296 HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING. 



to have been on this principle, that the Lords de Ferrars 

 were entitled to demand from every baron, on his first 

 passing through this lordship, a shoe from one of the 

 horses, to be nailed upon the castle gate, the bailiff of the 

 manor being empowered to stop the horses (and carriages 

 also of late years) until service was performed. The cus- 

 tom is still preserved in Lord Redesdale giving a shoe on 

 the 24th September, 1868.' 



Soon after the Norman Conquest, we also find that 

 ' Henry de Averyng held the manor of Morton, in the 

 county of Essex, in cap'ite of our Lord the King, by the 

 serjeantry of finding a man with a horse, value ten shil- 

 lings, and four horse-shoes {quatuor ferris equoTum), one 

 sack of barley, and one iron buckle, as often as it may 

 happen that our Lord the King should go with his army 

 into Wales, at his own proper expense for forty days.' ' 

 These acts will testify to the high value put upon shoeing 

 by the early Norman kings. 



It is rather amusing to read Bracy Clark's history of 

 the introduction of shoeing into Britain by the Normans, 

 and how the evil they had carried with them — for Bracy 

 Clark's sole idea seemed to be that shoeing was an un- 

 mitigated evil — recoiled upon themselves, and caused 

 the death of King William. He points the moral by 

 stating, that the conqueror lost his life through his horse 

 falling with him in jumping a ditch where the ground was 

 slippery, for if the animal had not been shod he would not 

 have fallen, ' Thus,' he says, ' the monarch who was the 

 first to introduce the art of shoeing into England, was one 

 of the first and most celebrated victims.' And M. Nicard 



" Blount's Tenures, p. 16. 



