Two male champions next appeared. They wore short white jackets and breeches and hose of the same colour; their heads were bare and freshly-shaven; one of them wore green ribbons, the other yellow. They were hideous to look at, their faces being all seamed and scarred. They also commenced by paying each other grotesque and amusing compliments, and then fell on each other with the same sort of weapons the women had used; but they showed more strength, vigour, and ability, if not more courage. One blow rapidly followed another; it was really surprising neither man should be killed … They fought five or six times running, and only stopped for the sewing up of a wound or when too exhausted to continue. After every round the victor was thrown money by his backers; but he had to exercise great skill in catching the coins, for he had a right only to those he caught in his hands; those that fell on the ground became the property of some of the numerous rascals that were standing about, who hastened to pick them up and appropriate them. The two combatants received several wounds, one of them having his ear nearly severed from his head, and a few moments later his opponent got a cut across the face, commencing at the left eye and ending on the right cheek. This last wound ended the fight and entertainment.6
William Hickey described a similar entertainment which he witnessed at Wetherby’s, a raffish club in Drury Lane, where men and women, ‘promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables and benches’, shouted encouragement at two ‘she-devils engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, their bosoms bare, and the clothes torn from their bodies’. In another corner of the room ‘an uncommonly athletic young man’ was defending himself from the assaults of three ‘Amazonian tigresses’ and various male members of the club who lashed out at him with their sticks. ‘He, however, made a capital defence, not sparing the women a bit more than the men, but knocking each down as opportunity occurred.’7
The public taste for violence was also indulged by bull- and bear-baiting. The scarred and battered animals were taken around the country by their leaders and, when a sufficient crowd had gathered, they were chained to a stake and the spectators paid a shilling each to set their dogs upon them. The handlers stood by with long staves to break the fall of the dogs as the infuriated bulls tossed them high into the air. An advertisement from the Weekly Journal promised additional excitements:
At the Bear Garden, at Hockey-in-the-Hole, at the request of several persons of quality, on Monday, the nth of this instant of June, is one of the largest and most mischievous bears that was ever seen in England to be baited to death, with other variety of Bull-baiting and Bear-baiting; as also a Wild Bull to be turned loose in the Same Place, with Fireworks all over him. To begin exactly at three o’clock in the afternoon, because the sport continues long.8
Badgers were also baited by being tied into holes in the ground by means of chains passed through their tails and then being set upon by dogs. As many as five or six dogs might be killed by a badger’s strong jaws and sharp teeth before the tormented animal died itself. But none of these so-called sports was as popular as cock-fighting, the widespread practice of which is indicated by the number of words and phrases connected with it, apart from cockpit itself, which have passed into the language, including ‘pit against’, ‘cut out for’, ‘scoot’ and ‘a clean pair of heels’.9
The sport appealed to all classes and was enjoyed in village churchyards, the courts of small taverns, and in specially constructed outdoor and indoor cockpits such as the New Red Lion Cockpit at Clerkenwell, the Royal Cockpit, Birdcage Walk, and the establishment, possibly at Newmarket, where the blind Lord Albemarle Bertie is seen in Hogarth’s engraving gambling with his cronies on the birds he cannot see.
As soon as its sex had been determined the owner of a cock intended for fighting would cut off its comb and wattles as well as the tail as far as the rump, clip the neck feathers from head to shoulders, then trim the wings to points, and sharpen the beak. The cock’s spurs would also be sharpened with a knife, though richer owners equipped their birds with steel or silver spurs. As at prize-fights enormous sums were wagered on cockfights by such patrons of the sport as the Duke of Rutland, while a poorer man might bet a Pig.
