1 Witches, p. 79.
2 v. Lyn White Jr., op. cit., p. 64: ‘… but c. 1191 we discover Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds granting lands equipped in one case with a plough of two oxen and three horses (presumably one of them for harrowing), in another case a team of six oxen and two horses, in another manor two more teams similarly made, and a third ploughteam of eight horses.’
3 Bright’s Farm, Bramfield.
4 I.F.W., p. 216
5 Ethel Mann, Old Bungay, London, 1934, pp. 253–5.
6 Halton East, Shipton-on-Craven: personal communication from J. G. Dent.
7 Dr Peter Eden, Cambridge.
8 Symbols of Transformation, p. 249.
9 Op.cit., p. 159.
10 Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, The Gypsies in Britain, London, 1944, p. 28.
11 Op. cit., p. 101.
12 Op. cit., p. 105.
13 Symbols of Transformation, p. 420, and The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 159.
21
Jading and Drawing a Horse
THE last three chapters have been a long but necessary preamble to a discussion of the ancient customs that have survived among certain farm horsemen in East Anglia particularly, but also in north-east Scotland, right up to the recent past. Many of the horsemen who followed and believed implicitly in these practices are still living, and some of these practices and customs have been recorded elsewhere.1 But much information has come to light since that book was written; and now, in order to put this information into a more clear perspective, it would be as well to restate the underlying principles of the customs and the rationale of the beliefs on which they were based.
One of the most interesting and spectacular devices of the old farm horsemen was the stopping of a horse dramatically so that it would not move. This was called in East Anglia jading a horse; and it was from this practice more than any other that the horsemen sometimes earned the name of horse-witches because they were able to make the horse stand as though it were paralysed or bewitched. A note in Gibbon2 shows how ancient this practice was. It concerns the sixth-century Gothic king, Clovis:
‘After the Gothic victory, Clovis made rich offerings to St Martin of Tours. He wished to redeem his warhorse by the gift of one hundred pieces of gold, but the enchanted steed could not move from the stable till the price of his redemption had been doubled. This miracle provoked the king to exclaim: Vere, B. Martinus est bonus in auxilio, sed carus in negotio.’ (Indeed, St Martin may be a good friend when you’re in trouble, but he’s an expensive one to do business with.) It is evident that the priests who served St Martin knew how to jade a horse and to attribute its state to the Saint’s intervention; and if Gibbon had had the slightest suspicion of how the miracle had been performed he would have used a much stronger form of irony than a mere italicizing of the word itself. For the priests, in fact, were doing exactly the same trick, and probably by exactly the same means, as the old East Anglian and Scottish horsemen who made out and actually believed that the horse’s immobility was the result of some secret and magical device they had resorted to. This incident concerning the Saint is also an example of early Christianity’s adaptation of the old pagan beliefs, with politic foresight, for its own purpose; and, as already shown, traces of the sacred horse-cult remained in Christian ceremony for centuries after this event recorded by Gibbon.
A later instance of the practice of jading a horse is quoted by Margaret Murray:3 ‘Another man-witch, who was sentenced to the galleys for life, said that he had such a pity for the horses which the postillion galloped along the road that he did something to prevent it, which was that he took vervain and said over it the Pater Noster five times and the Ave Maria five times, and then put it on the road so that the horses should cease to run.’ A more recent instance comes from the Suffolk village of Polstead4 towards the end of the last century: this shows also the same identification of the practice with witchcraft: ‘A harvest wagon was coming in from the field when suddenly the horses stopped and refused to go any further. Then someone suggested beating the wheels of the wagon with branches of broom. But still the horses wouldn’t budge: they were fixed as if something was holding them to the road. They didn’t move either until they got one of the old horsemen: he got them away without any trouble.’ The broom plant, it may be noted, was supposed to possess magical qualities as well as being a useful implement at home: the broom stick-that is, the green broom-could sweep out a room or carry a witch. The broom, according to the witch tradition, could give or blast fertility. Mrs Leather gave a similar instance of jading a horse from Herefordshire5 but without deducing anything from it except that the old woman concerned was thought to be a witch.
The following example of horse jading happened in Suffolk just after the First World War. It is typical of how an older horseman6 who had in his possession most of the ancient secrets, was able to deal with a situation that had baffled a younger man. The older horseman tells the story: ‘I was coming home with three lovely black horses which we always used on the road; and I used to glory in trimming them up, because they wore the worsted – red, white and blue – and they used to look lovely. I found I’d come to the Wetherden Maypole, and there was a chap there with his horses. He said to me:
‘“Hullo, Charlie. You’re just the chap I want to see.”
‘I said: “What’s the matter now, mate?”
‘“Somebody’s been a-doing the saddle up on my horses and I cannot get these horses away. The trace-horse is backing and the fill’ us7 is going another way!”
‘“Wait here a minute, bo’,” I said; “I’ll tell you what: you’ve been a-braggin’ again, haven’t you?”
‘“No,” he say, “I haven’t said a lot.”
‘“I told you,” I said, “you must not brag what you can do, because there’s allus somebody as good a man as yourself. Here now,” I said, “wait a minute….”
