The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  The horseman’s society appears to have had its most characteristic form and to have lasted until most recent times in the agricultural districts of Scotland. Here it was called The Horsemen Society or Society of the Horseman’s Word. Thomas Davidson, in an informative article1 in a recent issue of a folklore journal, has given a summary of the Scottish evidence. The Society’s main functions were to admit into its fraternity the farm-workers who had acquired the skills of their trade; and, after the initiation ceremony, to share with him the trade’s secrets and to pass to him certain closely guarded oaths and passwords. Such craft societies or trade organisations were once common in England, and there is a strong likelihood, as Lewis Spence suggests,2 that they had their origin in Romano-British times and stem from the Roman institution of the trade society ‘founded on the worship or patronage of some god appropriate to the predilections of the craft which they followed.’ Spence says of the Society of Horsemen in north east Scotland:3 ‘Down to the close of the last century the brotherhood held secret initiations in barns at midnight with a good deal of “horse-play”, the “altar” being a sack of corn. The initiate who was blind-folded had a “grip o’ the auld chiel’s hand”, a stick covered with hairy skin. “The auld chiel” is most obviously an euphemism for some debased deity, probably confounded in later times with that ubiquitous form “the devil” who succeeded and absorbed a whole pantheon of ancient divinities. The neophyte was then invested with “the horseman’s word” which there is no harm in revealing as “Both in one”,4 alluding to the harmony which was supposed to exist between man and horse. This word, it was held, could arrest a horse in the road so that no man could make him budge.’

  The similarity of this reist (or arrest) word to the alleged magic word of the ‘whisperer’ will already have become apparent. But if it would seem strange that such an ancient craft brotherhood with all its suggestion of magic and mysticism, symbolism and secrecy, should have survived in Britain right into modern times, one can point out its correspondence in at least some of its aspects with the Freemasons and, on a different level, with some of the Friendly Societies. All these appear from the outside to have this leaning towards the esoteric, and even the occult; and in this connection a High Churchman friend of the writer’s has stated that he did not know what the word ritual meant until he attended a meeting of one of these semi-secret societies.

  In the same article Thomas Davidson has stated that there was a class of horse charmers known in the Ely and Peterborough districts until quite recently. These were known as Toadmen. A toadman was accounted a kind of witch—male witches were common at one time—and got his name from the ritual in which a toad or a frog was involved. Evidence of some of these practices have been found in the Stowmarket area of Suffolk. But before discussing these it would be well to ask: what was the ritual of the toad or frog’s bone, and what was its purpose? The ritual is a primitive survival that is, or was, practised in countries as far apart as Scotland and India. As described to the writer by an old horseman living in the Stowmarket area, to obtain the power of the frog’s bone one had to perform the following ritual: ‘You get a frog and take it to a running stream at midnight, but before this you have killed it and pounded it up. You throw it into the water and some of it will flow downstream, but a part of it—a bone—will float upstream. This is the part you have to keep.’

  More evidence from a village in the same district has shown that the village wart-charmer is believed to have gained his powers in this way. He followed the ritual of the frog’s bone: ‘He took a frog to running water at midnight and he sold his soul to the devil, and now he has the power to cure warts’. Many Suffolk villages still have wart-charmers, operating more or less openly, or more frequently only within a small circle of the ‘accepted folk’ in the village. But only in this one instance has the writer come across the ritual of the frog’s bone associated with wart-charming.

  Thomas Davidson has recorded instances of identical practices in the Cottenham district of Cambridgeshire and in parts of Cornwall. Possession of the frog’s bone was believed to give a horseman absolute power over the most intractable horse that came into his care. ‘With the frog’s boon,’ said one horseman in this district of Suffolk, ‘you could do anything you like with a horse; take him upstairs if you wanted to.’

