A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment 9781350023994, 135002399X

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
SERIES PREFACE
Introduction
VIETH’S COSMOS: THE ENCYKLOPÄDIE DER LEIBESÜBUNGEN (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHYSICAL EXERCISE), 1794–1818
SPORT, PHYSICAL EXERCISE, OR TRADITIONAL GAMES?
SPORT—A TYPICALLY ENGLISH INSTITUTION?
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER ONE The Purpose of Sport
HOW CAN WE SHED LIGHT ON SPORTING PURPOSE?
THE PURPOSES OF ENLIGHTENMENT SPORT
TWO CASE STUDIES: HUNTING AND BULLBAITING
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER TWO Sporting Time and Sporting Space
WORKING TIME—LEISURE TIME—SPORTS TIME
SPORTING SPACE
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER THREE Products, Training, and Technology
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND COMMODIFICATION
PATRONAGE, PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PROVISION
PROFESSIONAL SPORTSMEN AND ENTREPRENEURS
PEDAGOGY, TRAINING, AND INSTRUCTION
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER FOUR Rules and Order
ORIGINS OF RULES
PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SPORTS
RULES OF BALL GAMES
RACING
ATHLETIC SPORTS: GYMNASTICS
FENCING, WRESTLING, BOXING
BLOOD SPORTS: BULLFIGHTING, BEARBAITING, COCKFIGHTING, ETC.
ARISTOCRATIC SPORTS: TOURNAMENT, RIDING, HUNTING, HAWKING, DANCING, SHOOTING
WATER SPORTS AND WINTER SPORTS
GENERAL TRENDS
CHAPTER FIVE Conflict and Accommodation
RECREATIONAL SPORTS: A RITUALISTIC EXPRESSION OF CONFLICT
TOWARDS A REGULATION OF RECREATIONAL CONFLICT
CAN WE TALK ABOUT A “SPORTIFICATION” OF CONFLICT?
CHAPTER SIX Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation
GENDER
RACE
RANK AND CLASS
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER SEVEN Minds, Bodies, and Identities
NAMING SPORTS AND LEISURE ACTIVITIES
PRESCRIBING A DOSE OF NATURE
FROM PHILOSOPHY TO PEDAGOGY
TRANSITIONS AND DEMARCATIONS: GENDER, AGE, AND STATUS
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER EIGHT Representation
REPRESENTING THE SPORTS OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
GENRES AND TRADITIONS
THE USES OF REPRESENTATIONS
SPORTS AS REPRESENTATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT VOLUME 4

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A Cultural History of Sport General Editors: Wray Vamplew, John McClelland, and Mark Dyreson Volume 1 A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity Edited by Paul Christesen and Charles Stocking Volume 2 A Cultural History of Sport in the Medieval Age Edited by Noel Fallows Volume 3 A Cultural History of Sport in the Renaissance Edited by Alessandro Arcangeli Volume 4 A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt Volume 5 A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry Edited by Mike Huggins Volume 6 A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age Edited by Steven Riess

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT

IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT Edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021 Rebekka von Mallinckrodt has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Series design by Raven Design Cover image: Cricket Match at Kenfield Hall, c.1760 © Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2399-4 Set: 978-1-3500-2410-6 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Refinecatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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SERIES PREFACE

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Introduction Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

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1 The Purpose of Sport Mike Huggins

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2 Sporting Time and Sporting Space Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and Angela Schattner

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3 Products, Training, and Technology Dave Day

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4 Rules and Order Wolfgang Behringer

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5 Conflict and Accommodation Elisabeth Belmas

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6 Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

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7 Minds, Bodies, and Identities Laurent Turcot

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CONTENTS

8 Representation Alexis Tadié

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8

Fox tossing tournament in Dresden Castle Courtyard, 1678. Girl Kolfer, about 1650, by Aelbert Cuyp (1620–91). Winter Scene with Two Gentlemen Playing Kolf by Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634). A Game of palla a bracciale by Antonio Joli (1700–77). Trading card for James Figg by William Hogarth, c. 1729/30. Water jousting tournament in Strasbourg, 1666, by Leonhard Baldner. Frontispiece to an eighteenth-century edition of The Art of Swimming. Woodcut engraving depicting the parabolic path of a tennis ball, seventeenth century.

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CHAPTER 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

The Cockpit, 1759, after William Hogarth (1697–1764). Racing Scene, 1792, by Samuel Howitt (1756–1822). The Jockey Club, 1811, by Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827). Lord Bulkeley and his Harriers, his Huntsman John Wells and Whipper-In R. Jennings, 1773, by Thomas Stringer (1722–90).

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ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

Frozen river with ice-skaters, unknown Dutch painter, seventeenth century. Boat racing on the river Thames in London, 1783. Supporters cheering a group of footballers playing a game on Crowe Street, 1721. Amphitheater in wood for the horse races in Lucca, Italy, eighteenth century. “Paulmerie, Jeu de Paulme et Construction de la Raquette” from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1771. Outdoor real tennis, 1751–2, painting by Giuseppe Zocchi (c. 1716/17–67). Skittle players outside an inn, c. 1660, painting by Jan Steen (1626–79). Bowling green in the garden at Plainpalais, Geneva, Switzerland, 1796, watercolor by Christian Gottlieb Geissler (1729–1814).

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CHAPTER 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

Early eighteenth-century lawn bowls. London, bullbaiting, print, 1816. An eighteenth-century horse riding school. Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836). The Royal Academy Club playing cricket in Marylebone Fields, engraving after Francis Hayman (1708–76). Hambletonian by George Stubbs, c. 1800. A Party Angling, 1789, after George Morland (1763–1804).

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CHAPTER 5 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4 5.5

Bullfight in a Divided Ring, attributed to Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, c. 1816. A Group of Peasants Practicing Archery, etching after David Teniers the Younger (1610–90). High jump, engraving from Gymnastik für die Jugend, 1793, written by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, illustrated by Johann Heinrich Lips and Konrad Westermayr. Portrait of John Broughton, an English bare-knuckle boxer or “pugilist,” by Robert Cooper, 1822. Cricket Pose, 1768, portrait of a boy holding a cricket bat by Francis Cotes (1726–70).

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Duel between Charles Lameth and the Marquis de Castries, November 12, 1790, gouache by Pierre Etienne and Jacques Philippe Lesueur.

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CHAPTER 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

Miss Wicket and Miss Trigger, caricature of sporting women, 1770. Archers, c. 1799, after Adam Buck (1759–1833). Equestrian portrait of Marie Antoinette in hunting attire, 1783, Château de Versailles, France, unknown artist. A game of shuttlecock, 1751–2, painting by Giuseppe Zocchi (1716/17–67). Women’s regatta in Venice, engraving from Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’huomeni et donne Venetiane, 1610. Richard Humphreys, engraving by John Young, 1788, after a painting by John Hoppner (1758–1810). Tom Molineaux (c. 1784–1818), bare-knuckle boxer, undated painting. Illustration of the boxing match between Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux, 1811.

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CHAPTER 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

Portrait of a Sportsman with his Son and Dogs, 1779, by Francis Wheatley. Whistlejacket, c. 1762, by George Stubbs. Gulliver Addressing the Houyhnhnms Supposing Them to be Conjurers, 1768, by Sawrey Gilpin. Stag Hunting Scene in a Park, c. 1795, by Thomas Rowlandson. The Breakfast, 1789, by Thomas Rowlandson. John Bull, Baited by the Dogs of Excise, 1790, by James Gillray.

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SERIES PREFACE A Cultural History of Sport is a six-volume series reviewing the evolution of both the internal practices of sport from remote Antiquity to the present and the ways and degrees to which sport has reflected—and been integrated into— contemporary cultural criteria. All of the volumes are constructed in the same pattern, with an initial chapter outlining the purposes of sport during the time frame to which the volume is devoted. Seven chapters, each written by a specialist of the period, then deal in turn with time and space, equipment and technology, rules and order, conflict and accommodation, inclusion and segregation, athletes and identities, and representation. The reader therefore has the choice between synchronic and diachronic approaches, between concentrating on the diverse facets of sport in a single historical period, and exploring one or more of those facets as they evolved over time and became concretized in the practices and relations of the twenty-first century. The six volumes cover the topic as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity (600 BCE –500 CE ) Volume 2: A Cultural History of Sport in the Middle Ages (500–1450) Volume 3: A Cultural History of Sport in the Early Modern Period (1450–1650) Volume 4: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age (1920–present) General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Emeritus Professor of Sports History, University of Stirling, UK, and Global Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK John McClelland, Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Sport History, University of Toronto, Canada. Mark Dyreson, Professor of Kinesiology, Affiliate Professor of History, and Director of Research and Educational Programs for the Center for the Study of Sports and Society, Pennsylvania State University, USA xi

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Introduction REBEKKA VON MALLINCKRODT

The period between 1650 and 1800 has been a neglected era in the historiography of sports. Situated after the reawakening of interest in physical exercise in the Renaissance but before the rise of “modern sports” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been characterized as a time of decline in sporting practice and literature (see, for example, McClelland 2009: 34f.). This volume makes the opposite argument. It shows that there was a rich sporting culture in the British Isles and beyond and that sports were practiced by the elites and the lower estates alike, as well as by male and female enthusiasts. Still, seventeenthand eighteenth-century sporting culture was likewise shaped by early modern notions and conditions as it exhibited traces of the commercialization, professionalization, and associativity that were to become typical for the modern era. Because of this “bicephalic nature” it cannot be judged just by modern standards. For instance, premodern society was largely rural. Even at the end of the period under study, only about 25 percent of Europe’s population lived in cities with over 2,000 inhabitants (Zeller 2003: 600). An early modern settlement with a population of more than 10,000 is regarded by researchers as a major city; a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants would be considered a premodern metropolis (Eibach 2006: 1145). Around the middle of the eighteenth century, this applied to just under a dozen European cities, with London in the lead with a population of 676,000, followed by Paris (556,000), Naples (310,000), Amsterdam (219,000), Lisbon (213,000), Vienna (169,000), Venice (158,000), and Rome and Moscow (146,000 each). Lagging far behind were the North American colonial cities, with 68,000 people living in Philadelphia, 63,000 in New York, and 20,000 in Boston (Bley 2008: 461, 470). However, many 1

