The Mari Lwyd ceremony lasted in Glamorgan to well within the present century. The phrase probably means ‘Grey Mare’ as Dr Iorwerth Peate has suggested;14 and refers to the horse’s head that was worn by a member of a wassailing party. His companions took him from house to house during the Christmas season singing and reciting their requests for alms. The grey colour in the name of this ceremony is significant and suggests a direct link with the Celtic horse cult. The Celts originated in the areas round the Caspian sea, in the grasslands which formed a natural habitat for the horse; and they were in close contact with the Scythians who were the horsemen of antiquity. The Celts, as befitted a nomadic people, prized the horse highly: theirs was essentially a horse-culture; for the horse had carried them across Europe, was venerated as their chief link with the next world, their glory in peace and their pride in battle. It seems likely that some of the horse monuments carved into the chalk downs of southern England, especially those at Uffington and Westbury, were made by the Celts, the worshippers of Epona, the horse goddess. Her name is said to be Gaulish for Mare;15 and it was in this form that she was worshipped by the auxiliary (Celtic) regiments of the Roman army. The figures of horses in the white chalk of the downs ensured that the goddess would see her creatures’ handiwork, especially when the sun was upon them. But the site also provided that these horses, dedicated to the goddess, would be of the right colour – white or grey, the colour linked with Epona under her name of the White Goddess who took another form, as Rhiannon, in the Welsh Mabinogi.
The Germans, too, as we know from Tacitus16 also kept sacred white horses at public expense, and paid particular regard to their haphazard neighings and whinnyings which they interpreted as a guide to action. This veneration for the horse was kept alive in northern Europe until late in medieval times; and it is probable that this thread in the complicated myth of the horse is most relevant to East Anglia and to the question which this chapter set out to answer. Many horse burials have been discovered in Scandinavia, and their purpose was to provide mounts for the dead to ride to Valhöll. In northern myth17 Odin, the most powerful of the Norse gods, rode a grey horse called Sleipnir to take him to and fro between the earth and the World of Death. Sleipnir was depicted as an eight-legged beast, probably to emphasize his speed as in a modern cartoon. Like the Valkyries he was the helhüst or death horse, and bore the dead swiftly to the other world where they were beyond mortal reach. It was for this reason that the horse-apparition, or a dream that figured a horse, was always attended with great dread and looked upon as a premonition.
This, then, is the horse or mare which has remained alive in country beliefs and customs up to today: the horse in its role as death messenger, confused – it appears – with the image of the Mare Goddess, Epona, or any other one of her various names. And what were once valid religious images have become debased, in their long passage through time and the buffetings of a newer and stronger religion, to the monster which troubled horses at night and rode them till they were white with lather, or settled on innocent sleepers: an incubus or lamia that gave them bad dreams. But this is the usual course of old discarded images and dogmas: they sink into society’s unconscious, the old traditional and unbroken rural culture; or they are kept alive in the games and practices of children who are still inadvertently keeping Epona’s memory green by spitting on their finger and wetting the sole of their shoe on those rare occasions when they meet a white or grey horse.18 But the old cult has left a trace at a more exalted level. It has come through the Middle Ages right up to the present in a form that is seldom recognized, but which can still be traced back to the horse-sacrifice of prehistoric times. As the economic value of the horse became greater, instead of sacrificing the horse itself a substitute sacrifice was made. Clay images of the horse were burnt; or, as in ancient Gaul, instead of burying horses with the deceased,19 images-rows of horse-heads – were carved on the lintels of the burial chambers to furnish a symbolic escort for the deceased to the land of the dead. This substitute practice survived in England until medieval times; for it was then the rule20 that on the decease of a tenant the lord of the manor had a right to appropriate his best beast as a heriot. The priest claimed the deceased man’s second best beast as a mortuary. But people of substance, on the death of one of their number – the lord of the manor himself, for instance – often walked his best horse, as a customary death due, to the church; and the horse complete with trappings and the dead man’s armour followed him in procession to the grave.21 Although the horse was later sold and the money donated to the church, its presence with harness and trappings at the funeral is patently a ritual one; a link with the time when the chief’s horse followed him right into the grave, his mount for his last journey. Today it is not unusual to see a riderless horse following the cortège of a well-known soldier or a person of national repute.
