Hackney Horse

The Hackney came out of the trotting horses of eastern England, the Norfolk Trotter and the Yorkshire Roadster, bred for elegance and speed. Thoroughbred blood went in during the late 1700s, and the result is usually dated to a stallion called The Shales Horse, foaled in 1760.

A roadster was a light driving horse, and it was expected to be fast over distance rather than merely fast. The numbers are worth reading twice. Wroot's Pretender won a seventeen-mile match race, trotting it in under an hour. Hundred-mile races happened, and Hackneys finished them in under ten hours. A mare called Phenomenon trotted seventeen miles in 56 minutes in the 1800s, and her daughter Phenomena took three minutes off that.

The Hackney Stud Book Society opened in England in 1883 and fixed the name. The decades around it were the golden age of carriage driving, and the breed was in heavy demand.

What you get is a long, reaching stride and a very fluid shoulder.

Be clear about one thing before you buy: the Hackney Horse and the Hackney Pony are not the same animal. The horse is the extremely rare one.