The Ceremony
Of all the customs and traditions associated with the villages of north London, none is more peculiar, more elaborately absurd, or more stubbornly persistent than the ceremony known as Swearing on the Horns at Highgate. The ritual, which in its heyday was practised in virtually every pub in the village, involved the administration of a mock oath to any traveller who had not previously passed through Highgate. The initiate was required to kneel before a pair of horns — usually mounted on a pole or held aloft by the presiding landlord — and to swear a solemn oath of allegiance to a set of entirely nonsensical principles, after which he was declared a Freeman of Highgate and obliged to stand a round of drinks for all present. The ceremony combined the solemnity of a legal proceeding with the lunacy of a pantomime, and it was conducted with a straight-faced gravity that made it all the more bewildering to the uninitiated.
The horns themselves were typically the horns of a ram or an ox, mounted on a wooden staff and sometimes decorated with ribbons or flowers. They were kept behind the bar of the pub where the ceremony was performed, and they were produced with considerable ceremony whenever a suitable candidate presented himself. The candidate — usually a traveller who had stopped at the pub for refreshment on his journey north — was informed that he could not pass through Highgate without first being sworn, and he was led, with mock solemnity, to the place where the horns were displayed. The landlord or a designated official then administered the oath, which the candidate was required to repeat word for word, kneeling on one knee and kissing the horns at the appropriate moments.
The oath itself was a masterpiece of elaborate nonsense. Its exact wording varied from pub to pub and from era to era, but the general form remained remarkably consistent over several centuries. The initiate was required to swear that he would never eat brown bread when he could get white, never drink small beer when he could get strong, never kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress — unless he preferred the maid — and a series of other commitments of equal absurdity. The oath concluded with the declaration that the swearer was now a Freeman of Highgate, entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto, chief among which was the right to kick a pig off Highgate Hill — though only when the pig was already on its way down.
Origins and Antiquity
The origins of Swearing on the Horns are shrouded in the kind of uncertainty that always attends the history of folk customs. The earliest written references to the ceremony date from the seventeenth century, but the practice itself is almost certainly much older. Some antiquarians have traced it back to the medieval period, connecting it with the traditions of the drovers who passed through Highgate with their herds of cattle on the way to the markets of London. According to this theory, the horns represent the cattle trade that was once central to Highgate's economy, and the ceremony was originally a form of initiation for drovers entering the village for the first time. The obligation to buy drinks, on this reading, was a practical mechanism for ensuring that newcomers contributed to the local economy before being allowed to conduct their business.
Others have sought the origins of the custom in older, more mysterious traditions. The horns have been interpreted as a survival of pagan fertility rites, a remnant of the ceremonies associated with the worship of horned gods that predated the coming of Christianity to Britain. This interpretation, while attractive to those of a romantic disposition, is difficult to support with evidence, and most modern historians prefer the more prosaic explanation that links the ceremony to the coaching trade and the culture of the English pub. Whatever its ultimate origins, the ceremony was well established by the time the first written accounts appear in the mid-seventeenth century, and it was practised with remarkable consistency across the pubs of Highgate for at least three hundred years.
The earliest detailed description of the ceremony appears in a pamphlet of 1638, which describes the custom as already ancient and well known. By this date, Highgate was firmly established as one of the most important staging posts on the Great North Road, and the village's numerous inns and taverns were doing a brisk trade with the travellers, merchants, and coachmen who passed through on their way to and from the capital. The ceremony was, in part, a marketing device — a way of attracting customers and encouraging them to spend money — but it was also something more: a communal ritual that bound the people of the village together and that gave Highgate a distinctive identity among the many stops along the road north.
The Role of the Pubs
The ceremony was inseparable from the pubs that hosted it, and at the height of the custom's popularity, virtually every drinking establishment in Highgate claimed the right to swear in travellers. The most prominent venues included The Gatehouse, which stood at the top of Highgate Hill where the old toll gate had been; The Flask, the ancient pub on Highgate West Hill that remains one of the village's most beloved institutions; The Angel, which occupied a prominent position on the High Street; and The Red Lion and Sun, another long-established Highgate hostelry. Each pub maintained its own pair of horns and its own version of the oath, and there was considerable rivalry between the landlords over which establishment could claim the most distinguished list of Freemen.
The landlord played a central role in the ceremony, acting as both master of ceremonies and chief beneficiary. It was the landlord who identified suitable candidates — usually by spotting strangers in the bar who were clearly passing through rather than resident in the village — and it was the landlord who administered the oath, conducted the proceedings, and collected the drinks that the newly sworn Freeman was obliged to purchase. A good landlord could turn the ceremony into a memorable piece of theatre, drawing out the absurdity of the oath, building the anticipation of the assembled regulars, and ensuring that the evening's entertainment generated a healthy profit behind the bar. The best practitioners of the art were local celebrities, men whose reputation for conducting the ceremony with particular style or wit attracted visitors specifically for the purpose of being sworn.
