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126 chapter five Secrets Bridled, Gentlemen Trained Gervase Markham’s horsemanship and horse care manual,How to chuse, ride, traine, and diet, both Hunting-horses and running Horses. With all the secrets thereto belonging discovered: an Arte never here-to-fore written by any Author served as a substantial part of Markham’s empire of practical guides to animal husbandry and gentlemanly occupations.First printed in 1595,it was reissued intactandaspartsofotherbooksbyMarkhamthroughouttheseventeenthcentury .1 It represents Markham’s first entry into the market of inexpensive print, and stands as part of a burgeoning collection of books by young gentlemen on the art of horsemanship.It is not the first to be published,but it is the only one to refer to the body of knowledge it addresses as a collection of secrets. One focus of this chapter will be locating this text within the genre of books of secrets by analyzing the ways in which the word secrets works in the text, what it signifies, and how it shapes the highly practical language of the contents into a body of knowledge unified by a model of practice built upon an experientially determined theory. The second focus of this chapter will be the ways in which the book contributes to the definition of elite masculinity by allying it with the means and time to purchase and maintain expensive horses and enter them in competitions. The model of horse care presented here requires that the gentleman in question have sufficient funds to purchase well-bred stallions and mares and pay the salaries of the various people required to care for and train them. These people, from stable boys to stable managers, form the third focus of the chapter, on the ways in which the knowledge presented in the text was disseminated to those most likely to use it.Unlike the majority of inexpensive print,which is directed to readers of any class interested in purchasing a cheap collection of previously unavailable information, this book clearly delineates its purchasers as gentlemen and its audience as their servants. Markham’s book insists upon attention to a set of questions that often elude careful analysis in other books in its price range, includingthesharingoftextsandnecessaryintersectionsbetweenprintculture and oral communication.It is the perfect book for examining the creation of a body of “secret” knowledge, the means of communicating that knowledge to two socioeconomically determined populations, and the extension of secrets beyond the workings of the natural world to inform both stable hands’ work and a gentlemen’s pastime. The book has two explicit final products: a well-trained and well-maintained horse and a gentlemen who is a good horseman. The success of both horse and man, however, depends upon the book’s implicit final product, a staff of skilled grooms whose lives are defined by the rhythms and demands of their work.Taken in combination,the activities that shape the lives of grooms, stable boys,and stable managers sketch the outlines of the equine industry in sixteenth-century England. The details of that industry have not attracted an enormous amount of historiographic attention, though English involvement in matters equine had its first upsurge under Henry VIII and played an integral part in the plans for his wars against France and Scotland. Joan Thirsk remains the authority on this topic, and her account of the place of horses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, including a few paragraphs on Gervase Markham and his family’s role in that history,appears in her broader work on England’s rural economy at the time.2 She argues that a combination of factors contributed to the rise of the horse and the ensuing improvement of equine quality in England, including the breeding program begun by Henry VIII in the 1530s and supported by the creation of his gentlemen pensioners, the steady increase in internal trade on roads and rivers that occurred between 1500 and 1700, the appearance of the coach as a means of elite travel, and the increasing popularity of mounted entertainment, including performances of classical military maneuvers, foxhunting, steeplechasing, and flat racing. The breeding program instituted by Henry VIII and continued by Elizabeth I arguably played the central role in increasing the popularity and quality of horses in sixteenth-century England, since it encouraged the emergence of an elite class of gentlemen who valued and enjoyed producing, training, and playing with expensive, high-class equines. The breeding program was initially begun to reverse the losses of horseflesh from two decades of...

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