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sporting events took place in small- and medium-sized towns and even in villages and in the countryside. Viewed against these dimensions of early modern settlements, spectator crowds of several thousand and even tens of thousands of people are quite significant indicators of the popularity of sport in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Blood sports, although already criticized by contemporaries, were particularly popular: amphitheaters for bullfighting in Spain held 6,000 to 12,000 spectators. The Viennese Hatztheater (baiting arena), where animals were pitted against each other, was designed for about 4,000 spectators (Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 300, 329). A total of 5,000 spectators apparently gathered in Verona for a game of pallone in 1786 (Behringer 2012: 178), and a crowd of 3,000 saw a running competition in Vienna in 1795 (Tanzer 1992: 272). Eighteenth-century prizefighting, cricket matches, and horse races in England attracted several thousand and even tens of thousands of individuals, not only in London but also in the provinces (Brailsford 1999: 84; Ungar 2012a: 32). Even if we critically consider rhetorical exaggerations, estimations, and roundings in the sources, it seems plausible that the size of various sports facilities reflected an actual demand. In England, people traveled up to ten miles to see sporting events such as wrestling, prizefighting, cudgeling and single-stick, football, cricket matches, or horse races (Griffin 2005: 52–4) and on the continent, too, they embarked on journeys of two to three hours to attend such events (Beck 2000: 6). As they

FIGURE 0.1: Animal sports were part of early modern pastimes. This engraving shows a fox-tossing tournament in Dresden castle courtyard in 1678. Fox tossing was an aristocratic sport in the seventeenth century; its goal was to throw live foxes high in the air with slings until the death of the animal. Courtesy of Alamy.

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traveled on foot, on horseback, or by horse and carriage, the spread of information about these sporting events was also linked to the speed of people or horses, that is, to a physical carrier, before telegraphy revolutionized transmission speed in the nineteenth century. Yet even before 1800, the expansion of roads and canals, the introduction of a network of stagecoaches, and the increase in the number of passenger and freight wagons significantly reduced travel times, even if the absolute speeds were still lower than today (Behringer 2003: 643, 664f.; Bongard 2005; Gräf and Pröve 1997). Thus, in the eighteenth century, London newspapers certainly reported on contests in the provinces. With the publication of the Racing Calendar from 1727 and of the Sporting Magazine from 1792, there were even periodicals specifically dedicated to sports with national reach. In the Netherlands competitions in kolf— the early modern version of golf—were announced in the newspapers too (Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 357); and it was through the print media that new leaseholders were sought for the baiting arena in Vienna, although the advertising for the actual event appeared comparatively old-fashioned, but remained typical of the early modern “presence society” (according to Rudolf Schlögl): “The announcements were made by means of placards and by the baiting master riding around accompanied by two people beating the drum” (Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 301). Still, in the eighteenth century, newspapers, magazines, and journals appeared in greater numbers than ever before. “[B]y the 1780s, English readers could choose from a dozen London papers and 50 or so regional ones” (Clark 2016: 81). Brailsford even speaks of “nearly 150 newspapers being published outside London” in the 1770s, probably referring to Britain as a whole (1999: 10). And while, around 1700, there were between fifty and sixty German newspapers in print, by 1800 there were already more than 200 (Wilke 2008: 79). In the cities, literacy began to reach the lower classes. Together with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment belief in perfectability, scientific knowledge and reformist ideas acquired a great dynamic that was also perceived by contemporaries. Although inequality was still a fundamental experience in early modern estatebased society, birth and even gender differences were increasingly subject to criticism. Differences in wealth and education not only grew in importance; in some countries they even surpassed status distinctions. All these factors shaped the appearance of early modern sport. In order to approach this contemporary perspective, I will first introduce a witness from the period who claimed to present his time’s recreational, calisthenical, and competitive physical activities in their entirety. In a second step, I will examine whether this contemporary author perceived different national traditions or differentiated between competition-oriented sports, health-oriented physical exercises, traditional games, dance, and animal sports. In a third step, I will relate this contemporary perspective to the still-controversial debate on whether “modern sports” are a specifically English phenomenon that spread from the British Isles to the world.

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“Modern sports” are defined here as an independent field of voluntary, ruleguided, competition-focused, and record-oriented physical activity with differentiated roles (players, spectators, referees) and bureaucratic structures (from local clubs to regional and national associations), whereby, according to Allen Guttmann, the interplay of all these factors constitutes the modern structure of sports (Guttmann [1978] 2004: 172). According to this definition, which is indebted to a modernization paradigm, physical exercises that emphasize the health and pedagogic purpose of movement, dance, and ludic physical activities do not count as sports. In terms of their emergence, modern sports have been linked to the rise of betting on sports, British society’s highly developed competitive thinking in the early industrial period, and the founding of clubs in eighteenth-century England (Guttmann [1978] 2004; Elias and Dunning 1986; Eisenberg 1999, 2011; Szymanski 2008). Peter Clark, who has made the most recent and complex attempt at an explanation, attributes the special role of England to its advanced urbanization and newspaper media, the liberal political climate after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which allowed English clubs to flourish, the comparatively great wealth of the English elite, the better reputation of publicans in England, and the unrivaled development of commercial providers due to the absence of traditional associations (2016). Among all the debates that these definitions and explanatory models have prompted, I will explicitly focus here on their contemporary explanatory power and relevance for the period from 1650 to 1800. The German teacher Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth (1763–1836), who, like the philanthropists, was particularly committed to including sports in school curricula, serves as a key witness for such an early modern perspective. His two-volume Versuch einer Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen (Attempt at an Encyclopedia of Physical Exercises), printed in 1794/95 and supplemented in 1818 by a third volume, is to my knowledge the only contemporary source that claims to offer a comprehensive global overview of the physical exercises of its time, both historical and contemporary, in over 1,500 pages. It thus seems all the more surprising that this rich source has hardly been considered in current research. Especially the first volume, which is the central concern here, assembles information on sports and physical exercise reaching from Europe, America, and the Caribbean to China. In its intention to compile complete knowledge, Vieth’s Encyklopädie was a typical Enlightenment product and comparable to Chamber’s Cyclopaedia (1727), Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1731–54), or the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (1751–72), although it concentrated on a specific field of knowledge and was accordingly less comprehensive. Born in a small town in the Dominion of Jever, Vieth studied in Göttingen and Leipzig, and worked from 1786 as a teacher in Dessau, where he was

INTRODUCTION

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promoted to principal in 1798 and school inspector in 1819. Vieth had not traveled through Europe and beyond. Instead, he had gathered his information from numerous travel reports, from historical and current publications, and from his own observations and questioning. Thus, his Encyklopädie, as “compilation literature,” was a typical product of this literary genre, which served above all to “pass on, supplement, constantly process, and rearrange knowledge” (Gierl 2006: 355). Vieth’s work is hence afflicted with all the limitations and problems of a contemporary source, and even more so of a compiled one (perspective, selection, “nonsimultaneity” of source texts). At the same time, his collection is so rich and represents such an important broadening of horizons that he should have the first word here.

VIETH’S COSMOS: THE ENCYKLOPÄDIE DER LEIBESÜBUNGEN (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHYSICAL EXERCISE), 1794–1818 The truly foundational and comprehensive nature of Vieth’s claim to knowledge is illustrated by the temporal and geographical scope of the first volume of his Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen: his historical introduction extends “from the oldest inhabitants of the earth” to the “ancient Israelites,” Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Parthians, Scythians, and Moors to the Greeks and Romans, and takes up a total of two-fifths of the book. He dedicated another fifth to his own nation before turning his attention (and allocating a similar amount of space) to its European neighbor countries: the French, Spanish, English, “mountain Scots,” Dutch, Swiss, Italian, Swedish, Icelanders, and Russians. The last fifth of the book covers Tartars, Cossacks, Voguls, Ostiacs, Samoyeds, Kamchadals, Kalmyks, Turks, Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Sumatran, Malabar, “Hottentots,” Californians, Mexicans, Iroquois, Caraïben, Peruvians, Chileans, and inhabitants of the South Sea. The length of the sections on the individual groups varies accordingly, from a few lines to over a hundred pages in the case of the Germans, although only twenty pages are dedicated to the period from the late sixteenth century to his own present day. This variation in coverage was typical for early modern encyclopedias, whose authors compiled rather than condensed the literature they read (Gierl 2006: 355). The fact that he treated his own nation in particular detail is not surprising; from today’s perspective, it seems rather unusual that he gave Spain much more space than England, from which one can already conclude that England did not occupy a prominent position for Vieth. The quality of his reporting also varied enormously: while the section on the Swedes is unsuitable for our purposes, because Vieth mainly drew on Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples) from 1555, for the

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Netherlands, by contrast, he referred to the most recent travelogues and observed and questioned people himself. The following analysis takes these uneven proceedings into account and focuses exclusively on Vieth’s contemporary reporting, which is clearly marked by the use of tense and explicit references to contemporary persons, events, and sources. Overall, the spectrum of contemporary voluntary physical activities mentioned by Vieth is enormous. He noted horse racing, dressage, a kind of javelin throwing (“juego de la barra”), fighting with pipes (“juegos de cannas”), various dances, fencing, and bullfighting for Spain (1794–1818, 1: 324–43); for Holland, he described dancing, figure and speed ice-skating, kolf, various animal sports, carriage, sledge, and trotting races as well as rowing and sailing regattas (1794–1818, 1: 352–60). For the Holy Roman Empire, Vieth included par force hunting, “the so-called knightly exercises still taught among us” (riding, fencing, dancing), vaulting (rarer), shooting (more common), ice-skating, swimming, animal sports, water jousting, Klootschieten, and other variations of ball throwing competitions, foot races, horse racing, and climbing contests. Furthermore, he mentioned bowling and billiard as widely practiced, in contrast to the rarely practiced ball sports jeu

FIGURE 0.2: Kolf—the early modern version of golf—was extremely popular in the Netherlands and from there spread to other countries. This painting of a girl kolfer (about 1650) by the Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp (1620–91) shows that it was played by both sexes alike. Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Alamy.

