The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  ‘I used to laugh sometimes—I’d hear a chap say: “Well, I got the milt. Now I got a good charm. I can get the horse to follow me anywhere.” But o’ course the milt were useless unless it were put in the right mixture first. I’ve heard them boast, too, about the frog’s boon that had never been properly cured. They didn’t know nothing about it. They didn’t have the secret. But I said nothing. It wouldn’t do to say anything.’

  It was from such occasions as these that the Suffolk proverb, Quietness is best, was born.

  The reader will have noticed that there is an important difference between the uses of the frog’s bone and the milt as outlined above. The action of the frog’s bone may be described as inhibitory: the horse is reisted by the aggressive, inhibiting odour in which it is steeped. But the action of the milt is to attract the horse, to get a horse to follow it owing to the special way it had been scented. The realisation that there were two types of substance—opposite in their action—involved in the secret practices of the horsemen was another key-point in the search.

  The search now moved to a chemist who was able to confirm this part of the theory. For although in the old days it is likely that the horsemen prepared their own mixtures and got most of their medicines from herbs and trees, as the gypsies do to this day, within the last few generation many have come to use the chemist’s shop where many of the substances they needed were to be bought. A chemist who came into an agricultural district of Suffolk during the hey-day of the farm-horse about forty years ago described how the old horsemen came into his shop for their mixtures:

  ‘They would sometimes have their recipes written down on an old slip of paper, in a half-literate hand. But we could usually puzzle them out. The remedies and so on were traditional, handed down for generations; and some of them had cures the vets had never heard of. They also had their drawing iles as they called them: aromatic oils for drawing or attracting horses to them. These oils were like candy to a child. A drop on a horse’s tongue, and it would follow you about all day; or even the scent of it on a horseman’s coat. If a horseman came in to ask for one of his chemicals, he first of all took a good look around the shop to make sure that no one else would hear what he was asking for. When I started in the chemist business as a young man forty years ago they used to come in and order their favourite powders—a stone or so at a time if they were going away for a period, to a show or something like that. The last of the old horseman who used to come to me regularly died a few years back.’

  Another chemist described how the more careful of the horsemen used to make up the mixtures themselves, coming to him for only one or two of the ingredients and then passing on to another chemist, and perhaps even a third, to get the remainder. One horseman has described how he had code names for chemicals, and these were understood only by the chemist and himself. Therefore, even when the shop was full, he could ask for what he wanted without anyone being any the wiser. ‘Dragon’s blood was one of the owd bluff names I used.’ And it would have suited his sense of secrecy and tickled his humour immensely if one of his rivals, overhearing his request, had in turn procured the real dragon’s blood—the red gum from a palm fruit. This horseman also frequently used an aromatic herb called foenu-greek but when asked for in the dialect as finnigig it was incomprehensible to anybody but the chemist.

  The action of the drawing oils is typified by the following illustrations:

  ‘The owd horsemen were very skilled,’—this from Harry Mason, the shepherd—‘they didn’t have to exert themselves. A horseman would go into a meadow and there’d be no horses about; but as soon as he got himself into the wind, they’d come a-running up to him, aneighing and rubbing their noses against him. They’d rub their noses along his legs and his body. He got something sweet-smelling on him, o’ course, put on specially.’

  ‘A stallion killed a horse-leader and it was decided to have him put down. But someone suggested that a certain well-known groom should look at the stallion—a valuable one—first, before they finally decided to get rid of him: “Let Jack Francis see him first,” they said. Now Jack Francis was a little man, a ha’porth of a man, bow-legged and wizened. When he got to the farm where they kept the stallion they told him: “You’d better hev something to eat first, Jack, afore you see the hoss.”

  ‘“No, I’d like to see the hoss fust.” So he went into the horse’s stall and immediately the horse started to nuzzle his head onto Jack’s shoulder and very soon he was rubbing his head against him as though they were two old friends. After lunch he went to the horse, put a rope halter on him and led him out as if he were a child’s pony.’

  ‘The old horsemen often kept a little bottle in their hare-pocket or in their sleeved weskit. If a horseman was going to approach a strange horse he had to deal with for the first time, he’d have some of the stuff from his little bottle sprinkled over his hand. Then he went up to the horse to talk to him. But as he was standing a-talking, his hand with the stuff on it would be gently rubbing the horse’s muzzle.’

  Thomas Davidson, in the article already cited, quotes the story of a blacksmith from Bourn in Cambridgeshire. This man, George —— had the power to reist a horse. One day a farmer offended the men in the smithy by hinting that one of them had stolen some money he had lost. ‘A little later the farmer drove up to the forge in a pony trap. George turned towards the road, took out his handkerchief, and held it to his nose and replaced it in his pocket. He did no more; but when the farmer was ready to leave, the pony refused to move. In spite of every effort on the farmer’s part, the animal remained where it was from nine o’clock in the morning until five o’clock in the afternoon. Then the horse charmer patted its neck, and it went off quite unharmed and unflurried.

