The use of this unusual equipment in the Scottish ceremony sometimes brings about an amusing situation. A hut in Orkney where a branch of the Society had just met was accidentally burned down shortly after the meeting. The next day the police were calling on farmers in the district to ask which of them had lost a stirk because the remains of a stirk’s feet had been discovered in the ashes. They were very puzzled when no one came forward to say that one of their beasts was missing.
Another aspect of the Norfolk account already quoted on page 218 will probably have been remarked by those who are familiar with the form of the primitive initiation ceremony. This is the noises: ‘as if buildings were falling down, a traction engine is running over you’. Noise is an essential part of the primitive initiation ceremony because it is the most effective means of impressing or frightening a blind-folded initiate.10 The old Norfolk horseman gave it as his opinion that the noises ‘must be something to do with the Devil’s work in the middle of the night’. And he was speaking true, though probably not in the sense he meant. For the leader of the group, the devil, in the Scottish ceremony today provides a certain ordeal chosen by him to test the blindfolded initiate: to determine whether he has absorbed his instructions to trust implicitly in his own sworn brethren in the group, whatever happens to him. One such ordeal at a fairly recent meeting of a group of the Scottish society is related by one of its members:
‘The ordeal can involve whatever they’ve thought up for you. On this occasion I know the meeting was being held not far from a very ancient and very well-known kirkyard where – because it was old – most of the stones were flat. Now at the initiation the entrant was told that if he would leave the room or barn, or wherever they were, and follow a certain path until he came to this kirkyard, and walk down one of the paths in the kirkyard and – say it was a tombstone, number five on the right – grope in there in the dark he would find a whip that would give him for ever more power over any horse that he was likely to meet. He did so, but in the meantime they had already planted one of the boys below the stone so that when he reached in to gather the whip he was immediately seized. Well, you can imagine in a kirkyard in the black of night what the effect would be on the entrant. But again here, he was in the hands of a brother, although he didn’t know it. And this is typical of what happens: they can frighten you but nothing will happen to you provided you believe in what you’re undertaking.’
Here it was not necessary to blindfold the entrant as he was operated on at night, but the shout in the dark and the seizure of his hand was aimed at stirring him to the depths. Noise played a great part in the initiation ordeal of most primitive tribes; and the bullroarer is an implement designed specifically for that purpose. It became the frightening noise made by the God, and it was one of the main instruments for penetrating deeply into the consciousness of the initiate and clearing the ground for a new alignment. For it is evident that the initiation ceremony was not simply a rather superfluous test of manhood, which undoubtedly it was, but only incidentally. Its main purpose was to align the individual to a new group consciousness, and this was done not simply by precept but by first attempting to shake him to the core of his being. For now he has ceased to be an immature individual and has become a member of a group each of whom had to a large extent to submit to the group’s will. In return he got the assurance, emphasized by the ceremony, that nothing would really harm him if he trusted to the power of the group and to the aid that his fellows, his sworn brethren, could bring him.
Therefore, the initiation, ‘going through the ring’, was more than the symbol of a new life; in many respects it was a new life for the initiate in a really primitive society. Ronald Rose,11 a pupil of Dr Rhine of Duke University, U.S.A., spent six years living among a primitive tribe in central Australia. His wife and children were with him. As a trained psychologist he noted particularly the function of the initiation ceremony from a psychological point of view. The aborigines were extremely suggestible and the witch doctors were able to practise hypnosis to gain a variety of effects. The initiation ceremony, it appears, actually aimed at producing this highly suggestible uniformity in the group; and it is instructive to note that if a youth did not submit to the conditioning ordeal he was led off into the bush to die. It is possible that the show of violence given to candidates in modern initiation ceremonies when they do not carry out the instructions of their conductor to the letter is a vestige of this final exclusion that was once offered to them. This aspect also comes out in the Scottish society’s initiation where the initiate can get slightly hurt if he does not carry out the instructions faithfully. ‘At the initiation ceremony, too, while the entrant is equipped to face life, not only is he equipped with a lot of secret and special lore, he is also disciplined, both towards his horse and towards his fellow horsemen. He must, at all time, render aid if called upon to do so. There are special signs which we can give, if we are in trouble with our horses or need a brother’s help in any way we make that sign and the brother must assist.’
