The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

  The Horseman’s Oath

  ‘I of my own free will and accord do hereby most solomly vow and swear before God and all these witnesses that I will always hele,5 conceal and never reveal any art or part of this secret of horsemanry, which is to be revealed to me at this time, or any other time hereafter except to a true and faithful brother after finding him to be so after due trial and strict examination. Further more I vow and swear that I will not give it or see it given to a fool nor to a madman nor to a drunkard nor to any one in drink nor to anyone who would abuse or bad use his own or his master’s horses. Further more I vow and swear that I will not give it nor see it given to a tradesman except to a blacksmith or a farrier or to a worker of horses. Further more I vow and swear that I will not give it nor see it given to any one under 18 or above 45 years of age nor without the sum of £1 sterling or anything of the same value being placed on the table as I do at this time before three lawful sworn brethren after trial and examination finding them to be so. Further more I vow and swear that I will not give it nor see it given to anyone after the sun sets on Saturday night nor before he rises on Monday morning nor in a public house. Further more I vow and swear that I will always be at a brother’s call within the bounds of three miles except I can give a lawful excuse, such as my wife in childbed or my mares in foaling or myself in bad health or in my master’s employment. Further more I vow and swear that I will not give it nor see it given to my Father nor Mother, Sister nor Brother, nor to a woman at all. Further more I vow and swear that I will not write it nor endite it, paint nor print it, carve nor engrave it in the valleys nor on the hillside, on rock nor gravel, sand nor snow, silver nor gold, brass nor copper, iron nor steel, woolen nor silk, nor anything moveable or unmoveable under the great cannopy of heaven; or so much as wave a single letter of it in the air whereby the secrets of horsemanry might be revealed. And if I fail in any of these obligations that I go under at this time or any time hereafter, I ask to my heart’s wish and desire that my throat may be cut from ear to ear with a horseman’s knife, my body torn to pieces between two wild horses and blown by the four winds of heaven to the uttermost parts of the earth; my heart torn from my left breast and its blood wrong out and buried in the sands of the sea-shore where the tide ebbs and flows thrice every 24 hours that my rememberance may be no more heard among true and faithful brethren. So help me God to keep this solom obligation. AMEN.’

  *

  As one of the members of the Horseman’s Society has said, this oath was not fabricated but has grown and been distilled over a long period of time. The beginning of the oath is remarkable in itself:6

  ‘There is a fine metrical flavour about the opening sentence, full of the echoing cadences so typical of the old Germanic legal formula – parallel and repetition for emphasis – “hele, conceal and never reveal”. I’ve never heard a modern use of O.E. helan. I think the last time I saw it was in Barbour who wrote helit horse for barded horses.’7

  The reference in the last sentence to burial on the sea-shore is also a clue to the cultural provenance of the oath. The belief implied here is that unless the body of a man who suffers violent death is laid under running water his ghost is likely to walk. Running water, as in the frog’s bone ritual and many other ancient practices, especially Anglo-Saxon, had special qualities.8 It is also recorded that the precaution of burying on the sea-shore was followed in England in 1797.9 Richard Parker, leader of the Nore mutineers, is said to have been so buried after his execution. But his widow and three helpers dug up his body and gave him Christian burial in Whitechapel Churchyard.

  The revealing of the Horseman’s Word is symbolically the most important part of the ceremony. The Word is still secret, but we know fairly conclusively what the Word is not. It is not the magical word supposed to have been used by the Whisperers who claimed to stop a horse by the word’s inherent mystical force. That is pure blarney as most horsemen knew but would not trouble to deny; just as they would not attempt to uncover or give a glimpse of any mystery that grew up spontaneously about their craft. The idea of a magical word has been mooted by George Borrow’s discussion in Romany Rye (Chapter 42) and in Lavengro (Chapter 14); and there Borrow stated very succinctly the objection to a magic word: ‘No words have any particular power over horses or other animals who have never heard them before – how should they?’ The old Irish horse-witches encountered by Borrow were using a principle known for centuries to the Gypsies.