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de paume and maille, along with “rounders in the open fields, ballon and shuttlecock striking,” and a German variant of baseball (1794–1818, 1: 289– 310; 2: 553; 3: 347–51, 362f., 367–71). For Italy, Vieth enumerated acrobatics, horse races, bullfights, and the game of pallone, in addition to horseback riding, fencing, and dancing (1794–1818, 1: 365–71; 3: 344–7), but surprisingly not calcio fiorentino (Florentine football), which is documented in numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources and was widely known, as it was often seen during the Grand Tour (Bredekamp 2001: 199–212; Behringer, Chapter 4 in this volume). For France, he described riding, dancing, and fencing, various ball games (including courte and longue paume), and acrobatics (1794– 1818, 1: 310–24, 3: 338–44). For England, he covered horse racing, vaulting, a special fondness for ball games (including baseball and cricket), wrestling, boxing, fencing, dancing, and (less frequently) ice-skating (1794–1818, 1: 343–8; 3:352–4); among the socalled “mountain Scots,” he knew of stone throwing (clochneart), pennystone, shinty, wrestling, jumping, chin-ups, circle games, and golf (1794–1818, 1: 350– 2, 3:372–7); for Switzerland, he emphasized schwingen (a form of wrestling) and chamois hunting (1794–1818, 1: 360–5); for Iceland, he named a particularly technically advanced form of wrestling with its own techniques and terminology, as well as riding (1794–1818, 1: 393–9). For Russia, he noted bathing, the sauna, wrestling, trotting, and sled races, riding, dancing, various ball games including football, ring throwing, various swings and merry-go-rounds, skating, sledding, skiing, and downhill skating (!) on artificially built icebergs on the Neva “for the pleasure of the masses” in winter or with trolleys in the gardens at Peterhof Palace for the noble world in summer (1794–1818, 1: 399–415, 520–2). For the Turks, he mentioned horse riding, lance throwing, archery, running, wrestling, dancing, bathing, rubbing, massage, and various ball games (1794– 1818, 1: 425–40). But he reserved his greatest enthusiasm for the Persians: “In terms of gymnastics, this nation is far ahead of us and could serve as a model for us.” Here, in addition to bow drawing, sabre brandishing, riding, polo, archery, lance throwing, wrestling, fencing, bathing, rubbing, massage, tightrope walking, and vaulting, he described public facilities for gymnastic exercises, which were used by “persons of various ranks, noblemen, merchants, etc.” and which, besides strength, flexibility, and stretching exercises, were mainly used for wrestling (1794–1818, 1: 448–63). For the Tahitians, he emphasized the importance of lance throwing, archery, wrestling, and boxing (by men and women), dancing, massage, juggling, swimming, and diving (1794–1818, 1: 484–511), while for the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands, he listed, among other exercises, dancing, wrestling, boxing, swimming, and surfing (1794–1818, 1: 510–5). Despite their diversity and scope, Vieth assumed that all these activities were essentially similar in nature. Although he clearly evaluated the quality of performance and pointed to differences in prevalence, he did not see any

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categorical differences. His descriptions rather convey the impression that many elements that are considered typical characteristics of “modern” English sports in current historiography were also found in other countries. For example, trotting races in Holland, with their strict regulation, their focus on competition, and their role differentiation, exhibited characteristics of modern sports: The riders of the harddraver horses are light boys who must be of a certain weight. The prize is a whip with a silver or golden handle. The innkeepers often set up such races because they have considerable earnings when many people gather. The conditions are read out beforehand and signed by the interested parties. Six judges are chosen to award the prize, and care is taken to ensure that no injustice is done to anyone, and that no one makes use of illicit means to forestall the other, e.g., that no one gallops, but that everyone remains constantly at a trot, no one pushes anyone else off the track, etc. . . . Famous harddravers are as popular as in England, their portraits decorate the taverns, just as the gold and silver whips obtained decorate the rooms of the owners. —1794–1818, 1: 358f Vieth’s work also elucidates how often entrepreneurs—and in the eighteenth century, these were mainly innkeepers—organized sporting competitions. Thus, referring to Spain, Vieth distinguished between bull festivals held by the court and attended by the king and bullfights organized by businessmen (1794–1818, 1: 328): The passion of the Spaniards for these games, especially for bullfighting, is astonishing. Some who can barely ward off hunger still seek to have enough to spare that they can pay for a seat in the amphitheater, and nothing is a greater seduction for a poor girl than to get her a seat at a bullfight. —1794–1818, 1: 334 Similarly, he reported on sailing and rowing regattas in Holland: “in almost all villages along the waterways, small races are held in barges, for which the innkeepers offer prizes that usually just consist of a few bottles of wine” (1794– 1818, 1: 360). The same applied to the game of kolf: “Usually you just play for your bill, but sometimes there are also competitions that are announced in advance in newspapers by innkeepers and kolf alley owners. In such games, the prize is usually a silver-plated trophy” (1794–1818, 1: 357). The artificial icebergs on the Neva River in Russia, from which people descended on sleds, skis, and even skates, were also commercial in character:

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The icebergs on the Neva are under police supervision and are public. Anyone who feels like it can take a ride for one or a few kopeks. Young people from all estates take part, including women, but of the latter, only those of low rank. —1794–1818, 1: 520f Likewise, the Viennese animal sports arena was leased out and obviously covered its costs, as, although three games were held weekly from March to October, “the amphitheater is usually quite full” (1794–1818, 1: 301). Numerous spectators were obviously willing to pay between ten kreuzers and one ducat for admission: The Viennese Hunt is a favorite spectacle of the Viennese public, and not only of the common people and not only of the male sex, but also ladies of the educated classes attend it and find it to their liking, even if others call it a sad and cruel pleasure. —1794–1818, 1: 300 Finally, commercial sports performances were not limited to Europe. Vieth reported about professional wrestlers and boxers in Egypt and Persia who displayed their skills for money (1794–1818, 1: 443, 452). Although the commercialization of sport thus seems to have been a general trend in the eighteenth century, Vieth clearly perceived national differences and emphasized the advantages of certain nations, such as those of the French with regard to the noble arts, which were still important among the higher estates: In the physical exercises of modern times: In riding, dancing, and fencing, the French have always been very skillful. Natural liveliness and good physical disposition mean that all these exercises are performed with a certain lightness and delicacy. This is above all in dance, where they are the teachers of the other nations. —1794–1818, 1: 319 Of course, Vieth also invoked national stereotypes here, as they were conveyed by travel reports, for example. However, he went beyond such stereotypic descriptions, when he explained reasons for specific developments. Thus, Vieth referred to the early institutionalization of dance education through the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse by Louis XIV in 1661 and novel notation techniques by Pierre Beauchamp and Raoul Auger Feuillet (1794– 1818, 1: 320f.). He explained that the French had introduced many terms and rules, not only for riding, fencing, dancing, and vaulting (“proof that the French

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first brought these modern exercises into formam artis”), but also for ball games, especially jeu de paume, a precursor to modern tennis, and maillet (1794–1818, 1: 322f.). Through these national comparisons, Vieth also noted different schools and sporting techniques, for example, in fencing: As far as fencing is concerned, the French method is not the best, at least in the eyes of a student of the German school. Everything is supposed to convey an air of lightness, of playing, but strength is neglected. The French fencer takes his épée or his rapier with a few fingers, as if it were a quill; the German grasps it with his whole fist. —1794–1818, 1: 321f In this round-up of nations, he also described the advantages of the English: It is well known how much the English excel in riding and other gymnastic exercises in our days. The English riders excite admiration everywhere with their advanced art of training horses and making all kinds of movements on them. In vaulting, they are unsurpassed by any other nation. Horse racing is one of the most popular pastimes of the English people, and nothing is more admirable and well-known than the extraordinary speed of their horses. —1794–1818, 1: 343 However, Vieth’s description of these merits resembled the praise he gave to other nations for other qualities, that is, he did not make any categorical distinctions between the English and the other nations, nor was there any indication that England was on the path to “modern sports.” The only remark that might be taken as a hint in this direction was almost hidden among many other enumerations and characterizations: “ball games and other gymnastic games . . . are loved by the English, and more than in Germany, they are played by adults” (1794–1818, 1: 348). Hence, when Vieth praised the skills of the Dutch in ice-skating, one gets the impression of a homogenous sequence in which each nation had its special abilities: In ice-skating, the Dutch are champions. A country that is, so to speak, made of water and frozen by long winters must necessarily produce masters in this art. Nothing can give a livelier spectacle than a Dutch ice track, such as the Maas or the so-called Y nearby Amsterdam. You can see old and young; men and women; young men and girls flying through each other as fast as arrows. One cultivates daintiness and separates himself from the crowd in order to trace spiral lines in undisturbed solitude that would give Archimedes

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something to examine, but a loud crowd rushes along with lightning-like speed in a race and destroys the artist’s beautiful flourishes . . . Here, brave young men push their sweethearts in dainty sleds before them. There, a long row-dance moves in serpentine lines across the crystalline surface. Here, an intimate couple, arm in arm, hovers in harmonious movements and seems to sway on air. There, bolder youths practice perilous turns and leaps. —1794–1818, 1: 353f It is this diversity that stands out in Vieth’s Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen and that also points to manifold transfers between the nations: thus, Vieth assumed that trotting races were introduced to Russia by Peter the Great, who spent a long time in the Netherlands (1794–1818, 1: 405). While the French were “the teachers of the other nations” in dance and jeu de paume was exported from France to many other countries (1794–1818, 1: 323), ice-skating was considered a specifically Dutch product. Meanwhile Spain not only sent bullfighters to Italy (1794–1818, 1: 369f.), but also bullfighting to America. From there, in the global eighteenth century, a freed African slave came to the Spanish capital as a matador and impressed the Madrilenians with his courage and skill (1794–1818, 1: 332f.). Similarly, African boxers, first as victims of the transatlantic slave trade and later as freed or escaped slaves, spread specifically African fighting techniques that changed boxing sport considerably (Mallinckrodt, Chapter 6 in this

FIGURE 0.3: This Winter Scene with Two Gentlemen Playing Kolf by Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) combined two sports that were perceived as typically Dutch: skating and the early modern version of golf. Photograph by Science History Images, courtesy of Alamy.