The animals used are of a particular breed [wrote de Saussure]; they are large but short-legged birds, their feathers are scarce, they have no crests to speak off, and are very ugly to look at. Some of these fighting-cocks are celebrated, and have pedigrees like gentlemen of good family, some of them being worth five or six guineas …
The stage on which they fight is round and small. One of the cocks is released, and struts about proudly for a few seconds. He is then caught up, and his enemy appears. When the bets are made, one of the cocks is placed on either end of the stage; they immediately rush at each other and fight furiously. It is surprising to see the ardour, the strength, the courage of these little animals, for they rarely give up till one of them is dead. The noise is terrible, and it is impossible to hear yourself speak unless you shout. At Whitehall Cockpit, on the contrary, where the spectators are mostly persons of a certain rank, the noise is much less; but would you believe that at this place several hundred pounds are sometimes lost and won? Cocks will sometimes fight a whole hour before one or the other is victorious; at other times one may get killed at once. You sometimes see a cock ready to fall and apparently die, seeming to have no more strength, and suddenly it will regain all its vigour, fight with renewed courage, and kill his enemy. Sometimes a cock will be seen vanquishing his opponent, and, thinking he is dead (if cocks can think), jump on the body of the bird and crow noisily with triumph, when the fallen bird will unexpectedly revive and slay the victor. Of course, such cases are very rare, but their possibility makes the fight very exciting. Ladies never assist at these sports.10
Cocks were also trained to dodge the sticks that were thrown at them in the game known as cock-throwing. In this the bird was tied to a peg by a cord, and those taking part in the game paid 2d or so for three chances of hitting it with a broomstick thrown from a distance of twenty-two yards. When they succeeded in knocking the cock over, they ran towards it and if they could pick it up before it rose to its feet again they could keep it. A well-trained cock could usually avoid the stick; but there was less chance of escape for the goose in goose-riding in which the bird, with greased neck, was tied by its legs to à bough while riders took it in turns to gallop beneath, attempting to snatch off its head as they passed.
Games like this were from time to time suppressed by the local authorities but not so much because they were cruel as because they were considered a public nuisance when they took place, as they often did, in the street. In other areas the authorities felt obliged by tradition and public opinion to maintain such sports: at Beverley in Yorkshire it was still the custom – as it had been ‘from time immemorial’ – ‘for every mayor of this town on his election, to give a bull to the populace, for the purpose of being baited, on the day of his being sworn into office’.11
Even racing had its cruel aspects. In one of his letters César de Saussure described the large open spaces, outlined by posts, in which the races were held, the starting and finishing pillars on which the judges sat, the jockeys’ ‘little shirts and tight breeches of red, blue, green or yellow cloth, and little caps of the same colour’. He wrote of the crowds of racegoers some of whom arrived in coaches, others in chaises, yet others in phaetons and many more on horseback; and of the farmers of the neighbourhood, ‘all well mounted and making considerable wagers … their manner of talking and behaving and expressing themselves being quite peculiar to their nation … their conversation artless and frank, but at the same time assured and very pleasing, if you pay no attention to the oaths they continually use’.12
Races were then run in a series of heats, the winner being the horse that won most heats, sometimes as many as four over a distance of four miles. Horses, bred for staying power rather than for speed, were untrained, and the jockeys more adept at jostling their rivals or even knocking them o
ff their small saddles than in skilful riding. They whipped and kicked and attempted to unhorse each other by entwining their legs, wrote John Lawrence, the eccentric author of A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Horse and on the Moral Duties of Man towards the Brute Creation: ‘I well remember a fellow … who was accustomed to boast of the execution he had formerly done with the butt end of his whip, and the eyes and teeth he had beat out.’13 When a jockey fell, a spectator might catch the horse and ride him past the finishing post. But winning was not always an unalloyed pleasure. The hard-drinking painter, George Morland, who kept eight horses at the White Inn, Paddington, told a friend in 1785 that, having ‘commenced a new business of jockey to the races’, he was angrily scolded and then whipped by ‘a mob of horsemen’ after losing a heat; yet, when he won at Margate, he was ‘very near being killed’. ‘I won the heat so completely that the other horses were half a mile behind,’ he said, ‘upon which near 400 sailors, smugglers, fishermen etc. set upon me with sticks, stones, waggoners’ whips, fists etc. and one man took me by the thigh and pulled me off the horse.’14
Racing – first organized at York in 1530 – was already, however, ‘the sport of kings’. The races at Newmarket had been patronized by Charles II. Queen Anne, a keen racegoer who gave plates to be run for at both Newmarket and Datchet Mead near Windsor out of secret service money, had ‘appointed races to be made’ at Ascot in 1711. In 1728 George II had attended the races at Newmarket ‘and nothing was spared to make them successful’. George III went regularly to the races at Ascot and Egham; while his son, the future George IV, owned some of the finest horses in the country, winning no less than 185 races between 1788 and 1791, though he refused to have anything more to do with Newmarket and sold his stud after his brilliant jockey, Samuel Chiffney, had been accused there of dishonesty and questioned by the members of the Jockey Club.15
After the foundation of the Jockey Club in about 1750, the St Leger was established in 1776, the Oaks in 1779, the Derby in 1780; and some of the greatest jockeys in the history of the turf began to make their reputations. It was not, however, until Lord George Bentinck turned his attention to the reform of the turf in the 1830s that its principal abuses were gradually extirpated.
