The great horse statue myth
An e-mailed ‘list of facts’ I received a while back (which I’ve been slowly deconstructing), contained the following claim:
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If
the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural ! causes.
This was one of the ‘facts’ in the e-mail that I’d already heard claimed several times before, by friends, and I think I can even recall it being debated on a TV show.
A quick Google brings up loads of web pages where the issue has been debated, and thoroughly debunked. My favorite is an ‘Ask Yahoo’ feature from back in 2001, where one ‘Larry’ from North Carolina asked whether the claim was true. The anonymous agony aunt style Yahoo! response outlines their findings, which they clearly also found through Googling (or Yahooing, I suppose). Here’s their conclusion:
While this statue code is oft-repeated and garners support from various sources, the stone cold truth is that the facts don’t support it.
The Yahoo gives as its first reference a link to the Snopes.com article Statue of Limitations, which is worth a read for its comprehensiveness, listing no less than 20 equestrian statues and their various positions.
I found another blog article, Horse Hooves and Myths, which also does a through deconstruction.
Finally, in perhaps the ultimate test of notoriety for a popular misconception, the Wikipedia article on Equestrian Sculpture has a section on the subject.
Of course, it’s fairly to debunk this misconception. The harder question is how it arose, and why it has been so popular. Here we can only guess. Perhaps the latter is answered by the way that this ‘fact’ seems to present us with a hidden piece of knowledge, a secret code hidden in statues, perhaps even a virtual ‘easter egg’ kept up by successive generations of horse statue sculptors. The Snopes article referenced above goes along with this idea, and even points to a similar (albeit less popular) misconception:
The crossing of the legs and/or arms of the effigies of certain Knights indicates that they were Crusaders and the number of crusades in which they took part.
The article also reminds us, that, for the horse statue myth at least, the probably of it being true by chance for any one statue is precisely one in three, a probability easily high enough to sustain the misconception.
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence as to exactly where the the horse statue myth originally came from - my guess is that it’s probably fairly old, possibly centuries, passed on orally from person to person. Alternatively, it could quite easily have arisen in a few places independently.