The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  As a coda to this account of the more sophisticated ways of controlling a horse, here is the down-to-earth method of an old Suffolk farm-worker who thus managed most of the horses that came under his charge:16 ‘You don’t stand for any nonsense from the young colts when you put them to work. You got to let them know the first letter of the alphabet, and that’s Whoa! But if you got a young horse on the plough, and he thinks himself a bit of man at first “go off” and kicks about a bit and get himself into a mess and throws himself down, let him lay there. Then when he’s said Amen, liberate him; and if you got the mother-of-a-sloe17 draw him one across the wallows18 with it and he’ll wonder what’s come over him; and he won’t trouble you no more. Some people used to have whips. But I niver had one. I used to put my whip in the manger – give ’em plenty o’ tooth-powder,19 that’s as good as any whip you can think on.’

  1 H.I.F., Section IV.

  2 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 6, chapt. 38.

  3 The God of the Witches, p. 154.

  4 Mrs Kate Rose (born 1881 at Polstead).

  5 F.L.H., p.55.

  6 William Charles Rookyard.

  7 The shaft-horse.

  8 The actual substance is red-gum resin which exudes from a kind of palm-fruit.

  9 From Albert Love, Wortwell, Harleston.

  10 George W. Sadler, Whittlesford, Cambridge.

  11 From Miss H. A. Beecham.

  12 Ipswich Journal, 3rd November, 1739.

  13 A. S. Parkes and H. M. Bruce, Science, 13th October, 1961, Vol. 134, No. 3485.

  14 V.G., III, 250.

  Nonne vides ut tota tremor pertemptet equorum

  Corpora, si tantum notas odor attulit auras?

  15 The Times, 23rd March, 1963.

  16 Sam Friend, Framsden.

  17 The sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn: the mother is therefore a stout blackthorn stick.

  18 The withers (East Anglian dialect); sometimes also wallis.

  19 That is, bait or food.

  22

  The Milt and the Frog’s Bone

  BOTH these objects were used as fetiches in connection with the two classes of practices described in the previous chapter – the jading, and drawing or calling of horses. The horseman, that is, who had been initiated – either formally or informally – into these ancient practices believed that in the milt and the frog’s bone inhered some power that enabled him to control, enchant or bewitch his horses.

  The milt1 was usually combined with the drawing oils to attract or allure a horse. It is a small oval-shaped lump of fibrous matter like the spleen (milt is, in fact, another word for spleen) and can be taken from the foal at birth. The milt lies on the colt’s tongue when it is in the mare’s womb: it is very rarely discovered in the afterbirth because the colt almost invariably swallows it. The old horseman was careful to extract the milt from the foal’s mouth with his finger the moment it was born. Veterinary surgeons, when they know of the existence of the milt, appear to disagree about its function – as do the horsemen themselves. Some horsemen say its purpose is to prevent the foal’s tongue folding back before and during the birth: if this happened the colt would be suffocated almost as soon as it was born. Others say it has no particular purpose at all. But the most convincing explanation of the purpose of the milt comes from a Welsh horse-breeder2 who said that the milt lies length-ways along the foal’s tongue until the colt either ejects it or swallows it. The tongue is slightly folded around it; and the function of the milt is to act as a former to cause the growing tongue to develop a longitudinal fold, or the ability to fold easily in this way when the foal suckles at the mare’s teats. Without some such former as the milt the tongue would tend to develop in the ‘round’ and make suckling extremely difficult.

