The Horseman's Word
The Horseman's Word, also known as the Society of Horsemen, is a fraternal
Influenced by the formation of the
Membership of the society required an initiation ceremony, during which Horsemen read passages from the Bible backwards, and the secrets included Masonic-style oaths, gestures, passwords and handshakes. Like the similar societies of the Miller's Word and the Toadmen, they were believed to have practiced witchcraft. In East Anglia, horsemen with these powers were sometimes called Horse Witches.
During the twentieth century, the Word attracted the attention of several folklorists and historians, among them J. M. McPherson, George Ewart Evans, and Hamish Henderson. Although a number of these scholars initially suggested that the society represented a survival of a pre-Christian religious order, later historical research established the group's nineteenth-century origins.
History
Background
The Horseman's Word was one of a number of groups that emerged in Britain as part of a popular outgrowth from
During the early nineteenth century, the
Formation
"'The Horseman's Word' serves as the umbrella-title under which many horsemen organised themselves, for centuries, and through which they collated and handed down the art/science of horsemanship. Semi-secret horse societies were once widespread across Britain and particularly powerful in north east Scotland. They were bodies of men that acted as a primitive trade union, as a cooperative veterinary service, as a repository of traditional knowledge, and as folk clubs – long before that revivalist phrase came into being."
— Historian Timothy Neat, 2002[9]
It was in this context that the Horseman's Word was founded.[5] Aside from protecting trade knowledge, the Word wanted to ensure that those men who were engaged in the profession were efficiently trained, that the quality of their work was consistently good, and that the remunerations for that work were appropriate.[10] It served as a trade union whose goal was to protect these horse trainers and ploughmen, along with their trade knowledge, from the threat of an encroaching economic system in which the resources for production were becoming privately owned and wages and prices for goods and services were being taken out of the control of skilled labourers and into the hands of large farm owners.[11] As Fernee related, "The ploughmen did not own the land, the horses, the harness, the ploughs or their homes but they took control of the new technology, the horses, and ensured that only a brother of the Society of the Horseman's Word might work them."[12]
In its structure, the Horseman's Word borrowed much from the Millers' Word,[10] although rapidly became numerically larger and less exclusive.[5]
The group gave men who otherwise were of lowly economic and class status a sense of personal and social authority based on their knowledge, skills, and occupational importance.[13] Neat noted that it was also "a quasi-religious and mystical cult".[7] The historian Ronald Hutton also described it as "a male anti-society, bent on deliberate misbehaviour in a private and controlled setting".[1]
Spread and decline
During the course of the nineteenth century, the Horseman's Word spread from its heartlands and into both other areas of Scotland and then into eastern England.
As literacy rates grew during the nineteenth century, information about horsemanship gained from published books filtered into the Word to supplement its oral traditions.[18] The links that many horsemen had to British cavalry regiments also resulted in knowledge from the latter being adopted by the Word.[18] Within Scotland, the Horseman's Word retained its cultural and social importance within rural communities until the mid-twentieth century.[13] It gradually became the equivalent of a working men's club which was focused on the well-being of its members.[19] As of the late 1990s it still existed in northern Scotland as a secret society of horse lovers.[1] The present Baron Kilmarnock claims membership of the group, stating that he was initiated in Sandwick, Orkney in 1983.[20]
Praxes
Initiation ceremony
According to Neat, the initiation ceremony into the Horseman's Word was "a dramatic and memorable event".
"So help me Lord to keep my secrets and perform my duties as a horseman. If I break any of them – even the last of them – I wish no less than to be done to me than my heart be torn from my breast by two wild horses, and my body quartered in four and swung on chains, and the wild birds of the air left to pick my bones, and these then taken down and buried in the sands of the sea, where the tide ebbs and flows twice every twenty four hours – to show I am a deceiver of the faith. Amen."
