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A DESCRIPTION of two ancient HORSE-SHOES,
found near SILBURY HILL, in WILTSHIRE.

As there appears to be some rather remarkable circumstances, disclosed by these very ancient
shoes, which attended the early state of the art of shoeing the horse, so we have considered them
well worthy of being figured and described, since we find no record or description of such practices
in any work left us on this interesting subject.

They were sent to me from Wiltshire, by my respected friend W. Bartlett, Esq. Surgeon, of
Great Bedwyn, in this county, who received them from the person who found them; the one being
picked up by the proprietor of the meadow in which Silbury hill is situated, and the other by the
occupant of a neighbouring farm not far distant from it.

My worthy friend, in his letter accompanying them, says, " one of these shoes was found by
the levelling of a bank, in Silbury-hill Mead, for the purpose of watering it," this was the shoe
No. 2. " The soil removed on this occasion was principally chalk, to the depth of a foot or two;"
no mention is made of anypart of the horse, or of his bones being found along with it,but the skeleton
of a man was found at some little distance from this place. Now this Silbury hill is a well-known
mound, seen on the road from London to Bath, on the right hand of the road, a few miles from
Marlborough, and is supposed of great antiquity, and of British or of Roman origin ; it represents
in its figure the regular frustum of a cone, whose elevation is about one hundred and seventy-five
feet, and whose diameter at its base, is found to be about five hundred feet, and out of which hill
have been dug, at various times, ancient relics.

The other shoe, No. 1, he says, "was found upon the down on the opposite side of the road, at
the distance of nearly half a mile from the former mead, under a heap of flints. These flints, it
is probable, were taken at some former period from the above spot, and were deposited upon
the down probably for the mending of the roads or paths; for, from the perfect accordance and
similarity of both these shoes, in their peculiar make and fashion, and other circumstances, there
can be no reasonable doubt, we think, of their having been constructed at the same period, and in
all probability were belonging to the same animal, the one being a hind and the other a fore shoe,
and of nearly the same size, as also with perfectly similar nails : being regarded, perhaps, by the
laborers, who removed the flints, as mere old iron, they were passed unnoticed by them, as they
sometimes find, in these localities, Roman and other coins of some value."

This seems to be all that my worthy friend has reported of them, and we shall now proceed to
make a few remarks upon the articles themselves. They are by far the oldest shoes I have ever
seen; neither is there, that I know of, any older shoe on record in present existence; at least the
only one recorded as more ancient is the shoe said to have been found in the coffin of Childeric,
king of the French, who was buried at Tournay in Flanders, and the opening of whose tomb more
than a century ago, was described by Chifletius ; and which shoe is again copied in Montfaucon's
Antiquities, torn. 1, p. 16, t. 6; but on turning to it, for it is stated to have fallen to pieces on
being handled, the shoe there represented, differs in nothing from a modern French shoe of the
last age, that I forbear to notice it, otherwise it was my intention to have introduced it here by
the side of these.

We think it something more than presumable, that the animal must have been buried with his
shoes left on, since the nails in both shoes are present, and with the clenches quite perfect, and in

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their flexed state; now had these nails been drawn, they must have been straightened, and as the
hoofs gradually rotted away from the s oes, these were left with their nails in the state in which
they are now presented to us.

