Society of The Horseman's Word - History

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. 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. 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."

According to Ben Fernee, "Unmarried ploughmen lived hard lives, drank hard, played rough and chased women." 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.