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Horseman's Word : ウィキペディア英語版 | Society of the Horseman's Word
The Society of the Horseman's Word was a fraternal secret society that operated in Scotland from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. Its members were drawn from those who worked with horses, including horse trainers, blacksmiths and ploughmen, and involved the teaching of magical rituals designed to provide the practitioner with the ability to control both horses and women. It also acted as a form of trade union, aiming to gain better rights for its members.〔Samuel 1981.〕 The initiation rituals into the society incorporated a number of elements such as reading passages from the Bible backwards, and the secrets included Masonic-style oaths, gestures, passwords and handshakes. Like the similar societies of the Miller's Word and the Toadsmen, they were believed to have practiced witchcraft. In East Anglia, horsemen with these powers were sometimes called Horse Witches. ==History== The formation of the Horseman's Word in the late eighteenth century coincided with the draft horse becoming the primary working animal in the farming areas of Northern Scotland, replacing oxen in the hinterland of Aberdeen and the Moray Firth and ponies in Caithness and Orkney. As a result, the ability to raise and control these animals became a valued skill and people possessing this ability were in high demand. This created a desirable form of well paid and respectable work.〔Hutton 1999. p. 62.〕 It was in this context that the Horseman's Word was founded as a trade union whose goal was to protect these horse trainers and ploughmen, along with their trade knowledge, from the threat of an encroaching economic system in which the resources for production were becoming privately owned and wages and prices for goods and services were being taken out of the skilled laborers control and put into the hands of large farm owners.〔Samuel 1981. p. 88.〕 The Society, aside from protecting trade knowledge, wanted to ensure that the men engaged in this profession were efficiently trained and that the quality of their work was consistently good and that the remunerations for that work were appropriate.〔 As Ben Fernee related, "The ploughmen did not own the land, the horses, the harness, the ploughs or their homes but they took control of the new technology, the horses, and ensured that only a brother of the Society of the Horseman’s Word might work them."〔Fernee ''et al.'' 2009. p. 15.〕 According to Ben Fernee, "Unmarried ploughmen lived hard lives, drank hard, played rough and chased women."〔Fernee ''et al.'' 2009, p. 3.〕 The Horseman's Word took much influence from Freemasonry, another fraternal organisation to have developed in Scotland, albeit two centuries before. It was also influenced by a similar magical secret society, the Miller's Word, which was primarily for those in the milling profession.〔Hutton 1999. p. 61-62.〕
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