One of these nails detached from the shoe is seen at fig. 1, others may be seen in situ, in fig. 2,
and are observable with the shank of the nail forming a remarkable elbow about its middle, which
was rather a puzzling circumstance on first viewing this relic, the bend being almost or quite at a
right angle, and the point of the nail is also bent again at nearly a right angle, and deflected from
the plane of the former bend; now the explanation of this appears to be, that at this early
period of the shoeing art, they could not point a nail as we now do, with a semi wedge termi-
nation, in order to give it a bias outwards, but they used a sharp-pointed nail simply, such as all nails
are usually provided with; and with these they dared not therefore attempt to carry the nail high
up the hoof, in the fear of pricking the horse, but were satisfied to bring it out very low down, by
an oblique direction given to it in driving, and what is more remarkable still, after they had
pierced the hoof through and brought out the shank, they did not wring it off and turn it down,
for the clench, as we do at present, but carried the shank so exposed, along the surface of the
hoof to some distance, which caused the large square elbow we see, and afterwards they drove the
point into the outer shell of the hoof and so made it fast; exactly in the way we see a carpenter
of modern times, wireing on the lid of a box, he drives his wire through it, then carries it along
the upper surface of the lid, and finally sends the point of the wire into the substance of the wood,
and so fastens it. There is, that I know of, no record of such a proceeding as this, in this art of
shoeing. And it also shows what I have often observed in mechanical inventions, that we are
generally obliged to take a circuitous course in order to find out the shorter way. To wring off
the shank and turn it down at once is much easier and stronger than this round-about proceeding.
We now shall notice the make of the shoes themselves, and their construction as truly exhibiting
an early period of the art. Their mould or general form, is neither broad nor heavy, as in the
oldest French shoes that we have ever seen,but they are rather what would be called a light shoe.
In their upper surface, flat, a little concaved however inwards, and at the inflections perfectly flat.
The under surface of the shoe is rounded a little and convex, or rising in the middle, having in each
of the quarters, three immense deep oval or oblong stamp-holes or countersinks, as mechanics
would call them, not very near to the outer rim of the shoe, and perforated through in the middle of
these cavities, with three pretty large almost square perforations, the size of these, which time and
oxydation may perhaps have a little enlarged, gave abundant opportunity for the early artisan, to
direct his nail as much obliquely outwards as he wished, which a more confined aperture, or greater
thickness of metal would not have allowed him so readily to do. Now these stamp pits must have
been done with a very rough clumsy tool, for the rim or outer margin of the shoe has been terribly
disturbed by it, and thrown out into bulges of a surprising size, disfiguring the shoe very much,
and also endangering the horse's legs.

The holes for nailing also are carried very far backwards, and near enough, or in fact too near, to
the inflexions of the hoof, thereby pinioning it the more grievously, which shews that they had no
notion whatever of any elastic action that it possessed, or that the hoof grew narrower and thinner
as it passed backwards. The heels of these shoes are provided with very prominent calkins, made
by doubling or turning over the iron, and lapping and welding it; finding, no doubt, (having no
silly college theory to trouble their practice,) the very vast advantages which attended this plan of
the shoe.

The wearing line of the shoe at the pince in No. 1 was considerably worn away; but in No. 2
hardly so much. And we may remark also, that these shoes, generally speaking, are thickest
forwards and go declining in thickness, till you arrive at the calkins, which showed a degree
of wit that our contemporaries of these later ages did not possess, who for the most part, thicken
their shoe all the way to the heel, thereby loading the poor animal with an unnecessary weight
of iron in the parts least requiring it. The inside of these shoes are rather thicker in metal
than the outside, which was certainly an error, though it saved them considerable trouble in
hammering them out.

The nail heads are very remarkable for their size, and projecting high from the shoe; and that
part of the head next the aperture in the shoe is formed with a very abrupt broad shoulder, and
nearly straight, but a little inclining however towards the shank; the sides of the head of the nail
are nearly straight and perpendicular, forming an obtuse angle to the former line, upwards it
passes by another converging line towards the summit, or top of the nail, which is made flat,
and is of the length of about a quarter of an inch, for receiving the office of the hammer; now
the head itself stands out of the shoe, as we have observed, and if embraced by the fingers is flat,
and shows a thickness of only about, or perhaps rather less, than the eighth of an inch. The
shank of the nail is short compared with modern nails, and is square, tapering all the way to the
point, but is made rather flatter and broader on one side, viz. that side which is corresponding
to the lateral flatness of the head.

The excellent preservation in which these shoes are found, can only be accounted for by their
having been for a long time defended perhaps, by the hoofs to which they were attached, and
secondarily, from their being deposited among flints and chalk, the most indestructible and
undecomposable materials of all the earthy substances, the former at least is most particularly so.
Whose horse's feet these shoes protected, or of what period they are, it is impossible for
us in the least to conjecture; whether they might possibly have belonged to the owner of the
skeleton, which was buried, as we have remarked, at no great distance from the spot;�all we
know is, that they must be very ancient.

