FOR many better-off early modern Britons, gaming and wagering were ubiquitous, a deeply embedded part of social life, enjoyed in domestic circles but linked in broader culture to other social and economic contexts of risk, which made them acceptable and even desirable. Betting was far more than an idle practice motivated by mere diversion and the chance of winning a bet. The aristocratic honour code and personal pride insisted that challenges should be met and honourable debts paid. Backing one's judgements and opinions with money dramatized status and provided a means of settling disputes and arguments without violence. Wagering, like emergent capitalism, involved competitive skills, ruthlessness and chauvinistic self-interest. Like any financial market, race betting's importance tempted some into tactics used to fix results that overshadowed ethical considerations.

Horse races were encouraged by gambling owners. They ran alongside the new forms of gambling-inspired venture capitalism and financial speculation emerging in the early eighteenth-century British economy. Betting's meaning and significance could be read as a form of deep engagement, mirroring and reinforcing elite relationships and social structure. Later, as it became more widely popular, more complex socio-cultural differences started to emerge.

Historically, horse-race gambling has offered a range of pleasures. Betting on a race could have multiple meanings: a playful hobby; a hope that chance and luck would lead to life-changing fortune; emotional excitements; or a highly cerebral strategic approach by calculative and manipulative adepts skilful at risk management, employing expert knowledge to manipulate betting-market prices, even when racing outcomes were uncertain. It could encourage recklessness and corruption, or become a life-changing pathological and irrational addiction, creating problem gamblers who suffered problems not just of debt but social relationships – though insufficient data precludes a more quantitative approach here.

Legislation that tried to contain it forbade specific activities, imposed penalties for cheating, or tried to limit amounts staked, and was largely ignored. But the relationships between betting and horse racing in the early modern period are complex and have hitherto been underexplored. Historians focusing on more modern horse-racing gambling are just beginning to acknowledge gambling's centrality to the sport's early development and rules. Eisenberg has correctly stressed the way that the beginnings of modern sport were linked to competitive betting, and racing bears this out strongly.