‘“Yes,” he say, “and I know right well how to handle ’em.” Now the stableman wanted to finish early that afternoon, and to do this he needed to move these three horses to a stable in another part of the yard. So after a while they decided to change the horses’ stalls. But when they tried, the horses wouldn’t move an inch. Then one man who was more in the know than the rest said:
‘“I know the way to shift ’em!”
‘And he did. He got a bottle of vinegar; poured some in his hand and smeared the muzzle of each horse with this as he moved him from his stall. The horse couldn’t smell nothing else when he did this; and they got ’em all out without any trouble.’
The same man gave another facet of the old horsemen’s activities, still observed—it may be noted—from the outside:
‘The horsemen would never tell you their secrets. But if you listened and watched, kept your ears and your eyes open, you could put two and two together. I was in a pub in Stowmarket once; and I got to know a bit of their business. There were a couple of men talking about some stuff to give the horses, and a third man who was listening said: “If the stuff cin do thet, I’ll go out and git some from the chemist’s.” But when he came back he said he’d been to every chemist in the town and none of ’em had got it. “Give me a pint,” said one of the men, “and I’ll go out and git if for you.” He returned with the stuff within five minutes. You see, the chemist wouldn’t give it to anyone, only a man they knew—one of the regular horsemen.’
The old horsemen would not allow anybody to take liberties or impinge on what they considered to be their craft preserves; and they were fond of putting the uninitiated in their place. The following incident is typical of a number related to the writer: ‘The stockman on a farm said to one of the horsemen: “I’m going to take one of your horses into Stowmarket early tomorrow: I’ll take him afore you git back from breakfast, so you don’t want to bother.” The next morning the horseman fed the horses at his usual time and went home for breakfast. When he returned the horse was still there.
‘“What’s the matter with him?” the stockman asked in despair; “he won’t come out!”
‘“Won’t come out,” said the horseman, “’course he will!” And with a word he led the horse out of the stable.’
One thing was very soon established: only a very small proportion of horsemen during the last half-century were in possession of the know, as one old farm-worker referred to the secrets of his craft. The horsemen who had it, guarded the know jealously and would pass it on to no one: least of all to those who were working on the same farm. One horseman revealed this at a very early stage in the search, and at the same time confirmed that some ‘stuff’ or substance was in fact used when, at this point, only a very tentative theory had been formed about the real nature of the ‘magical practices’. On being asked about the horseman’s strange power to control horses at a distance, when the horseman was not actually present himself he said:
‘Some used it, but I never used a piece of the stuff in my life. I always managed my business without any of it. Someone tried it on me once, but I knew enough to get out of that!’ And to the further question: ‘What did you use?’ he replied with a twinkle in his eye: ‘Only a drop of water—just cold water.’ The incident could be reconstructed when later more was known about such happenings. Probably a fellow-horseman had placed some of the ‘stuff’ on the doorpost of the stable thus preventing him bringing out his horses. But although he was not in possession of the full secrets, he knew enough to wash down the woodwork before attempting to force his horses out of the stable.
One horseman in the Stonham Aspal district told of a similar incident: A horse-dealer or jobber had sold two of his geldings. The head groom told one of the men in the stables: ‘These two horses are going away tomorrow, and I’m not a-taking them. But the man who is, will have to wait till I get here afore he takes ’em out.’ But the man who took the horses the next morning did not wait. He harnessed them up and brought them out of the stable; and he passed the horseman as he was coming out of his cottage. ‘Mornin’, Bill,’ he shouted. But the horseman kept a sullen silence, put down by the other man’s knowing quite as much as he did.
One further example will add emphasis to what has already been written about the jealous guarding of precedence among farm horsemen. The incident happened on a farm in the Ipswich area about fifty years ago: ‘There were a big chap working on this farm. I believe he were the second horseman, or maybe he were the second’s mate: a big, cross-grained fellow. He were one of the Brethren—with God on Sunday and with the devil the rest of the week. He started taking his team out in the morning as soon as he were ready, right out of his turn. No one said nothing at first. Then one morning, one of the baiters said kinda quiet like: “He’s not allus a-going to do thet, is he?” The next morning the big fellow had some trouble with his horses. He couldn’t get them out of the stalls. He cussed and swore because he couldn’t get them harnessed up; and there were the horses, getting into the other horses’ stalls as he were laying into ’em. There was a regular rumpus. But all the rest of the men turned out as usual and just left him to manage it as best he could. He niver gave any more trouble after thet.’
The horseman did not go into details about the way the lesson was taught, but from what has already been stated the reader can infer the actual procedure.
These incidents illustrate some aspects of the old farm life that are worth dwelling on briefly. They confirm the impression, already discussed, that only a handful of horsemen, at least within the last fifty years or so, were within the inner brotherhood of the craft; and these possessed the secrets that were held, one supposes, by members of the craft society when it functioned regularly. Confirmation of this came from two particular horsemen who later revealed information that demonstrated that they were outstanding, and held secrets very few horsemen in the district knew of. One of these gave some details about the horsemen’s society that used to meet in the town: ‘My grandfather used to go to it and the horsemen from Bush Hall, Akenham Hall and Thurleston Hall used to go with him. Both my father and grandfather told me this. There was some sort of ceremony to join, I believe; but it was all before my time (He was born in 1886). They met to have a chin-wag amongst themselves.’
