The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  ‘One of these witchmen (men connected with the frog-or toad-bone ritual) was once walking in the village street when he saw a very old man trundling a full wheelbarrow. The old man was making a very hard job of it. So the witchman stopped him and asked him where he was taking it. The old man told him. Thereupon the witchman took off his cap; made two or three passes with it. The barrow immediately went of its own accord to the old man’s destination.’ This was from the Woodbridge area.

  ‘A farmer not far from Ipswich came into possession of a toad’s bone. It was the back-bone of the toad and was supposed to have magical powers. But the bone got the master of him, after a time, and he were afraid it were a-driving him crazy. It got so he had only to make up his mind to get a muck-fork, say, from another part of the yard for the fork to start coming to meet him. So he threw the toad’s bone away.’

  Very early in the researches into the Horsemarn’s Word we came across three or four references to alleged magic practices with a fork stuck in a muck-heap: ‘An owd horseman could stick a fork into a muck-heap in a certain way; then you could hitch a horse to it, and the horse couldn’t budge it. But after he’d unhitched the horse, the horseman could go up to the fork and take it out with one hand.’

  ‘They used to teach the horses to draw2 by hitching them to a fork stuck deep into a muck-heap. If they got the horse to draw gently at first, and not pull at it sudden-like, the fork would stay in. The muck would fly all over the place but he wouldn’t shift it. They reckon it were the special knack the horseman had of putting the fork into the muck.’

  Some of the horsemen had the reputation of curing warts. As already stated, in a village near Stowmarket the wart-charmer is said ‘to have sold his soul to the devil’ by means of the frog’s bone ritual. Another wart-charmer, a horseman in the same district, cured a woman’s warts by rubbing them with a certain substance; and some have claimed to have cured warts by rubbing them with a live toad. The toad, since is itself wart-like, was thought to cure warts on the homeopathic-magic principle of like curing like. But if interfered with—anyone picking up a toad will notice this—it exudes an irritant fluid: some believe it is this fluid that effects the cure, if cure there is.

  The writer has known two village wart-charmers in Suffolk. Each had real powers of curing warts. The method of cure was this. The charmer, when first approached by the patient, asked how many warts he had. The number was critical, so he said; and if the warts were wrongly counted the cure might not work. When the patient had told the number, he was assured that the warts would now go. One charmer, however, was accustomed to tell his patients: ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry. If it’s still there in a fortnight, don’t worry: it will go.’ Both charmers stated that the charm had been passed on to them many years before by an older person. While they kept this secret they held the power: as soon as they disclosed it to anyone the power would pass on to that person. Here, although no material principle is involved—no substance or actual medicine of any sort—we cannot write off the wart-charmers as practising magic, in the derisory sense. If the modern forms of treatment by hypnosis and suggestion are magic we can call wart-charming by the same name. For it appears that we are here in the psychosomatic borderland, and some skin ailments respond better to treatment by suggestion than by surgery or physic. Warts have been treated by hypnosis in experiments in a London hospital,3 and it is reported that a country doctor has referred patients with warts to the village wart-charmer who has a more certain and less troublesome form of cure.

  In the inquiry into the Word we discovered in two or three different villages the belief that the hoof-parings of a horse—particularly the parings from the frog—have the power of attracting dogs. The first came from a blacksmith: ‘Often in the travus a dog would be snapping at the parings from the hoof while I was shoeing a horse. One old fellow told me: “You keep a piece of the frog in your pocket, bor, and you can get a dog to follow you, or you can manage the fiercest one you meet.”’ The two other sources confirmed this and one old horseman added: ‘We used to trim up the corns on a horse’s leg—you know, the pieces of bone-like warts that grow out from the side. The dogs liked these parings. You could keep one or two parings in your pocket as a charmer. But they whooly ponged (smelled).’ This is similar to a practice reported from the Midlands: a piano-tuner who was nervous of the dogs which he often met in going round the various houses, always kept a piece of dried liver in his pocket, believing that the smell of this would make the most sullen dog well-disposed towards him.