The noises mentioned by the Norfolk horseman were patently not real but hallucinations, a folk-memory of the time when the initiation ceremony was performed as it is in Scotland today, in the classical manner with blindfold initiates and a hidden band of assistants who supplied the works – the whole apparatus of perturbation. The injunction that ‘you must keep your eyes on the bone, else you’d get no power’ was the prelude to the hallucination. Like the primitive shaman the initiate was hypnotizing himself by staring into the running stream: the noises were what folk-memory told him he would hear, and expecting to hear them in his highly suggestible state induced by staring into the water, he actually heard these noises; and that they were all, in fact, subjective did not make them any the less terrifying. A similar account of the frog’s bone ceremony complete with ‘all manner of noises’ comes from the Hargrave district of west Suffolk.
One aspect of the frog’s bone has not been commented upon. This is the horseman’s practice of keeping it under the arm-pit. After it had been cured and kept in this place, if he used it on a horse the animal ‘couldn’t pull a duck off its nest even if he wanted to’. It is possible that the horseman did this for the same reason as the New Guinea magician mentioned by Frazer.12 The magician kept the hair of an intended victim in a little bamboo tube which he placed in his arm-pit to keep warm and to ensure that it retained the energy of the unfortunate victim. But it is more likely that the horseman kept the bone and the milt there for more practical reasons – for the same purpose as he kept his slack-baked oatcakes there – to impregnate them with the scent of his own person. The horse he managed would then be conditioned to associate his individual odour with the other scents on the cake or the bone, and he would respond effectively to that particular horseman and to him only. There was, one imagines, nothing mystical in specifying the right arm-pit as a Suffolk horseman did in his recipe. The right arm was the one more often used and therefore the one that would generate the most sweat.
Another method of horse control which is assumed to be of primitive origin is the blowing down a horse’s nostrils.13 Strangely enough, this method was used by an old Sheffield blacksmith14 in fairly recent times. He trained all his apprentices to breathe into the nostrils of any horse brought to the forge in order immediately to establish friendly relations with it.
But whatever methods they used – breathing down the nostrils, frog’s bone, milt, native intelligence or use and intuition – some East Anglian horsemen could control their horses to a degree that hardly seems credible today, as the following stories will show.
A Suffolk farmer once told his head horseman rather peremptorily: ‘Tomorrow morning I want you to put three horses in the wagon and take ’em to Ipswich market. I’ll follow you with the pony and meet you at the Fleece.’ The horseman said nothing: he did not like such short, unvarnished orders. So at six o’clock next morning, out of pique or simply out of devilment, he harnessed a horse to the wagon and backed it against t
he muckle (muck-hill). He then took the horse out of the shafts, led him up the muckle and then onto the wagon. He did the same thing with the second horse, packing him neatly alongside the other in the wagon. The third horse he led up the muckle and left him standing there, motionless while he went to wake the farmer. Having aroused him by gently pulling a bell which was fixed outside the farmer’s window (a not unusual method in East Anglian farms) he called up: ‘I got two the horses in the wagon, Maaster, but I’m durned if can git the third ’un in.’
The farmer came down in a fury: ‘Call yourself a horseman! What is the matter with you?’ But on seeing the horses, each weighing nearly a ton, standing immobile in the wagon with the third horse posed alongside on the muckle like a carefully contrived tableaux, he had a second and more effective awakening.
