68 The History of the Spur 



some very eccentric individual, and the use of the secondary 

 pair of arms is by no means obvious. 



There are, no doubt, many other freaks to be found in the 

 various museums and private collections — for these are just the 

 things to get into museums — as curators readily seize upon them 

 on account of their peculiar form, while all history of their 

 origin has perhaps been lost for years. 



While on the subject of eccentric spurs, this seems the 

 place to mention those spurs which have more than one neck 

 and more than one rowel on each spur. There are several 

 such now in existence. The first I found is in the collection of 

 Mr. Redfern, of Cambridge, and of which an illustration is 

 given on Plate 42. It is a German spur, apparently of the 

 seventeenth century. It has curved sides terminating in the 

 usual double rings, and has three necks one above the other, 

 each carrying a five-pointed rowel rather more than an inch in 

 diameter. When I first saw this spur I thought it might have 

 been presented to some individual by his friends as a joke, as 

 emblematic of his extreme celerity of movement, or possibly in 

 sarcasm on account of his extremely sluggish habits. But I 

 found in the Stibbert Collection at Florence an exactly 

 similar spur, which might have been the fellow spur to Mr. 

 Redfern's, except that in the case of the Florence spur there 

 were some incised lines cut by way of ornament on the con- 

 necting pieces between the three necks. This spur is also 

 believed to be German. In the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum at Milan 

 there is a three-necked spur with straight sides having a great 

 deal of ornament and a hinge in the middle of each side. 