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volume). The Italian Domenico Angelo (1717–1802) in turn learned his art in Paris before founding a much sought-after fencing school in London (Behringer, Chapter 4 in this volume). Besides him, numerous fencing masters from France and Ireland offered their arts in London and other English cities (Brailsford 1999: 32). Hence—from a contemporary perspective—at the end of the eighteenth century there can be no talk of a specifically English model of sports that served as an example for other countries. The evidence instead points to multidirectional transfers that have not yet been analyzed in sports historiography of the early modern period.

SPORT, PHYSICAL EXERCISE, OR TRADITIONAL GAMES? Vieth neither defined nor distinguished between sports, physical exercise, dance, (traditional) games, or animal sports. The term “sports”—which was also differently connoted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—did not even appear in his work, although he mentioned numerous disciplines that are today taken as typical examples of “modern sports” in England, such as horse racing or boxing. The only categorical distinction that he took from his historical introduction and used to describe the contemporary situation was the Greek differentiation between palaestric and orchestral exercises: the former referred primarily to warlike exercises, while the latter were for pleasure or to show dexterity (1794–1818, 1: 3, 2: 9). Vieth included under the former all physical exercises and sports except dances, which formed part of the orchestral exercises (1794–1818, 1: 42f.). A third category, “various physical games and amusements” (1794–1818, 1: 43), was mentioned but not used in later descriptions. On the whole, this classification played only a minor role for Vieth, since he referred to it only sporadically. By contrast, one might object that an analytical concept such as the definition of modern sports presented at the outset of this paper in principle surpasses the horizon of contemporaries and, as an ideal type, abstracts from concrete manifestations and thus also variants. This is precisely its heuristic function. However, Vieth’s Encyklopädie illustrates just how rich early modern sporting life was and what we miss if research continues to focus on this rather narrow concept, which was developed based on English nineteenth- and twentiethcentury examples. When applying a sporting paradigm of this kind, we may not only ignore the multifarious developments in other countries as well as transfers between them but also, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, devote less research to them. The same applies to a second line of tradition, for which Vieth stands with the second volume of his Encyklopädie: Vieth is a representative of a tradition of physical exercises for health and educational but also military purposes that

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goes back to antiquity; thus, the Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis (1530–1606), drawing on Galen (129–199 AD), distinguished between gymnastica medica, bellica, and athletica, but rejected the latter because of its competitive character and the associated one-sidedness and risk of injury. According to Galen, the goal of “true or legitimate gymnastics” was “preserving health and acquiring good physical condition”; “athletics,” by contrast, was “corrupted” or “perverted gymnastics” (Mercurialis [1601] 2008: 31, 171, 173). “Simple gymnastics,” Mercurialis wrote: “is a part of medicine and seeks only to bring about and conserve human health by the use of moderate exercises, and to ensure a sound constitution” ([1601] 2008: 171). The goal of athletic gymnastics was, on the other hand, “to make men so strong . . . that they would come first at the Games and win prizes and crowns . . . [it] is called perverted, since it aims at strength, not health” ([1601] 2008: 173, 177). It not only corrupted the minds of many athletes, but also their bodies, since they did not pay attention to any moderation in the sex res non naturales: they exerted themselves too much for too long, were eaten by the passions of the soul due to ambition, victory, or defeat, and their total abstinence from sex was not healthy either ([1601] 2008: 183, 185–97). Referring to Plato, Mercurialis also differentiated between active and so-called passive exercises in which at least part of the force was applied from the outside ([1601] 2008: 217). This included sailing, being driven or carried, swinging, but also bathing. Vieth not only adopted ideas from Mercurialis, who was republished well into the seventeenth century, but also borrowed the structure of his second volume largely from the work of the Italian doctor: he distinguished similarly between passive exercises, in which the environment acted upon the body or the exercise consisted of slight body stabilization, “exercises of the senses,” and “exercises of the limbs.” Only the latter would be included in the category of sports and physical exercise today. Competitions were mentioned by Vieth for the purposes of pedagogic motivation, but they were not at the core of his treatise, nor were they the real aim of physical exercises, which should serve to perfect the human body (Vieth 1794–1818, 2: 2). Vieth shared this intention with numerous other authors of educational, medical, and military writings in Germany, France (Turcot, Chapter 7 in this volume), but also in England: In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke (1632–1704), for example, recommended swimming, dancing, riding, and fencing, although he would rather have seen the latter replaced by wrestling to protect the lives of his protégés (1693: 7, 67, 234–9). He was especially enthusiastic about dancing: nothing appears to me to give Children so much becoming Confidence and Behaviour, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their Age,

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as Dancing, I think, they should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of Learning it. For though this consists only in outward gracefulness of Motion, yet, I know not how, it gives Children manly Thoughts, and Carriage more than any thing. —1693: 67 Similarly, the medical practitioner Francis Fuller (1670–1706) began his Medicina Gymnastica, which was published first in 1705 and printed in its ninth edition in 1777, with the sentence: “That the Use of Exercise does conduce very much to the Preservation of Health . . . is scarce disputed by any” (1705: 1); in what followed, he spoke out in favor of “moderate,” “gentle and close exercise” for men and women (1705: 12, 18, 49, 55), but as a concrete example he mentioned—besides sitting and standing—only riding (1705: 31, 161–209). George Cheyne (1671/72–1743), practicing in Bath, suggested in his Essay of Health and Longlife (1724), which was printed eight times in the very first year of publication, “Walking, Riding a Horse-back, or in a Coach, Fencing, Dancing, playing at Billiards, Bowls, or Tennis, Digging, Working at a Pump, Ringing a Dumb Bell, &c.” (1724: 94f.). At a minimum, he saw the necessity for “Three Hours for Riding, or Two for Walking, the one half before the great Meal, and the other before going to Bed” (1724: 98f.). But he also urged moderation: “That it be not continued to down-right Lassitude, Depression of Spirits, or a melting Sweat. The First will wear out the Organs, the Second spend the Strength, and the Third will only do Violence to the Natural Functions” (1724: 99f.). Richard Mead (1673–1754) in his “Regimen of Life” also argued clearly in favor of physical exercise: In fine, all sorts of bodily exercise are necessary; and in particular, it will be of great service to play at bowls or tennis, to toss the arms brisky to and fro with lead weights grasped in the hands; but nothing is better than riding daily on horseback. —1762: 557 Yet he simultaneously warned against overexertion: “But a means is to be observed in all these things, and too much fatigue to be avoided; for frequent and violent exercise over-powers the natural strength, and wastes the body” (1762: 571). Finally, William Buchan (1729–1805) recommended in his extremely popular and often re-edited Domestic Medicine that boys be instructed in military exercises (1769: 35). His lament about his contemporaries’ reluctance to exercise echoes similar complaints from his colleagues on the continent and therefore seems to be more a mark of his profession than a reliable testimony to contemporary practices:

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’Tis now below any one to walk who can afford to be carried . . . It is much to be regreted, that active and manly diversions are now so little regarded . . . As active diversions lose ground, those of a sedentary kind seem to prevail. —Buchan 1769: 101, 104 At the same time, he had substantially expanded the spectrum of possible sports, hence his contemporaries were apparently not as disinclined to move as he claimed, otherwise the field would not have developed in this form: “exercising the body within doors, as dancing, fencing, the dumb bell, playing at tennis, &c. . . . riding, walking, running, digging, swiming, and such like . . . hunting, shooting, playing at cricket, handball, golff, &c.” (1769: 104f.). Similar to George Cheyne, he recommended two to three hours of exercise daily and like his predecessors he warned against any overexertion. For this reason, he advocated playing golf before “cricket, tennis, or any of those games which cannot be played without violence” (1769: 105). These findings show that, in the British Isles, too, there was a tradition of physical exercise that advocated movement in the sense of gymnastica medica and even bellica rather than in the sense of gymnastica athletica. Although the range of recommended sports expanded during the period studied here, the main objective of exercise was to maintain health and thus moderation, not to achieve top performances or victories. Contemporary opinions on the purpose of voluntary physical activity hence also depend on the type of source consulted. Last but not least, the same sport could and can be considered from the perspective of competition and of physical training: thus, Vieth described the game of pallone first as an “exercise,” then as a popular Italian “game in this narrow sense, namely as a fight” (1794–1818, 3: 344–7). Despite the sharp distinction made by Galen and Mercurialis, gymnastica medica and athletica do not necessarily seem to have been perceived as antagonistic in the eighteenth century, for Vieth never distanced himself from the idea of competition. In the early modern period, the scope of exercises intended for physical training was also much broader than the term “gymnastics” implies today. The diverse forms of gymnastics Mercurialis discussed in his book included various ball games, dancing, wrestling, boxing, pancratium (a mix of wrestling and boxing), running, jumping, throwing, weightlifting, walking, standing, breathing and vocal training, rocking, riding, being driven, carried, or rocked, sailing, fishing, hunting, and swimming. In the second volume of his Encyklopädie, Vieth listed lying, sitting, rocking, being carried or driven, bathing, rubbing, and “hardening of the body” as passive exercises; as exercises of the limbs, he specified standing, walking, running, climbing, exercises with the swing rope, balancing, jumping, vaulting, swimming, ice-skating, dancing, leapfrogging, rope skipping, various strength, flexibility, and balance exercises, carrying, balancing others, throwing, shooting, wrestling, fistfighting, fencing,

