104 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



proves that horseflesh was largely utilised as food by the 

 inhabitants of Britain until it was forbidden by the Church, 

 in the latter part of the eighth century, because it was eaten 

 by the Scandinavian people in honour of Odin. It appears, 

 however, that the deeply-rooted prejudice against the use of 

 the horse as a source of human food, which prevails in 

 modern times, was only gradually acquired ; as it is recorded 

 {see " Cave Hunting," p. 133) that the monks of St G-all not 

 only ate horseflesh in the eleventh century, but returned 

 thanks for it in a metrical grace as follows : — 



"Sit feralis equi caro dulcis sub cruce Christi." 



The wild horses here referred to, and others mentioned in 

 early chronicles, are supposed to have been domestic animals 

 which escaped and reverted to a semi-wild condition. How 

 long the British people continued to disregard the pro- 

 hibitive epistles against the use of horseflesh issued by Popes 

 Gregory III. and Zacharias I., it is, of course, impossible to 

 says {see Geoffrey Saint- Hilaire, "Lettres sur les Sub- 

 stances Alimentaires et particulierement sur la Viande de 

 Cheval," Paris, 1856). Bones belonging to a large and small 

 kind of horse were identified by Professor KoUeston among 

 some animal remains sent to him from the crannog of 

 Llangorse Lake. The same authority identified the shoulder 

 blade of a small horse among the contents of a box of bones 

 from the Lochlee crannog. According to Dr Traquair, F.R.S., 

 the horse was scantily represented in a collection of bones 

 from the Elie kitchen-midden, the date of which was other- 

 wise ascertained to be the seventh or eighth century 

 {Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot., vol. xxxv. pp. 281-300). It 

 would thus appear that the presence of remains of the horse 

 in any of the food-refuse heaps, so often found associated 

 with early inhabited sites in Britain, such as crannogs, hill- 

 forts, motes, etc., has a certain chronological value in dating 

 that particular habitation to a period not later than the 

 twelfth century. 