The second story is told by a Cambridgeshire farmer:15 ‘My grandfather used to stop at a certain pub used by other horsemen and he’d take the horses out of his wagon and go inside; well, they’d get arguing the toss, what they give their horses and what they don’t give them; and the tricks they know, and the tricks they don’t know. And one day my grandfather bet some of them in there a gallon of beer – he’d got four Suffolk horses; he’d been to the makings, I suppose with about forty sacks of barley – that he could go out and get the horses out of the stable, put ’em in his wagon without the halters or without touching their heads, get in the wagon and drive round in front of the pub. They bet him a gallon of beer he couldn’t. Anyway, he went and he called these two horses to go in the shafts out of the stable, backed them in – told them to back into the shafts – fixed them in. Then he got his two trace horses out, yoked them on, got in his wagon and cracked his whip and drove them round in front of the pub. And he left them outside there, while he went in and had the beer; and they never moved; wouldn’t move. And in fact they daren’t move.’
1 Also called the milch or melt in Norfolk and Suffolk, meld in Cambridgeshire, the pad in Scotland, the mummy in parts of Wales.
2 J. E. Jones, Dollas, Berriew, Montgomeryshire.
3 V.G., III, 280.
Hic demum, hippomanes vero quod nomine dicunt
pastores, lentum distittat ab inguine virus,
hippomanes, quod sape malae legere novercae
miscueruntque herbas et non innoxia verba.
4 W.G., p. 386.
5 H.I.F., chapt. 23.
6 Albert Love (born 1886), Wortwell.
7 The natterjack (bufo calamita) v. W. A. Dutt, Wild Life in East Anglia, London, 1906, p. 203.
8 How Natives Think, p. 67.
9 The Integration of the Personality, p. 93.
10 cf. The sudden beating of a gavel on the table in the Freemasons’ ceremony.
11 Op cit., pp. 161, 215 ff.
12 Aftermath, pp. 48–9.
13 H.I.F., pp. 242–4.
14 From Miss H. A. Beecham.
15 G. W. Sadler, Whittlesford.
23
North-east Scotland and East Anglia
THE reader will no doubt wonder, after the copious references in the last chapter to the north-east of Scotland, what this region, apparently so different, has to do with East Anglia. But is north-east Scotland – and the Scottish carses, for that matter – so very different from the subject of the present study? Both in East Anglia and in these Scottish regions arable farming is of primary importance: it has been historically the chief work and it was developed and given its characteristic stamp by the same waves of people from the Continent in the centuries after the departure of the Romans. The dialect spoken by the people of both regions has the same basic roots – Anglian to use a comprehensive term. The Scots themselves recognized this and once called the language of the Scottish lowlands, the north-east and the east coast Ingliss, reserving the term Scottish to mean Gaelic or Erse. The fourteenth-century Scottish poet, Barbour, called the language he wrote in Ynglis; and W. W. Skeat1 has shown that ‘Barbour at Aberdeen and Richard Rolle de Hampole near Doncaster wrote for their several countrymen in the same identical dialect’; and the East Midland dialect which East Anglia shared was not very different from the northern dialect that covered northern England and the English-speaking parts of Scotland.
In writing this one risks the ire of many Scottish friends because it appears to do them the injustice of hinting that, after all, they are only a kind of northern Englishman. This is the last thing the writer wants to do, but it is necessary to insist that the language of John Barbour, Robert Henryson, and William Dunbar is not very different from Geoffrey Chaucer’s who was addressed by Dunbar as:
O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris2 all,
As in oure tong ane flour imperiall
This similarity has lasted to this day, and there are many words in Lallans that would be recognized by an East Anglian dialect speaker.
Again, evidence for the similarity between the arable areas of Scotland and East Anglia can be found in a book on agriculture written during the last century in beautifully measured English by the Scot, Henry Stephens. Although Stephens designed his book, The Book of the Farm3, for use anywhere in Britain, he took most of his examples from Scotland; and it could well be a basis for the history of Scottish farming during the nineteenth century. Yet a reading of the book today shows that it would serve almost equally well for a text-book of East Anglian farming during the same period. There is also another link between the farming of north-east Scotland and East Anglia. These regions were together in the van of the new agriculture that was emerging in the eighteenth century; and it was probably more than an accident that when Pitt established the Board of Agriculture in 1793 its first President was Sir John Sinclair (Statistical Sir John) of Thurso, and its first Secretary Arthur Young of Bradfield Combust in Suffolk.