  From all that has previously been written here it is not surprising to discover that horses were once believed to be very susceptible to the powers of witches. Hag-stones—stones with holes in them and pieces of metal, sometimes a key, attached—are still to be seen hanging up outside farm buildings in Suffolk.4 The hag-stone, a charm against witches, was hung up on the stable door: the writer, has seen a hare’s foot, pinned to a door, serve a similar purpose in south Wales. The idea was to prevent the horses from being hag-ridden. But farm-horses in the old days were sometimes unaccountably tired for two entirely different reasons: from their surreptitious use by smugglers—this was frequent on the Suffolk seaboard; and from the horse-play that sometimes accompanied initiation to the ‘Horseman’s Society’, when the initiates, fresh from the ceremony, rode the horses about the fields at night, mainly, it appears, out of devilment.5

  The fairy-loaf6—the sea-urchin fossil—is reported by some to have been carried by the old horsemen in their pockets as a charm; and they have associated the term fairy- or farcy-loaf as a charm against the particular disease of farcy, or glanders, in horses. The writer has not been able to find an instance of this, and undoubtedly farcy-loaf is a mis-hearing for pharisee-loaf; for in the Stowmarket area of Suffolk fairies were once called pharisees or even ferrishers7 and as the loaf was well known as a charm in another connection it is not difficult to see how the wrong association came about. But none of the horsemen in this area has heard of the sea-urchin fossil being linked in any way with horses.

  A well-documented instance of primitive imitative magic has been reported in Suffolk, and we have recently heard of a similar occurence in Cambridgeshire: A horse pierced his hoof by treading on a nail; the horseman, in addition to treating the horse’s hoof, preserved the nail. He cleaned and greased the nail daily to prevent the wound from festering.

  1 East Anglian Notes and Queries, Vol. XII, (1907–08), p. 215.

  2 A.F.C.H., p. 124.

  3 ‘Skin Conditions and Hypnosis,’ by Hugh Gordon, Skin Physician to St George’s and the West London Hospitals: article in Health Horizon, Autumn 1955.

  4 Horseshoes served the same purpose.

  5 Gwerin, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 73.

  6 A.F.C.H., p. 212.

  7 History of Stowmarket, Hollingsworth, 1844, pp. 247–8. Also Lady C. Gurdon, Folklore of Suffolk, p. 33.

  Conclusion

  It would be much easier, and safer, to leave this section out altogether. Conclusions are dangerously near to commitments; and it is not the fashion for a writer to commit himself to anything, least of all to pointing out what he considers to be the likely developments of trends implicit in the period studied and the historical facts assembled. Facts, it is said, should be left to speak for themselves; and it is too often considered sufficient to get together massive, magpie collections whose very weight would seem to excuse the writer from forming any conclusions about them. But facts are merely disparate objects unless they serve a purpose that will vitalise them and give them some sort of being; and a work is only half a work if it stops at this stage of collecting and recording. Like the man in the Thurber cartoon who falls noticeably short of his full human stature in the satisfaction he shows in ‘knowing nothing except the facts,’ a study that proposes to offer no more is cutting itself off from the most vital source of communication with its reader. Moreover, it will only tend to strengthen the error that history is solely the technique of finding, establishing a
nd recording facts. Facts are the proud blazon of this type of study; but sterility is too often its sub-title. It is hoped that what is written below will be productive of something, if only disagreement.