  The Gypsies wanting to sell an old horse, for instance, one that had been worked almost to a stand-still, would treat him for some time before the date of the sale. After tethering the horse to a post they rattled a pail full of pebbles under his nose incessantly until the horse became almost frantic. After a few days of this treatment it would only be necessary for the horse to see the dreaded pail for him to go into a frenzy of restlessness. At the time of the sale while the seller of the horse approached him with a buyer, an accomplice of the seller would appear carrying the apparently innocuous pail. The horse would react; and the buyer would soon have the illusion that he was about to buy a horse of spirit with a number of years of service in him. The Gypsies used the same principle in training their dancing bears. They tied the animal to a stake, getting him to stand on a heated iron plate; and while the animal lifted alternate feet in an attempt to relieve the pain, someone played a lively tune on a fiddle or a pipe or beat out the rhythm on a drum. After this has been done a sufficient number of times it was only necessary to strike up the tune or the rhythm for the bear to simulate dancing irrespective of where he was standing. But an instance of this principle has already been given in the practice of sweating oatcakes or gingerbread biscuits and keeping the frog’s bone under the horseman’s arm-pit to condition the horse to his groom’s individual odour. Incidentally, Borrow’s horse-witches also used gingerbread buttons as rewards; and the word, or one of the words, they used as a ‘magical’ one was deagblasda (sweet-tasting, as Borrow translates it); but cock-robin would have done just as well, provided the animal had been suitably ‘treated’ while the word was being spoken. There is no need to point out that this principle is the keystone of the behaviourist school of psychology – Pavlov’s conditioned reflex.

  But the word given to the initiate to the Horsemen’s Society must be much more subtle and interesting. The horse himself never hears the word. It is, so it appears, a word of symbolic almost mystic intent which points to the very core of the reason for the Society’s existence. It binds the horseman not only to his brother horseman but also to the horse himself. The horse was held to be, in one respect, one of themselves by the horsemen; and this, as one initiate has stated, is the basis for the immense sacred bond between the old Scottish ploughman who was an admitted member of the Society and the horses who were in his charge. He lived with his horses, often sleeping in the loft or bothy above the stables: at midday he brought the horse into the stable for his bait and he himself often lay down half-under the horse with his head resting against one of the hoofs – a position he knew he could assume with impunity. There was no question of a ‘training’ word in the Scottish society: on the contrary, any admitted horseman who was thought to be ill-treating his horses would stand exposed to immediate correction by one of his fellow-horsemen. To the power of the Word, the initiates claim, to its psychological and almost mystical understanding of the bond between animal and man is due most of the remarkable control the old Scottish ploughman had over his horses. The Word, they say, and its underlying meaning is a positive one: the Word was lived rather than used, and was a symbol of an attitude both towards the animal and to the other members of the group or clan.

  This declared aspect of the Word is significant in itself, but of deeper significance still is the evidence it gives of the age of the Horsemen’s Society and the cultural seed-bed from which the Society grew. For the attitude which assumes a direct kinship between the animal and the man is the basic attitude of totemism: the animal is a full member of the clan and is
respected as such. It is, moreover, the pre-requisite of that mysterious control over animals that the primitive shaman regarded as being necessary to his attaining the mystical state:10 the behaviour of the lions with the Old Testament prophet, Daniel, for example. But David Thomson in his book The People of the Sea11 has shown clearly that the horse was not the only animal so regarded in Britain. Right down from Shetland to south-west Ireland the seal was held to have real kinship with man; and the taboo on killing a seal or eating seal-flesh, the mystical veneration of the animal, and the ambivalent light in which the seal was sometimes regarded – half animal, half man or woman – clearly point to the beliefs’ origin in the same cultural stratum as the horse-beliefs as preserved in the Society of the Horseman’s Word. In this connection it is relevant to say that it was not regression in the primitive’s eyes to be identified with the animal: it was promise of entry into a fuller life, with perhaps, too, some of the nostalgia for illud tempus, as Mircea Eliade calls that lost time when man and all nature were one, a state that many Christian saints aspired to attain by establishing rapport with birds and wild animals.

