User:Peaky76/Newmarket Match Book

The Newmarket Match Book is the earliest surviving formal record of Thoroughbred horse racing. It contains a hand-written record of every Thoroughbred horse race held in Newmarket, the headquarters of British horseracing, from 1 October 1718 to 11 November 1788.

It contains around one thousand pages, bound into a single volume, although it is believed it originally existed as several different volumes.

It is on display at the National Horseracing Museum at Newmarket.

It predates the Racing Calendar, which has been the primary means of recording race results.

Together with the General Stud Book it is the most valuable documentary record of horse racing in Great Britain in the 18th century.

Other early documents
There were other documents of the time. John Cheney produced a printed list of results, the Historical List ,but only from 1727, ten years after the Match Book.

In February 1679 John Nelson was keeping a record of sporting contests including horseracingwhich could be obtained for half-a-crown from the Groom-Porter’s Office at Newmarket. There are no copies of these documents, nor any other early match books that have survived.

Cheney's successors included Reginald Heber's Historical List and John Pond's Sporting Kalendar. There were also Match Books kept by historians in the north. Ultimately, John Weatherby and family, who were Keepers of the Match Book for the Jockey Club, became the official archivists of racing. Weatherby's first Racing Calendar was published in 1773 and has been ever since.

Importance
The Newmarket Match Book is the only remaining record of certain aspects of early racing. It features races that were not included in other sources.

Also, it is the only source of jockeys names from the early period. The Racing Calendar did not publish them until 1822, and not comprehensively until 1844.

from 1744 to 1772 the jockeys and the owners’ colours are recorded for many of the races.

In turn this has helped identify horses and jockeys in paintings of the period. One example of where this has been useful is Francis Sartorius' painting Four racehorses outside the Rubbing Down House, Newmarket. This depicts the race between Bay Malton, King Herod, Turf and Askham on 21 April 1767. The horses have been identified according to the colours worn by the jockeys, as recorded in the Match Book.