  In cultivating the land man has always been compelled to adapt his methods to the type of soil, the prevailing climate and the tools he has at hand. A change in any one of these, forces him eventually to change his methods, and by changing his methods to change—in a greater or lesser degree—the organisation of his farming, and finally the community associated with it. For example, the climatic changes in Britain during the last few centuries B.C. gradually caused the giving up of the system of ploughing and cross-ploughing associated with the square Celtic field, and demanded in its stead the ploughing of the soil in ridges necessary to drain it in the succeeding period of wet, temperate climate that has persisted until the present age. The new, heavy plough with iron coulter and share was developed on the continent and brought here by the Belgae, a tribe who came to Britain about 50 B.C. This was the type of plough that was used all through the Middle Ages and even into the eighteenth century. The weight of this plough needed a team of four, six or eight oxen to draw it; and the ox has become the symbol of the collective, subsistence farming of the Middle Ages. There are two main reasons1 why the horse was not used in the plough during early times: he was too small and had not the strength to draw such a heavy implement; and again, the breast-collar which he wore made it difficult for him to breathe when given a heavy task. It was not until the invention of the hard collar, sometime during the twelfth century, that the horse was able to put his full strength into the drawing action. Horses were used in the plough here and there after this date, as we have seen from the Norwich records; but it was not until the release of the ‘great horse’, following the change in the mode of warfare, that it was possible to develop a larger horse suitable for the plough. This change roughly coincided with the beginning of the break-up of the old feudal and manorial economy and the introduction of the commercial farming, farming for the market, that over the next few centuries was to displace the old subsistence farming almost entirely. The change-over from oxen to horses was made easier by the development of the lighter ploughs, notably the Norfolk and the Rotherham, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The enclosure movement helped to complete this change, and the horse became the typical draught beast of the ‘individual’ type of farming that had its heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the coming of the tractor the horse has largely been displaced from his main task of ploughing the land and, where he has been retained, he now does some of the marginal tasks that were previously allotted to him during the era of the ox. One of these jobs was harrowing: for this horses were used from very early times. It was a job the horse was equal to, and one that the ox, accustomed to the steady, resistant pull of the plough, found particularly uncongenial2 owing to the jerky, spasmodic movement of the harrow over the furrows. The wheel, therefore, has come full circle; for on many farms today, one of the few jobs left to the horse, expecially in the heavy land districts, is to draw the harrow, thus eliminating the need for taking the heavy weight of the tractor on to the prepared seed-bed.

  The square Celtic field cultivated by the light, primitive plough drawn by a pair of oxen; the long strip of the open-field worked by the heavy, Belgic type of plough and a large team of oxen; the small, multi-form, ‘patchwork-quilt’ field of the post-enclosure era, cultivated by the lighter, better designed all-iron ploughs drawn by horse-teams—all show that a certain method of cultivation tends to demand a certain shape of field and size of holding. What is the shape and size of holding ‘natural’ to the new era of the machine farming we have entered during the last thirty or forty years? The majority of farms in East Anglia, as in most areas of the country where arable farming has predominated, appear to have taken their present size and shape during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century enclosure movement—probably much earlier in Suffolk. The fields were blocked out then in sizes that were best suited to their working by horse teams; and, in the main, these same fields are still in existence today under full tractor cultivation. Put in another way: the tractor is being confined and compelled to work in restricted units, of unsuitable shape, that were designed for or evolved under an entirely different economy. Figures show that agriculture in the United Kingdom is the most highly mechanised in the world:3 ‘one tractor for every 50 acres of ploughland as compared with 120 acres in the U.S.A.’;4 and one cannot escape the conclusion that farming here is over-mechanised—not, be it noted, because too many processes have now been taken over by the machine—but for the reason that each individual machine is doing far less than it is capable of doing. Field units and farm units are so small that in few instances is the machine being worked to anywhere near its full potential. A number of small farms are grossly over-capitalised, each holding equipment whose aggregate could be halved if it were shared on a co-operative basis.

  If there is a lesson to be learned from the study of farming history it is this: the optimum size of unit of cultivation for arable land in any given area depends on the tools and methods used for its working. No one knows what is the best size of unit for the mechanised farm today: it would be rash to make an estimate when so many factors are involved and the tide of mechanisation is still flowing. But it can safely be said that it is many times larger than the average unit worked in the arable areas at present; and if it were possible to plan the farms of the future in units best suited to the machines, the agronomist would have to think in terms of thousands rather in hundreds of acres.