  Those who have knowledge of Freemasonry will have noticed many points of resemblance between the ritual of the Society of the Horseman’s Word and their own: the blindfolding or hood-winking of the initiate; the correspondences in the formula of the oaths in both societies; the archaic language in both (hele in the Horseman’s Oath, mote12 (So mote it be) in the Masonic ritual, and the use of the word cowan13 in both rituals). But before the seventeenth century when Freemasonry was in its operative stage – that is, when all its members were working masons – the points of resemblance between these two societies or craft guilds must have been great. For both Freemasonry and the Horsemen’s Society had their origin in pre-Christian times: the ritual of both proclaims this to be so. The merchants’ guilds, to which the horsemen and the masons as craft guilds would be opposed, were committed during the Middle Ages to the religion of the kirk. This in itself would have been sufficient reason for both horsemen and masons to keep to their old beliefs. But the horsemen and the Society of the Horseman’s Word must have retained many more elements of the pre-Christian religion than the masons; chiefly because this was essentially a fertility religion, and as the horsemen were themselves tied to animals and the soil the chthonic elements in the old cult were more likely to be preserved in their organization. Moreover, since the time when Freemasonry reached its fully speculative14 stage (The Grand Lodge in England was formed in 1717) its origins have been glossed over to a certain extent in order, presumably, to qualify for full respectability in a Christian polity. But the Scottish Horsemen’s Society still retained its ancient origins and was not self-conscious about them because it remained purely operative, right up to the last few years, not admitting anyone who was not a practising farm horseman, and – as already stated – excluding all those who were farmers or farmers’ sons, thus recognizing and retaining the ancient polarity between craftsmen and merchants.

  During the latter part of its existence the Horsemen’s Society has become an informal trade union and also a sort of ‘fun-and-games committee’ of the countryside preserving the old forms of festivity wherever it could. But now that nearly all the working horsemen have left the farms there are hardly any operative members in the Society at all, and it needs must move into a speculative stage, admitting – as it is already doing – those who are interested in horse matters in general and also in preserving the rich oral lore that has accrued to the Horseman’s Word down the centuries: the cornkisters or bothy ballads, the ancient formula of its proceedings and its ancient phraseology. But it is clear that when the Horsemen’s Society was fully operative, that is, up to twenty or thirty years ago, it could also be considered as a kind of operative witchcraft – the remnant of the old fertility cult one of whose main concerns was for mair yird, in the formula of the Scottish society, more growth or more fertility for the land – a purpose that should have assured it full social sanction down the ages. But the Society of the Horseman’s Word appears always to have been under suspicion. For the Kirk identified the Deil (The Auld Chiel or The Auld Gudeman), who presided as vicar of the old god of fertility at the horsemen’s ceremonies using many of his ancient trappings (stirk’s feet, horn symbol, either actual or in the form of the crescent moon), with ‘the Satan of theology’, as one initiate to the Society has put it. And this has been enough to discredit the Society in some people’s eyes.

  This functioning of the Horsemen’s Society as an underground trade union in Scotland suggests another reason for the absence of remnants of any tight organization among East Anglian farm horsemen. In East Anglia the movement to form open trade unions received a long set-back after the notorious lock-out of 1874.15 After this date any form of combination resulted in the threat of immediate loss of job and in many cases of house as well. In the conditions that followed – the succession of disastrous harvests and a general slump in agriculture – any organization among the men that had existed up to that time could hardly have escaped fragmentation. But if the East Anglian horsemen were, in fact, able to meet in groups formal or informal after this time, their secrecy was so effective that no evidence of their corporate activities now remains.