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FIGURE 0.4: Palla a bracciale, a variant of pallone, was extremely popular in eighteenth-century Italy. This painting by Antonio Joli (1700–1777) depicts a game attended by King Ferdinand IV and Queen Caroline of Naples. Photograph by Leemage, courtesy of Getty Images.

riding, foot drills, waving flags, various ball games, and hunting. This means that the juxtaposition of gymnastics and sports we see in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had no equivalent in the eighteenth century, either in the spectrum of sporting disciplines or in the evaluation of competition. Neither concept was part of (national) identity politics at that point. This is why Szymanski’s thesis that “ ‘sport’ and ‘physical education’ represent political ideologies that became established during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (2008: 2) is a retrospective projection from the nineteenth century.

SPORT—A TYPICALLY ENGLISH INSTITUTION? As it can be rightly argued that Vieth—as a German representative of physical exercise—is neither the best nor the only source to discuss evolutions in England, in this last section I will relate his findings to current historiography. More recently, Peter Clark has proposed the most convincing and complex model to explain the development of sports in England, since, in his opinion, “only in England did the shift towards more organized commercial activities lead to the seminal growth of modern-style commercial sports with large

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numbers of spectators and voluntary regulatory bodies” (Clark 2016: 80). Here, I will discuss the six reasons cited by him (see above p. 4) in light of further sources and research literature, grouped into three thematic areas— first, urbanization, commercialization, and professionalization; second, media; and third, associativity—in order to show in what respect we can speak of England having a special role as early as the eighteenth century, even if Vieth was not aware of it, and in what respect we cannot. Urbanization—Commercialization—Professionalization As Peter Clark has pointed out, urbanization in England was already more advanced than on the continent (and much more so than in the American colonies) (2016: 80) and thus also had an impact on the commercialization and

FIGURE 0.5: This trade card for James Figg was illustrated by William Hogarth c. 1729/30. It served as advertisement for instruction in swordsmanship by the “Master of the Noble Science of Defence.” Photograph by Culture Club, courtesy of Getty Images.

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professionalization of sports, which started in the cities. Thus, in 1800, around 30 percent of the English population lived in cities with more than 2,500 residents compared to only 25 percent elsewhere in Europe (Keller 2011: 1117; Knittler 2000: 25; Lees and Lees 2007: 5). At the same time, the predominance of rural society in all eighteenth-century European countries may explain why contemporaries did not find the situation in England substantially different and why traditional forms of sports continued to exist for a long time in the British Isles, too (Clark 2000: 43f.). By contrast, the capital city London catapulted itself into the modern age. In 1650, at the beginning of the period under study, Paris, with a population of 455,000, led the ranking of the largest European metropolises, just ahead of London, with 410,000 inhabitants. Yet London overtook Paris at the turn of the century, and, by 1800, London with 861,000 residents had left all other large European cities in the shade. A difference of 300,000 inhabitants now stood between London and Paris (547,000), the next-largest European metropolis (Bley 2008: 460f.). It is therefore not surprising that, purely quantitatively and because of the dramatic difference between the British capital and most other cities, London also exhibited qualitatively unprecedented commercialization and professionalization. Here—because of the size of the city alone—there were more sporting events, more sports facilities, more sports teachers, and also more professional athletes, for London offered completely new opportunities to earn money with sports. Whether the British elite was also more affluent than comparable groups on the continent and therefore more inclined to bet, as Peter Clark assumes (2016: 82), is difficult to assess because of the varying cost of living and the heterogeneous composition of wealth. However, the decisive factor was probably—and here Clark’s thesis should be specified—financial wealth, because the provision of playing fields alone (which certainly played a role in rural areas) would hardly have spurred the development of sports as strongly. The emergence of the British Empire, as well as the opportunities for the British gentry and even the second and next-born sons of the nobility to engage in economic activity—and not only on their own estates—certainly promoted the accumulation of wealth and thus of available money that could be used to organize sporting events. In contrast, trade and commerce on the continent was often frowned upon among aristocrats and these were sometimes even threatened with the loss of their noble titles. The greater social permeability between the bourgeoisie and nobility in England and lesser importance of behavior appropriate to one’s social status apparently also facilitated active participation in sports, which appeared rather problematic on the continent: while in France and Germany, the noble exercises (riding, fencing, dancing) still played a major role in the eighteenth century, English aristocrats also tried cricket, archery, and even running (Mallinckrodt 2019b: 154).

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In the cities, and thus especially in more strongly urbanized England, wages were also increasingly paid in money (instead of natural produce). This enabled entrepreneurs to become independent of aristocratic patronage. A mass audience emerged that could afford admission fees and even the rent for a court in one of the numerous tennis or fives courts, so that “Journeyman, Labourers, Servants, Apprentices, or any inferior Persons” were sometimes excluded by explicit regulations in order not to lose their upscale regular clientele (Schattner 2014: 204). The passion for betting, in contrast, was not an English specificity and, when it concerned large amounts of money, obeyed the logic of “conspicuous consumption” above all else. For those who bet heavily could obviously afford to do without the (possibly lost) money. Thus, the Spanish court also bet on the outcome of horse races (Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 335), at the Runner’s Festival (Lauferfest) in Vienna’s Prater large sums were bet on individual runners, and Zedler mentions high-stakes bets at horse races in Paris (Krünitz 1795: 87f.; Mallinckrodt 2019b: 149; Zedler 1748: 1091). Manevieux even devoted an entire chapter in his Traité sur la connaissance du royal Jeu de la Paume of 1783 to betting fraud in tennis (Tadié 2015b: 94f.). Competitive thinking was not the sole preserve of the English either, given the multitude and variety of contests mentioned by Vieth for the various nations and peoples he described.

FIGURE 0.6: Water jousting tournaments took place in many European cities throughout the early modern period. This painting by Leonhard Baldner, himself a fisherman and town councilor, depicts a competition in Strasbourg in 1666. Photograph by De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

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A key difference instead seemed to be whether athletes could turn their skill into a profession and find an audience that was willing and able to pay for their pleasure and appreciation in cash. This was above all an urban phenomenon, even if the audience also came from the surrounding rural areas. It is therefore no coincidence that Vieth often mentioned metropolises as venues for sports events in his Encyklopädie. Around 1800, this was the case for the abovementioned cities of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and Madrid (Bley 2008: 461). It would therefore be worthwhile to think about differences in urbanization, commercialization, and professionalization less in categorical terms than in terms of degree, and to look more closely at the above-mentioned cities, but also at the highly urbanized Netherlands whose level of urbanization even surpassed England’s (Lees and Lees 2007: 133). While Vieth’s detailed description of the Netherlands may be attributed to his own origins and geographical proximity, the large number of sporting events and sports facilities mentioned in other contributions in this volume speaks to the important role of this country (cf. Behringer, Chapter 4; Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Chapter 2). Media: Newspapers, Journals, and Books With regard to eighteenth-century media, findings are less clear. Clark mentions the much more advanced development of English newspapers following the abolition of censorship in 1690 (2016: 80f.). With regard to the number of newspapers, however, this finding is not confirmed by a comparison with the German newspaper landscape in the eighteenth century—despite the continued existence of censorship (see above p. 3). Furthermore, newspapers were also used in the Netherlands to announce competitions (see above p. 8), notwithstanding the strict censorship Clark attributes to the Dutch press (2016: 81). Apparently, reporting of this kind was not of great interest to the censors. Moreover, information about sports events could also be distributed without newspapers with the help of town criers and posters, but it makes our present investigation of the phenomenon more difficult. Yet, for the formation of a betting system independent of physical presence, newspapers and journals were essential. With regard to the latter, a decisive difference can be found: while journals were published in all European countries in such large numbers that the period has been described as the century of journal culture, the only currently known periodicals that specialized in sports during the eighteenth century—the Racing Calendar, printed from 1727, and the Sporting Magazine, published from 1792—appeared in England. In contrast, a look at the entire printed sports literature clearly puts England’s special role into perspective: as Wolfgang Behringer shows in his bibliographical study in this volume, numerous new editions of older sports tracts document a tradition going back to before 1650 that continued to have an impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, translations, but also

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FIGURE 0.7: Frontispiece to an eighteenth-century edition of The Art of Swimming, which was a retranslation of Everard Digby’s sixteenth-century treatise De arte natandi. The latter had been published under the name of Melchisédech Thévenot in France from the seventeenth century on. Due to its older origins, the frontispiece displayed swimming in terms of artistic feats in water rather than its pragmatic aims, which became prominent in the eighteenth century. Photograph by Granger, NYC, courtesy of Alamy.

FIGURE 0.8: A woodcut engraving depicting the parabolic path of a tennis ball, dated from the seventeenth century. Photograph by Universal History Archive, courtesy of Getty Images.

