Recently, I have been reminded of a work I studied several years ago.  It is allegedly the earliest known equine veterinary manual in English, printed at the dawn of printing by an associate of Caxon, Wynken de Worde.

Wynken de Worde printed on a wide range of subjects in the late 15th Century.  As well as equine veterinary manuals he printed on topics as diverse as household manners to Christmas Carols.  This particular piece – “Proprytees and Medicynes of hors” dates to 1498.  To put this into context, Columbus had only recently discovered the continental United States (1492), Henry VII (father of Henry VIII) was on the throne, and England was still a Catholic nation.

Proprytees and Medicynes is more than just a veterinary manual for horsemen of the time, it also encompasses parts of what we today would call horsemanship, including guides to breaking and schooling, selecting a horse, and dealing with problems under saddle and in hand.  There were professional, dedicated equine vets - sometimes referred to as “Horseleeches”, but this work was aimed at a wider and less specialised consumption.

The volume begins by giving a contents page that is split into two parts.  The first deals with the horsemanship side of things, and has diverse topics ranging from a rather unscientific way of selecting a horse according to its colour, to aspects of training and schooling such as how to make a “wylde hors tame”.  There is a description of desirable aspects of a horses’ conformation that speak of some truth and probably have sound, certainly practical, experience to back them up.  One remedy tells of how “To make a hors followe his mayster” – something that would be useful today no doubt, and perhaps the ancestor of techniques such as “join up”, which are popular today.  Other advice wouldn’t be out of place in an unscrupulous dealers’ yard, such as “To make a hors that he shall not ney” and “To make an olde hors seme yonge [young]”.

The second, much larger, section focuses on the medical treatment of the horse, and describes many ailments, some of which will be very familiar to us today.  I’ll discuss that in the next article.

Predictably though, for an age where life was often harsh and a great deal more uncertain than today, many of the “remedies” for dealing with schooling problems are cruel, certainly in our eyes.  Medieval people were not an outright cruel group, certainly when dealing with a horse (that was considered an expensive commodity, and would have been cared for to the best of the owner’s capabilities, due mainly to a sense of protection of investment and not sentimentality).  They did not however shirk from doing what they thought was necessary to attempt to achieve the results that were desired.

A perfect illustration of this is the remedy for dealing with a horse that does not react to, or is said to be dull to the spur.  “For the dulnes of the spore” – This “remedy” takes the following form:

“Take and shave him the bredth of a saucer on both sides there as you will spur him.  Then take a launcette [a medical instrument] and put him through the skin in six or seven places the length of wheat corn.  And then take a “hawndeler”(?) and raise up the skin from the flesh.  Then put it full of salt.  This will make his sides to bleed.  And then keep him three days from riding.  Then sit on him a child with a pair of spurs.  Spur him in the same place.  And then at night wash him in the same place with salt, piss, and nettles sodden therin.  This shall grieve him so sore that he will never abide {the} spur after.  Then take half a pint of honey and anoint the place therewith three or four time and it shall make him whole”

Obviously this is totally barbaric in our eyes, but looking through the eyes of the practitioner five hundred years ago it was a means to an end.  That the treatment calls for honey to be applied to the wound for three or four days afterwards illustrates that this is not an attempt to maliciously inflict pain on an innocent animal, as we unfortunately hear too often in our modern society, but a crude, clumsy (and probably counter-productive) attempt to remedy the problem of a horse that has probably been over-spurred in it’s past.

Not all of the treatments were harsh though.  The advice for encouraging your horse to follow you is to fill a bag oatmeal and honey and tie it next to your skin, so that when you work you sweat into the bag.  The idea is then not to feed your horse for a day and then to bribe him with it, the theory being that the sweet food after a few days’ abstinence has your scent on it and he associates it with you, and will therefore follow you.

An interesting piece of advice is how to predict a colt’s eventual height.  It tells you to measure him from the lowest hair on a hoof of one of his forefeet, up to the highest point on his “Mary bone” (knee joint).  Then measure from the knee to the withers.  Compare this with the height from the ground directly up to the withers, the difference being the eventual amount he will grow, as according to the author, the length of the canon bone is the same throughout a horse’s life.  Interestingly, whilst in Portugal in 2013 this was the same advice given to me when I was looking at one of two colts that we eventually bought as unbroken youngstock.

Although the advice and the remedies given in the treatise seem bizarre, cruel, and counter-productive, medieval people, for all their superstitious beliefs and lack of scientific understanding were an immensely practical society.  Materials and livestock were expensive in a world where widespread mass-production and automation were many hundreds of years away, and there must have been an element of successful trial and error (as well as superstition) in most of the things that they did, especially as some of the practices are described in later manuals and therefore survive.  Who is not to say that if, 500 years from now the latest equine veterinary journal is discovered it will not be branded cruel, clumsy and ineffective?