{1}
With Notices of some other Ancient
Turf-Monuments
THERE are few travellers by any of the Western high roads who can have failed to have seen one or other of those great figures of horses cut out in the chalky hills which form such conspicuous landmarks for a distance of ten miles or more. A large proportion of such persons are generally found to be desirous to learn something of the history of these singular memorials of a past age. It is this wish which the following pages are intended as an attempt to gratify.
We must commence first of all by remarking upon the employment of animal forms from the very earliest ages as the badge or symbol of nations. The seals of the Phocæans, the tortoises of the Æginetans, and the beetles of the Egyptians, all date from several {2} centuries before the Christian era, and seem to have been persistently retained during very long periods of time. To which we may add the Horse itself as a well-known Thracian type, appearing upon the coins of that country for at least four centuries before this period. The horse was also the emblem of Carthage, Abdera, Pharsalus, Amphilochium, Argos, Corinth, &c., &c.
Not only this, but horses themselves appear to have been from very early days the objects of religious regard. Cyrus is reported by Herodotus (B. I., § 189) to have ordered that the river Gyndes should be punished for its having drowned one of his “sacred horses”; and we hear again, in the same history, (B. VII., § 55) of “sacred horses” as passing over the Hellespont immediately before Xerxes himself. Some five centuries later, Tacitus tells us in his treatise, De Moribus Germanorum (§ 10), “These people have certain horses, which are kept in their sacred groves, untouched and free from any sort of mortal labour (candidi et nullo mortali opere contacti); and when they are harnessed to the sacred chariot, the priest and the king, or the chief man of the city, go with them and observe their neighings and whinnyings. Nor is there any sort of augury to which more importance is attached—both in the minds of the people and also in that of the nobles and priests—for they imagine themselves to be the servants, but the others the favourites of the gods (se enim ministros deorum, illos conscios putant).
This national characteristic seems to have been long-enduring, for Camden in his Britannia (Holland’s {3} Trans., p. 135, a.) says, “Moreover this nation of the Saxons was very much addicted to superstition, and, for that cause when they were to consult of weighty and important matters, besides soothsaying by inspection of beasts’ entrails, they observed especially the neighing of horses as presaging things to come. And thence perhaps it is that the Dukes of Saxonie in ancient times gave the horse in their Armes. But why our first progenitours, Hengistus and Horsa, tooke their names of an horse (for both their names in the Saxon tongue do signifie an horse) surely I know not, unless it were for a lucky osseomen and foretoken of their warlicke prowesse, according to that verse of Virgil—
‘For warre our horses armed are,
These beasts also doe threaten warre.’”*
* “Bello armantur equi: bellum hæc armenta minantur.” Æneid, III., 540.
In Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (p. 626, Ed. 1844) it is said that the worship of the horse was common to the Celtic and Germanic as well as to the Sclavonic tribes, and in the Saga of Olaf Trygvesson it is reported that Olaf, hearing of the inhabitants of Drontheim having relapsed into the worship of Freyr, sailed himself with an expedition and destroyed their temple. “And when he landed,” adds the chronicler, “he found the sacred horses of the god feeding in the precincts of the temple.” And in connection with this part of the subject may be mentioned a coin of the Belindi, on which appears a very singular representation of a horse standing within a distyle temple. This is {4} supposed by De Lagoy to have been a type of the goddess Epona (see Apuleius, Metamorph. III.)—which may or may not be the case.
S. Bede, the Venerable, also mentions the reverence shown by our ancestors to the horse, and it is, perhaps, not improbable that when Caligula spoke of raising his horse to the consulship it was not a mere freak of imperial caprice, but was with the idea of a compliment to the superstition of his Gallic and British subjects.
Amongst the Scandinavian nations, not only was the horse an object of religious reverence, but the sacrifice of horses appears to have been one of their sacred rites. In a curious book of Keysler’s, entitled Antiquitates Septentrionales et Celticæ, is a quotation from the works of Dithmar, Bishop of Merseburg, a historian of the eleventh century, in which the latter says of the Danes, “There is a place in these parts, the capital of the country, called Lethra, in the district of Selon, where the whole people are accustomed to come together, and there to sacrifice to their gods ninety-nine men, and as many horses, together with dogs and cocks.” And in the sixth century Agathius says, “The Alemanni are accustomed to appease the deities of certain trees, sacrificing to them horses and many other victims with their heads thrown back.”
After the sacrifices followed a feast upon the flesh of the victims,called “Blotfagnat,” of which we have some very curious details in the Saga of Haco, cap. 18. “On the feast day, as soon as they had sat down to the tables, the country folks came to the king and prayed him to taste the horse-flesh. And when he {5} would on no account consent to this, they entreated him to drink some of the gravy; which, when he equally refused, they assure him that the fat would be far from disagreeable. At last Sigard makes petition that he will at least bend down towards the cauldron and touch the handle of it with the tip of his lips. Accordingly the king rose up and, having first covered the handle with linen, applied the extremity of his lips to the cauldron. Then taking his place again upon the royal seat he is hailed by all as having clearly done that which was well-pleasing to the people.” Haco was at this time a Christian king, though he is said afterwards to have relapsed into idolatry, and what was “well-pleasing” to his heathen subjects was very far from being so to the ecclesiastical authorities of the day. And we accordingly find that the eating of horse-flesh was prohibited under the severest penalties by several Popes. Gregory III. (a.d. 737), in his Epistle to Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, says, “You have mentioned to me, among other things, that some persons eat the flesh of the wild horse, and most persons that of the domesticated one. This, very holy brother, you must on no account allow for the future, but restrain in every possible way, and impose a suitable penance upon the offenders; for it is an unclean and execrable thing to do.” The next Pope, Zachary, goes farther still, and pronounces that “even beavers and hares, much more wild horses, are to be avoided (for food).”
Perhaps it may not be altogether foreign to our subject, considering the extensive connexion of the {6} great Indo-Germanic nation, to refer in passing to the Aswamedha, or sacrifice of a horse, enjoined by the rites of the Hindu faith, and to the reverence paid to the consecrated animal previous to the consummation of the sacrifice. The description given by Southey, in his Curse of Kehama, singularly reminds us of some of the very phraseology of Tacitus in the passage given above:—
“Along the mead the hallowed steed
Still wanders wheresoe’er he will,
O’er hill, or dale, or plain;
No human hand hath tricked that mane
From which he shakes the morning dew;
His mouth has never felt the rein,
His lips have never frothed the chain;
For pure of blemish and of stain,
His neck unbroke to mortal yoke,
Like Nature free the steed must be,
Fit offering to the Immortals he.
A year and a day the steed must stray
Wherever chance may guide his way,
Before he fall at Seeva’s shrine.
The year and day have passed away,
Nor touch of man has marred the rite divine.”
—§ VIII.
To this really magnificent piece of poetry, Southey’s editor drily appends the following note: “Compare with this the account of the Bengal horses in the very amusing work of Captain Williamson—‘Which said horses have Roman noses, narrow foreheads, white eyes, ugly ears, square heads, thin necks, narrow chests, shallow girths, lank bellies, cat hams, goose flanks, and switch tails!’”
{7} Let us hope that no one will be unkind enough to apply this description to any of our White Horses; although, indeed, beauty does not seem to have been one of the characteristics by which the fabled horses of our ancestors were distinguished. For in an old poem of the sixth century, called The Talisman of Cunobeline, the name of the sacred horse is “Trycethin,” and “Cethin” means “the hideous one!”