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tacit loans and plagiarism, bear witness to a variety of transfers and appropriations between different countries, to which the mobility of professional athletes and coaches contributed in no small measure. And finally, a glance at the complete bibliography of this volume reveals a rich collection of contemporary printed sports-historical sources for the entire European region, which calls into question the singularity of the English example. Publications that exhibit the same desire to regulate as the English works include, for example, the eightythree Loix du Paille-Maille (rules for playing pall-mall) printed around 1655, Johann Georg Bender’s Kurtzer Unterricht deß lobwürdigen, von vielen hoch Stands-Personen Popular Exercitii deß Ballen-Spiels (1680), Joseph Lauthier’s Nouvelles règles pour le jeu de mail (1717), François de Garsault’s Art du Paumier-Raquetier, et de la Paume (1767), or Manevieux’s Traité sur la connaissance du royal Jeu de la Paume (1783). Numerous instructional manuals also provide impressive evidence that optimizing one’s performance—by engaging in training, using technical improvements, and considering scientific findings—was not just motivated by competitions, but should also be seen in the larger context of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment idea of human perfectibility, and an exploding book market, in which many authors tried their luck (Mallinckrodt 2016: 231– 51). At the same time, there was an overall rise in the value ascribed to physical and technical skills, as expressed, for example, by the inclusion of crafts in the French Encyclopédie. François de Garsault, author of the Art du PaumierRaquetier, et de la Paume (1767) and member of the French Académie des Sciences, combined both aspects in one person, since before writing his treatise on tennis as a mechanical art he had published on wig makers and cobblers (Tadié 2015b: 88). Likewise, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises described swimming as a combination of levers and forces according to the rules of the new leading science, mechanics, as well as mass experiments to determine the specific weight of man (Thévenot 1699: Translator’s Preface; Mallinckrodt 2008: 231–45). Athletes and trainers tried to profit from this increase in standing, too. For example, the British boxer Daniel Mendoza called himself “Professor of Pugilism” (Day 2016: 142), and Nicolas Roger, also known as Gabriel Feydel (1756–1840), wrote in 1787: The art of horsemanship was not yet imagined when the knight of Pluvinel set forth its basic principles in the sixteenth century; today, a knight of Pluvinel would need to ask us how to hold a bridle. As soon as academies for the art of swimming produce masters like Laguérinière, Nestier, Labie, d’Abzac, and Lambesc [all famous riding instructors, RvM] and our cavalry fords a river as if marching down a broad street; and as soon as the swimming manuals published are as complete as those we have on riding, my writings

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will betray my inadequacy: yet perhaps one day people will recall that it was I who took the first step in this direction. —Roger 1787: 64 Roger wrote here—just as Garsault did with regard to tennis—of an “art” and, in a similar way, numerous other authors, including English ones, promoted their sporting disciplines as “art” or “science.” Formally, the depiction of movements in a sequence of images, as can be seen in Johann Georg Paschen’s (1628–78) treatises on wrestling, fencing, vaulting, drills, and flag-waving from the second half of the seventeenth century, even brought about an innovation that was significant far beyond the history of sports, as it laid the intellectual foundations for the development of cinema (Wellmann 2008). Overall, these findings increasingly call into question the hypothesis of illiterate coaches and athletes from the lower classes and instead reveal training techniques as a hitherto neglected yet also economically relevant field of practical knowledge that made sport intellectually and morally acceptable for the higher estates. Again, it would be worthwhile to investigate how this specialist knowledge transcended not only social groups but also national borders. Associativity Eighteenth-century clubs and associations, in contrast, were still often an elite and primarily an urban phenomenon, which only opened up to the middle and lower classes and rural areas towards the end of the period under study (for England, see Clark 2000: 135–7; for the American colonies, see Riess 2008: 35f.; for Central Germany, see Zaunstöck 1999: 114–24). Yet the oftensimplistic juxtaposition of English liberalism versus a supposed continental fear of free associations fails to recognize the fact that in the century of the Enlightenment, there were a large number of voluntary associations in many different countries and for a wide variety of purposes. Enlightenment organizations—be they language, reading, or music societies; learned, literary, economic, or patriotic associations; freemasons; secret lodges; or clubs—were a pan-European phenomenon. Furthermore, for the most part, the same social groups as in England gathered here. Because associations were pervaded by the elites, it was not necessary to regulate them as strictly as is often claimed in research, nor did their elected boards simply submit to such procedures. This sense of autonomy applied to traditional associations such as fraternities and new enlightenment societies alike (Mallinckrodt 2005). A quantitative comparison—as far as it is possible on the basis of current research and the various methods of counting—shows clear differences, but as with urbanization, these are mainly differences of degree and not so much

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categorical ones. For the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, over 1,200 enlightened societies with at least 100,000 members have been recorded up to the end of the eighteenth century (Zaunstöck 1999: 113, 275); traditional associations such as fraternities, shooting clubs, etc. are not even included in this sum. For England, which was smaller in territorial terms but more highly urbanized, Peter Clark counted about one hundred associations first mentioned between 1700 and 1710; in the 1730s this number rose to circa 250 and to 400 in the 1760s, with declines in between, while it was especially at the very end of the period under study, with about 700 and 1,050 first mentions for the 1780s and 1790s, that England had its take-off phase with regard to the associational world (Clark 2000: 132). On the other hand, a number of traditional associations continued to exist on the continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While older research had assumed that shooting fraternities (Schützenbruderschaften) fell into decline after losing their military function, more recent publications have shown that although archery, crossbow, and rifle shooting declined in popularity as sport and social events during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and were temporarily discontinued, they grew again from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. Shooting competitions, which often included other contests such as foot races, were no longer organized by the towns, but by shooting societies or innkeepers (Rosseaux 2007: 162–70; Krüger 2008: 43–5; Tlusty 2011: 210). In France, companies of archers, arbalists, and harquebusiers, some of which had been founded as early as the fourteenth century, were still popular in the first half of the eighteenth century (Belmas, Chapter 5 in this volume; Beck 1997: 88). For the second half of the eighteenth century, Vieth described shooting associations as “an amusement for the citizens in many German cities” (1794–1818, 1: 293). He even mentioned seventeenthand eighteenth-century fencers’ guilds and fencing schools that are usually associated with the late medieval period and the sixteenth century (1794–1818, 3: 28–30). These findings support Clark’s thesis that commercialized sports developed faster in England than elsewhere because guilds, fraternities, and other traditional associations, which had organized and continued to organize sporting activities on the continent, hardly played a role in England before and even more so after the Reformation. This gave hostelries a more central role in the organization of sports, all the more so because the Puritan Revolution had led to a real break with sporting traditions. “Thus in England, unlike on the Continent, there were fewer established competitive centres to stop the development of new commercial sports from the late 17th century” (Clark 2016: 83). In contrast, his argument that publicans in England were better regarded, more developed, and better organized (2016: 82f.) is refuted by a large number of examples cited in Vieth, but also in other sources that prove an

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active role of innkeepers in the organization of sport in France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Netherlands (see, e.g., Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Chapter 2 in this volume). Therefore, neither commercial sport events organized by publicans nor the lively associational life appear to be specific to seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England; a distinguishing characteristic of England, however, was the founding of new sports clubs, whereas a number of traditional associations continued to exist on the continent between 1650 and 1800. However, even in England, the development of modern sports was not necessarily accompanied by establishing clubs; thus, clubs played no role in eighteenth-century bareknuckle fighting or pedestrianism (Clark 2000: 125; Szymanski 2008: 12). Finally, it would be worth investigating if the Netherlands provided an alternative model of commercialization without associativity (all the more since both aspects are not necessarily linked), which leads back to the question of whether the English model is really the only conceivable one.

CONCLUSION The eighteenth century did not simply prepare the way for the nineteenth century, as a modernization-theoretical perspective suggests. In various respects, it differed from the ensuing era: in many countries, there was—despite all the ambivalences, contradictions, and contemporary limits on Enlightenment thinking—a greater tolerance, a greater willingness to experiment, a more intensive international exchange, and a greater permeability for women who wished to participate than in the nineteenth century, which was more strongly influenced by national and restorationist thinking. In the eighteenth century, we do not find an antagonistic, ideologically charged juxtaposition of sport and physical exercise, as is characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first sports clubs were founded in England, while English authors also advocated physical exercise. Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth did not even make a distinction between competition-oriented sport and health-oriented physical exercise, and a differentiation on the basis of sporting disciplines can only be made to a limited extent from a contemporary perspective, since the scope of physical exercise in the early modern period was much broader than later gymnastics. We find a growing commercialization of sports in all countries, but it was particularly pronounced in England due to increased urbanization and the beginning of industrialization. At the same time, throughout Europe and in the colonies, early modern society was still predominantly rural. The coexistence of traditional games and modern sports is therefore characteristic for the eighteenth century. On the continent, the importance of traditional associations such as shooters’ guilds, which had organized competitions since late medieval

