transferred their weak Kingdom into a might Empire by adding cavalry to their war machine.

Even further north the horse was native to Britain, even before the Romans came, of course the animals back then would not be the magnificent creatures we see today but probably the short stocky wild horses of the European plains, cut off when Britain became an island. We still have a few around today.

But with the Romans came a greater variety of horses, examples from all over their empire and from history it is clear that selective breeding was already well established to achieve different types of horse for different functions. Although strength was seen by the Romans as more important than intelligence therefore the Roman cavalry was made up of great horses that would charge to almost certain death with little or no fear.

Unfortunately, for the Romans that is, they missed one of the most fantastic animals in the world, the Arabian an extremely intelligent horse, one fully capable of thinking for itself. As a result of this lack of foresight the Arabian horse was not brought to Europe until much later and we adopted the stronger breeds for our needs.

Of course, as with many things, with the decline of Roman influence much of the horse breeding skills were lost in Britain although not in many European countries, notably Spain, France and Germany. Then with the invention of the stirrup in the 800’s AD a soldier and his horse became a powerful fighting team. Armoured Knights became a formidable weapon used to control the feudal kingdoms for their lords and masters leading to many of the European nation states we see today.

During the Roman occupation and prior to the Middle Ages (the fifth to the fifteenth centuries) horses were mainly used for sport and war. Their use as draught animals came much later after the invention of the horse collar to replace the less efficient Roman harness.

In agriculture the old Roman two field crop rotation system slowly gave way to a more efficient three crop system and this was entirely due to horsepower over Oxen. The three crop method allowed one field to be planted with a winter crop, the second with a spring crop and one field remained fallow.

The greater power and speed of the horse, over Oxen, meant more land came under the plough with an ox plough the average ploughing rate was half an acre per day, the horse doubled this to an acre a day.

Unfortunately after the Romans departed our shores no one it seems recognised the benefits of using the road system they left behind and so the roads fell into disrepair and any movement over long distances soon became a nightmare. The easiest way was on horseback but this was the reserve of the landed gentry and the privileged few.

There were covered wagons but given the state of the roads without suspension that must have been a real joy. A train of pack horses was perhaps the most efficient way to move goods cross country however, when it came to bulk transport then boats from river to river around the coast became the easiest and most widely used method.

And so it remained for centuries, by the seventeenth century a glimmer of hope appeared with the introduction of a few toll roads, where people were charged to travel on them and the money was used in part to maintain the road surface. By this time stagecoaches were a regular method of transport between towns and cities with regular stops at wayside hotels and Inns for comfort stops and a change of horses. Many of these old Inns still exist today and have many tales to tell including more than a few about highway robbery by people like the notorious Dick Turpin.

Turpin’s highly romanticised antics are well known but in reality he was a brutal man, known as a horse thief and murderer as well as his highwayman activities. He and his famous horse Black Bess were made famous for the apocryphal story of an overnight ride between the cities of London and York, a distance of 200 odd miles, in an attempt to create a false alibi that even he, Turpin could not be in two places at the same time. A nice story, I suppose, but as I said pure fiction written 100 years after Turpin’s execution and all the sadder because the journey killed Black Bess. However it demonstrates, albeit fictitiously, the strong bond between man and his horse and the animals seeming willingness to please his human partner.

It’s not until the eighteenth century, with the faint glimmer of the Industrial Revolution on the horizon, do we start to see man getting to grips with the need for a real and serious transport infrastructure. Lessons we should have learnt when the Romans were still around such as good roads and to use canals to improve river transport. At the time moving heavy loads such as coal, building materials and trade goods was extremely expensive.

In 1759 the Duke of Bridgewater employed canal builder James Brindley to build him a canal to bring coal from his mines in Worsley to Manchester. This brilliant if far from original idea lead to an explosion of canal building in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They played a major role in the Industrial Revolution by making it a far cheaper method to transport goods. Of course all of that effort would have been for naught if it hadn’t been for the literal amount of horse power that made the canal barges move.

Compared to a cart a heavy draught horse can move fifty times as much weight when it is loaded in a boat, that’s nearly one hundred times its own body weight. It was this highly efficient power to weight transportation method that maintained the profit of the canal system for a hundred and fifty years and well into the twentieth century. Even as steam and diesel powered engines started to take over horse drawn barges still continued to operate and competed with them.

Steam is often credited as being the power behind the Industrial Revolution and in many instances it was. It was the invention of the steam driven pumps that kept the copper mines in Cornwall from flooding. Water powered mills became the thing, so industry moved to the river valleys to capture and harness that power. Eventually steam power replaced the less reliable water powered systems and for the first time in history meant that any power hungry industrial process could be placed anywhere it was needed.

What the history books fail to mention was that even with all this explosion of ideas and technology. Without the large number of horses that handled the short haul work pulling the carts and wagons full of coal from barge to factory and then the finished goods back to the canals. Even the long range transport was under horse power, so without the humble horse the Industrial Revolution as we know it almost certainly would never have happened.