The pubs also served as the repositories of the tradition's material culture. The horns, the staff on which they were mounted, and any written copies of the oath were kept behind the bar and treated with a mixture of reverence and humour that perfectly captured the spirit of the custom. Some pubs displayed their horns prominently, mounted above the fireplace or behind the bar, as a kind of advertisement for the ceremony and a badge of the establishment's credentials. Others kept them hidden until the moment of the ceremony, producing them with a theatrical flourish that was designed to startle the uninitiated and delight the regulars. The physical objects associated with the ceremony — the horns, the staffs, the ribbons — were passed down from landlord to landlord, accumulating the patina of age and the authority of tradition with each successive generation.
Lord Byron and Other Famous Initiates
The list of people who were sworn at Highgate reads like a roll call of English history and literature. The most frequently cited famous initiate is Lord Byron, who is said to have been sworn on the horns during one of his youthful excursions to the village in the early years of the nineteenth century. Byron's biographers have generally accepted the story, which fits well with the poet's taste for eccentric rituals and his appetite for any experience that was unusual, theatrical, or faintly disreputable. Whether Byron kissed the horns and swore to never drink small beer when he could get strong is not recorded in his own writings, but the tradition is well established and has been repeated by his biographers from Thomas Moore onwards.
Other notable initiates are said to have included Charles Dickens, who certainly knew Highgate well and who set several scenes in his novels in the village and its surroundings. David Garrick, the great actor, is another claimed Freeman, and the tradition also lists various members of the aristocracy, numerous army officers, and a considerable number of clergymen among its initiates. The reliability of these identifications varies considerably — some are well attested, others rest on local tradition alone — but the sheer number of famous names associated with the ceremony testifies to its widespread fame and its remarkable longevity.
The social range of the initiates is worth noting. Swearing on the Horns was not a ceremony reserved for the wealthy or the well-born; it was practised upon anyone who passed through the village, regardless of rank or station. Drovers and dukes, merchants and Members of Parliament, serving soldiers and strolling players — all were subject to the same ritual, the same oath, and the same obligation to buy drinks for the house. In this sense, the ceremony had a genuinely democratic character that set it apart from most of the social rituals of pre-modern England. Within the space of the pub, with the horns held aloft and the oath being administered, the hierarchies and distinctions of the outside world were temporarily suspended, and everyone — from the highest to the lowest — was equal before the absurdity of the proceedings.
The Oath in Full
The precise wording of the oath varied over time and between establishments, but the version recorded in the eighteenth century by the antiquarian William Hone gives a good sense of its flavour. The officiating landlord would begin by addressing the candidate in tones of exaggerated solemnity: "Upstanding, sir! Take the horns in your hand and repeat after me." The candidate would then be required to swear: "I do swear, by the rules of sound judgement, that I will not eat brown bread while I can get white — except I like the brown better. I will not drink small beer while I can get strong — unless I like the small better. I will not kiss the maid while I can kiss the mistress — unless I like the maid better." The recurring formula — the solemn prohibition followed immediately by the exception that negated it — was the comic heart of the oath, reducing each grand declaration to cheerful meaninglessness.
The oath continued with further commitments of equal absurdity. The candidate swore that he would not eat an egg without salt unless he preferred it without, that he would not sleep in a barn when he could sleep in a bed unless he found the barn more comfortable, and that he would not go through Highgate on foot when he could ride unless he preferred to walk. The cumulative effect of these self-cancelling pledges was to create a mock-legal document of perfect uselessness — a parody of the solemn oaths and binding commitments that governed so much of public life in pre-modern England. The oath was, in effect, a joke about authority itself, a gentle satire on the pompous rituals of the state, the church, and the law that the ordinary people of Highgate encountered in their daily lives.
The conclusion of the oath was the most memorable part. Having sworn to all the preceding commitments, the candidate was informed that he was now a Freeman of Highgate, with certain specific privileges. Chief among these was the right, already mentioned, to kick a pig off Highgate Hill whenever one was encountered coming down. But the most important privilege — and the one that gave the ceremony its commercial logic — was the right to claim a free drink in any Highgate pub. This privilege, of course, was more theoretical than real, since the cost of the round that the new Freeman was obliged to buy far exceeded the value of any future free drink, but it gave the ceremony a semblance of reciprocity that softened the essentially extractive nature of the proceedings.