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times, even increased again after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, regulation, performance optimization, and even quantification were not only motivated by competitions. Rather, a broader embedding in the culture of the Enlightenment reveals the general effort to enhance both the status of physical skills and their practitioners. When, in addition to “science,” the word “art” was used in relation to different sporting disciplines, this did not necessarily refer to an older ideal of skill and delicacy. Rather, as an example from the early nineteenth century shows, such terminology can also be misleading: Recently, high-speed running has also been practised as an art, and such artists who can move their legs quickly enough, so that they can pass a good German mile and more in 45 minutes, travel all over Europe to show their art, and thus earn a living. Until now, it is the Germans and the French who practise this art. —Krünitz 1827: 431 Today, we would refer to this as a sport. The fact that the author of the article “Schnellläufer” (speed runner) in Krünitz’s Encyklopädie was not aware of the development of English pedestrianism may be surprising. However, predominantly national perspectives like this one as well as the hitherto dominant sports paradigm have led to a situation in which our knowledge of recreational, calisthenical, and competitive physical activities between 1650 and 1800 is still very incomplete. Eighteenth-century sporting culture was apparently much more heterogeneous, complex, and sometimes even alien if we do not just consider phenomena and factors that fit Guttmann’s modernization-theoretical definition of sport. Moreover, the emphasis on the national and diachronic perspective seems to have led to a number of aspects being presented as specifically English, which they were not if the perspective is extended to other countries. Finally, when Peter Clark writes of a “failure of sporting modernization in early modern Europe and . . . failure of cultural transmission from England during the long 18th century” (2016: 72), he presupposes that there is only one model and only one possible development path instead of assuming a plurality of processes and multidirectional exchanges. Yet, given the current state of research, the latter seems to be not only more appropriate to describe eighteenthcentury phenomena but also heuristically more promising. Therefore, in order to develop a deeper understanding of premodernity (and not just modernity), scholarship should: 1. Give greater consideration to the synchronous and comparative perspective and thus also to alternative models/variants; 2. Place an increasing focus on multidirectional transfers and appropriation processes;

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3. Make the global dimensions of early modern history fruitful for sport historiography. This volume is a collective effort to shed more light on the period between 1650 and 1800 in sports-historical terms. While the contributions by Mike Huggins, Dave Day, and Alexis Tadié focus primarily on the emergence of modern sports in the British Isles, Elisabeth Belmas and Laurent Turcot have complemented this by describing developments in France. Wolfgang Behringer, Angela Schattner, and I have attempted to write more geographically comprehensive chapters. Together, we would like to offer a view of early modern sports history that is as complex as possible and that takes into consideration contemporary perspectives. That there are still many treasures to be unearthed in the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sports is hopefully illustrated by the numerous images included in this volume as well as by the many sources analyzed here for the first time. Translation by Roisin Cronin

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CHAPTER ONE

The Purpose of Sport MIKE HUGGINS

Sport has always fulfilled a range of needs and purposes. Indeed, Neil Tranter has argued that “the need for some form of sporting physical recreation has been almost as imperative to human beings as the need to procreate, work and sleep” (Tranter 1998: 1). An understanding of the multiple ways in which people thought socially about sport and found purpose in the sporting activities and practices in which they engaged plays a key role in studies of the cultural history of sport during the Enlightenment period. The universalistic culture developed then, with its shared ideals and freer social intercourse, qualified by aspects of social elitism and socially divisive character, helped to create the proto-modern forms of what was to become modern sport. So in recent decades historians have paid much increased attention to the ways in which sporting identities, purposes, and benefits were created and debated within the public sphere, everyday practices, and material culture (Harrow 2015b). The overview provided here falls into three parts. It begins by exploring the difficulties and challenges of exploring earlier sports’ purposes. It then outlines a selection of the main reasons and purposes of sports during the Enlightenment, setting them in their context, and noting changes over time. Finally it provides two contrasting studies, of hunting and bullbaiting, which illustrate the way such sports had different purposes and attractions.

HOW CAN WE SHED LIGHT ON SPORTING PURPOSE? The complex diversities and tensions within and between social groups and expressions of popular culture all make difficult the teasing out of sports’ purposes, meanings, and associated beliefs, the more so since most sports history 29

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still lacks transnational perspective. Indeed, this study focuses more on British examples simply because the writer’s expertise is strongest there. Sports’ purposes were influenced by age, status, generation, gender, time, and locality, so studying and analyzing the ways in which people in the past conveyed such ideas presents many challenges. Sports’ purposes were often taken for granted, and appeared self-evident, only mentioned when disputes or controversy occurred. Different regions and settlements had different patterns of sporting recreation, and these were embedded in complex webs of social and cultural relationships. This all makes identifying the ways in which contemporaries saw sports as having any purpose beyond the immediate experiences of participants and the occasion on which they were played a very complex and demanding task. Detailed information on how people in the past made meaning from their sporting actions and the purposes for which they were practiced is extremely difficult to find. Sports’ language, symbols, and rituals sometimes shed some light on its ludic aspects, but those associated with sports-related purposes are harder to access. Cultural historians are forced to rely on the mediated texts and fallible memories of contemporaries viewing these, often from outside the culture concerned. And for some participants, sports like angling or game-bird shooting might have little wider meaning except that of providing a form of escape from the responsibilities of daily life. The many textual and material sources that survive provide substantial detail about who took part or watched, when, where, and how, but not why. They gave an insight into sporting events and conveyed the results of sporting competition. National and regional newspapers, for example, which increasingly from around 1700 focused on sporting activities and events, existed in symbiotic relationship with commercial sports events, advertising them, reporting on them, and gaining readership as a result. Unfortunately, they rarely considered purpose directly, or allowed multiple interpretations. Wood cuts, drawings, letters, and serial sources such as autopsy reports, the sports manuals and guides to popular recreations published during the early modern period, or the diaries and correspondence between members of the elites are likewise all largely silent with regard to purposes. Even when people did voice their claimed motives, these are hard to verify. Because cultural history has relied largely on written texts and other forms of representation, academic coverage of purposes has been limited. To give just one example, though sport was clearly gendered, women’s voices remain largely unheard. Much more work needs to be done here. Smock races for women often formed part of descriptions of fairs and similar annual events. But the purpose of such races can only be inferred indirectly. Wealthy women could ride, and a few examples of races for women survive from this period, but we know nothing of their motives and purposes. In 1724 and 1725, for example, the Yorkshire town of Ripon had a heat race for women riders, who could ride

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“aside or astride as they pleased” (Huggins 2018: 63). The first prize was £15 and the second-placed won a laced hat and hoop petticoat. In the 1720s too, there were female pugilists like Ann Field, an ass driver from Stoke Newington, or Londoner Elizabeth Stokes, who fought in London amphitheaters for £10 purses. In mainland Europe, across the period, there were regular running races with prizes for women and girls as an attraction at fairs, festivals, and carnivals (Mallinckrodt 2019b). Financial gain was presumably one purpose, but female comment was rare. Looking at colonial America, women’s diaries show an active agency and participation in ice-skating, swimming, horseback riding, and foot racing, and sometimes in less strenuous activities like angling, while commercial entrepreneurs regularly targeted women as consumers of sport by providing facilities for them (Struna 1991). Sport-related activities were often described as “recreation,” “sport,” “refreshment,” “diversion,” or “exercise,” a way of making leisure time more interesting. Sport’s role was to furnish a relaxation from the toils of labor, business, or estate duties, and an alleviation of life’s cares. Other purposes of sports were rarely considered but rather taken for granted. In terms of sport’s linguistic significations, eighteenth-century dictionary definitions tended to see the term “sport” as something contrasting with everyday life and work, not part of serious business. Contemporary dictionary compilers (e.g., Bailey 1721: 796; Kersey 1739: 254; Ash 1775: 582) rarely made any acknowledgment of sport involving any form of competition. The activity was an aim in itself. The compilers conceptualized and emphasized sport as a form of “play,” a pleasing activity but something not to be taken too seriously. Such attitudes are not surprising, given that, as the cultural historian Johan Huizinga ([1944] 1980) made clear, play is a universal and formative element in human culture, both transcending and affecting it, and play has always been part of sport. Play is voluntary, pleasurable, and operates under rules and cultural rituals that are different to those of everyday life. Sport was also emphasized as being a “diversion,” a distraction, a moving away from everyday life, work, and family obligations. It was a pleasurable way of passing time (a “pastime”). It avoided boredom, and was a form of “dalliance.” It “refreshed” the spirit and provided exercise. For early British settlers in America, for example, participation in sports and games provided a diversion that “mitigated the harshness of living and working in a new environment” (Boulware 2008: 230). The word “sport” itself was used most often in talking about the sports popular among the elite, who were producers and consumers of the main sources about sport. In published contemporary British literature, up to 1660 the term was most often only applied to angling. Late seventeenth-century recreational guidebooks written for the wealthy classes also often included substantial coverage of ways to enjoy the pleasures of the ritualized sports of hunting and angling (e.g. Howlett 1684; Smith 1684).

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By the early eighteenth century, the term was also being attached to hunting, fowling, fishing, and other field sports. Giles Jacob (1718), in his book of advice to the “compleate sportsman,” focused only on hunting for game—whether shooting, using dogs, or hunting on horseback—and on fishing and angling. Three years later Nicholas Cox (1721) listed gentlemen’s recreations as hunting, hawking, fowling, and fishing. Thereafter the definition widened further. More “popular” beliefs and sports’ meanings were often indistinct in their formulation and this makes understanding of their purposes difficult. Historians who have explored Enlightenment “popular” sports such as bullbaiting, throwing at cocks, pugilism, wrestling, cudgeling, or football have found the evidence base relatively scantier, and written largely by those from the middling and elite groups (Malcolmson 1973; Griffin 2005; Kelly 2014). They have had to read such material much more against the grain. Griffin (2005: 1) made the point that such writing demonstrated “an inability to describe local sports and recreations” for much of the period, and was often critical and negative. In sum, historians have discovered more about sports’ purposes in relation to the upper levels of society. They have struggled to shed similar light on the sports of the common people as they made their own sporting histories. The history of popular mentalities during the Enlightenment is not yet fully explored. Elite writings and descriptions did, however, sometimes infer the purposes linked to popular sports and offered explanations of their meaning beyond the enjoyment that they afforded. So they often regarded paying plebeian spectators at cricket matches, wrestling, and other commercial sports as showing a raucous enjoyment of brutality, strength, physicality, or gambling, and a thirsting for more violent competition. But their views tended to be critical, seeing popular sports as lacking “refinement,” rather than demonstrating “improvement,” “civility,” or “respectability.” Thus, a less sympathetic view of popular recreation was emerging among the governing and employing classes. Elite writers were the ones possessing local power to push their beliefs, which meant that depending on their attitude, sports could be promoted and encouraged, subject to regulation, or attacked and suppressed by local magistrates and urban elites. During the Enlightenment period, sports’ complex, multi-layered statuses and functional roles in exercising and disciplining people and individuals make it extremely difficult to track shifts in the historical mentalities pertaining to them. The same activities were put to different purposes by different social strata. Sports developed across Europe, America, and the wider world in a whole variety of physical, material, and ideological entities. Even in England, different regions and settlements had different patterns of sporting recreation (Griffin 2005). Sports’ purposes were hidden within a diverse range of practices and cultural forms that were often related to issues of wealth, status, age, gender, and regional differences. Despite such caveats, analysis can tease out the main constants and the general trend of changes in terms of sporting

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purpose. Thus, sports’ patterns had both unity and variety, as Burke (2009: 49–102) has noted.

