Toadmen, known to have still existed in Cambridgeshire between 1918 and 1938, had the gift of controlling horses, and rendering them motionless, despite all attempts to make them go. Their feats are usually explained today as involving the use of drugs and herbs, but they were formerly ascribed to supernatural powers.
They got the name ‘Toadmen’ because of a ritual they are said to have carried out. The would-be Toadman had to catch a live toad and either skin it alive or peg it to an ant heap until the ants had eaten the flesh off its bones. Alternatively, it could be simply thrown on the ground hard enough to kill it. Either way, the Toadman would carry the bones in his pocket until they became quite dry. Next he would go at midnight on a night of full moon to a running stream and throw in the bones (said to scream horribly as he did so). One bone was supposed to detach itself and point or begin to move upstream. The Toadman had to rescue it, and it became the source of his power.
According to an account recorded by Enid Porter from a retired horsekeeper of March, the Toadman had to carry the bones to the stable at midnight on three nights running, and on the third the Devil would appear and, by drawing the Toadman’s blood in a fight, initiate him as a full Toadman. Whether this was thought to be true by the teller or not is a moot question: horsemen were usually unwilling to reveal their secrets.
In 1936, E. G. Bales heard from a man living near Wisbech some stories about Toadmen he had heard sixty years before. According to one of these, an ‘entire leader’ (a man who led his stallion from farm to farm to service the mares) went to a farm between Wisbech and Upwell, but the farmer said that the mares were out at work and he would have to wait until they came home. Meantime he should put the stallion in the stable. Once the horse was in the stable, the farmer put a spell on it to make it stay there all day willy-nilly, so that the mares would not miss their turn at being served.
On another occasion, the same farmer charmed the horses hitched to a wagon loaded with corn the night before, ready for an early start to Wisbech. The horseman who did the loading was in the habit of putting some straw on the cart to sell on his own account. This time, when he went to start the horses, they would not budge. Then the farmer put his head out of the window and called down to him, ‘Take that bunch of straw off, then they’ll go.’ The horseman took the straw off, and sure enough they went. After a while, however, he thought he would hoodwink the farmer, and turned back to get the straw. When it was on the wagon again, the horses once more refused to go, until he had thrown it into a dyke. ‘Of course’, said the narrator, ‘if he had whipped the cart wheel those hosses would have gone and then that farmer would have felt the pain hisself.’ (This was the treatment traditionally advocated also when witches stopped horses.)