504 THE DEVELOPMENT OF EQUITATION [CH. 



outside margin (produced by the stamping of the nail-holes, 

 in which process the iron bulged out along the edge) may be 

 assigned to that age. 



There are also small iron horse-shoes found at Silchester 

 which certainly must have been used during the Roman 

 occupation of this island. It is probable that the practice of 

 employing some kind of protection for the feet of mules 

 and horses in Italy and elsewhere in Roman times was 

 due to the great paved roads which formed the high- 

 ways of the Empire, and along which the public post-horses 

 were constantly passing. But it must still remain an open 

 question whether the iron horse-shoe was invented in Italy, 

 or in some other southern land, or north of the Alps 

 among the Celts in the regions where iron had probably first 

 been systematically worked and used by that people. As the 

 Angles had no horses when they came to Britain it is most 

 unlikely that they brought any peculiar shape of horse-shoe, 

 and Prof. McKenny Hughes is probably quite right in main- 

 taining that many ancient horse-shoes found in England and 

 commonly denominated Saxon, belong to a period posterior 

 to the Norman Conquest 1 . 



But it is probable that although the shoeing of horses has 

 been continuously practised in this island from the Roman 

 period downwards, the majority of horses in medieval England 

 went barefooted, as was the case not only over most of the 

 world in medieval times, but is still universal among Arabs, 

 Tartars, Gauchos of the Pampas, and in the Western States 

 of America. 



Ornaments. As man attached to his own person certain 

 objects for protection and decoration, so he not unnaturally 

 treated his horse in the same fashion. We have seen tassels 

 on the Assyrian horses, which of course may have been simply 

 ornaments, but in the light of what we know of such ap- 

 pendages to the harness of horses, asses, and camels in modern 

 times, it is much more likely that they were some form of 



1 ''On Ancient Horse-shoes," Proc. of Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 

 Vol. x. pp. 249-58 (with a plate of illustrations, for the use of which in this work 

 I am indebted to my friend Prof. Hughes, and the Council of the Cambridge 

 Antiquarian Society). 



