Food for Horses

Samuel Johnson, the writer and critic, spent most of nine years on his Dictionary of the English Language. When it came out in 1755, most of it was what a dictionary should be: careful, learned and dull. But now and then he enjoyed himself. A lexicographer, the person who writes a dictionary, was "a harmless drudge". A pension was "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country". And under OATS he wrote:

People still quote it, and Scots still bristle at it. The odd thing is that it is not really false. In 1937 Lane Cooper, an American scholar, looked into it and called it "strictly true". England did feed most of its oats to horses, and Scots did live on oatmeal. The reason lies largely in the plant.

An oat is a grass, and a latecomer. It began as a weed among the first wheat and barley, and probably went along with them as farming spread into Europe, until, perhaps somewhere in the centre or north of the continent, probably about 3,000 years ago, farmers stopped pulling it up and started sowing it. It does well where wheat struggles: in cool, wet summers and on poor, acid soils. Scotland is cool and wet, and most of its rocks are acid. Oats suited it better than wheat, and they became the grain Scots lived on.

Johnson was not even the first to notice. Seventeen centuries earlier Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, put the oat first among the diseases of grain: barley, he thought, turned into oats in damp soil under a damp sky. The people of Germany, he added, sowed it on purpose and "make their porridge of nothing else". He had the biology wrong and, it is hard not to suspect, the weather right.

So the facts in Johnson's line were largely the oat's doing. But nobody reads the line as a fact about farming. It is an insult dressed up as a fact. That raises a question worth asking about any joke at someone else's expense: if every word is true, what is wrong with it?

The answer is that the definition is not about oats. It is about the people who eat them. It puts the Scots in the same column as the horses and leaves the reader to finish the thought. Johnson admitted as much late in life. In 1783 James Boswell, the Scottish lawyer who became his biographer, told him he had made a whole nation into enemies by attacking the Scots. "Why, I own," Johnson replied, "that by my definition of OATS I meant to vex them."

That could have been the end of it: a clever man being clever and a bit nasty. What makes the story worth telling is that almost everything around the definition then went to work making a fool of the man who wrote it.

The clerks

Start with the people who helped write the book. Johnson did the thinking, but he hired six clerks to copy out the quotations and notes. Boswell, writing for Scots who thought Johnson hated them, could not resist pointing out that "five of them were of that country". There were two men called Macbean, a Mr Shiels, a Mr Stewart (the son of an Edinburgh bookseller) and a Mr Maitland. The sixth, a Mr Peyton, taught French. Nobody knows who copied out the slip for OATS. But the odds were five to one that it was a Scot.

Lichfield

Then there is Johnson's home town. In March 1776 he took Boswell to Lichfield, in Staffordshire, where he had grown up as a bookseller's son. They stayed at an old inn next door to the house he was born in, and Boswell, by his own account in high Tory spirits, drank plenty of the local ale. In Lichfield he found two things he had not expected: "oat ale", which he had never seen before, and oatcakes, "not hard as in Scotland, but soft like a Yorkshire cake".

Then comes the sentence he was clearly enjoying: "It was pleasant to me to find, that Oats, the food of horses, were so much used as the food of the people in Dr. Johnson's own town."

It is one of the neatest put-downs in literary history, and Boswell delivered it over breakfast without raising his voice. Johnson's own neighbours were the people his definition had left out. Staffordshire still makes oatcakes today, soft and floppy and often eaten in the morning, wrapped round cheese and bacon.

The Highlands

The real test had come three years earlier, when Johnson did something nobody expected and went to Scotland. In the autumn of 1773, in his sixties, he and Boswell travelled up the east coast and out to the Hebrides, the islands off the west coast, by horse and by boat, sleeping wherever they could. It was an odd trip for a man known for mocking Scotland, and Boswell had fun with that. On the road to the west coast, he said he was thinking of writing Johnson a comic poem. It would be a letter from a lady in London who had bought him a fine chicken and some asparagus at the market, only to find that on his return:

Sullen you turn from both, and call for OATS.

James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, entry for 31 August 1773

Johnson laughed. His only objection was that the poem should not be signed with the name of his friend Hester Thrale. That, he said, would be in poor taste. He let the joke about the oats stand.

In fact he never took to oatcakes. In his book about the trip, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, he called the thin Highland ones "coarse and hard". He preferred the barley ones. But the journey showed him oats from the other side. On the road by Loch Ness he and Boswell went into a hut where an old woman was boiling goat meat. Two of her sons, she said, had gone to Inverness to buy "meal", which in the Highlands always meant oatmeal. To her it was expensive food. In spring, when her goats gave milk, her children could manage without it. The grain that England fed to its horses was, for this family, something to save money on.

And then there was breakfast. Johnson gave in to it completely. In the Journey he wrote that breakfast was a meal in which the Scots "must be confessed to excel us". The tea and coffee came with butter, honey, jams and marmalades. "If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland."

That was a big concession from a man who hated to give the Scots an inch. Boswell records an argument over breakfast about whether to say grace before breakfast as well as dinner, as the Scots did. Johnson said it made no difference. Boswell explained in a footnote why he would not budge: Johnson "could not bear to have it thought that, in any instance whatever, the Scots are more pious than the English". Then Boswell added, clearly pleased, that Johnson had conceded "the peculiar merit of breakfast in Scotland". He held out on prayer, but he gave way on the marmalade.

He did not give way on everything. In the islands, he complained, people put great slices of Cheshire cheese on the breakfast table, and its smell spoiled the tea. They "pollute the tea-table", he wrote.

What the joke was about

So was the definition wrong? Not quite. As a statement about fields and stables it held up, even on Johnson's own trip, since he never learned to like a Highland oatcake. But it was never really about fields and stables. A food's status depends on who eats it, and Johnson's line got its sting from that. It ranked a nation by what it ate. That is how it could be true in every word and still be unfair, and how one breakfast in Lichfield could turn it on Johnson's own neighbours.

He never took it back, and he never stopped teasing. The writer Percival Stockdale remembered a Scottish lady who tried to correct him: in Scotland, she said, they gave oats to their horses too, just as the English did. "I am very glad, madam," Johnson replied, "to find that you treat your horses as well as you treat yourselves."

But his final word was in the Journey, in print for anyone to read. Eat supper wherever you like. For breakfast, go to Scotland.