hors
Wright's OE grammar
§106;
§280;
§306;
§343;
Add:
as distinguished from
as distinguished from
[Horses were used by those who had to journey or whose business required them to move about; for the drawing of vehicles in which either people (especially invalids(?) v. under wægn, Bd. 3, 9: Lch. ii. 30, 29: and see hors-bǽr) or goods (v. lád;
) were carried; and as beasts of burden (v. Ll. Th. ii. 298, 23 supra: seám-hors). They were used, too, in hunting. When the Danes came Byrhtnoth seems to have been hawking: He lét him of handon fleógan hafoc, By. 7; the huntsman of Ælfric's Colloquy receives a horse from the king (Coll. M. 22, 35 supra); and from the story in Bd. 5, 6 (supra) it seems that racing was not altogether unknown at a very early time. But if a passage in Alfred's translation of Boethius describes English feeling, riding as an amusement was little known (v. rídan). In war, too, and in farming horses were less used than in later times. In the Chronicle under the year 1055 (v. supra) a defeat of the English is attributed to their being on horses, a mode of fighting which according to Florence of Worcester was 'contra morem'; and Byrhtnoth, who bids his men drive away their horses (By. 2 supra), himself alights (By. 23). According to the colloquy ploughing was done with oxen, and the difference between the English and Scandinavian practice may explain the reason for Alfred's noting Ohthere's account of the use of horses in ploughing (Ors. 1, 1 in Dict.).]
a horse, as a general term
a male of the horse kind.
mare
hengest
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Entry information
Citation
Bosworth, Joseph. “hors.” In An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2014. https://bosworthtoller.com/53022.
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