ON HORSE-SHOES. 
661 
Whatever form the horse-shoe may be, if it is provided 
with a sunken groove round the margin to admit of the 
heads of the nails, its great antiquity must be looked upon 
as questionable. One of the earliest examples that I have 
seen with a groove is represented in fig. 6. It w r as found 
ten feet deep in the Walworth sewer, but differs altogether 
in the form from the other specimens discovered in this 
locality, and is palpably of a much later date. It is of a 
large size, nearly circular, with a broad surface, grooved 
close to the edge, and pierced for eight nails; it is stamped 
■with the letters H. I., and it has calkins at the heels; this 
shoe is of German manufacture, and, from the fashion of a 
buckle found with it, we are justified in assigning it to the 
first half of the seventeenth century. A similar shoe to the 
above was found, twelve or fourteen feet deep, in making the 
sewer by the “ Plough and Harrow” public-house, Ken- 
nington Lane. Various minor changes have taken place in 
the fashion of horse-shoes during the eighteenth and nine¬ 
teenth centuries, and the names of Clark, St. Bel, Taplin, 
Coleman, Moorcroft, and others, have become famous for 
their suggestions in regard to the form of the shoe best 
suited to the hoof of the horse; but it is quite beyond our 
province to enter upon these details. 
There are few objects the dates of which are so difficult 
to fix as those of horse-shoes. Not but that great and 
marked changes have taken place in their form and fabric, 
as may easily be seen by comparing the earliest with the 
latest of those alluded to: but the difficultv lies in the fact 
' %/ 
that no one has attempted to follow out the subject in a truly 
archaeological spirit. 
In the present state of our knowledge it is almost impos¬ 
sible to ascertain the age of a horse-shoe, unless it be found 
accompanied with some relic which points to the period. 
The most certain way of arriving at a knowledge of the dates 
of horse-shoes will be to try and exhume them from our old 
battle-fields. Specimens obtained from such localities would 
afford us invaluable assistance in the endeavours to establish 
their chronology. 
Little change has probably taken place in the fashion of 
horse-shoes in Asia and Africa for many years. In some 
parts of Bokhara the people shoe their horses with the antlers 
of the mountain deer. They form the horn into a suitable 
shape and fix it on the hoof with horn pins, never renewing 
it till fairly worn out.* 
* See * Mirror/ vol. xxv, p. 221. 