  A Suffolk horseman who was born towards the middle of the last century wrote down how he prepared the milt. He included it in a carefully written note-book where he put down all his secret methods: ‘Now for all natural Causes I shall give you a alurement. For it is thus: when a mare foale her first foal get the milt. It must be a mare foal for a intire horse and a male foal for a savage mare. Everey living foal spue it up directly they are foaled. First rap it up in a pice of thin white papper jest as it comes from the foal; then put a pice of Brown papper over that. Put it in to a old Baken tin; put it in an oven after the Bread is drawn out when it is not to hot, and perhaps it will have to be put in the oven twice. And when it become cold it will become hard and like a peice of pitch. Let it keep in the papper till you want to use it. Keep it very dry; and when you use it Beat it up into a verey fine powder: mix a smal quantity of oat flower and lunis powder and mix it with pure olive oil and slack bake it in the oven after the Household Bread is drawn. When it is not to hot. After it is baked put it in to a mussiline Bag and sweat it under your right arm. Let him or her get the sent of it, and if he be ever so savage you can take him under your Charge and do aney thing with him: only be kind and gentel to him or her. Sometimes if you put a few drops of rhodium on the cake and then sweat it under your arm it will improve it when you first go to them. But you must not put aney thing Else on it but pure rhodium. The pure rhodium has a portion of the natural scent of the sweat of a man’s under his arm, only stronger and it does not take the natural scent from the milt; but all other ingredients will take away the natural Scent. This is the most useful and precious Recipt in the world for savage horses that are so by natural Causes.

  ‘Another Alurement made from the same thing: take the milt and put it in a stone jar. Put a little olive oil on the milt then put a peice of Brown thick papper over it and bind it down tight and plaster it over the white of an egg to prevent the Steam coming out. Set it in the Oven after the Bread is Drawn out, and it will Draw forth an Oil out of it. Pour the Oil into a small vial. When warm, put a few drops of the Oil of Rhodium and a few Drops of the Ottar of roses in with it and Cork it up air tight. And when you feed or handle your Stallions put a glove on your right hand, and 3 or four drops on the palm of the glove; and you can do what you like with them. For they have a distinctive passion for it; and so they have for them that use it. It is a good thing for Colts of all kinds to make them kind and good tempered. Give them 2 drops on loaf sugar.’

  The milt, as one can gather from the above, was not of much effect if used by itself. But in addition to its practical use in this manner it was carried about by some farm horsemen simply as a charm. They believed that possession of the milt ensured that the foal would always be attracted to them and follow them about even when it reached maturity. This belief in the powers of the milt is of very ancient origin. It is indubitably the hippomanes of antiquity. Both Pliny and Juvenal mention its use in love potions. It was described as a small black membrane on the forehead of a new-born foal. Virgil mentions it as something different:3 Robert Graves4 cites Aristotle and says that the mare normally eats the membrane as a means of increasing her mother-love. Most farm horsemen in East Anglia, however, believed that it was the foal that swallowed it; and unless it was taken from the foal’s mouth at the moment of birth it would not be found: it is rarely discovered in the afterbirth itself. It will have been noticed that these accounts are contradictory; but it should not surprise us that the ancients were uncertain about the exact location and purpose of the milt and the reason for its scarcity when it is far from being ‘scientifically’ established even today what the milt is for and what usually happens to it at the time of birth.

  The milt then was normally mixed with some of the drawing oils and used as an allurement. But one Suffolk head horseman described how he used the milt as a jading substance when one of his horsemen went out of his place in the hierarchical order of turning out of the stables for the morning ploughing: ‘I used the milch only once to rub on the door when one of the under-horsemen, a youngster, kept a-turning out in the morning out of his proper order. I said to myself: “I can’t have that!” So I used the milch. His horse wouldn’t come out of the stable, and that was the end of t
hat caper: he stuck to his turn after that.’ This exceptional use of the milt strengthens the theory that it was used as a fetich, because either drawing or jading substances could be added to it; and it could be equally effective in either case, so it appears. But almost invariably the old farm horsemen in East Anglia used the milt with the drawing oils to allure the horse and to establish rapport with him in accordance with the ancient usage.

