I am a bit obsessed with  how different travel was before the railways. However, one need hasn’t changed, though the job that arises from it is now completely different.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which all motor mechanics and all their knowledge vanish overnight. How long would it be before we had major problems getting to where we needed to be, growing the crops we needed,  and buying the goods we wanted? Even maintaining the roads would soon be beyond us as the motor-driven bulldozers and ditchdiggers ground to a halt.

Once, most of those needs were met by horse power. In Regency times, when the railway engine was just a local device, still unproven for more than moving materials from mine to barge, and cars and tractors had not been imagined, the invention of mechanical engines to provide power for travel, travel on the roads depended on horses, maintenance of the roads depended on horses, planting and harvesting depended on horses. (By the 18th century, horses had almost entirely replaced oxen in English agriculture.)

In the past, the importance and education of farriers has been seen through the lens of the vetinary specialists who replaced them in treating animal injuries and illnesses. I’ve been reading a thesis that revisits that story, and suggests that farriers were much more important and better educated than previously thought.

The good health of horses, particularly foot health, depended on farriers. When you think that a typical large inn on the Great North Road might own 2,000 horses for hire and that estimates of horse number in England at the turn of the century in 1800 sit somewhere around 1.5 million, you begin to get an idea of how much the farrier’s skill mattered. England would have ground to a halt if they were as useless as has sometimes been suggested. Farriers “cared for the most important animal in English society, attending to its shoeing and caring for its fractures, illnesses and lesions.” [McKay, 2009]

The following excerpt gives some insight into the work of country farriers, such as the one in my new novella for the next Bluestocking Belles collection. McKay looks at the records for an estate regarding the bills paid by the Earl of Egremont to a farrier by the name of Peter Hay, and also at Hay’s accounts to work out what Hay actually did in Egremont’s extensive stables between the 1740s and the 1780s. Over that 40 year period, he visited the Egremont stables on average, 80 times a year.

First, Hay would simply shoe Egremont’s horses, which involved removing and then nailing the shoes onto the horse’s feet. Second, after shoeing the horses, he would obtain and apply ointments and waxes to the horse’s legs and hoofs. Third, he gave basic medical care to the horses. Aside from one visit, in which Hay sharpened a pitchfork, his visits fell into these three categories. [McKay, 2009]

An important part of Hay’s practice was making the medicines, ointments, and waxes he used in treating the horses.

The thesis also mentioned another farrier, Edward Snape, who was farrier to the King and also to the Horse Guard. He was known as Dr Snape, did his best (twice) to establish a college of equine medicine, and wrote a textbook called A Practical Treatise on Farriery. Not an uneducated man.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the role of the farrier had been reduced to shoeing horses, and the vetinary surgeon did everything else.