1 F. E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, London, 1963, p. 313.
2 George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens, London, 1941, pp. 11 ff.
3 This is the non-differentiation between subject and object which Levy-Bruhl, in How Natives Think, calls participation mystique.
4 Ronald Rose, Living Magic, London, 1957, p. 75.
5 Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. III, p. 196.
6 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, London, 1954, Vol. 1, p. 90.
7 Symbols of Transformation, p. 420.
8 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North, p. 251.
9 W.G., p. 384.
10 T. Gwynn Jones, Welsh Folklore and Customs, London, 1930, p. 112.
11 T. Sheppard, ‘The Parc-y-Meirch Hoard’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, XCVI, Part 1, June 1941.
12 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, op. cit., p. 56.
13 F.L.H., p. 104.
14 Quoted by Trefor M. Owen, Welsh Folk Customs, p. 55.
15 T. C Lethbridge, Witches, p. 115.
16 Germania, X: hinnitusque ac fremitus observant, cf. Heroditus, Book III, 84–7.
17 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, op. cit., pp. 57, 71.
18 Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children, London, 1959, pp. 206–7. Spitting is the ancient device of spitting out evil (despuere malum).
19 A. A. Dent and D. M. Goodall, The Foals of Epona, London, 1962, p. 15.
20 W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest, Cambridge, 1951, p. 69.
21 If we should express surprise that the medieval Church tolerated a custom that was manifestly pagan, we have only to note that the Church itself had issued a clear interdict under Canon Law against breaking the taboo on eating horse-flesh, v. J. P. Clebert, The Gypsies, p. 101.
20
Horse Bones
WE DISCUSSED the taboo on horse-flesh in the last chapter; and what is the most convincing evidence of the former power of the horse-cult is that the taboo has lasted in Great Britain – especially in Ireland-up to the present day. There is still a strong repugnance here to eating horse-flesh, although continentals tell us it is tasty; and an attempt during the last war to popularize it failed completely. But more evidence of the cult comes from East Anglia than any other region of England, and it is worth trying to find out some of the reasons why this is so.
In one of his books1 T. C. Lethbridge derives the name Iceni – the Celtic tribe who occupied eastern England before the coming of the Romans – from an old Celtic word Eachanaidh, meaning people of the horse; and he also suggests that the Icknield Way also took its name from the same tribe. Whatever philological support is brought for or against this derivation, it is true that the name of a Scottish clan, the MacEacharns who come from the Mull of Kintyre and the nearby islands, is Gaelic for ‘Sons of the Horse’; and it is also true that in the eastern counties, the territory traditionally occupied by the Iceni, the breeding of horses has been highly developed throughout historical times. In this region horses made up full plough teams long before other regions changed over from their teams of oxen; and it is recorded2 that in Suffolk the horse was harnessed
to the plough as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. In this region, too, there evolved one of the best known and most successful of the heavy breeds of farm- and draught-horses: the Suffolk. There is, moreover, enough evidence – as will be shown later-coming from the old farm horsemen themselves for us to infer that the horse tradition in East Anglia is a very ancient one.
The related objects most frequently found in the region are horse-bones placed in buildings for a specific purpose. It may be disputed what in every case the purpose was; but in many instances there can be no doubt that the bones were placed in the buildings to serve as amulets to keep away a visitation from the Mare. Horse-bones have been discovered in the foundations of houses in the Fens and some of them are now in the Cambridge Folk Museum. A horse’s leg-bone was found in the flint and rubble packing of a Suffolk farmhouse;3 and where a horse-bone has been unearthed in a house-floor it is now generally explained as a foundation sacrifice. But horses’ skulls were frequently buried under the floors of houses and public buildings for acoustical effect: in Ireland skulls placed under the flag-stones of a house improved the sounds when the occupants danced on them and the following is quoted in Professor Estyn Evans’s book4 on Irish folk-life: ‘A good thrashing floor should bend to meet the flail, and in Scandinavia, for instance, great pains were taken in the old days to construct floors which would make the flails sing. They were occasionally strung with wires, and to magnify the echo of the clay floors a horse’s skull was buried under each corner.’
