62 White Horse Jottings. 
considering that in the vast majority of ancient coins the former is 
the position shewn, I was at first inclined to fancy that this ir- 
responsible individual must have absolutely destroyed the old horse 
before beginning to cut the new one. I had, indeed, ventured to 
state the question even more strongly than this, and in my paper at 
Trowbridge I said that in zo British coin did a horse ever face to 
dexter. Butit was pointed out to me some years ago that this was 
a mistake, and I have subsequently seen in the British Museum 
several coins showing horses thus facing, though they are in an 
exceedingly small minority. 
I imagine, therefore, that King Alfred did, for some reason or 
other, cut his horse in this unusual position ; and that the fact of 
its being shewn in the normal one in Gough’s plate is due to the 
carelessness of the engraver, who simply re-produced upon his block 
the drawing sent to him, not thinking that such a detail as the 
right or left facing of a turf figure was a matter of the least moment. 
And I am the. more inclined to this view as I have, over and over 
again, in engravings both old and new, seen drivers represented 
with the reins iv their right hands and the whips in their left; or 
a troop of cavalry boldly sweeping on in line, every one of whom 
held his weapon after the fashion of that renowned warrior, Caius 
Mutius the left-handed, 
Nor, indeed, are engravers the only folk that seem to be unable 
to distinguish between their right hands and their left. There is a 
remarkably pretty picture in one of the art exhibitions in London 
this year representing a medieval company of ladies and gentlemen 
going out a-hawking, and all of them without exception carrying 
their hawks on the right wrist! Now this is, unfortunately, an 
absolutely impossible position, for the left wrist, being protected by 
a gauntlet, while the right is not, is the only one upon which the 
hawk could possibly be carried. A wrist less strongly guarded 
would be scratched and torn by the bird’s talons to the very bone. 
And accordingly you may have noted that amongst the innumerable 
instances in which we find a human hand or arm represented in 
heraldry, the solitary exception to the rule that this must be the 
right limb is when a hawk is shewn to be thereon carried. I presume, 
