lie on the road to Lincoln – sixteen miles as the crow flies, and the crow is welcome to it, seeing that the potholes are so bad. Scroop I liked particularly – a meek little cluster of old houses drawn up on an ancient green, with the wolds behind it and the sun hanging low over the meadows, and yet this is a bare country, where the wind sweeps in over insufficient hedgerows and the sheep stand shivering in the fields. Scroop Hall a quaint, tumbledown pile, with an army of rooks lodged about its chimneys, dimly visible through the trees …
W. M. Thackeray, ‘A Little Tour Through Lincolnshire’, 1859
IT USED TO be wondered how Mr Samuel Davenant had come by his champion horse Tiberius, which won the Epsom Two Year’s Old Plate, altogether ran away with the Trial Stakes at Abingdon and absolutely tied with the Duke of Grafton’s Creditor for the Middle Park Plate. Some people said that Mr Davenant hardly knew himself. Owners of racehorses are always supposed to be wealthy sporting men, with strings of thoroughbreds to their name and broad acres to run them over, but Mr Davenant was a country squire who lived in a small way in Lincolnshire, owned no other horses but a pair of ancient hunters and an old cob, and whose name had previously been as absent from Bell’s Life and The Field as Tennyson’s or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. When know ledge of Tiberius reached the sporting intelligence, they turned fanciful and said that Mr Davenant had simply found the horse wandering in one of his meadows or bought him from a Gypsy at Louth Fair.
But this was a falsehood, for Mr Davenant had merely acquired him as one of a number of items ceded by a country neighbour who owed him money. There might have been some mystery as to how the country neighbour had come by him – he was supposed by one school of sporting opinion to have been got by Mr Fortescue’s Tantalus out of Lord Faringdon’s brood mare Belladonna – but at any rate that was nothing to do with Mr Davenant. Even then the horse might have lived out its life in the obscurity of the Lincolnshire wolds, but if Mr Davenant was not a sporting man himself he had friends who were, and when they advised him that he ought not to keep in his tithe barn a horse whose true stamping ground was Newmarket Heath, he took the hint. So a sporting man was brought in to manage the business, and Tiberius was shown at a couple of race meetings at Stamford and Lincoln, with which he duly ran away, was talked of for the Two Thousand and the Derby and, rather to his surprise, Mr Davenant found that he was a figure of remark in a world of which he had hitherto taken scarcely any notice.
As to what Mr Davenant thought about this, nobody knew. But then hardly anyone knew anything about Mr Davenant. He was a man of about forty, who had lived in Lincolnshire all his life and whose father and grandfather had done the same, very proud of the hundred acres which he and his tenants farmed, but with no particular interest in how his yields might be improved or his rents better remitted. He was a widower, which people said had made him melancholy, and he had a backward daughter, a girl of about fourteen with white hair and a big moon face, which people said had made him more melancholy still. Lincolnshire is rather a shy place, but even so Mr Davenant was not conspicuous in it. He had never sat as a magistrate; he took no interest in politics; he was never likely to be Lord Lieutenant. He liked going to church on Sunday, sitting in the family pew and thinking of his ancestors who had sat there, and running his dogs over the wolds, and dining with the very few friends he had in the neighbourhood, and so people said he was odd, and reclusive, that he lived only for his house, and that the dead wife and the moon-faced child were a judgement. It had rained on the morning of Mrs Davenant’s funeral, which took place on St Andrew’s Day, and it was said that Mr Davenant, with his white face
W. M. Thackeray, ‘A Little Tour Through Lincolnshire’, 1859
IT USED TO be wondered how Mr Samuel Davenant had come by his champion horse Tiberius, which won the Epsom Two Year’s Old Plate, altogether ran away with the Trial Stakes at Abingdon and absolutely tied with the Duke of Grafton’s Creditor for the Middle Park Plate. Some people said that Mr Davenant hardly knew himself. Owners of racehorses are always supposed to be wealthy sporting men, with strings of thoroughbreds to their name and broad acres to run them over, but Mr Davenant was a country squire who lived in a small way in Lincolnshire, owned no other horses but a pair of ancient hunters and an old cob, and whose name had previously been as absent from Bell’s Life and The Field as Tennyson’s or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. When know ledge of Tiberius reached the sporting intelligence, they turned fanciful and said that Mr Davenant had simply found the horse wandering in one of his meadows or bought him from a Gypsy at Louth Fair.
But this was a falsehood, for Mr Davenant had merely acquired him as one of a number of items ceded by a country neighbour who owed him money. There might have been some mystery as to how the country neighbour had come by him – he was supposed by one school of sporting opinion to have been got by Mr Fortescue’s Tantalus out of Lord Faringdon’s brood mare Belladonna – but at any rate that was nothing to do with Mr Davenant. Even then the horse might have lived out its life in the obscurity of the Lincolnshire wolds, but if Mr Davenant was not a sporting man himself he had friends who were, and when they advised him that he ought not to keep in his tithe barn a horse whose true stamping ground was Newmarket Heath, he took the hint. So a sporting man was brought in to manage the business, and Tiberius was shown at a couple of race meetings at Stamford and Lincoln, with which he duly ran away, was talked of for the Two Thousand and the Derby and, rather to his surprise, Mr Davenant found that he was a figure of remark in a world of which he had hitherto taken scarcely any notice.
As to what Mr Davenant thought about this, nobody knew. But then hardly anyone knew anything about Mr Davenant. He was a man of about forty, who had lived in Lincolnshire all his life and whose father and grandfather had done the same, very proud of the hundred acres which he and his tenants farmed, but with no particular interest in how his yields might be improved or his rents better remitted. He was a widower, which people said had made him melancholy, and he had a backward daughter, a girl of about fourteen with white hair and a big moon face, which people said had made him more melancholy still. Lincolnshire is rather a shy place, but even so Mr Davenant was not conspicuous in it. He had never sat as a magistrate; he took no interest in politics; he was never likely to be Lord Lieutenant. He liked going to church on Sunday, sitting in the family pew and thinking of his ancestors who had sat there, and running his dogs over the wolds, and dining with the very few friends he had in the neighbourhood, and so people said he was odd, and reclusive, that he lived only for his house, and that the dead wife and the moon-faced child were a judgement. It had rained on the morning of Mrs Davenant’s funeral, which took place on St Andrew’s Day, and it was said that Mr Davenant, with his white face
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