  But which bone of the frog was the one preferred? The bone can be identified without much doubt both from descriptions given here: ‘It was like a chicken’s wish-bone in shape: my father used to keep it in his trousers pocket’ (an old Suffolk horseman is the narrator), and from a passage in a book describing a piece of Indian folklore.5 In India the frog was wrapped in a piece of white linen and given astrological benedictions. It was then put on an ant hill at sunset. The ants ate the flesh and left the bones, and two bones were then kept. One of these was to hook the object desired—the lover in this case; the other to reject him. This latter bone was called the shovel, and is probably the supra-scapula of the frog. The hook or wish-bone—the bone kept by the horsemen here—is without much doubt the ilium, the chief bone in the frog’s pelvic girdle. Another horseman from this area of Suffolk has given the pith of the matter in an observation: ‘The frog’s boon was the same shape as the frog in a horse’s hoof’; and if there were any doubt about the identity of the particular bone used by the old horsemen, this similarity would appear to dispel it. For the ilium of a frog is, in fact, identical in shape to the V-shaped horny, elastic substance in the middle of the sole of a horse’s hoof; and moreover the identity of name points strongly to the principle of magic under which the frog’s bone was supposed to operate. Frazer’s first principle of homeopathic or imitative magic is operating here in at least two of its aspects: like has control over like; an object of particular shape once possessed by a man gives him the power of control over a similarly shaped object he desires very much to influence. The horseman has the frog’s bone, therefore he can control the frog on the hoof: in other words, he can stop or release the horse at will. The second aspect of magic involved is this: by the possession of the bones of a dead animal, one can render another animal as immobile as death, until you wish to release him.

  The ilium, it may be stated, is also roughly the shape of a boomerang; and one wonders whether this peculiar shape caused it to behave differently from the other bones when they were thrown into the stream. Is it too fantastic to suppose that its shape would carry it into an eddy, out of the mainstream, where it would revolve while the other bones were carried downstream? Only actual experiment would throw light on this; and this the present writer has not attempted.

  By this time, the reader is no doubt saying: ‘Where is all this farrago of superstitious nonsense taking us?’ or he may be ready to make the ultimate gesture of criticism—to close the book at this particular point with an unanswerable and inexorable snap. If he has this impulse he is asked, most politely, to hold his fire and impatience; for there is in this belief of the frog’s bone, as there is in most primitive beliefs, very much more underneath than appears manifest on the surface: an iceberg-like proportion of the belief, in fact its real substance, is well out of sight. This, the kernel of the belief, was the justification for all the secrecy of the old horsemen’s societies—the arcana that it was vital for them to preserve intact and to pass on only to the initiated and the well-affected.

  But before going on to discuss these secrets and how they were applied by horsemen here in Suffolk, and before proceeding to uncover the results of the present efforts to make sense of these primitive and seemingly fantastic practices, one observation should be made concerning the frog’s bone. Even if it were used merely as a charm, its cherishing by the old horsemen would seem to be justified on this ground alone. Many times during the last war, to give an example, pilots of operational aircraft went on flights with the most curious charms one could imagine. Occasionally a member of the ground-crew had to return a child’s teddy-bear or a toy dog to a pilot who had inadvertently left it in the cockp
it after coming back from an operation. No comment was made at the strangeness of the mascot: the practice was accepted. For it was held, even though it was seldom openly stated, that where a man’s fate hung on chance he would be flying in the face of chance if he made no effort to propitiate it. In the same way, a horseman who had to deal with a killer stallion was better able to gain control if he had the fertile suggestion in his pocket, in the shape of the frog’s bone, that he could not but succeed in his task. For it has been said that no animal can sense better than a horse any nervous tension in a person who is approaching him. Nervous tension is rightly interpreted as fear by the horse; and fear begets fear and trouble is bound to follow. (Is the breathing-down-the-nose device a recognition of this? It is impossible to have full muscular tension while breathing thus.) The use of the charm is in one sense a recognition of what psychologists agree is a fact: that there is a large area of the mind that is not directly and easily accessible to reason: this is particularly true when, as in the primitive mind, reasoning is often faulty. Therefore a charm such as the horseman carried had to a certain extent a pragmatic sanction: it was used because it appeared to work—not perhaps as it was supposed to: directly on the object; but through giving confidence to the wearer and suggesting to him that he was full master of the situation in which he was about to engage. But there was very much more to the frog’s bone than this—at least as it was used by horsemen, certain horsemen, here in Suffolk. In the following chapter the active principle that underlay its use will be shown, and in addition the true substance of the supposedly magical power of ‘the word’ or ‘the whisper’.

