Over time, they became known as the "White Marble Horse". The Boulannais were a highly sought after breed, particularly during the Crusades and also one of the most popular draft horses in all of France and in other parts of Europe. The breed is said to be the distant descendant of the horses that were imported by the legions of Julius Caesar, which stayed along the coast of the Pas-De-Calais before invading what is present-day Great Britain.
It was during the Crusades that Oriental and Andalusian blood was introduced into the Boulannais line, the later addition of Mecklenburg blood from Germany helped further shape the breed into what it is today. The addition of all these other breeds set the Boulannais horse apart from all the other breeds of draft horse; its speed, elegant build, refined head, silky coat, and thick mane are all attributed to the introduction of other breeds.
As far back as the 17th century, the Boulannais has made a reputation for itself from traders from different regions coming all the way to obtain one of these horses. They were commonly used to pull fish delivery carts from Boulogne (the city in which they were named after) to Paris. For this reason the horse had become known as "mareyeur" which in English translates to "seller of fish".
Today these horses are commonly found in different regions of France, particularly Pas-de-Calais, North (Dunkerque and Hazebroucq), Somme, Seine-Maritime, and Oise.
For the most part, this breed of horse is produced on government-owned stud farms to keep their numbers climbing and keep them from being in any sort of danger from being wiped out.
The horse is a remarkable draft horse and works even better in a team as a harness horse; because of these reasons, it is often used in the improvement of other draft horses.
Aside from the small "fish cart horse", there is another type of the Boulannais; it is a larger type of horse but today it is very rare and hard to come across. The larger Boulannais was bred mostly in the nineteenth century to perform work in the beet field; it was considered such a large and powerful horse because it often weighed over one ton.
This breed comes in a variety of colors, mostly gray, black, or a bay color. The gray gene, however, is the dominant gene in this horse and since its numbers are not very high, to find a non gray colored Boulannais is a very rare thing. These days there have been attempts to reintroduce the black color by using a single black stallion that goes by the name of "Esope".
At the height of the breed's popularity, there was an estimated 600,000 of these horses all over the world. It was only after the First and Second World War that they were almost completely wiped out. Their homes were made into battle fields and as a result the smaller version of the breed was destroyed; the larger type is still in small production with its number only reaching an estimated 1,000 just in Europe.
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