‘“What about your horses?” he said.
‘“I ain’t frightened my horses will run away: it’s yours I’ll have to look after.”
‘So I just went a-front there with my milk and vinegar; rubbed it in my palm and fingers; and then I rubbed it inside the horses’ nose and then round their nostrils. I then said to this young horseman: “Now hop on your wagon and be off!” and he done so.’
As can be inferred from the above account there is no magical practice involved. Someone had played a trick on the young horseman and had put down a substance that was so obnoxious to the horses’ delicate sense of smell that they would not move. The older and more knowledgeable horseman knew exactly what had happened and took immediate steps to neutralize this smell. The substance or substances were placed down either on an object in front of the horse or somewhere on the front of the horse himself. Until the smell of the substance is neutralized the horse will not move forward an inch, resisting all kinds of persuasion and even force. One horseman revealed that he could jade a horse standing, say, on the sandy apron outside an inn simply by walking round him and unobtrusively dropping one of the obnoxious powders in the sand, especially in front of him: ‘You didn’t have to touch the horse, but that would stop him.’ The same horseman also revealed that if this particular device had been used there was no need to use a neutralizing substance. A well-informed horseman simply had to grasp the horse’s head firmly and give it a sharp turn and back him out of the area that had been contaminated by the jading substance.
One cunning old horseman used to jade a horse simply by pretending to feel the horse’s fetlocks, but with the palm of his hand covered with the repellent substance. Later when he wanted to release him he had only to go through the same motion but this time having his hand covered with a substance that would neutralize the smell. And he gulled, and also impressed, the bystanders by lifting up one of the horse’s front hoofs, giving it two or three sharp taps with his knuckles and saying confidently: ‘Right! He’ll go now.’
Many of these secret jading substances are organic; and their number is added to by,
for instance, an observant horseman adapting something for his own use. While out ploughing a horseman had noticed a stoat some distance away stalking a rabbit. The stoat was gradually moving round unobserved by the rabbit. But as soon as the stoat got into the wind and the rabbit scented it, the rabbit set up a shriek and remained as though paralysed. It was easy then, as the horseman saw, for the stoat to make its kill. The incident remained in his mind and was reinforced by another experience he had shortly afterwards. He was ploughing a stetch not far from the headlands when his two horses suddenly stopped dead. He was too wise and experienced a horseman to attempt to force them to go forward: instead he turned them short and proceeded to plough another stetch A little while later he gave his horses a rest, and returned to the spot they had refused to pass. He found a dead stoat lying near the hedge. Reasoning from this he made himself a jading substance compounded of stoat’s liver and rabbit’s liver, dried and powdered up and added to dragon’s blood8 which was a code name among the old horsemen for one of their more powerful jading substances. The same horseman, a stallion-leader, gave another instance of how he made use of the horse’s hyper-sensitive power of smell. When his horse staled he kept some of the urine. He corked it down in a bottle until the smell was particularly aggressive. If he wanted to keep his horse away from a certain mare he had only to rub some of the liquid on the stallion’s bridle or on the mare to ensure that the horse would not go near her.
In addition to the repellent or jading substances there are the drawing or calling oils. They have the opposite effect: they draw or call a horse towards the horseman; but they, too, depend for their effect on the horse’s keen sense of smell. The drawing oils are nearly all aromatic oils to which the horse is attracted. The following will show how the name drawing arose: To catch a frisky horse or a young colt in a field the horseman placed a little of the mixture of oil of origanum, oil of rosemary, oil of cinnamon, and oil of fennel about his person. The instructions with this recipe which came from an old horseman’s notebook were: Set this mixture by the wind; that is, the horseman was advised to stand in the wind so that as soon as the colt or horse scented him he would advance towards him. On a warm day, the instructions said, it would be sufficient for the horseman to place a few drops on his perspiring forehead to call his horses from a fair distance without saying a word, or making any sound. Another device was to bake sweet-scented cakes to give to the horse as tit-bits:
‘It is For Catching Wild Colts and Vicious Horses on Aney Feild or Common (For a long distance)
‘You must get by the wind and take with you scented cakes made as follows: half lb of oat flower mixed with Treacle and slack baked. Then sweat it under your arms. The cakes to be scented with the oil of origanum, oil of cinnamon, oil of fennel, the oil of rosemary and the oil of vidgin. If you have not time to bake the cakes you must scent a peice of gingerbread and give him that, and it will answer the same purpose.’
The castor or wart that grows on the inside of horse’s foreleg was also used as the basis for a drawing powder: ‘Dry it in your pocket; great it into powder with a bright file or rasp. And it will be a pure white powder. Put it in a verey Close Box for the purpose. This powder has a great attraction for all animals, and the horse itself. The oil of rhodium possesses peculiar properties: all animals cherish a fondness for it and it exercises a subduing influence over them. Oil of Cumin: the horse has an instinctive passion for this. Both are natives of Arabia. With this knowledge horse taming becomes easy, and when the horse scents the odour he is drawn toward it.’
