Читать книгу Montegue Blister’s Strange Games: and other odd things to do with your time - Alan Down - Страница 48

Shoeing the Wild Mare is a traditional and totally mad Christmas game that goes back to at least the early seventeenth century.

To play, get a strong wooden beam, a few centimetres wide, and suspend it from the roof by two ropes of even length. The beam is the ‘mare’ of the title and should be level, yet high enough above the floor so that the players’ feet are off the ground. A player, ‘the farrier’, then sits on the ‘mare’ in the centre, a leg on either side. This player has a hammer and has to give the underside of the beam ‘four time eight blows’ at a designated spot. If they fall off, it is someone else’s turn.

Much hilarity, and the odd broken shoulder ensues.

Shoeing the Mare appears in its own nursery rhyme, Shoeing:

Shoe the colt,

Shoe the colt,

Shoe the wild mare;

Here a nail,

There a nail,

Yet she goes bare.