— The Horseman's Creed, as recorded as part of an initiation ceremony in Angus.[24]
Among the Horseman's Word group in
The diabolist elements of the initiation ceremonies of both the Millers' Word and Horseman's Word might have been a deliberate parody of
Prior to the initiation ceremony the candidate, often a ploughboy, was told to come to the barn where the ceremonial procedures were to take place, normally held between 11pm and 1 am. Once at the door he was blindfolded and taken before the master of ceremonies, who was often an elder ploughman.
The Word
After the candidate completed the initiation ceremony he was then given a word that was supposed to give him power over horses. "The Horseman's Word" was an actual spoken word. This secret word, which varied by location, was said to have
Neat stated that the Horseman's Word was "infused with verbal richness that would have thrilled" William Shakespeare or Robert Burns.[9]
Techniques and secrets of the Horseman's Word
"Question: Who caught the first horse?
Answer: It was Adam.
Question: Where did he catch him?
Answer: At the east side of the garden of Eden, in the way of the Land of Nod."
Quote from a Horseman’s Word ritual.[33]
Until the initiation ceremony and induction into the society and the receiving of the word, the horseman who were not members of the society but potential candidates would have trouble with horses. This would often be caused by older ploughmen who were members of the society tampering with their horses. They would put things like tacks under the horse's collar to cause it to behave irrationally.[28] This would be unknown to the potential candidate as the techniques for training and controlling the horses were not yet given to him. Most of these techniques were based on the horse's sharp sense of smell. Foul substances placed in front of the horse or on the animal itself would cause it to refuse to move forward. This technique is known as jading and is still used by horse trainers today. There were also pleasant smelling things that were used to make a horse move forward or calm down. If the substance was an oil it could be wiped on the trainer's forehead, they would then stand in front of the animal and the smell would draw it towards them. This practice was often used in taming unruly horses. There were also pleasant smelling and inviting materials, such as sweets, that the horseman could keep in their pocket in order to calm, attract, and subdue a crazed horse.[32] Keeping these techniques secret, along with the myth that there was a word that only the horseman knew that gave them and them alone power over horses helped guarantee their reputation, prestige, job security, and pay. The same type of logic and protection of trade secrets can be seen among modern magicians who keep their tricks secret and only share them with other members of their trade.
One critic of the Society, a ploughman who later became a grocer and published a book entitled Eleven Years at Farm Work; being a true tale of farm servant life (1879), claimed that "Without betraying any secret, it may be said the real philosophy of the horseman's word, consists in the thorough, careful, and kind treatment of the animals, combined with a reasonable amount of knowledge of their anatomical and physiological structure."[34]
Legacy
Historical study
In the twentieth century, a number of scholars began to study the history and origins of the Society. The first of these, J.M. McPherson, published his findings and theories in his Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (1929), in which he outlined the idea that it was a survival of an ancient pagan cult that had been persecuted in the
Nonetheless, around the same time that Evans was publishing his theory of a pagan survival, there were also researchers who had examined the origins of the Society and criticised the idea that it had ancient roots. In 1962, Hamish Henderson detailed how it had arisen in the eighteenth century,[42] with his information being expanded upon by Ian Carter in his 1979 study of agricultural life in Scotland.[43]
In 2009, The Society of Esoteric Endeavour published a compilation of nineteenth and early twentieth century texts about the Society in a volume entitled The Society of the Horseman's Word. Limited to an edition of one thousand copies, the first hundred copies contained an envelope inside within which was contained a piece of horse hair knotted in exactly the same manner as that which was originally used to invite prospective members into the Society.[44]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999b, p. 8.
- ^ Hutton 1999a, p. 62; Hutton 1999b, p. 6.
- ^ a b Hutton 1999b, p. 6.
- ^ Hutton 1999a, pp. 59–60; Hutton 1999b, p. 6.
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999a, p. 62; Hutton 1999b, p. 7.
- ^ a b Hutton 1999a; Hutton 1999b, p. 7.
- ^ a b c Neat 2002, p. 62.
- ^ Fernee 2009, p. 3.