  ‘When asked by his co-workers how he did it, George said it was by means of a charm. He then proceeded to give, in detail, a version of the ancient charm of the frog’s bone that floats upstream.’3

  A Suffolk horseman gave the following information which undoubtedly illumines the above: ‘I used to use the drawing oils some bit. If I had a horse in a loose-box or in a yard and it was being a little troublesome, a little oil of —— on a handkerchief and held up would do the trick.’ The handkerchief that figures in both these accounts is significant and there is no need to dwell on the correspondences. But why did George the blacksmith give his fellow-workers the rigmarole about the old frog’s bone? Undoubtedly it was to put them off the scent. He could safely give away the ritual in all its details and be sure that no one could make any use of it, as long as he kept the ultimate secret to himself. He was only acting in accordance with his kind in letting people know of the ritual, because this was, consciously or unconsciously, part of the smoke-screen to the real practice and also part of the atmosphere. His real secret gave him added social status, some economic advantage and in this particular environment a great deal of power, and in no circumstances would he be ready to give it away. The similarities between the use of the drawing oils, outlined above, and the motions of the so-called ‘whisperers’ are too obvious to need stressing. One horseman actually stated that he pretended to be ‘talking quietly’ to a horse when all the time he was introducing it to a soothing, aromatic oil.

  The farm, it has been said, is the last resort of magic. This is probably true; but we can now see that we must not interpret this word magic too uncritically. For it is part of magic’s function to conceal its real dynamic under a smoke-screen of fustian and fantasy, precisely because magic is no longer magic if it ceases to be the monopoly of the class or section who practise it. A secret that is shared by the whole community has no realisable value, and brings no kudos—of status or actual economic advantage.

  A very appropriate illustration of this principle is given by a former district officer in the British Solomon Islands, D. C. Horton, in an account4 of primitive Melanesian magic called The Vele Man. The Vele men were able, it appears, by the aid of a system of magic to terrorise the populations of certain islands, thus g
aining effective control over these islands for themselves. For a long time it was difficult to stamp out the terror because none of the islanders would discuss the Vele for fear of being victimised himself. Finally, however, a determined administrator, Commander Wright, stamped out the terror and the methods of the Vele men were unmasked.

  The victim of the Vele men was usually someone who had offended the secret society. He was attacked at dusk, though not before an atmosphere of terror had been carefully built up. The Vele men themselves spread rumours that the Vele were in the district and they drew attention to the simulated cry of an evening bird whose presence always preceded an attack. While the whole village was in a state of hysteria the victim was singled out. ‘At the right moment the Vele man would step out of the bush behind his victim, clasp him round the throat and force something into his mouth, at the same time uttering an incantation in a high-pitched shriek.’ The victim, if he did not actually die of fright, died from the poison that had been thrust into his throat; for the rest of the villagers were too frightened to help him and left him alone, although it would not have been difficult to save his life by getting him to spit out the poison and giving him an emetic to induce him to vomit up any he had swallowed. But the substance itself appeared not to be directly connected with the death of the victim; and the interesting fact emerged, when the terror was cleared up, that the Vele men themselves believed they had actual magic powers, and did not associate the killing with the poison thrust into the throat of the victim.

  It is likely that all the hocus-pocus connected with the ritual of the frog’s bone originally impressed not only those who got to know rumours or even some details of the ritual but deceived even the men who practised it into believing that it was the carefully followed formula of the ceremony that was important and not the substances that went into the curing of the frog’s bone. This view is strengthened by other discoveries here in connection with it. The frog’s bone was used not only in the way already described but it was also ground up and given with other substances to farm-horses either as medicine or a ‘drawing powder’. Though for this use the backbone of the frog or the toad was reported to be favoured, in addition—it is assumed—to the ilium.

  The widow of an old horseman, in a village near Stowmarket, turned out his papers after his funeral and gave certain scraps of paper containing some of his old remedies to a young horseman who lived next door, thinking they might interest him: ‘There was witchcraft in one of them: all about grinding up a frog’s boon and mixing it with some other stuff.’ An old farmer also confirmed that some of the horsemen sprinkled a powder containing a ground-up frog’s bone in the horses’ bait: ‘I’ve seen a horseman with some: he kept it in a tin and he’d give a pinch now and then in the bait. The horse would come after him and always do what he wanted.’ Some of the horsemen undoubtedly believed that the frog’s bone was the sovereign principle in their composite remedies.

  The similarity between aspects of the frog’s bone ritual here in Britain and certain aspects of the Indian and South Seas magic already described raises an interesting problem in the diffusion of cultural patterns. At first sight the Gypsies appear to be likely agents in spreading the lore. The Gypsies, according to the most widely accepted theory, had their first home in India, and their interest and skill in horse-lore would provide a likely vehicle for the transmission of the ceremony of the bone. But it is more than probable that it had reached Britain centuries before the Gypsies.

