Tag Archives: horse

Legal Limericking II

A touch of historical judicial versifying with something of a topical edge today,[i] dealing with alleged mistreatment of horses …

(I should mention that there is also a measure of everyday racism in the surrounding facts).

Newspaper reports of April 1910 [coming to you courtesy of the mighty National Library of Wales] tell of hilarity in court at the poetic performance of Phillimore J, in a case, Red Man Syndicate Ltd. v. Associated Newspapers Limited which included evidence from a Yeovil Builder about the pulling of horses’ (or ‘bronchos’) ears in a cruel manor, at or in preparation for a ‘Wild West’ show at Earl’s Court. Phillimore, unable to contain his finely-tuned literary tendencies, MC Phillimore J gave us ‘an old rhyme’

There was an old man with a beard,

Who sat on a pony that reared;

When they cried Never fear,”

He held on by one ear,

That courageous man with a beard.

 

The report notes that there was ‘great laughter’, possibly so great that the hearing was adjourned. Or, then again, there may not have been a causal connection between those two things.

Is this a real ‘old poem’? There is one Edward Lear poem that starts the same way, but gallops off (!) in a different direction, and another, closer to this theme, which is horsier, but not the same.[ii] Was the judge treating his audience to his own literary stylings? The dodgy last line (right number of syllables, stress not quite there, unless ‘courageous’ is pronounced in a weird way …) might suggest so.[iii]

Anyway, it’s another vignette from that odd world of light moments in litigation so beloved of late 19th C/ early 20th C newspapers. All rather ‘The [legal] past is [we hope] another country’.

 

GS

29/7/2024.

 

Image, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: a horse, taking no chances with the ear-pulling thing.

[i] For an earlier posts on judges and limericks, see here.

[ii] The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), pp 3, 45.

[iii] A general point – really don’t like the repeated endings in lines 1 and 5 in this style of limerick. Maybe I just prefer these things with a proper punchline rather than the more circling, reflective style. And this style seems slightly lazy, in that it does not require a third A-rhyme.

Dangerous driving, medieval style

A sad but informative little snippet from a 15th C coroner’s inquest … (well, I suppose you know it’s not going to be a jolly tale when you look at ‘an inquest on the body of …’).[i]

This death took place in 1419, between Whitechapel and Mile End, in modern London. John Waryn of Stratford Langthorne died in a cart accident – the two separate records describe it slightly differently, but the main point seems to be that John dozed off and the cart overturned. An obstacle or ditch may have been involved, and John may or may not have struggled to get things under control, but, one way or another, the cart and/or one of the horses squashed him.

At the risk of seeming callous, I will note that this sad little tale does, incidentally provide someOn –  interesting information about medieval transport. First of all, we learn a bit about the cart – it must have been a reasonably substantial vehicle, with its iron-clad wheels, and its team of four horses. Then we learn that one of the horses had a special designation –  ‘the Thyllehors’ (in this case, a bay). Not a horsey person, but the trusty Middle English Dictionary tells me that this was the horse which worked closest to the wheels, in between the shafts. There is some more Middle English as well – the description of the dozing is somehow rather charming: within the Latin record, we have the specific description that this is not full lack of consciousness – it is partial sleep ‘ commonly called Slomryng’. All very peaceful. Until it wasn’t. Poor John.

GS

18/9/2021

 

[i] Records can be seen here, here and here. It is also quite interesting from a deodand point of view.