Decline and Near-Disappearance
The ceremony of Swearing on the Horns reached the peak of its popularity in the eighteenth century, when Highgate was at its most important as a staging post on the Great North Road and when the village's pubs were at their busiest. The coming of the railways in the 1840s and 1850s dealt the custom a severe blow, for the simple reason that travellers no longer needed to pass through Highgate on their way north. The Great Northern Railway, opened in 1850, offered a faster, cheaper, and more comfortable route from London to the north of England, and the coaching trade that had sustained Highgate's inns for centuries dried up almost overnight. With the coaches gone, the stream of potential initiates diminished to a trickle, and the ceremony became an increasingly rare event.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Swearing on the Horns had become more of a curiosity than a living tradition. It was still performed occasionally — particularly at The Gatehouse and The Flask — but it had lost the spontaneous, everyday quality that had characterised it in its heyday. Visitors came to Highgate specifically to be sworn, which gave the ceremony a self-conscious, antiquarian flavour that was quite different from the robust, unselfconscious character of its earlier incarnations. The horns were still displayed in the pubs, and the oath was still administered, but the context had changed irrevocably. What had once been a routine feature of village life had become a performance, a piece of heritage rather than a living custom.
The decline continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the time of the First World War, the ceremony had virtually ceased to be practised. The social changes wrought by two world wars, the transformation of Highgate from a semi-rural village into a prosperous London suburb, and the broader decline of folk customs in an increasingly urbanised and secularised society all contributed to the custom's near-extinction. By the mid-twentieth century, Swearing on the Horns survived principally in the memories of older residents and in the pages of local history books, a curiosity from a vanished era that seemed to have no place in the modern world.
Revival and Renewal
The story might have ended there, but the late twentieth century brought a remarkable revival. In the 1970s and 1980s, a growing interest in local history and folk traditions — part of a broader cultural movement that sought to recover and preserve the customs and practices of pre-industrial England — led to the reinstatement of the ceremony at several Highgate pubs. The revival was spearheaded by local enthusiasts who saw in the custom not merely a quaint survival but a living expression of Highgate's distinctive identity, a tradition that connected the present-day village with its coaching-era past and that gave residents and visitors alike a sense of participation in a shared history.
The revived ceremony follows the essential outlines of the historical practice, though inevitably some details have been adapted to suit modern sensibilities. The horns are still produced, the oath is still administered, and the newly sworn Freeman is still obliged to buy drinks for the house. But the ceremony now takes place as a scheduled event rather than a spontaneous ambush, and it is attended by people who come specifically for the purpose of being sworn rather than unsuspecting travellers who happen to be passing through. The Gatehouse pub, which claims the longest continuous association with the tradition, has been particularly active in promoting the revived ceremony, and it continues to host regular Swearing on the Horns events that attract visitors from across London and beyond.
The revival has also attracted scholarly attention. Folklorists and social historians have studied the ceremony as an example of the way that folk traditions are adapted and reinvented by successive generations, and the Highgate ceremony has been compared with similar customs in other parts of England and Europe. The academic interest has, in turn, contributed to the ceremony's prestige and visibility, ensuring that it is taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon rather than dismissed as a mere pub stunt. The horns that are displayed in Highgate's pubs today are not the same horns that were kissed by Byron or Dickens, but they represent a tradition that stretches back at least four centuries, and possibly much longer, and that continues to give the village a character and a flavour that is entirely its own.
The Meaning of the Horns
What does Swearing on the Horns mean? The question is more interesting than it might appear, because the ceremony, for all its apparent silliness, touches on themes that are fundamental to the social life of any community. At its most basic level, it is an initiation rite — a ritual that marks the transition of an outsider into a member of the group, however temporary that membership might be. The traveller who arrives in Highgate as a stranger and leaves as a Freeman has undergone a transformation, however absurd, that binds him to the village and to the community of people who have shared the same experience. The oath, the horns, and the round of drinks are the mechanisms of this transformation, and their very absurdity is part of their power: by participating in something patently ridiculous, the initiate demonstrates a willingness to surrender his dignity for the sake of belonging, which is, after all, the essence of most initiation rituals.
The ceremony also served a practical economic function. By obliging every traveller to buy drinks, the landlords of Highgate ensured that the village's pubs benefited from the coaching trade in a direct and measurable way. The oath was, in this sense, a kind of unofficial tax — a levy on passing trade that supplemented the income from food, drink, and accommodation that the inns already provided. The genius of the custom was that it disguised this commercial transaction as entertainment, transforming what was essentially an extraction of money from strangers into a communal celebration that left everyone — the initiate included — feeling that they had participated in something enjoyable and memorable.
But the ceremony also had a deeper, less easily articulated significance. It was an assertion of local identity, a declaration that Highgate was not merely a place that people passed through but a place with its own traditions, its own customs, and its own authority. The oath, with its mock-legal language and its self-cancelling commitments, was a parody of the real oaths and allegiances that governed public life, and in parodying them, it asserted the right of ordinary people — publicans, villagers, travellers — to create their own rituals and their own forms of belonging, independent of the state, the church, and the apparatus of official power. In this sense, Swearing on the Horns was a profoundly democratic custom, and its survival — in however attenuated a form — is a testament to the enduring human need for community, ceremony, and the shared absurdity that binds people together.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*