A seventeenth-century house in Bungay,5 Suffolk, once had about forty horse-skulls neatly laid under the floor, the incisor teeth resting on a square of oak or stone. On discovery it was assumed that they had been placed there for improving the acoustic properties of the room; and it was pointed out that skulls were sometimes placed for this purpose under the choir stalls of a church. In Llandaff Cathedral, for example, skulls were embedded in the choir stalls of the south aisle (east). A similar find is reported from a Yorkshire village where horse-skulls were discovered under the flag-stones of cottages that were being restored. ‘According to local tradition, if one had a good horse and it died or was put down, it was the custom to take the head and bury it under thus, in order to retain some measure of the virtue and protect the house from evil.’6 This, it seems likely, was the original purpose of burying skulls in the foundation and the echo effect was at first, at least, subsidiary; and it is relevant to add that later on earthenware jars, sometimes Bellarmines, served as substitute echo-makers for the horse-skulls.
Evidence from other sources suggests that the original purpose of horse-bones or skulls concealed in the house was to keep away evil; and the discovery of bones in other parts of the house – even in the roof – points away from the theory that they were symbols of a foundation sacrifice. Horse images as well as bones are to be seen on the roofs of some houses, and they remind us of the mouldings of animals on the ridge tiles of medieval buildings7 (not very different in their intended purpose from the gargoyles on medieval churches). A notable example is from Old Manor Farm, Fen Drayton, Cambridge, a late sixteenth-century house with corby gables. On its chimney-stacks the head and shoulders of a horse were moulded or cut in brick. T. E. Tegg of Beccles, a former official of the Ministry of Housing, has taken between seven and eight hundred photographs of Tudor houses in Suffolk; and he discovered that many of these had horses’ heads carved in brick, usually on the chimney. (The photographs now form part of the National Buildings Record.) He points out that similar horses’ heads in brick, rendered with cement to make it resemble stone, are to be seen in the outstanding brick porch of Great Bradley Church, Suffolk. In one of the houses Mr Tegg photographed, Hill Farm, Great Wenham, the owner called the horses’ heads squirrils.
This, it appears, was also a common practice in north Germany where the horse-beliefs were so strong. C. G. Jung, the psychoanalyst, who was deeply interested in old country myths because he so often found them buried in the unconscious of many of his patients, mentioned the horse myths particularly. He wrote8 of the belief in the lamias who rode their victims, and ‘their counterparts the spectral horses who cany their riders away at a mad gallop’. He also quoted an eighteenth-century Dutch writer, Hendrik Cannegieter of Arnhem, who said: ‘Even today, the peasants drive away these female spirits (Mother-goddesses, moirae) by throwing the bone of a horse’s head upon the roof, and you can often see such bones on peasant houses hereabouts. But at night they are believed to ride at the time of the first sleep and to tire out the horses for long journeys.’
But we must distinguish this, which we might call the use of bones as amulets, from their use to serve a more mundane purpose: the strengthening of mud floors in medieval houses to give the floors a more resistant surface. R. C. Lambeth who lives in a timbered house at Fulbourn, Cambridge, has discovered that the floor in that part of the house which was once an open hall was thick with sheep bones. This was not due to the slovenliness of the early dwellers but to their wish to have a sound, durable floor to their living-room. The practice is well documented, and C. F. Innocent9 wrote that it was common in the eighteenth century; and he gives an example from a seventeenth-century house (now destroyed) in Broad Street, Oxford, with a floor of trotter bones tricked out whimsically in patterns. The practice is undoubtedly the reason why floors in minor ‘follies’ such as bizarre summer-houses, have been laboriously built up or patterned with horse-teeth.
