In all probability, on the eventful night on which the treasure was lost, the waggon and horses conveying it were also left to perish in the Dove.
From the examination I have been able to make of the other shoes, it appears that the horses were small. One specimen would, when perfect, have been about 4¼ inches wide, and 4½ long. It had a small raised (not rolled-over) calkin on one side; only three nail-holes were visible on each branch, and the shoe altogether was very narrow and light, as if it had been worn by a saddle-horse. The iron appeared to be fibrous and of excellent quality. Another half-shoe was a trifle smaller, had three holes on each side, and the calkin was formed by doubling over the end of the thin branch, as in the Chedworth and Gillingham specimens. Completely encased in a compact slab of rusty-coloured conglomerate, a portion of which has been removed, is one more example that may have been a little larger, though it is still a small shoe, and would fit a horse between 14 and 15 hands high; while a fragment of another, though about the same dimensions, had a little more cover or breadth, and probably was worn by one of the waggon-horses.
None of these show any traces of toe-clips; all have the even border of the present shoe, and their holes are the ordinary quadrilateral apertures with which we are now familiar; they have not been fullered or widely stamped for the nail-heads. Both surfaces appear to have been plane; and altogether the shoes are not of a bad type, but one that, if the hoofs were not mutilated by paring, could do a horse but little harm.
In the interesting chronicles of Froissart, we find many
