BBC History - The Life & Times Of The Stuarts 2016_

Alistair Dougall describes how Puritan

attempts to ban games such as football, wrestling and

bowling divided the people of England in the 17 th century

Bad

sports

72

Stuart life / Bad sports

J

ust over four hundred years

ago, in 1612, the Cotswolds

hosted its own form of the

Olympics. But, not only was

it on a vastly smaller scale

than the games today,

it also took place at a time

when – far from uniting people and

nations – sports and their celebration

were hugely divisive.

Organised by a local lawyer, Robert

Dover, the ‘Cotswold Olimpicks’ were held

at a natural amphitheatre now known as

Dover’s Hill. The Olimpicks became an

annual event, with participants competing

in sports that included wrestling, pike-

throwing, leaping, running and hunting.

Dover’s Olimpicks seem to have been

designed, in part, to revive the sort of

communal festivities that had been held

throughout medieval England. May

games, ales and wakes were all forms of

communal celebration that reinforced

neighbourly bonds. They took place after

church on Sundays and holy days, and

provided opportunities to feast, dance and

play sports such as football, handball,

running, bowling, archery and wrestling.

Cock fighting and bear-baiting were also

common entertainments.

Sporting value

However, the crown wanted men to focus

on archery on Sundays and numerous acts

were introduced in an attempt to prevent

them from indulging in other sports.

Typical of these is a 1365 decree that

forbade men from playing “handball,

football, club ball, cock fighting or other

vain games of no value” in the hope that

they would instead practise the archery

skills that were seen as vital to the

country’s defence.

When holy days were banned during the

English Reformation, Sunday became the

day of leisure. Although church attendance

now became compulsory, the church

remained relaxed about what parishioners

did after the church service.

Yet all that changed with the emergence

of so-called Puritans in the late 16th

century. Puritans were members of the

established church, but believed zealously

that both church and society needed

further reform. As a contemporary

pamphleteer observed, they were the

“hotter sorte of Protestants”. They

contended that people should devote

Sunday entirely to God, and sought to

suppress any form of recreation on the

‘Lord’s Day’. They therefore gained

a reputation as killjoys who condemned

traditional revelry as either papist or

pagan in origin and as an occasion of

temptation and sin.

The Elizabethan clergymen Richard

Greenham and Nicholas Bownd led the

Puritan attack, insisting that no sports

whatsoever were permissible on Sundays.

Directly challenging established royal

legislation, they argued that Sunday was

“no fit time” for archery practice and

declared that men “must not come to

Church with their bowes and arrows in

their hands”.

“Filthie exercises”

Numerous Puritan writers denounced all

manner of sports as Sabbath profanations.

Phillip Stubbes, for example, claimed that

wakes led to days of “drunkennesse,

whoredome, gluttony, and other filthie

sodomiticall exercises”. He also attacked

the May custom of going into the woods

to collect garlands to adorn houses and

maypoles as opportunities for fornication,

claiming that of the many young women

who went into the woods scarcely a third

returned “undefiled”.

Puritan assertions that these festivities

led to debauchery were grossly

exaggerated; certainly, there was no

discernible increase in illegitimate births

following May celebrations.

However, ales and

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES X2

A man taking part in a hunt, as depicted in

an early 17th-century English tapestry