Part of a page remaining unoccupied, and printing being dear, and encouragement scarce,
not to waste it uselessly, I shall devote it to a few remarks on Silbury hill, and that remarkable
Druidical temple of which this hill was the appendage, it being placed exactly due south or in
the meridian of the centre piece of that stupendous edifice, serving there astronomical purposes
probably, but more certainly useful as a commanding station for all the lesser mounds of the
kingdom for securing intelligence and giving signals in case of inimical approach, for it has been
remarked that these mounds were always so placed as to be visible from each other.

This astonishing mound was opened in the year 1723, and a human skeleton found in it, the
antlers also of a deer, a knife with a horn handle, a horse's bit, which, in my treatise on Bits of
Horses, I have described and figured, and have conjectured whether it might not have belonged
to King Cole, whose name Coel, perhaps, or Cortius, in Latin, might have given the name to this
hill, Callus easily making Silbury. The Stag's horns, the knife, and the bit would seem perhaps
to smell of the Sportsman, and they who sacrifice in the morning at fair Dian's shrine in the
evening often become the zealous votaries of Bacchus, which may account for the British King
having the appellation of the merry king of England.

On perusing Sir Richard Colt Hoare's splendid work on North Wiltshire I was led unexpectedly
into some reflections on this astonishing Druidical structure, the most magnificent building of the
kind perhaps in the world, and of its name and of the name of the village now resting on the site of

it, and which is called Abury by Dr. Stukely who is followed in this by Sir Richard and others;
the natives of the village however call it Aybury, which I believe to be right, for certain reasons
which, with much deference to such truly great authorities, I shall, with all due submission, expose.
It is stated in Sir Richard's work, in a note at the foot of a page, that in the Chaldee language,
a serpent was called acan, or akan, and it is probable therefore in the Phoenicean language also;
these Phosniceans, the builders of this vast temple, gave their name to it, since one of the hills
adjacent to the village of Kennet is called at this day hagpen or hackpen hill, the British word
pen, signifying head, being superadded to the word ag, or ak, the name of the serpent,�and on
this hill, the head of this immense snake was represented by a double circle of stones, the outer
of which was of the extent of forty yards diameter, so vast were its proportions. The area of
the coil was twenty-eight acres, and the wings of the building extended nearly two miles.

Now if the Phoenicean name was appropriated to this building which there is just reason to believe,
it is likely also the village which followed it, and stood upon its site would partake of the
same name, and we suspect that Agberic, or Agberig, was the first Saxon name of the hill and its
vast buildings: ag being the name as we have already seen of the serpent, and berig in Saxon, signi-
fying as at this day also in modern German, a hill; and these Saxons or Germans affected hilly
situations very much for their towns, and often almost inaccessible situations, as better exposing the
approach of an enemy, now these places were very naturally called after the hill, berigs, or berics;
and in England the harsher sound of the final g being perhaps considered as unpleasant, was often
changed to a y, and they then became berrys or burys, or, the g being sometimes retained, burghs
also; after the same manner the common word for day, which is dag, became what we see it, viz.
day; and mag was made into may, and not only did the final or terminating g in a word undergo
this change but often the initial g also, as gestern was converted into yestern, &c, in this way we
evidently get the name of bury. Andnext as to the ag, being of no very agreeable sound or meaning
indeed, and Christian zeal in removing an idolatrous image in some degree perhaps assisting, and
commending the change, the g was here sacrificed also, and made into a y, and thus we obtain
the name of Aybury, and which renders the preservation of the y therefore necessary.

It may be also not unworthy of note that Snakes are at this day called hags or aggs in Yorkshire,
and it may be further remarked that it is probable this Phoenicean word has extended more deeply
into our language than we were before aware of, and to hack or haggle a thing, perhaps took its
origin in the thing so disfigured being likened to the irregular work of a serpent's teeth.

It may be also an acceptable, and perhaps new, fact to the philologist to observe that in akan,
we have the elements of the English word Snake, the s being added as in many other cases where
this letter is an initial, as it were to strengthen and facilitate its pronunciation, as in snaffle, from
gnathos, and in snore, from ronfler, &c. One step further and we conclude, if the agg in this
eastern word for serpent was pronounced as in the greek, ang, as in ayytkog, for instance, an angel
or messenger, we shall then obtain the chief elementary letters of the Latin word, unguis. Finally,
in Dragon, we have the ag preserved with a thundering dr before it, but in the Latin, Draco the
k or c hard is retained.

J. and C. Adlard, Printers, Bartholomew Close.