Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. His successor, Charles I, had a stud of 139 horses when he died in 1649. In the 17th century James I sponsored meetings in England. In the 16th century Henry VIII imported horses from Italy and Spain (presumably Barbs) and established studs at several locations. During the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189–99), the first known racing purse was offered, £40, for a race run over a 3-mile (4.8-km) course with knights as riders. Racing in medieval England began when horses for sale were ridden in competition by professional riders to display the horses’ speed to buyers. Such horses became familiar to Europeans during the Crusades (11th–13th century ce), from which they brought those horses back. Thence came too the Arabian, Barb, and Turk horses that contributed to the earliest European racing. Presumably, organized racing began in such countries as China, Persia, Arabia, and other countries of the Middle East and in North Africa, where horsemanship early became highly developed. The history of organized racing in other ancient civilizations is not very firmly established. Horse racing, both of chariots and of mounted riders, was a well-organized public entertainment in the Roman Empire. Both four-hitch chariot and mounted (bareback) races were held in the Olympic Games of Greece over the period 700–40 bce. Knowledge of the first horse race is lost in prehistory. By the first decades of the 21st century, however, the sport’s popularity had shrunk considerably. In the modern era, horse racing developed from a diversion of the leisure class into a huge public-entertainment business. It developed from a primitive contest of speed or stamina between two horses into a spectacle involving large fields of runners, sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment, and immense sums of money, but its essential feature has always been the same: the horse that finishes first is the winner. Horse racing is one of the oldest of all sports, and its basic concept has undergone virtually no change over the centuries. View talks on racing in America and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame See all videos for this article
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