The Story Behind The Horse Brass.
Video credit: http://www.youtube.com/@britishfilminstitute
From working horses to good luck charms: the history behind the antique brasses in my newest collection.
My first memory of seeing a horse brass was probably at one of my grandparents’ houses, hanging by the fireside. And, if I’m being completely honest, I thought they were pretty ugly things.
My family have always been heavily connected to horses. My grandfather served as a Queen’s Household Cavalry Horseman and later, together with my uncle, ran a successful father-and-son farrier business in the Cotswolds. So horse paraphernalia was everywhere when I was growing up. It was simply part of the background of family life, but I never really gave the brasses much thought.
That was until very recently, when I happened to stumble across some mid 20th-century Zodiac horse brasses.
Something about them stopped me. I’d never seen anything quite like them before, and suddenly those rather unremarkable pieces of brass I remembered from my grandparents’ houses seemed much more interesting. They rekindled some fond, half-forgotten childhood memories, but also a new curiosity about what these objects actually were, why they were made, and what their purpose had been.
So, what actually was a horse brass?
A horse brass is essentially a decorative brass plaque attached to a horse's harness. They were particularly associated with Britain's heavy working horses — the great Shires, Clydesdales and other cart horses that hauled wagons, brewery drays, canal boats, railway goods and farm equipment.
They became increasingly fashionable from about the middle of the 19th century, reaching their greatest popularity just before the First World War. London Museum has surviving examples from brewery, railway and Corporation of London horses, and describes them as an everyday sight on London's streets.
Why were they put on horses?
The simplest and shortest answer I found is decoration, pride and identification.
The National Horse Brass Society suggests that around 1850, carters and wagoners began decorating their horses’ harness partly in imitation of the elaborate harness decorations used on smart carriage horses. Walsall, already an important centre for brass harness fittings, became a major manufacturing centre for horse brasses — first casting them and later stamping them — and there were thousands of different designs. The National Horse Brass Society estimates that more than 2,000 are known.
And these weren’t just anonymous decorative objects. Businesses could use them as a form of visual identity. The London Museum specifically notes that breweries and railways often had their own distinctive brasses.
So imagine Victorian London: hundreds of horses and wagons rattling through cobbled streets, each carrying goods, people, messages and the identity of the business behind them. A distinctive brass could effectively say: “This horse belongs to us.” It’s a surprisingly early form of branding.
But this next reason is probably the one I found most compelling — probably because of my mid-life induced disdain for minimalism and greige!
The Victorians absolutely loved ornamenting things, and a Victorian carter’s horse was an incredibly valuable possession. The harness wasn’t simply functional; it was an opportunity for a bit of display. Pride in your horse, pride in your trade, pride in your business. Why have plain leather when you could have brass?
photograph credit: https://www.norwich-heritage.co.uk/
And this is where the history gets particularly delicious.
There is a much older tradition of putting symbolic objects and imagery onto animals for protection, and horse brasses existed within that world of folklore, superstition and symbolism. The Museum of English Rural Life notes that designs such as moons and stars may represent survivals of older protective traditions.
We can’t say that every horse brass was intended as a talisman — they were primarily decorative harness ornaments — but some of the imagery clearly draws from a much older visual language of protection, luck and symbolism.
And that, for me, makes them even more interesting. Because it starts to sound rather familiar.
We don’t only wear jewellery because it looks beautiful. We wear things that signify something: a birthstone, an initial, a religious symbol, a lucky charm, something inherited from someone we love. Sometimes the meaning is deeply personal; sometimes it’s simply because we like the object, what it represents and it's a part of the pomp and ceremony! And who doesn't miss that these days?!
Horse brasses seem to have occupied a similarly delicious little intersection of decoration, status, identity and superstition.
And then they disappeared.
Their popularity peaked in the period immediately before the First World War. But the world was changing. Mechanisation meant fewer working horses, and as motor vehicles took over the roads, the elaborate harnesses — and the brasses that adorned them — gradually disappeared with them.
By the 1950s, horse brasses had virtually disappeared from London’s working streets.
The horses were gone. The brasses remained.
The beginnings of an idea...
Zodiac imagery wasn’t one of the most obvious forms of working-horse decoration, and I was genuinely surprised to discover that these brasses existed.
The Victorians had a particular fascination with astrology, astronomy, antiquity, symbolism, mythology and the occult — sometimes sincerely, sometimes simply because these subjects made for beautiful and fashionable decorative motifs. So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me quite as much as it did.
And then I got that particular buzz of excitement that comes when an idea takes hold and simply has to be made.
For me, the symbolism was irresistible. I’ve always had a weakness for things that are magical, symbolic and a little bit woo. Which makes the zodiac brasses feel rather inevitable, really. Astrology, spirituality and all things mystical have enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent years, particularly on social media, but I can’t claim to have discovered my inner mystic through Instagram. I’ve been quietly drawn to this stuff for as long as I can remember.
The zodiac is fundamentally about the heavens, the seasons, the agricultural year and, of course, human fate. The horse, on the other hand, belonged firmly to the earth — to agriculture, transport, work and wealth.
Bringing those two worlds together in a piece of contemporary wearable jewellery felt like a natural progression.
There is something I particularly love about the contrast between the materials I chose too. Brass has a permanence and an agricultural, almost industrial hardness to it, while silk is soft, colourful and ephemeral. One has been shaped to endure; the other is delicate and fleeting.
If you’ve enjoyed this little journey into the history of the horse brass, sign up to my newsletter for the release dates of future blogs.
Next time, I’ll be taking you behind the scenes of the making of my Reclaimed Horse Brass Zodiac Collection — from prepping the brass medallions to working out how on earth to turn something designed for a horse’s harness into something beautiful you can wear.
Lucy. x