If violence often erupted on the racecourse before Lord George Bentinck’s time, so it still did during games of football, matches which were ‘very inconvenient to passers-by’. A ‘score of rascals’ would appear in the street kicking about ‘a leather ball filled with air’. ‘They will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches,’ a foreign visitor remarked, ‘and almost knock you down without the slightest compunction; on the contrary, they will roar with laughter.’16 Cricket, on the other hand, was a relatively peaceful game. ‘Everyone plays it,’ de Saussure said, ‘the common people and also men of rank … They go into a large open field, and knock a ball about with a piece of wood. I will not attempt to describe this game; but it requires agility and skill.’17
At that time the wicket consisted of only two stumps about one foot high and perhaps two feet apart with a third stump or bail across the top. The ball was thrown along the ground as fast as possible by the bowler, and the batsman, who stood at a distance of twenty-two yards from him, attempted to hit it with a wooden bat curved like a hockey stick. In the early days of the game runs were scored by cutting notches on a stick, a method satisfactory to the innumerate player. If the batsman missed the ball, or after he had hit it and taken a run, he had to place his bat in a hole scooped out between the stumps, known as the ‘popping hole’, before the wicket-keeper got the ball into it first. Later, instead of getting his bat into the ‘popping hole’, to avoid being run out or stumped, the batsman had to place it behind a line marked about two feet from the wicket; this was, and still is, known as the popping crease.
It appears from medieval manuscript illuminations that a kind of cricket was being played in England at least as early as the thirteenth century. References to the game become more common in the sixteenth century when, for instance, one of Queen Elizabeth’s coroners for Surrey deposed in court that ‘when he was a scholler in the free school at Guildford, he and several of his fellowes did runne and play there at crickett and other plaies’. As the game spread across the southern counties it seems to have been frowned upon by the authorities. According to Sir William Dugdale, Oliver Cromwell, who was born in 1599, ‘threw himself into a dissolute and dangerous course’ and ‘became famous for football, cricket, cudgelling and wrestling’, acquiring the ‘name of royster’. In the county of Kent, where it was played on a Sunday, the game caused particular offence. ‘Maidstone was formerly a very profane town,’ wrote the author of a life of Thomas Wilson who was born two years after Oliver Cromwell, ‘in as much as I have seen morrice-dancing, cudgel-playing, stoolball, cricket and many other sports openly and publicly indulged in on the Lord’s Day.’ It was not until 1748 that it was formally decided that cricket was not an illegal game, the Court of King’s Bench holding that it was ‘a very manly game, not bad in itself, but only in the ill use made of it by betting more than ten pounds on it; but that was bad and against the law’. Soon afterwards the celebrated Hambledon Club was formed, and the men who played in this club on Broad Ha’ Penny and Windmill Downs in Hampshire were a match for any team that could be brought against them.18
By now the game was played by the well-to-do as well as by the common people. The Gentlemen of Sevenoaks had been playing the Gentlemen of London by the 1730s; and in the 1740s a team from Kent – captained by the head gardener at Knole and including Lord John Sackville whose family had lived there since the beginning of the seventeenth century – was facing an All England team which lost by one run. In 1792, 2000 spectators watched Kent play Hampshire. On this occasion there were evidently eleven players on each side but in village matches there were sometimes less and often more, sometimes as many as twenty-two.
