In our community, we usually post a lot of recent videos whose main focus is horses and we rarely bring very old content here. With old, I do not mean stories from the previous decade nor the last few decades, with old I mean centuries and the story that you are about to read comes from more than three centuries ago. This is a really great thing about history, that we get to know a lot of things about the past and the impact that it has on the times that we are living right now.
Believe it or not, there is enough information about very important horses that have shaped the whole horse world. You would think that in times when things are really difficult to be documented and when horses do not get as much attention as they do get now, you would barely find evidence that puts the spotlight on these horses. One of these historical horses that changed horse racing more than three centuries ago is Eclipse.
Eclipse was one of the most exceptional racehorses of the 18th century. Considering his bloodline, it is even more outstanding as 90% of the thoroughbred racehorses are directly descended from this animal and if we look into the past we get to know that this horse was painted by the most famous artists of the 18th century and was also feted by princes.
A lot of evidence about this horse is in the book Eclipse by Nicholas Clee, which does not only show Eclipse as the strong horse that is believed to have strengthened a lot of horse breeds that we have nowadays but also it shows Eclipse’s life in relation to his different owners. Eclipse died when he was 24 years old, however, he was sent all over the UK to be bred with the main goal of improving a lot of horse breeds over the country. I didn’t hear of Eclipse previously and I must say that I am impressed, especially for the fact that such information was gathered from a time when the information is difficult to gather. Indeed impressive.
