Horseshoe
An old horseshoe nailed over a door or on a stable, kept for luck and, in English, Scottish and wider European folklore, against witches, fairies and the devil. Which way up it should hang is disputed: points up so the luck cannot spill out, or points down so the luck pours onto the house or the devil cannot nest in it.
Meaning
In folklore the horseshoe's power comes from two things, its shape and its metal. Frederick Elworthy, in The Evil Eye (1895), called it “a handy representation of the powerful amulet the crescent”, its power reinforced by its material, “the witch-hated cold iron”, and iron and steel were believed to keep off fairies and goblins. Robert Means Lawrence, in The Magic of the Horse-shoe (1898), gathered other theories too, among them the arch made by the blood on the doorposts at Passover and the shape of a serpent, and concluded that the belief “cannot be referred to any one particular starting-point”. The custom is still kept. The horseshoe is the emblem of the county of Rutland, and peers still present ceremonial horseshoes to Oakham Castle, where the oldest surviving one was given by Edward IV in 1470.
Origin and history
In 1895 Elworthy found horseshoes in his own county, Somerset, nailed on stable doors, hung from the ceiling above the horses and fixed to cowhouse walls “to keep off the pixies”, who were said to ride the horses at night. Houses were guarded the same way against witches. Near his home, he wrote, one house had a horseshoe nailed behind the door with a book wrapped in black cloth above it, and nothing would induce the occupier to have it disturbed. He had also seen horseshoes fixed to houses in Tunis, Cairo, Constantinople, Spain, Italy and Sicily, and in Italy small horseshoes were worn on the watch-chain against the evil eye, always beside the coral horn, never instead of it.
Lawrence's collection of beliefs runs across Europe. Lancashire farmers nailed horseshoes to their buildings against fairies who rode the horses by night, drove the cows out and stole the butter, and in Oxfordshire two or three were often to be seen on one cottage wall. Iron was a safeguard in the Scottish Highlands against elves who carried off young mothers, and Scottish fishermen who heard one of their number swear called out “Cauld airn!” and each grasped a piece of iron. Sailors nailed horseshoes to the mast. In Germany a horseshoe found on the road and nailed on the threshold was thought to protect the house against witches, fire and lightning. Bohemia held the opposite belief: whoever picked up a horseshoe picked up bad luck with it. A found shoe was luckier the more nails were left in it, and in Northumberland the empty holes were counted to tell how many years the finder would wait to marry.
The belief went with soldiers to the First World War. The Science Museum Group has a small copper horseshoe, described as Belgian and dated 1917, marked with seven rivet heads and with a loop for hanging, reputedly carried by a soldier in the First World War. It came from the collection of British amulets and charms made by Edward Lovett. The museum notes that shoes were traditionally fixed with seven nails, and that seven is a lucky number in many cultures. In Turkey the horseshoe (nal) is one of the figures worked into charms against the evil eye, with the eye, the hand and the crescent, the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam records.
St Dunstan and the devil
The best-known story of the horseshoe is a legend about Dunstan, the 10th-century English churchman. As Lawrence tells it, Dunstan, a skilled farrier with his own forge, was asked by the devil to shoe his “single hoof”. Dunstan knew his customer and hurt him so badly that the devil begged him to stop, and Dunstan let him go only when he promised never to enter a place where a horseshoe was displayed. The best-known medieval tale has tongs, not a horseshoe. Eleanor Parker, who writes on the literature and history of medieval England, notes that the story of Dunstan and the devil best known in the Middle Ages first appears in the late 11th century, in the Life written by Osbern, precentor at Canterbury, where Dunstan, working metal in his cell at Glastonbury, seizes the devil by the nose with red-hot tongs. Mayfield in Sussex keeps a pair of tongs said to be the ones, and Sussex has its own horseshoe version of the legend, in which Dunstan bargained with the devil to spare any house with a horseshoe on the outside and then nailed a horseshoe to every house in the village before the devil could reach them.
Points up, points down
Traditions disagree, and each has its reason. Points up is the luck-keeping position. In Derbyshire, Lawrence records, a horseshoe was driven prongs upward between two flagstones by the door, “so placed, the luck cannot spill out”, and in a popular poem by James T. Fields a farmer who nailed his found shoe prongs down had nothing but bad luck until a passing stranger told him he had hung it upside down. Points down is the protective position. Lawrence, following the theory that the horseshoe is “the mystical door reduced to its simplest possible form”, wrote that as a charm against the evil eye it “would have no meaning except with the points downward”, so a protective horseshoe should have its arch uppermost and only a luck token should hang the other way. The Oxfordshire cottages he describes had their horseshoes “invariably placed with the prongs downward”. In eastern Pennsylvania horseshoes were often hung with the prongs pointing inward, “so that the luck may be spilled into the house”. Rutland hangs all its horseshoes points down, Discover Rutland says, so that the devil cannot make a nest in the bottom of the horseshoe and so that the luck falls on those who walk beneath. Lawrence's own suggestion for farmers was to hang a pair on each building, one each way.
The horseshoes of Oakham Castle
Oakham Castle in Rutland, whose great hall was built between 1180 and 1190, holds more than 230 ornate ceremonial horseshoes given by members of the peerage. By tradition, royalty and peers forfeit a horseshoe to the lord of the manor on their first visit to the town. The castle says the exact origin of the custom is lost, but it continues, and the oldest surviving shoe was given by Edward IV in 1470. Discover Rutland links it to the Ferrers family: Henry de Ferrers, master of horse to Duke William at the Norman Conquest and rewarded afterwards with the manor of Oakham, bore six black horseshoes on a silver shield. Lawrence repeats the belief that Henry received his surname because he was entrusted with inspecting the farriers. A story that Elizabeth I began the custom when her horse cast a shoe at Oakham is, Lawrence says, incorrect.
See also
Evil eye (nazar), Italian horn (cornicello), Four-leaf clover, Lucky cat (maneki-neko), Dreamcatcher.
Sources
- The Magic of the Horse-shoe, with other folk-lore notes, Robert Means Lawrence, 1898, Houghton, Mifflin and Company (Project Gutenberg), Chapters I, II, IX, XIV, XV and XX
- The Evil Eye (Elworthy, 1895), Frederick Thomas Elworthy, 1895, John Murray
- Stories of St Dunstan, 4: Dunstan and the Devil, Eleanor Parker, 15 May 2012, A Clerk of Oxford
- About Oakham Castle, Oakham Castle (Rutland County Council)
- Rutland's Horseshoe History, Discover Rutland
- Copper horseshoe shaped amulet, Belgium, 1917, object A79968, Lovett collection, Science Museum Group, object record
- Nazar (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi), Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı
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Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research