The third reason for including the Scottish evidence here is the striking similarity between the horse-practices in north-east Scotland and East Anglia. These have undoubtedly grown out of a common historical background, the ‘dark period’ when the invaders brought their own farming techniques and their beliefs and customs from the Continent; and these practices had their full flowering when the horse was harnessed to the plough and became closely identified with arable farming. But there is also one big difference in this respect between the two regions, and it can be summarized in the question: why have the practices and especially the old organization survived much more completely in north-east Scotland? The reason is largely a historical one. In England by the middle of the sixteenth century the ancient craftsman’s guilds or corporations had practically died out, and many handicrafts became open to all who cared to practise them. In Scotland,4 however, these craftsman’s guilds lasted until very much later and remained tight little societies bitterly opposed to the merchant’s guilds. This opposition continued until recent times in the Horsemen’s Society particularly; for no farmer was admitted to the Society, not even a farmer’s son despite the fact that he might be working as a ploughman. But other craft societies have also lasted up to the present in north-east Scotland; the Sadlers, for instance, and the Hammermen. And remoteness, too, has probably played a part in the continuance of the old tight organization in Scotland. Although there was a fairly vigorous persecution of witches there during the seventeenth century, it probably did not equal Matthew Hopkins’s drive in East Anglia; and from a period well before this the horsemen, by the nature of their practices, by their form of initiation and their secret meetings, must have been firmly identified with witches. The members of the Horsemen’s Society were always exposed, but they were careful not to take risks and offend the Kirk overtly. They became adept at covert activities and survived; and when the danger of being dubbed witches receded the horsemen seem to have adapted their ancient horse-cult to the purposes of an underground trade union in the modern sense of the word, lampooning an unpopular employer with scurrilous songs. These songs are called Bothy Ballads or Corn Kisters, and were so named because at the horsemen’s meeting the men used to sit on the kists –
chests or bins where the corn was kept for the horses – singing the songs and beating the kists with their feet to keep time.
The initiation ceremony has already been mentioned. The following details will show how suspect the Scottish society must have been during the witch-hunting period and how great was the need for secrecy. The initiate is blindfolded, and he is brought to the altar by two conductors. The altar is usually a bag of corn with an upturned bushel on it; and upon the altar are laid the sacramental elements – bread and whisky. The man standing behind the altar is the one who is conducting the ceremony – the priest, head-horseman, devil (his function and standing are the same by whatever name he is known). He is a man with a great force of personality, who is able to give weight and urgency to his instructions to the initiate. On his way to the altar the blindfolded entrant is taken by devious ways through crooks and straits, in any direction but a straight line. A path fraught with difficulties, a symbol of life, but with this difference that while he has his conductors, the sworn brethren he is about to join, he will have nothing to fear as long as he trusts them implicitly. The initiate’s path to the altar, moreover, is an analogue of a young horse’s progress during the first stages of his training; and if he does not obey instructions correctly he is liable to get slightly hurt or at least be made very uncomfortable. This in itself is proof of the age of the ceremony because it is the mark of primitive ceremonial that it must be carried out to the letter, otherwise the magic does not work, and the participant who causes the lapse is punished. The ritual of initiation contains question and answer, in which the initiate has been previously coached, but also direct instruction. The main part, however, is the taking of the oath. Having taken this he is given the secret Horseman’s Word which admits him as a sworn member. The oath itself reads like a piece of ancient poetry which, no doubt, in some part it is. It was found in the effects of an old horseman who lived during the last part of the nineteenth century.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 20