  In the writer’s experience of recording the practices of old farm horsemen the frog’s or toad’s bone was nearly always linked with the jading of a horse, and they used the repellent substances with the bone, which was either powdered or whole, in this practice. Like the milt it has wide and ancient associations. Many of these have already been described elsewhere,5 but here is a description by a Norfolk horseman6 of his way of getting and preparing the toad’s bone. It is unusual for two reasons: he used the powdered bone of the toad with drawing oils and substances instead of with jading substances as most horsemen in Suffolk did; again, the description of the actual ritual of getting with all the attendant circumstances is of the deepest interest. He described the whole process as The Water of the Moon, presumably referring to its happening in a running stream when the moon was at the full:

  ‘Well, the toads that we use for this are actually in the Yarmouth area in and around Fritton. We get these toads alive and bring them home. They have a ring round their neck and are what they call walking toads.7 We bring them home, kill them, and put them on a whitethorn bush. They are there for twenty four hours till they dry. Then we bury the toad in an ant-hill; and it’s there for a full month, till the moon is at the full. Then you get it out; and it’s only a skeleton. You take it down to a running stream when the moon is at the full. You watch it carefully, particular not to take your eyes off it. There’s a certain bone, a little crotch bone it is, it leaves the rest of the skeleton and floats uphill against the stream. Well, you take that out of the stream, take it home, bake it, powder it and put it in a box; and you use oils with it the same as you do for the milch. While you are watching these bones in the water, you must on no consideration take your eyes off it. Do [if you do] you will lose all power. That’s where you get your power from for messing about with horses, just keeping your eyes on that particular bone. But when you are watching it and these bones are parting, you’ll hear all the trees and all the noises that you can imagine, even as if buildings were falling down or a traction engine is running over you. But you still mustn’t take your eyes off, because that’s where you lose your power. Of course, the noises must be something to do with the Devil’s work in the middle of the night. I’ve been lucky enough to get two lots through, but with the third lot I didn’t succeed. I think what really happened then [the third time] there was a sort of crackling in the noises as if someone was falling down. It makes you take your eyes off it. Then there was no answer: he [the bone] had no power. He wouldn’t answer. But once you got the bone, you take it home, bake it, dry it well, and break it up into powder. You preserve it in a tin or bottle till you want it. Or you can mix it in the bottle with the oil so it’s always handy in your pocket if you ever have occasion to use it. You put it on your finger, wipe the horse’s tongue, his nostrils, chin, and chest – and he’s your servant; you can do what you like with him.’

  We shall return to the second part of the old horseman’s description: here it is necessary to emphasize that he used it in an exceptional way. Most horsemen in Suffolk did not powder the bone but used it whole and also as a device to jade and not to draw the horse. They also went to a running stream at midnight at full moon, after going through the same procedure with the frog or toad. But after extracting the bone from the stream they cured it in jading substances. They then wrapped it in linen and concealed it about their person: to jade a horse they touched him in the pit of the shoulder with the frog’s bone: to release the horse they touched him on the rump. The bone itself is probably the ilium, one of the bones in the toad or frog’s pelvic girdle: some say it was the breast bone. Whichever bone it was, it was a crotch in shape; that is, a forked bone like a wish-bone, and having precisely the same shape as the frog – the horny elastic pad – in a horse’s hoof.

  But what is the meaning of this apparently nonsensical ritual of going to a running stream at midnight at the time of a full moon? One thing is clear to the present writer: after talking to many of the older horsemen who had performed it – men born before or about 1890 – he became convinced that they were totally involved in the ceremony. They believed implicitly in the effectiveness of their method of preparing and getting the bone, and they were certain that the bone’s power stemmed as much from the special treatment it had during the ceremony as from the actual jading or drawing substances with which they afterwards impregnated it. It was no empty show or flippant rehearsal of an ancient practice: they were in deadly earnest, serious and secret about everything concerning the frog’s bone, mainly because they felt they were dealing with something that was dangerous. This is identical with the reaction of primitives to a fetich: it is animated by something they cannot understand. And as Levy-Bruhl had pointed out,8 they cannot distinguish between the fetich and the effective substances that are sometimes associated with it. If, for instance, poison were used with something, harmless in itself but merely used as a carrier, a primitive would think that the fetich is just as effective in killing as is the poison. In the same way, the old horsemen believed that the milt and the frog’s or toad’s bone contributed almost wholly to their skill in drawing or jading their horses. The situation for them was a total one: and it was from this totality – the ritual killing of the frog, the dismembering and the unusual behaviour of the bone in the running stream – that they gained their conviction.

