broken wind

"It really seems a little too bad to have to ride a broken-winded hunter, and see men, who, are not half such good judges as yourself, able to throw away any amount of money on buying bad bargains."

It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse.

That strange ambivalence, at the heart of the early modern Englishman's relationship with the horse, is captured wonderfully in the story that Professor Peter Edwards tells here: the story of the plough horse; the racer; the hunter; the charger and the draft horse; the story of the well-bred horse as a status symbol, imbued with virtues of loyalty, courage, nobility; and the story of the veteran horse, old and broken-winded through long service, cast aside as dog-meat.

Double Silk had cost him just pounds 2,750 as a broken-winded five-year-old.