The Liverpool tradition of May Day parades began in the 1850s when drivers of working horses and their families took to the streets in holiday spirit. By the 1880s the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and various promoters of heavy horse breeds had turned the parades into not only a free show …
Category Archives: Equine Institutions
Heavy Horses: Horseman’s Oath
Anthony Dent calls The Society of Horsemen “a unique institution”, a “friendly society” of grooms, drivers, ploughmen and waggoners in the east of Britain from Kent to Aberdeenshire. Their shared code and knowledge included a variety of magick, charms and recipes for assorted horse ailments, and East Anglian members took a ferocious oath not to …
Sign of the Times
Thank you to Slaminsky for sending me this sign which she spotted in the window of Le Grenier. The Institute of the Horse was the original name of the British Horse Society, from which the Pony Club developed as an off-shoot. I suspect that this was rather like a Les Routiers recommendation – should you …