The mixture of classes in a game which had originally been played only by the lower was condemned in some quarters. The British Champion of 8 September 1743 loftily declined ‘to dispute the privilege’ that noblemen and gentlemen enjoyed of making butchers, cobblers and tinkers their companions if they so wished.19 But the appeal of the game was too wide for its devotees to be deterred by such criticisms. It was, in any case, seen as a more gentlemanly and sportsmanlike game than most. ‘You will desire to excel all boys at your age at cricket,’ that fastidious arbiter of taste, Lord Chesterfield, informed his son. Several distinguished habitués of the expensive and fashionable Star and Garter tavern in Pall Mall, including the Earl of Winchilsea and Charles Lennox, later Duke of Richmond, met occasionally to play cricket on White Conduit Fields in Islington and in 1752 they formed the White Conduit Club. Considering it undignified to play on public land, they arranged for Thomas Lord, their Yorkshire ‘attendant’, to take a lease of private land on the site of what is now Dorset Square. The ground was opened in 1787, the year in which some members of the White Conduit Club formed the Marylebone Cricket Club. The two clubs were later merged, and in 1814 the Marylebone Cricket Club moved to a new ground in St John’s Wood taken by Thomas Lord.20
The rules of the game had by then been much altered. A third stump had been introduced in 1776 and the wicket had been raised to a height of twenty-two inches. It was some time, however, before these rules were generally observed. When Diana Sterling painted a cricket match being played in Essex during the Regency she depicted only two stumps and a bat far larger than the new regulations allowed. The gentlemanly players are all in white with tall hats.21 But, although white top hats with black bands were preferred by more formal teams – those of the Earl of Winchilsea’s being distinguished by silver lacing – most country players wore no special clothes.
They also disdained the use of gloves and pads, and seem to have been less willing than those in London teams to welcome girls into their sides.
It was certainly not a game for delicate fingers, particularly for those who played as wicket
-keepers.
The blood of a cricketer is seldom shed from any part of the body but his fingers [wrote John Nyren, the Hambledon cricketer and author of The Young Cricketer’s Tutor]. But the fingers of an old cricketer, so bent, so shattered, so indented, so contorted, so venerable! are enough to bring tears of envy and emulation from any eye.22
We never thought of knocks [another Hambledon player told the Rev. James Pycroft]. Certainly you would see a bump heave under the stocking and even blood come through, but I never saw a man killed now you ask the question, and never saw an accident of much consequence. Fancy the old fashion before cricket shoes! I saw John Wells tear a finger nail off against his shoe buckle in picking up a ball.23
Gambling was carried on as eagerly at cricket matches as it was at cockfights and prize-fights and at horse races. Bookies were banned from Lord’s in 1825; but huge private bets continued to change hands as they had done in the past. There was also much drinking at cricket matches, and the deeper men drank the higher they gambled.
Foreign visitors considered, in fact, that gambling was a kind of national fever. Bets were placed on everything, not only on games of chance and every sporting event and political contest but on all manner of happenings whose outcome was unknown or on anything that cropped up in conversation or led to argument. ‘There is nothing, however trivial, or ridiculous which is not capable of producing a bet,’ noted the Connoisseur magazine in 1754. Horace Walpole told the story, which thereafter became well-known, of a man who fell down in the street; immediately bets were placed as to whether he were dead or not; a sympathetic passer-by, suggesting that he should be bled, was shouted down by the gamblers as this, they protested, would affect the fairness of the betting.24
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