to have been on this principle, that the Lords de Ferrars were entitled to demand from every baron, on his first passing through this lordship, a shoe from one of the horses, to be nailed upon the castle gate, the bailiff of the manor being empowered to stop the horses (and carriages also of late years) until service was performed. The custom is still preserved in Lord Redesdale giving a shoe on the 24th September, 1868.'
Soon after the Norman Conquest, we also find that 'Henry de Averyng held the manor of Morton, in the county of Essex, in capite of our Lord the King, by the serjeantry of finding a man with a horse, value ten shillings, and four horse-shoes (quatuor ƒerris equorum), one sack of barley, and one iron buckle, as often as it may happen that our Lord the King should go with his army into Wales, at his own proper expense for forty days.'[1] These acts will testify to the high value put upon shoeing by the early Norman kings.
It is rather amusing to read Bracy Clark's history of the introduction of shoeing into Britain by the Normans, and how the evil they had carried with them—for Bracy Clark's sole idea seemed to be that shoeing was an unmitigated evil—recoiled upon themselves, and caused the death of King William. He points the moral by stating, that the conqueror lost his life through his horse falling with him in jumping a ditch where the ground was slippery, for if the animal had not been shod he would not have fallen. 'Thus,' he says, 'the monarch who was the first to introduce the art of shoeing into England, was one of the first and most celebrated victims.' And M. Nicard
- ↑ Blount's Tenures, p. 16.