  It is very likely, however, that this ceremony whereby East Anglian horsemen visited a stream at midnight is a vestigial one, and that at one time it was attended by other horsemen who observed the participant and saw to it that he carried out the ritual correctly. The main support for this theory is that similar initiation ceremonies are being carried out to this day in north – east Scotland where there still exists a tight organization of an ancient horsemen’s society or craft guild called the Society of the Horsemen’s Word. Only in relating the ceremony to what was undoubtedly its original form can we explain the apparently nonsensical and irrational. And it is incumbent upon anyone who studies rural history to make an attempt at a rational explanation because, too often, the marginal or apparently superficial has been impatiently swept aside as negligible and not worth examination, when often there is underneath a hard core of historical fact and enlightenment. Academic fashion avoids the dark and ‘way-out’ places where no kudos, or at least no kudos that will pay immediate dividends, is to be gained; and much that is valuable to an understanding of our rural culture has already been lost either because it is not considered worthwhile investigating or because academic reputation is too flimsy a covering to risk a few rough journeys into country thickets and morasses. It is in the belief that the marginal is worth spending time over, and in the conviction that a hypothesis – even a wrong one – is better than none at all that the writer offers the following explanations. The truth, after all, is more likely to emerge from honest error than from the present confusion of a subject which is contemptuously dismissed as folklore by many people who – to judge from their position – should know very much better.

  The frog, as C. G. Jung has pointed out, is a symbol of initiation. After listing a number of animals so linked, he wrote:9 ‘The frog, on the other hand, stands on a higher level and counts because of its anatomy as an anticipation of man on the level of cold – blooded animality.’ It is clear that the frog, because of its similar anatomy, was a surrogate for a human being: it was a sacrifice and also a reminder to the initiate that he would, after the ceremony, become a new human being. He was undergoing a second birth, a birth and entry into a group that would for ever afterwards be his sworn brethren. Some support for this com
es from the remnants of the Horsemen’s Society in Scotland. For here ‘a bone of a more sinister origin’ was once used in fairly recent rimes in the Society. Initiation was one of the most important and notable ceremonies in the Scottish Society; and there is a strong probability – though actual testimony is naturally lacking – that the ‘sinister bone’ was one of the fingers of a dead child’s hand.

  A constant thread in the descriptions of the frog’s bone ceremony in East Anglia is that great care must be taken in performing the ritual as ‘the Devil is looking over your shoulder’. The devil here has nothing to do with the ecclesiastical Devil who is, as far as the evidence goes, a symbol or extrapolation of subjective evil that is in man himself. The devil in this context is undoubtedly the man who was in charge of the ceremony of initiation, the priest or Head Horseman, exactly as he is today in those branches of the Horsemen’s Society still existing in Scotland and Orkney. He is the man who has the most outstanding or leading personality in the group; usually, too, who is the most intelligent; and he is responsible for the proper carrying out of the ritual by the initiate. To confirm that this interpretation of ‘devil’ in this setting is the correct one we can again refer to the Scottish society. Here the officiating horseman, or the devil, is vicar for the ancient horned god of fertility, the ‘Auld Chiel’ who was long ago written down by the Church as the Arch Enemy. He was the old pre-agriculture, fertility god and was maligned and castigated by the Church when it was fighting to establish its ascendancy. To underline this relation to the ancient cult a stirk’s (or steer’s) foot is used in the Scottish initiation ceremony: the initiate has to grasp the Auld Chiel’s hand and the stirk’s foot is used for this purpose. The priest of the god took his form, dressing in his skin or using one of his significant marks: the symbol of the horns is also used in the Scottish ceremony, linked in meaning with the crescent moon, which also forms an essential mark. The meetings in north-east Scotland and Orkney are secret, and the place of meeting is carefully guarded by two of the brethren who stay on watch for ‘cowans and intruders’. The group rarely meets in the same place on consecutive occasions.