  But in spite of their isolation, individual horsemen in East Anglia – the rare but real master horsemen – had apparently as great an amount of lore as their counterparts in Scotland, operative lore, that is: and this can be demonstrated pretty clearly from a Suffolk horseman’s manuscript note-book16 compiled towards the end of the last century. These individual horsemen practised on their own, and went through the ritual on their own, which shows how deeply rooted the practices were in the countryside; but undoubtedly the practices had derived their sustenance from their direct link with some of the processes and methods of arable farming that up to the First World War had not changed basically for centuries, animal power being its chief motive force from very early times. Although they worked alone, or with the most tenuous links with other, like horsemen, they believed in the practices absolutely. They were, it is clear, completely involved in the frog’s bone ritual. Whether they acted as a result of a self-induced trance caused by staring at the bone in the stream, or whether there is some other explanation cannot be easily ascertained.17 But having got or used the frog’s bone they were fully convinced of its power. Here is an account from one old horseman whose experience with the frog’s bone caused him and his wife great concern:

  ‘You know the frog’s bone is a funny thing, and also I must mention that not one man ever know’d what dragon’s blood is – and they never will. Well this bone is a marvellous thing which when you have done with it you want to make a fire and burn it away ’fore anything happens in your house, ’cos there’s nothing only the Devil behind you, I’m sorry to say. I was once at home one night, and I was abed, and my horse come right to my bedside; and in a while in the night, I thought to myself: “I don’t know, you are bringing trouble on yourself, and you are going to be crazy with that stuff if you don’t mind.”

  ‘My missus said: “Well now, you’ll soon have to do something. Don’t matter what I’ve got indoors there’s nothing that bakes right; and I don’t feel right; and you are the same. Of a night,” she said, “you are awake and your horse come to the side of your bed. You’ll have to do something!”

  ‘“All right,” I said, “the only thing to do is to get rid of it.”

  ‘So I dug a huge hole down through the clay, put the tin with the bone in it; filled it full of milk and vinegar first. Put it down the hole and covered it up. And I never knew more about it. But I couldn’t never get on so well with my hosses after that.’

  The horse this man led was a stallion weighing about a ton. It was, of course, impossible for the horse to come to his bedside; and the horseman knew it and was accordingly very frightened by his hallucinations. It is likely that this fear of the results of dealing in the ‘black art’, or fear of an uninitiated person g
etting hold of dangerous horse-drugs, is also the explanation of a recent discovery at Shelford, Cambridge. Reginald Lambeth collected from the Shelford blacksmith, Stanley Webb, dozens of jars, bottles and phials, ranging from bellarmines to delft ware. They contained horse-cures, and were undoubtedly connected with the type of practices described here. The bottles were found when the smith was modernizing his shop. He and his assistant had already removed a ton or so of material from an old brick forge when they unearthed the bottles. The presence of the bellarmines is instructive; and if one of the bottles contained the powdered frog’s bone as part of its contents, it was probably another instance of someone having second thoughts about his methods of horse-control, and therefore bricking up the ‘implements’ out of his own and anyone else’s reach.

  There is also a persistent belief among old country people in East Anglia that a man who had undergone the frog’s bone ritual invariably went mad or came to a violent end. This may well have been true and may have been the result of a horseman’s going through the ritual on his own. For his feeling of guilt about ‘having truck with the Devil’ and the assumption that by the very act of the ritual he had put himself outside the community of his fellows on the farm may well have gained more force as he got older and have preyed on his mind after his retirement. In effect, these old horsemen who had continued in the ancient practices alone and against the feeling of the community in which they lived were at the tension point between two antagonistic cultures – the old prehistoric religion of the countryside and the newer dominant culture stamped by the Christian Church. Although they went through the practice in secret and no one was able, therefore, to tax them with it, subjectively they were terribly exposed, lacking the support of a tightly knit group and the mutual assurance of their fellows that were the props of the Scottish horsemen in the Society of the Horseman’s Word.