Horse Fairs
Any town or city of note had its own Fair and, while many have become merely distant memories many remain, still held on the very same ground where they started all those centuries ago.
Of course a good few of those have now become very large commercial ventures, with 200 or more stalls of all types and sizes, selling pretty much everything you can think of that has anything to do with horses, and a lot more besides. Horse numbers can easily exceed 1000, and visitor numbers range from 70,000 or so in the smaller venues to literally hundreds of thousands in the largest.
And among the thronging crowds that come to be variously entertained, enlightened and relieved of their hard earned cash are the descendants of those same medieval equines; displayed, paraded and put through their paces, in hand, shafts, chains and under saddle.
Nor do the parallels with past centuries end there; just as the horse has not changed, neither have the breeders and practitioners of horsemanship.
There are still the same gifted trainers, passionate breeders and skilled performers along with a sprinkling of charlatans, bullies and those for whom it is all merely a matter of money.