Drawing oils and jading substances were sometimes used with spectacular effect. A Norfolk man answered an advertisement for a horse-leader in Essex. He went down to the farm and applied for the job. They told him that the horse’s previous leader – an old man – had died suddenly. He asked to see the horse and they took him to the stable. When he got to the horse’s stall he found it was locked. Then the farmer admitted that there had been many applicants for the job already, but each had been driven out of the stall by the horse. Latterly they had been feeding him by dropping his fodder from a loft above the stall, and lowering down pails of water on a string. The farmer warned him of the danger of entering the stall. But the Norfolk man said: ‘Never mind. Give me the keys.’ He opened the door, took off his cap and threw it into the stall: ‘If that’s welcome,’ he said, ‘so am I.’ In a short time the horse came to the door: they put the bridle on him and shortly afterwards the Norfolk man was taking the horse to the smithy to be shod.9 A similar incident happened in the Hartest district of Suffolk. A vicious stallion had ‘got the master’ of his leader who could not do anything with him. Someone sent for the narrator’s10 father: ‘My father said: “I’ll come later on tonight: I’ll catch him for you.” They couldn’t catch this stallion: it was in a loose box and it got on top of the chap who’d been leading it. The chap had tried but he daren’t tackle him any longer. That night my father went out after it, but he did something before he left. As soon as he got to the loose box where they had the horse he pulled a little bit of stick about six inches long out of his pocket and threw it right up into the manger. The horse went up to the manger and stood there. Then my father went in and put his headstall on and led him out. But he never did tell me what he’d put on that stick.’
Drawing oils were also used in a more quiet way. A stallion leader had a walking stick which he invariably carried with him when he travelled a horse. The stick had a special feature about it; the horseman had split it at the end, just above the ferrule, and he had inserted a piece of cotton wool which he impregnated with a drawing oil mixture. A similar device can sometimes be seen at a pig-judging ring in a show. An old horseman pointed it out: ‘You’ll notice at a show that one man’s pigs may be standing quite still, though it’s natural for pigs to be a-rooting about all the time. The man has something at the end of his stick you may depend – some of the oils – and he keeps holding it in front on ’em. You’ll notice the difference when you see someone at the other side of the ring with the sweat all over him trying to keep his pigs somewhere in position.’ A similar appreciation of the horse’s acute sense of smell induced an old blacksmith to keep a bunch of violets in the forge whenever the season permitted.11 He believed that the smell of the flowers had a soothing effect on the horses brought to him to be shod. In this connection it is worth adding that it was once considered the fashion to wear a little bunch of violets in the coat when riding to hounds.
Many of the drawing oils were allied to the conditioning powders which were sold in great quantities up to recent times. These powders helped to keep the horse in good condition; and their essence or oil was often the kind of tit-bit that made an effective drawing substance as well. An advertisement in an eighteenth-century newspaper12 shows that in East Anglia they have varied hardly at all over a period of two hundred years:
Advertisement
Having fix’d up two large Mills which I work with Horses, for grinding the following Powders with which I’ll supply Country Shopkeepers, upon Cheaper Terms than any Man in London; I sell for Ready Money, and no less Quantities than 14 lb of a Sort; and to any Person that takes 56 lb of an Sort at a Time, I’ll allow 2s for every 56 lb on Account of Carriage, or 4s for 112 lb.
Fine Powder Liquorice at 6d per Pound Powder Gentian at 7d
Ditto second sort at 3d Powder Bay-berries at 6d
Powder Elecampane at 4d Root of Liquorice at 5d
Powder Turmerick at 6d Powder of White Hellebore Root at 16d
Powder Fenugreek at 4d Fine Powder of Ginger at 34s per cwt.
Powder Horse Spice at 4d Fine Powder of Ginger at 34s per cwt.
Powder Aniseeds at 6d Ditto second sort at 18s per cwt.
Powder Cummin seeds at 6d Pepper Dust at 30s per cwt.
Powder Diapente at 6d 6d
N.B.: Please to direct for JOHN ROWLEY, Druggist at the Red Cross in the Poultry, London; where may be had all Sorts of Drugs, Chymicals and Galenicals upon Reasonable Term
s.
In support of this hypothesis that the horse’s sense of smell is the critical factor in most examples of so-called magical control, evidence is forthcoming from biologists who have lately turned their attention to a field that has been comparatively neglected.13 They point to the great variation in olfactory perception in vertebrates: birds, for instance, have poor sense of smell but excellent vision, and this has a great effect on their social behaviour and their response to their environment. But among mammals smell is the most important sense; and odours can have a direct neural effect on certain animals, and have caused physiological changes in some animals tested in the laboratory. The horse is one of those animals whose nostrils are specialized for high sensitivity; and it is likely that much of a horse’s behaviour is conditioned by this highly perceptive sense of smell. In man, however, the sense of smell deteriorated during the later stage of his evolution and now ‘it is not so much rudimentary as vestigial’. This will explain why in the use of drawing oils and jading substances the horse will react strongly to an odour which a human being cannot detect.14 Research has also been going on in the University of Georgia on a chemical repellent which, it is hoped, will have early practical application:15 it will be used to discourage savage dogs, and the United States Post Office Department have already experimented with the mixture.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 18