  1 Gwerin, Vol. 2, 1956, Blackwell, Oxford.

  2 Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game and Rhyme, p. 158.

  3 Ibid.

  4 sic iubeo—Thus I command thee—in the Fen districts of Cambridgeshire. Folklore, Vol. 69, June 1958. ‘Some Folk Beliefs of the Fens,’ Enid M. Porter.

  5 Sudhin N. Ghose, The Flame of the Forest, Michael Joseph, p. 151.

  22

  The Search for the Horseman’s Word

  In his search for the principle behind the nexus of beliefs known variously as the whisper or the power of the horseman’s word the writer stumbled by accident across a seemingly irrelevant fact which proved to be the first step in a direction that ultimately led to what is claimed to be the real centre, the holy-of-holies, of the old horsemen’s practices. The incident was this: in a small Suffolk village a woman mentioned to another in the sort of conversation women have in an environment where new topics of interest are rare: ‘That’s the duttiest (dirtiest) house in the village! The horseman at X Farm can’t get his hosses past it. Every time he goes that way he very nigh has to drag them past the door.’ This incident lay dormant at the back of the mind for some time and then a somewhat similar observation brought it forward again: ‘The owd hoss were all right when they mucked out the cows with him; but you should ha’ seen him when they tried to get him to muck out the pigs! He wouldn’t play at all. He kicked and he snorted, very near tipped the cart up, and he runned (ran after) the hossman, cart an’ all, right across the yard. As soon as we took him away from the pigs he were as quiet as his usual self.’ The next link came when a farm-worker mentioned that he dare not hang a dead rabbit on the tumbril when it was drawn by one or two of his horses. With some it was all right; but an occasional horse would shy and refuse to draw the cart until the dead rabbit had been taken away.

  The obvious, and in itself quite undramatic, inference from these incidents is that a horse has a very keen sense of smell.1 But the possibilities of this hyper-developed sense in a horse and its importance for our inquiry were not fully realised until a meeting with an old horseman in the Halesworth area of Suffolk—Walter Lovett (born 1878) of Bramfield. It was plain that he had never been in the inner circle of horsemen in the district: he did not have the know, or the Word as it was called in Scotland; but, when asked about some of the seemingly magical powers claimed by the older teamsters when he was a young man at the end of the last century, he related what proved to be a germinal incident in the search:

  ‘I heard tell that two carters once called at The Wherry Inn in Halesworth for the usual snack and drink and bait for the horses. They put up the horses in the stable and then went into the pub. After they’d had a couple of drinks, one said to the other:

  ‘“Shall we have another?”

  ‘“No, I reckon we’d better see to the horses.”

  ‘But when they went to the stables they couldn’t budge the horses from their stalls. They pulled and they cussed and they swore, but the horses wouldn’t move an inch. After they tried for a quarter of an hours or so, an old man who happened to be in the yard said to ’em: “What’s the matter on ’em? Won’t they come out?—I can fix thet.” He may have been the one who done it—mind you, I don’t know. But he went inside the pub, and in a minute or two he came out with a jug of milk. He got this jug and put it above the lintel of the stable door and after a minute or two he say: “It’s all right: you cin take ’em out now.” And sure enough they led the horses out of the door without any trouble at all.’ No explanation was given: no explanation was asked for at this stage; for it had become obvious that the horses’ acute sense of smell was involved here without question: because milk has the property of absorbing any obnoxious or strong smell arising anywhere near it.