  It will be objected at this stage that this is mere copybook, and that the academic approach has no relation to the actual needs of the land or the people who work it. But now that farming is almost fully commercialised, it cannot hope to escape the same laws of growth that have governed other sections of industry and commerce. Farm mechanisation is one of the last products of the first industrial revolution; and that means, unless it is centrally guided and controlled, farming as an industry is certain to take the same course of development as any other industry in this country: the increasingly large-scale organisation of its productive units and the progressive elimination of the small producer. A poor prospect for the small farmer and the small-holder? Here is a quotation from a newspaper serving one of the most highly mechanised arable-farming areas in the country: ‘In Britain three out of every five farmers work fewer than 50 acres. They are there because they love the land, and they love the independence that the land gives them. But they are a doomed race.’5 Yet the position is not as desperate as this. It will be desperate if the machine is allowed to dominate farming, as it most certainly will unless there is a bold re-organisation of agriculture as a whole to meet the new conditions. Unless an attempt is made to do this the machine will take on a dynamic of its own and appear to push the small farmers out of their holdings by its own ineluctable force.

  The formation of large co-operative units of small farmers is not only desirable but inevitable if the small farmer is to survive: the alternative is that he be allowed to suffer in the same way as the cottagers and peasant farmers did during the enclosure movement—the last analogous, large-scale change in the countryside. These were swept to one side by a movement that was thought as impossible of control as a thunderstorm; and on one side they remained, getting scant sympathy and little help as some of history’s unavoidable casualties. Historically the return to an era of collective farming would seem inevitable; a farming organised by the local community as it was in mediaeval times, but with the addition of centralised guidance. This was the embryo system, with local agricultural committees and central control, that worked during the last two wars; and the new farming that is bound to develop with the increased momentum of the machine will demand that some such system be adapted more fully to serve its needs.

  If the farmer objects that this is merely controls writ large, and is the ultimate challenge to his independ
ence, the objection can be answered by one bold statement: With farming for the market as it is today, there is no independence, and the issue is simply this: Which is the better: to be a member of a planned, co-operative unit of small producers with some sort of guarantee of a return for his labour and some safeguard against a bad year, or to be at the full mercy of a pair of tyrants, the market and the weather, both or either of which is capable of turning him out of his holding within a couple of seasons?

  The re-organisation will only be possible, given a clear-sighted policy and vigorous State action. Whether it can be accomplished without the State taking over the full control of the land is doubtful. Dr. C. S. Orwin, writing nearly thirty years ago,6 was of the opinion that, apart from any questions of politics, nationalisation of the land is inevitable if we are to control the economic forces set into motion by the industrialisation of farming by the machine. The argument seems to have more cogency today, especially in the face of the opportunist, Budget-to-Budget, almost day-to-day, agricultural policy of the major political parties whose watchword appears to be: We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going there fast. Even if farming were simply an industry, it would demand vigorous and far-sighted action now. But farming is more than an industry: it is a way of life, and the need for such action is, therefore, doubly urgent.

  But what will be the place of the horse in the new farming? We have seen that in agriculture more than in any other industry the old methods and old forms of cultivation tend to survive alongside the new, and that even in comparatively small countries as in Britain different regions develop at different rates. It is likely that the horse will still be used in agriculture in these islands for many years to come; and the whimsical forecast given to the writer by an old ploughman will take a long time to be realized: ‘Horses are dying off on the farms and they’re not being replaced. Before long, if you want to see a farm-horse you’ll have to visit the zoo; and in about twenty years’ time you’ll see me a-settin’ in there (pointing to his cottage) and doin’ my ploughing by radio-control.’ It will take many years for the second industrial revolution to reach the farm: even when it does the horse will probably be there to welcome it.