Noble horse has illustrious past

LAST month saw the Cheltenham Festival, the election of the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years and the continuing saga of horseflesh sold as beef.

These stories are strangely connected; we can blame the last non-European pope, the one before Francis, for our hang-up about eating horses.

Gregory III, a Syrian, ascended the throne of St Peter in the year 731. The leading religious figure of the day was an English missionary, Boniface the ‘Apostle of the Germans’, whose evangelising methods were somewhat heavy-handed by today’s standards. Determined to stamp out idolatry among the pagan tribes, he destroyed their temples and shrines. A great oak at Geismar in Hesse was sacred to the thunder god.