I googled for the original text and I got the answer that the missing word is "would". But I am not quite convinced of it as the only answer, and I think "might" is also acceptable here grammatically.
What's more, I find the sentence itself not very logical: I don't think "They(they are horses) would frequently bite and kick as well as gallop" can be the reason for "had rather rough play". The horses preferred to play in a violent way because they tended to bite and kick? I can hardly understand the logic here.
Can you help me?
Answer
You have two questions:
Filling in the blank
It's clear that you need a conjugated auxiliary verb to fill in the blank, since bite, kick, and gallop are all in their infinitive form rather than in a past tense form.
These sentences are talking about the habitual past. Possible auxiliary verbs you could use for habitual past are used to and would.
Used to implies that the biting and kicking happened habitually in the past, but was no longer going on. That's not the case here — the biting and kicking was concurrent with the rough play. Therefore, even though used to appears twice in the previous sentence, it's not appropriate for filling in the blank.
Might is not quite right, as it clashes with frequently. It expresses a possibility of something happening, and here we are talking not about a possibility, but something that did happen, repeatedly.
By elimination, would is the word of choice.
Use of for
For is being used as a conjunction, with a similar meaning to because. You could interpret the sentence as
Sometimes we played in a way that could be classified as rather rough, because they would frequently bite and kick as well as gallop.
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