Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/312

 was found a horse-shoe, which fell into the hands of the late Mr Faussett. After that gentleman's death, his collection of antiquities passed to Mr Mayer, of Liverpool, who presented them to the Free Public Museum of that town. Unfortunately, of the dozen specimens of horseshoes in that building there appears to be but little, if any, history to be obtained; nearly all the specimens belong to the Rolfe collection, and but one to that named the Faussett, and this, I presume, is that from the grave at Brighton. Mr Mayer appears, from the statement given to me by the sub-curator of the museum, to think it might be Roman, but the shoe is not of the usual Roman type. It has apparently eight nail-holes, is 5¼ inches long and 4½ wide, and the breadth of the branch is about 1½ inch (fig. 105). It may be added, that in the Rolfe collection there are two or three specimens of apparently the same age, and several of a later period. But these lose their value through having lost the history of their discovery.

Two remarkably curious specimens of a similar kind to that from Fleet Ditch were discovered in 1854, at Horred Hill, parish of Gillingham, Kent, deeply imbedded in brick clay. In appearance they look even more primitive than that example, and one (fig. 106) would appear to have been made during the transition from the Roman to