minister, William Clough, who told his
congregation: “The king of Heauen doth
bid you keepe his Sabboath... the king
of England is a mortall man and he bids
you breake it. Chuse whether of them
you will followe.”
Yet, while some were outraged by James’s
Book of Sports, others cited it to support
their revelry. In Northampton, a Puritan
woman who scolded servants for playing
games on a Sunday was met with the
response that they “must play upon the
Sabboth... and obey the king’s laws in
that point or else be hanged”. She replied
that “they might choose whether the
king should hang them for not obeying
him or the devil burn them for so
breaking the Sabbath”.
In Exeter, a constable who tried to stop
men playing trap-ball was defiantly told
that “they played att noe unlawfull game
and that the King [himself] did allowe it”.
And, in Marlborough, a parishioner cited
the “king’s book” when challenged for
taking part in summer games.
Those who resented attempts to stop
them enjoying traditional sports were,
it seems, in little doubt as to who was
to blame for the crackdown. While
parishioners were in church at Albrighton
in Staffordshire, a mob gathered outside
beating drums, firing guns and shouting:
“Come out, ye Puritans, come out”.
Tensions between the two camps may
have been running high during James’s
reign, yet they were as nothing compared
to the ill-feeling that would sweep the land
once his son Charles I ascended the throne.
In October 1633, following moves to
ban Sunday recreations by magistrates
in Somerset, Charles issued an amended
version of his father’s Book of Sports.
Charles I deeply disliked Puritans and
regarded their attempts to suppress
traditional Sunday recreations as
extremely dangerous.
Charles’s father had prudently decided
not to punish those ministers who refused
to publish his declaration, but Charles wasEARLY MODERN GAMES
Despite protestations from the Puritans, King James VI and I and his
successors wholly supported playing games on the Sabbath. These
were some of the most popular games of the period:FOOTBALL BOWLING
WRESTLING ANIMAL BAITING
RUNNING, LEAPING
AND VAULTINGMAYPOLES
Early football was a mass ball
game with virtually no rules and
no limit on the number of players.
Whole villages or sizeable teams
from rival parts of a single parish
would challenge each other to a
contest, which, if it involved
neighbouring parishes, would
often spread over several miles
of countryside.
Football was invariably violent and
frequently resulted in broken limbs;
even fatalities. Phillip Stubbes called
it “a bloody and murthering
practice”. James I claimed football
was “meeter for laming, then making
able the users thereof”.Bowling was played both on greens
and in bowling alleys, and was
popular at all social levels. Yet, the
law prohibited the lower orders from
playing bowls because it so often led
to gambling and unruly behaviour.
Nonetheless, there were hundreds
of illegal wooden bowling alleys
where people played a rowdy sort of
nine pins or skittles, in sharp
contrast to the rather sedate form of
bowls, or lawn bowling, that the
gentry played on their bowling
greens. The Puritan Robert Crowley
declared that hell awaited men who
frequented bowling alleys and those
who failed to close them down.Stripped to their doublet and hose,
two men would wrestle while,
typically, the onlookers linked arms
around them to form the wrestling
ring. The man who succeeded in
forcing his opponent’s upper body to
touch the ground won the bout.
Wrestling was believed to be of
military benefit as it kept men fit and
“full of manlinesse”. James approved
of it as a sport that enabled a man to
“exercise his engine, which surely
with idelenesse will ruste”.
James included it in court
entertainments put on for his
brother-in-law, Christian IV of
Denmark, when he visited his sister,
Queen Anne.This was extremely popular in early
modern England, and led to
considerable gambling. Bear-baiting
was the most common form, but
dogs also baited bulls and badgers
for public amusement. Mary I and
Elizabeth I attended bear-baitings,
while James VI and I watched both
bear and bull-baitings – and even
introduced the baiting of bears
by lions.
Few contemporaries
acknowledged the sport’s barbarity,
although Phillip Stubbes asked:
“What Christian heart can take
pleasure to see one poore beast to
rent, teare, and kill another, and all
for his foolish pleasure?”These were seen as beneficial to
keep men fit and ready for war. Foot
races over both short and long
distances were commonly run at
wakes and ales. Leaping could be
like tumbling in the air in a somersault
or involved leaping through a hoop.
Vaulters leapt over horses or onto a
horse’s back.
King James wrote that both
running and leaping “may further
abilitie and maintaine health”, but did
not regard leaping or vaulting as
princely pastimes, dismissing “such
tumbling trickes as only serve for
comedians... to win their bread with”.Puritans were fierce in their
condemnation of maypoles, which
they saw as a pagan symbol and
denounced as the ‘mischievous pole’,
‘madding pole’, and ‘stinking idol’.
The taking down of maypoles
symbolised a general attack on
traditional revelry and could explain
the tragic incident in May 1572 when
a man was shot and killed as he tried
to take away the maypole standing
on the green in the Sussex village of
Warbleton. The man was from a
neighbouring village and he may have
been trying to destroy the maypole
as something ungodly – or simply to
steal it as a trophy.A game of court tennis in 1659ALAMY