Bits and pieces of evidence collected about this society suggest that many of the secrets—probably the traditional medicines and cures, chiefly—were actually written down. The book was available, so it is reported, for certain horsemen at a cost of £5—a mint of money in the days when the average farm-worker’s wages were twelve or fourteen shillings a week. Basil Brown, the Suffolk archaeologist, who once farmed in north Suffolk, has also heard of the existence of this booklet; but he was unable to secure access to the particular copy he knew of. Recently, too, the writer has been informed2 that the secret of ‘The Horseman’s Word’ has been offered for sale by a man—a ploughman—in Scotland; and this seems to suggest that the Society has broken up even there where it flourished more strongly than in other parts of Britain.
One other aspect is this: the secret of ‘the horseman’s word’ gave certain horsemen a positive economic advantage, and they were very careful not to jeopardise this advantage by giving their secrets away. The more they knew, the more skilled they were, the better they could do their job and the more likely they were to hold it; and in the agricultural depression of the end of the last century and the pre-war years of this, possession of the know was a very real advantage indeed. The set-up on some of the farms during these years, as related by the old horsemen, was anything but idyllic; and the description they gave of the rivalry, back-biting and sometimes open malice that existed, even among the men themselves, should be taken into account when there is any impulse to depict the countryside under the old order as a haven of peace and rural contentment. The scene was not as it looked to visitors from the town—the Corydon and Amaryllis seekers—who even now are convinced that the Golden Age is immediately behind us.
But what was the relation of the farmers themselves to the practices of the horsemen? In most cases they appear to have known nothing of them. Like the shepherd the head horseman had a very responsible job. He was usually given a free-hand by the farmer who did not interfere with the actual technique of looking after the horses. As long as he was assured they were treated well and were kept in good condition, he knew that it was best to interfere as little as possible. Certainly, few farmers would belong to the horsemen’s society even if they knew of its existence. Some, however, were aware of unorthodox practices and gave out that anyone caught using ‘stuff’ would immediately be given the sack. But on the whole the farmers were forced to err on the side of trust rather than suspicion; for once a farmer’s suspicion became overt the smooth running of his farm would greatly be hindered. The horseman had the ‘whip-hand’, in more senses than one. The following incident will illustrate this:
‘A farmer had a horseman who couldn’t pass a pub. So he told the policeman at B …. to look out for him: if he ever saw the horses standing outside a pub, to get the horseman out of it and send him home. One day the policeman saw this farmer’s horses standing outside The Fox. He went inside and said to the horseman:
‘“You better get back to the farm.”
‘“Yes, I will: when I’m ready.”
‘“If you don’t get going now I’ll take the wagon and the horses back myself.”
‘“Right. In that case I’ll be here till stop-tap!”
‘The policeman went out and tried to lead the horses back to the farm. But he couldn’t get them to move an inch. He returned to the pub and told the horseman: “I can’t shift ’em.”
‘“No more you will. They’ll go when I’m ready,”’ and he quietly finished his drink and took the horses home without further trouble.
1 cf. Job. 25; ‘he (the horse) smelleth the battle afar off.’
2 Personal communication from Mrs Leslie More of Newbridge, Midlothian.
23
The Frog’s Bone
During the search the writer talked with dozens of horsemen up and down the county of Suffolk; and he soon learned to distinguish the ones who were likely to have secrets of the inner-circle of the craft. That this circle was still in existence—if not in formal operation—was apparent to him on one of the first occasions when he talked to a horseman who, he was sure, was more likely to have the know than anyone he had so far met. Wishing to indicate that the horsemen’s secrets were not entirely unknown to him, and that the revealing of information would not, therefore, be entirely a breach of the craft’s secrecy he gave a rather gratuitous explanation of an incident—similar to those already given—where a horse was reisted1 or stopped by apparently magical means. He was immediately met with the sharp challenge: ‘Who told you that?’
But in the weeks that followed when the old horseman came to recognise that the questioner’s motive was no more sinister than to record the past farm-economy in all its aspects, he became less cautious; and he grew sensible to the argument that while at one time giving his secrets away would have been equivalent to letting someone ‘take the bread from his mouth’, as one horseman put it, at present, when a full ‘horse economy’ had gone from the farms, the secrets could be of little material advantage to anybody. Moreover, as there was now no working horseman to pass his secrets to, unless he told them now they would soon go into oblivion.
For at this stage the inquirer was still puzzled by one apparently unassimilable fact. The reist phenomenon, the control at a distance, had been explained at least to his own satisfaction; and, judging from the old horseman’s reaction when he heard it, his theory was the right one. But how did the frog’s bone fit into the picture? When the old horseman was first asked if he had ever come across the frog’s bone, he shook his head and said bluntly: ‘Never heard of it.’ Here was a lesson the questioner should have learned long before this: it is almost useless for a folklorist to ask the direct question—at least in a cold and purely ‘informative’ atmosphere. The real information comes of its own accord, is nourished by a kind of involuntary flow between the questioner and the questioned; and when the time is ripe it comes unannounced, with all the freshness of a discovery and with the same conviction of rightness that accompanies the poet’s inspiration.