  The reading of a remarkably illuminating book5 by Ronald Rose, who with his wife lived for many years with the natives of Central Australia, leaves one with the conviction that much of the material which is fashionably described as ‘folklore’ in Britain could be more profitably studied if it were considered as vestiges of a definite stage of social development in the past, when these fragments were part of a system of vital social practices. There are so many correspondences in pattern between ‘folklore’ in Britain and the actual beliefs and some of the social practices of the Australian aborigines that one is tempted to relate the origin of many of the ‘folklore survivals’ here to a prehistoric period when the people of these islands were similarly hunters and food-gatherers, before they had learned the use of metals.

  One other point regarding the Horseman’s Word in East Anglia needs to be discussed. Thomas Davidson has stated his belief that the Word was introduced into East Anglia by the influx of Scottish farmers, already mentioned, in the second half of the last century. Much evidence here in East Anglia discounts this theory altogether. In not one instance has the writer discovered that the practices described here have been associated with a Scottish farmer, or a farm that has been occupied within the last century by a Scottish farmer. Again, the writer’s most reliable informant on the Word stated with an assurance that is backed by all the other accurate information, checked and counter-checked, given by him: ‘We had it here before the Scots came down. My father was born in 1862: he had it (the frog’s bone) and my grandfather had it before him.’ But the strongest of all arguments for considering the practices indigenous to East Anglia, co-extensive perhaps in time with the Scottish practices and not stemming from them, is the peculiar insular character of this region. Outside influences, outside practices, such as these, do not usually weave themselves into the pattern of a folk in the bare span of a century: in East Anglia they would hardly do so in the space a of millennium.

  The expression the frog’s-boon was also used by the old horseman in another way that is worth recording: it was heard as a kind of metaphor for ‘being in control’. If, for example, a horseman was in the field and the ploughing was going on extremely well, his stetches coming out neatly, with dead-straight furrows and a level ‘top’, his mate sometimes called out in recognition of his prowess:

  ‘I see you got the owd frog’s boon with you this morning.’

  There are one or two other notes to add as a supplement to what has already been said about the Word. For a horseman who had the know it was easy for him to release a horse that had been reisted. He did not attempt to look for the place where the inhibiting substance had been placed. He took the shorter way, as already indicated in a previous page, and went to the horse himself, temporarily paralysing his sense of smell by introducing another stronger or more pungent substance, vinegar or gin, for instance. ‘If you had a drop of gin and just rubbed it in the horse’s muzzle he could smell nothing else. Or you could even blow some cigarette smoke up his nostrils. Then you could lead him past anything that had been put down.’

  Apart from the necessity of keeping their secrets for their own advantage, the old horsemen probably realised, however dimly, that it was to the society’s advantage that their knowledge should remain esoteric. For in irresponsible hands the real secrets of the Word were dangerous; and if they had become common knowledge, especially at a time when the horse was literally one of the motive forces of society, the result would have been anarchic. Even at the present time it is considered best not to disclose the names of these actual substances: to do so would not add anything to the folklore aspect of the account; but it would certainly leave it open to be used for purposes other than for those it was intended.

  Finally, to balance the above account the following cannot be emphasised too strongly: in ninety nine farms out of a hundred the Horseman’s Word—to give a comprehensive name to the whole corpus of practices—was never heard of, or even if dimly known was not known well enough to be practised. The majority of farm horsemen cared for and managed their horses by the orthodox methods; and control was by use and patient training. As the old horseman who was possessed of the real know has stated: only one or two men in a district would have it; and often where it was openly talked about, discussed and even claimed to be practised, the self-styled practitioner boasted he had the Word merely to gain extra status among his kind. In most instances what he had was the husk and not the kernel. Yet, although the practice of the Word in the farms of Suffolk was exceptional, it is in
cluded here and discussed at length even at the risk of giving it a false emphasis. For at this point of time folklore deals with the exceptional; and what appears to be exceptional in one area or country, when taken in relation to the whole field—that is, the world and all its peoples—reveals itself as the manifestation of an universal type or pattern and, therefore, valuable data for recording.

  1 A Scottish dialect word.

  2 cf. Christina Hole, English Folklore, Batsford, p. 82.

  3 Gwerin, Vol. 1, no. 2, p. 70.

  4 The Listener, 6th January, 1958.

  5 Ronald Rose, Living Magic, Chatto and Windus, 1957.

  24

  Additional Folklore Linked with the Horse

  Under this heading is included all the folklore material collected in the course of the search, but not to be explained under the theories advanced in the previous chapters. Most of this is written down without value-judgment or comment whatsoever; and the reader can ponder, mock or dismiss it—whichever he pleases. But it is included here, first of all because it would be questionable to record only the data that fitted in with a particular theory; and again because similar phenomena have been reported from other areas and recording them here may help towards their final explanation. It will also serve to show that even the most exhaustive investigation in this field still leaves a number of questions to be answered:

  ‘A man told me—and he’s not given to making up tales and thet sort o’ thing—he saw a horseman in the field make a few turns with his hand and there was something a-shinin’ on the handle of the plough “I dursn’t go near it,” he say.’ Similar incidents to this one (from north Suffolk) have been reported from elsewhere, and are associated with the phenomena known as plough-witching.1