  From this point onwards the search, instead of being a rather futile and frustrated groping about in the half-light of primitive fantasy and magic became a consciously determined drive to get at the centre of the whole tangled system of horse-beliefs. The man who had wilfully caused the horses to refuse to come out of their stalls had used a substance that was so aggressive to their sense of smell that it was impossible to get them to cross the threshold of the stable. Such was the hypothesis at this stage. But what was the substance and where had the trickster placed it? These questions were not answered until later; but now, having an hypothesis, it was possible to work systematically towards its confirmation—or its rebuttal; to the stage where all the questions would answer or cancel themselves.

  But at this point came support for the theory that the horse’s sense of smell is more highly developed than is ordinarily realised. A brief inquiry into the steps in the evolution of the horse show that at one stage of its evolution the development of a keen sense of smell was very important to its survival. When the horse was in the wild state, chiefly a plains dweller relying for his food on grass and plants near the ground, he had no protection against his enemies except his speed and his ability to apprehend danger as soon as it was in the vicinity. The horses with the best eye-sight and the keenest sense of smell, those best equipped for seeing and scenting the approach of an enemy, were most likely to survive. Therefore through the first stages of its development the head of the horse tended to lengthen: the eyes were then further off the ground, making better instruments of detection while the horse was grazing, and the nostrils had also lengthened giving him the optimum sense of smell. For this depends on the thousands of small nerves that line the nasal passages: and to increase the surface of the nostrils meant to improve the power to smell. It is part of our thesis that this hyper-acute sense of smell has survived the horse’s domestication.

  The next step was a discussion of the old horseman’s practices with a farmer of the old school. He had never been a horseman himself, yet he had been a keen observer of their activities all his life; and he had his own theory about the way they got their seemingly magical results. The reist word, ‘the whisper between the collar and the hames’ to stop a horse and keep him on a spot until the horseman—and no other—wished to move him, was given a new meaning by conversation with this old farmer. But it is likely that this information would not have been given had he not realised that the questioner was already at the threshold of the truth before he talked with him. His first illustration showed that the hypothesis formed above was not far wrong:

  ‘These owd horsemen, you could
n’t tell ’em anything; and they’d never tell you! I seen one of ’em put a stick up in a field in front of his pair of horses, and they wouldn’t budge from where they were for anybody. The horseman could go off to Ipswich and they’d still be there when he come back.’

  After this the writer related to him the story told him by a horseman from a different part of the county. This was the story: ‘They had about a hundred horses at …. Hall the time I’m telling you about. A man who was working up there got wrong with ’em over something or other—I don’t know what happened. Anyhow he got the sack. But thet night he went up and did something to the horses. Next day not one on ’em would go near the harness. No one could do anything with ’em. In the end they had to fetch that man back for him to put it right. No one ever knew how he did it. He went in and locked the stable doors. But not long afterwards they harnessed the horses and they came out as if nothing had happened.’

  The old farmer’s comment was direct and to the point:

  ‘I reckon the fellow who got the sack didn’t do anything to the horses. He put something on the harness, you ma’ depend. They wouldn’t go near the harness because of it. When they had him back he wiped it off or put something else on it to take the smell away. But he’d make sure they wouldn’t see him a-doing of it. I reckon it’s the same sort of thing as when a horse won’t come out of a stable. The horsemen put something on the doorpost—something that a horse couldn’t bear the smell of, and wouldn’t shift to go near it.’

  To illustrate his theory he told another story which fitted in with the writer’s, formed not long after he had heard the original story of the old man and the jug of milk:

  ‘A horseman brought three fine horses into a Suffolk town on market day and stabled them and baited them at an inn. The stableman happened to say to him: “You got three fine horses there, bor.”