So it was with the old horseman. After a number of talks extending over a few months, one winter’s evening the true secret of the frog’s bone was revealed. But first of all, the searcher had to sit humbly under a mildly astringent and admonitory lecture. The horseman rolled himself a cigarette; trimmed the shreds of tobacco from its ends and threw them into the fire: ‘Now look, you’ve been hearing things! Someone round here has been telling you things about the horseman’s business—about stuff and chemicals, the frog’s boon and all thet. Well, you don’t want to believe half on it. It’s someone who’s heard a bit of it and is making the rest of it up. Now I’ll tell you about the frog’s boon….’
At this point the horseman paused to take another shred of tobacco from the end of his cigarette, and the effect was both dramatic and painful. Painful, because the inquirer sensed that here he was about to learn a vital fact that would quicken most of the others; and yet at the same time he knew that in the long seconds that were passing before the old horseman would start to speak again, there was plenty of time for him to change his mind, to gloss over or to retain the information he first intended to impart. But with all the solidity of his kind he kept to his first intention:
‘I’ll tell you about the frog’s boon. First of all not one in ten thousand knows what kind of frog it comes from, or would be able to recognise the boon if they saw it—not one in ten thousand. I knew only one man in this district who had one. The frog you were after wasn’t easy to come by: it were a rare kind. It were a black frog with a star on its back; and you’d be most likely to find one in a wood where they’d been a-felling trees. You’d get one, maybe, under an owd felled log or something like thet. After you’d caught it you had to kill it and hang it up on a blackthorn tree to dry. Then you took it down and treated it till it were all broke up and dismembered. Or you could clean it by putting it in an ant hill: the ants would pick all its flesh off the boons. You then took it to a running stream and placed it in the water. Part of it would float upstream; and that’s the part you had to keep.’
So far the account was no different from the conventional account of the frog’s bone ritual, already given by two other horsemen in the area. But what followed was the crux:
‘When you got the boon you next cured it. You got umpteen different things and you cured the boon in this mixture. After you had cured it and dried it again, it was ready. You kept it in your pocket until you wanted to use it. There were no charm about it. This is how it were used. A farmer would tell a horseman just before “knocking-off” time:
‘“There’s a load of oil-cake to get from the railway station: will you take the tumbril down and get it?”
‘“But my horse is tired: he’s been working hard all day.”
‘“It’s not the horse is tired!—But all right: I’ll get someone else to do it.”
‘But when the farmer told another horseman to harness the horse and put him in the tumbril, the horseman found that he wouldn’t come out of the stable. What you did was to rub the frog’s boon on the horse’s shoulder. Then whoever came to fetch him would straightway be in a muddle. The horse would go through the motions of moving but wouldn’t shift an inch. To make that horse go you just had to take the frog’s boon and rub it lightly on his rump.’
It will be immediately recognised that the potent principle in this, as the old horseman indicated, is not the exotic type of frog, the ritual at the stream, or even the bone itself. All these were incidental. It was the herbs or chemicals in which the bone was cured or steeped and the resulting odour with which it became impregnated that had the seemingly magical effect. So, as in the use of ‘stuff’ on stable-doors, lintels and harness, th
e deciding factor in the use of the frog’s bone was the hyper-sensitive smelling power of the horse. The frog’s bone was steeped in substances not detectable by human smell; but they were so aggressive to the sense of smell of the horse that he was as though paralysed when the odour was anywhere near his nostrils. When the bone was rubbed on the horse’s rump, the odour coming from somewhere behind he was impelled to move away from it. The frog’s bone, it may be mentioned, was used in the incident where the policeman tried to get a horseman out of the inn.
The principle behind the use of the frog’s bone is analogous to the one that operated in that other secret charm of the old horsemen—the colt-milt.2 The colt-milt or melt is a small, oval-shaped lump of fibrous matter like the spleen (milt is in fact another, older word for spleen). It lies at the back of the colt’s tongue when it is in the mare’s womb. The old horseman described what happened at a colt’s birth:
‘When a mare was about to foal, one of the horseman had to set up with her. She usually foaled at night. In the morning the farmer came in to have a look:
‘“Well, I see you got a colt. Where you with her when it was born?”
‘“Yes, I was here.”
‘“Where’s the milt?”
‘Then you took out the milt for him to see. The milt would show you were actually on the spot and not asleep when the colt were born. Because to get the milt you had to put your two fingers into the colt’s mouth and prise it out just as it were a-coming out of the bag. Do you leave it until a moment later, the colt would swallow it.’
Like the frog’s bone the milt was a good charmer. The old horseman said he had a dozen milts at one time. But they were no use unless they were properly cured. Like the frog’s bone, to be effective the milt had to be cured in a mixture of ‘umpteen different things’, before it could be used.
The Horse in the Furrow Page 25