Freemasonry. The Freemasons and these friendly societies were weakest in the rural hinterland of Scotland, and it was here that several groups emerged to cater for local conditions while embracing the basic Masonic model. In the eighteenth century, the Miller's Word had been established among members of the grain milling profession in Scotland. Designed to restrict entry to their trade, the Miller's Word formed into a system of local groups each of which had initiations, passwords, and internal secrets, also meeting at night and spreading the claim that they were in possession of magical powers that they acquired through reading the Bible backwards three times over a period of three years. During the early nineteenth century, the draft horse became the primary working animal in the farming areas of Northern Scotland, replacing oxen in the hinterland of Aberdeen and the Moray Firth and ponies in Caithness and Orkney. As a result, the ability to raise and control these animals became a valued skill and people possessing this ability were in high demand. This created a desirable form of well paid and respectable work. The historian Timothy Neat characterised the horsemen as being largely "serious, practical men", while according to the esoteric publisher Ben Fernee, "unmarried ploughmen lived hard lives, drank hard, played rough and chased women." Formation It was in this context that the Horseman's Word was founded. Aside from protecting trade knowledge, the Word wanted to ensure that those men who were engaged in the profession were efficiently trained, that the quality of their work was consistently good, and that the remunerations for that work were appropriate. It served as a trade union whose goal was to protect these horse trainers and ploughmen, along with their trade knowledge, from the threat of an encroaching economic system in which the resources for production were becoming privately owned and wages and prices for goods and services were being taken out of the control of skilled labourers and into the hands of large farm owners. As Fernee related, "The ploughmen did not own the land, the horses, the harness, the ploughs or their homes but they took control of the new technology, the horses, and ensured that only a brother of the Society of the Horseman's Word might work them." In its structure, the Horseman's Word borrowed much from the Millers' Word, although rapidly became numerically larger and less exclusive. The group