- ^ a b Neat 2002, p. xix.
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999a, p. 62.
- ^ Samuel 1981, p. 88.
- ^ Fernee 2009, p. 15.
- ^ a b Neat 2002, p. 65.
- ^ a b Hutton 1999a, p. 63; Hutton 1999b, p. 7.
- ^ Hutton 1999a, p. 63; Hutton 1999b, pp. 7–8.
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999a, p. 63.
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999a, p. 63; Hutton 1999b, p. 8.
- ^ a b Neat 2002, p. 67.
- ^ Neat 2002, pp. 64–65.
- ^ Baron of Kilmarnock 2009.
- ^ a b c d Neat 2002, p. 53.
- ^ Hutton 1999b, p. 7; Neat 2002, p. 66.
- ^ a b c d Hutton 1999b, p. 7.
- ^ Neat 2002, p. 59.
- ^ Neat 2002, pp. 53–54.
- ^ Neat 2002, pp. 53–58.
- ^ a b Neat 2002, p. 58.
- ^ a b Porter 1998.
- ^ Hutton 1999. p. 62.
- ^ Ankarloo and Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 8.
- ^ Kerr 2004, p. 11.
- ^ a b Society Meetings. (Folklore, Vol. 82, No. 1. Spring, 1971), 88.
- ^ Fernee 2009, p. 4.
- ^ Quoted in Fernee 2009, p. 30.
- ^ McPherson 1929, pp. 290–292; Hutton 1999a, p. 61.
- ^ Davidson 1956, p. 70-72; Hutton 1999a, p. 61.
- ^ Evans 1966, p. 228-235.
- ^ Evans 1972, p. 225.
- ^ Evans 1975, p. 42-43.
- ^ Evans 1979, p. 137-141.
- ^ Hutton 1999a, p. 61.
- ^ Henderson 1962, p. 696-698.
- ^ Carter 1979, p. 154-156.
- ^ Fernee 2009, p. 1.
Works cited
- Baron of Kilmarnock (2009). "The Horseman's Word". The Lordship and Baronate of Kilmarnock. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
- Carter, Ian (1979). Farm Life in Northeast Scotland 1840-1914. Edinburgh: John Donald.
- Davidson, Thomas (1956). "The Horseman's Word". Gwerin 2.
- Evans, George Ewart (1966). The Pattern under the Plough. London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24379-2.
- Evans, George Ewart (1972). The Leaping Hare. London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-10630-1.
- Evans, George Ewart (1975). The Days That We Have Seen. London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24380-8.
- Evans, George Ewart (1979). Horse Power and Magic. London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24664-9.
- Fernee, Ben (2009). The Society of the Horseman's Word. Hinckley, Leicestershire: The Society of Esoteric Endeavour. ISBN 978-0-9563713-0-0.
- Henderson, Hamish (June 1962). "A Slight Case of Devil Worship". New Statesman and Nation.
- Hutton, Ronald (1999a). The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192854490.
- Hutton, Ronald (1999b). "Modern Pagan Witchcraft". In Bengt Ankarloo; Stuart Clark (eds.). The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century. London: Athlone Press. pp. 1–79. ISBN 978-0485890068.
- Kerr, Peter (2004). Thistle Soup: A Ladleful of Scottish Life. Globe Pequot.
- Lyon, Russell (2003). The Quest for the Original Horse Whisperers. Edinburgh: Luath Press. ISBN 978-1842820209.
- McPherson, J.M. (1929). Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland. London: Longman.
- Neat, Timothy (2002). The Horseman's Word: Blacksmiths and Horsemanship in Twentieth-Century Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. ISBN 978-1841580944.
- Porter, James (1998). "The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on Cultural Representation". Folklore. 109: 1–14.
- Samuel, Raphael (1981). People's History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge.
Further reading
- ISBN 0-7486-6157-3.
- Maple, Eric (December 1960). "The Witches of Canewdon". Folklore. Vol. 71, no. 4.