beck, in Nottinghamshire, was, at the invasion, in the possession of a Saxon chief named Gamelhere, who was allowed to retain two carucates of land in Cuckeney, on condition that he shod the king's palfreys upon all the feet, with the king's shoes and nails, whenever he visited the manor of Mansfield; and if he put in all the nails, the king was to give him a palfrey worth four marks; or if the horse was lamed in shoeing, the chief had to supply one of like value to the king.[1] A Saxon nobleman unacquainted with the art of shoeing before the conquest of England by William, would not have been deemed a very safe agent in superintending that important operation immediately after that event. If any reliance is to be placed on the Bayeux tapestry, said to have been wrought by Matilda, the wife of the Conqueror, or the Empress Matilda, wife of Henry I. of England, the Normans and the Saxons are in one part represented with their horses shod with heavy shoes, while in another part King Harold's horses have unarmed feet.
The Normans brought many horses with them to England, and it was their cavalry that enabled them to defeat the army of Harold II. From a period far antecedent to that conflict, the Normans were acquainted with the mode of extending the usefulness of the horse by protecting its hoofs with a metallic rim attached by nails; and on their gaining the supremacy in England, the art of shoeing appears to have received marked attention. William gave to Simon St Liz, a Norman nobleman who had accompanied him across the channel, the town of Northampton, and the whole hundred of Falkley, then
- ↑ Thornton's Nottinghamshire, p. 447.