*
No discussion of horse lore could leave out the Gypsies who have been active agents in keeping the old beliefs and practices alive. The Gypsies came into Britain in the early fifteenth century:10 Wales between 1430 and 1440; Scotland between 1492 and 1505; and they made their appearance in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the first records of English Gypsies comes from Suffolk where the Earl of Surrey entertained a party of Gypsions at Tendring Hall about the year 1520. The Gypsies, coming originally from the Malabar Coast of India, preserved at that time – as to a certain extent they still do today-many of the aspects of the horse-cult which was an integral part of ancient Indian religion. Jean Paul Clebert,11 the French historian of the Gypsies, says that to them the horse is ‘a funerary and psycho-ceremonial animal’; and they practised the two customs peculiar to those peoples who were usually or originally nomads: the taboo on eating horse-flesh (the breaker of the taboo bringing on himself the penalty of madness); and the use of the horse as a funerary animal. In this, as we have seen, the horse suffered ritual slaughter and was buried with his master. In later times the Gypsies appear rarely to have killed a dead man’s horse, probably for economic reasons; but they burned his wagon and his effects and sold the horse out of the family. Clebert shows how the ritual burial of the horse was sublimated during the nineteenth century in a Caucasian Gypsy’s funeral. For several days after the funeral the dead man’s horse was led to his grave fully saddled, and the servant who led him had to call the deceased three times by name and ask him to come to dinner.
As well as being bearers of the cult aspects of the ancient tradition, the Gypsies in Britain have also carried the practical lore that is associated with it – as Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald has so convincingly shown. No people are more skilled in curing (or disguising) a sick horse and few people know more about horse psychology. This is important for our purpose because it will be suggested that some of the old farm horsemen in East Anglia and Scotland also carried much of the old horse cult – not necessarily directly connected with the Gypsies; and as well as following some of its ritual were also outstandingly skilled in the practical application of the ancient lore to the farm-horses that came under their charge.
Clebert has also picked out another facet of the horse tradition in Britain, indicating at the same time that it was one result of the strength here of the ancient horse-cult:12 ‘Let us finally mention that in England the love of horses (which moreover came from the Islamic Orient) gave birth at Chester in 1511 to the first horse-races. The turf remained an
exclusively British sport until the nineteenth century.’ The Frenchman is probably using England here as a synonym for Britain, because no one could exclude specific mention of Ireland in this context. This statement about the love of horses prompts one to draw attention to the well-defined social caste which is associated with the horse and is strong even now a considerable time after the eclipse of the horse as a transport and draught animal. It is unlikely that historians would recognize the class; but social satirists and cartoonists who used to delight in depicting the horsey people would disagree; and the fact that this class appear to be surviving a social revolution argues a tenacity that has its roots in something deeper than the privileges of a ruling minority whose riding on a horse gave them in every sense a claim to a higher station.
Mention has already been made of C. G. Jung’s interest in horse myths. He discovered numerous symbols of the old cult in the unconscious of many of his patients: unknown to them they shared these symbols in common; and from long experience of this phenomenon Jung postulated a racial, or collective unconscious as he named it. Using the hypothesis of the collective unconscious he repeatedly demonstrated the correspondence between the figures he detected there – the archetypes – and the phylogenetic myths transmitted down the ages either orally or in writing. Many of these were horse myths, and they were – as he pointed out – only another facet of the horse’s appearance as a numinous figure in myth and folk story. In more than one place13 in his works he illustrated the coincidence of ancient horse myth and modern dream. He brings out, for instance, how in a dream the horse represented ‘the dynamic and vehicular power of the body’ – the libido, and was also linked with death and, paradoxically, with the Mother who is life and fertility exactly as he was in the historical myths discussed in the previous chapter.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 17