THE PURPOSES OF ENLIGHTENMENT SPORT In practice, engagement in a sport, then as now, often combined several reasons and purposes. Competition lay at the heart of many sports, whether in terms of tournaments, personal challenges, or the matching of individuals, teams, or town, county, or country representatives against each other. Sports could offer scope for the working out of various animosities. But beyond that, as Allen Guttmann (1978: 3) long ago perceptively pointed out, “in the real world, motives are mixed,” and sports could variously offer pleasure, sociability, excitement, or financial gain. In talking about early cricket, for example, Christopher Brookes (1978: 22–3) listed four different motivations for the aristocracy’s involvement: it provided an opportunity for aristocrats to socialize with each other; it provided a means for social and political rivalries to be acted out peacefully; it enabled a landlord to maintain relationships with tenants; and

FIGURE 1.1: The Cockpit, 1759, after William Hogarth (1697–1764). Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust, @ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

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finally, it offered a source of entertainment, not least as a means of gambling. Cockfighting likewise provided a focus for gambling by spectators; an opportunity to gain prestige and status by the owners, breeders and feeders of the game cocks; and opportunities to charge an entry fee and sell refreshments to cockpit organizers. The Promotion of Health and Fitness Among some members of the elite, one purpose of sport was to promote health, longevity, and welfare (Arcangeli 2003: 14). Moderate involvement in sports like hunting was presented as useful for health reasons. In medical literature, likewise, the functional, health-preserving roles of sport were emphasized. Some writers drew on the work of the physician Hieronymus Mercurialis, who had modified Galen’s humoral theory to argue that human metabolism was promoted by physical exercise and sporting activities, though excess should be avoided. Moderate sporting exercise was seen as playing a positive, psychological health-preserving role, keeping genteel bodies in balance, disciplining their bodies both individually and socially (McKay 2008). For aristocratic women, mild exercises were seen as enhancing health and beauty, and fitting them for childbirth. The key was moderation. Dietary tracts across Europe generally suggested that overly vigorous activity was injurious to health. Enlightenment philosophers and educators took a similar view of sports’ healthy benefits but, as McClelland (2009: 34–5) shows, increasingly relegated them to the youthful phase of human development. John Locke, probably the most popular political philosopher during the first part of the eighteenth century, stressed the importance of child health, advised children to learn swimming and to maintain their fitness, and argued that education should be infused with game play. Jean-Jacques Rousseau encouraged exercises for children to improve their strength, including running, jumping, and climbing, and linked these to sports such as jogging, swimming, stone throwing, archery, and ball games. Rousseau demanded that every school have a gymnasium or an area for training. In Germany, Johann Christian Friedrich GutsMuths applied Enlightenment ideas to promote an intensive, disciplined school gymnastics curriculum based on physiological factors, arguing that it had benefits for body and soul from a national and aesthetic perspective. By the 1660s universities in Paris and Rome expected students to devote time to activities such as tennis, fencing, or jeu de paume (Behringer 2009: 338). French Enlightenment writers promoted swimming as a healthy activity to strengthen the body and save lives (Mallinckrodt 2016). Military Preparation Many pre-modern sports had military origins and some elements of this attitude continued to be important during the eighteenth century. Physical activities

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such as wrestling had long been ways for young men to develop martial skills. Successive British rulers and governments had emphasized the importance of use of the longbow in national defense. In 1631 archery was still seen as “both healthful for the body and necessary for the common wealth,” giving a man the power to “preserve and defend his country” (Markham 1631: 56–7). This cultural emphasis on the military importance of archery declined as the musket took over from the bow, and military training slowly became disengaged from sport. By 1700 archery as military preparation was no longer widely practiced. The popularity of shooting game rendered falconry old-fashioned in Britain, though interest among the elite continued in Holland and Germany. Gentlemen began to compete as marksmen and their skill was gauged by the numbers of animals they killed. In frontier America the importance of being able to shoot was sometimes essential to survival. Hunting and horse racing were both regarded as good training for cavalry warfare, and all the European elites enjoyed hunting. In Britain from the later seventeenth century onwards the quality of hunting and racing horses improved substantially. There was a growing fashion for eastern horses imported from the Ottoman Empire, Arabia, and the Barbary Coast to mix with native breeds, leading to the development of a new hybrid, the “thoroughbred” horse. There was far more systematic emphasis on breeding and pedigree. Racehorse breeders increasingly bred from winners, and focused on speed or endurance. Royal plates were introduced to encourage the sorts of horse potentially useful for cavalry purposes. Some races were put on especially for fast, strong, and mobile hunting horses. Such approaches during the eighteenth century ensured that the country possessed good stocks of suitable cavalry horses when needed (Huggins 2018: 140). In Britain, over time, sports’ purposes were less linked to military preparedness than in continental Europe, though there was a salutary reminder of the latter’s importance in 1763 at Fort Michilimackinac in the Canadian Great Lakes. To celebrate King George’s birthday, the First Nations Algonquian tribe invited traders and the garrison to watch their game of lacrosse outside the fort. The British failed to recognize the game’s cultural significance and the way its rituals, challenges, and equipment were strongly linked to warfare. The match was merely a guise for an attack. Some of the garrison were killed and others were captured. The fort was taken (Cohen 2002). In mainland Europe, states such as Prussia, France, Denmark, and Sweden needed better preparation for war, and so their sports placed more emphasis on the defense of the nation state and the mobilization of fit young men. Rifle shooting was still seen as a patriotic duty. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who was to become the father of the Turnen movement and a very significant figure in the development of physical education in Germany and France, witnessed the defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806.

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He blamed defeat on the Germans’ lack of physical conditioning and moral resistance. His series of gymnastic exercises were introduced to help prepare young men for possible battle (Ohmann 2008). In Europe most shooting societies slowly became more commercialized and less focused on military preparation, though in the Tyrol and Switzerland they continued to have a military focus, and eighteenth-century German university student shooting societies were associated with military training. Manliness Sport had a role to play in the cultural construction of gender, coupling often shared ideals of what writers termed “manliness” with expectations about female behavior. Women’s participation in vigorous sports was problematic, the more so later in the period. Even so, at York in 1804, a horse race between Alicia “Thornton” (alias Meynell) touted by contemporaries as a female jockey, riding against a gentleman, Mr Flint, on the last day of the races for a wager of 500 guineas put up by her “protector” Colonel Thornton drew huge crowds, estimated as up to 100,000 (Huggins 2018: 63). Enlightenment sport offered a means of displaying and asserting manliness in relation to other people, and gaining honor, credit, and reputation in the process. Pugilistic prizefighting was often portrayed as what Eliott Gorn (1986) has called “a manly art,” the most dramatically masculine of all sports, though also the most brutal. John Broughton, the leading London boxer from the 1730s to the 1750s, drew on Enlightenment classical references to promote his sport, while presenting boxing as a way of preserving British identity and virile manliness, and challenging foreign “effeminacy.” For its supporters pugilism became an important ritual of tough and muscular manhood, expressing a particular male ethos, that of defending one’s honor by using the fists, in the process marginalizing the more “effeminate” and deeming them unfit for any respect. Demonstrating appropriate manliness of behavior in fights, by showing vigor, heroic courage, “bottom” (endurance), aggression, judgment, and bravery was of key importance. Other popular physical sports also attracted beliefs in their demonstration of manliness. At Bury St. Edmunds in 1755, for example, ten men a side contested “that manly exercise of football playing” for a prize of hats (Ipswich Journal, May 10, 1755). Sometimes, however, manliness carried a subtext of “gentlemanliness,” though still linked to physical strength and vigorous health. In 1721, for example, hunting, a “noble and healthy pastime,” was also described as “this most manly recreation, because of all others it contributes most to the health and strength of the body as well as the clearness and vigour of the mind” (Cox 1721: 1). Hunting’s supporters continually made claims for its manliness through the period and tried to reserve it for the elites.

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Identity and Social Status Sports were a way of demonstrating various types of communal and individual identities, and since the theme is covered elsewhere this needs only brief examples here. Some sports were highly regional and village-based in terms of their identity. United Kingdom examples include several different regional forms of wrestling, cudgel-play in Wiltshire and Somerset, camp-ball in East Anglia, stool-ball in Gloucestershire and North Wiltshire, cricket in the southeastern counties, cnapen in Wales, shinty in the Scottish Highlands, and hurling in parts of Ireland. In colonial America, copying English sports like horse racing, cricket, or cockfighting initially helped to create a collective English identity (Boulware 2008: 431). Competition could function to create loyalty to a group or nation, and competitive commercial sports were often presented as testing the mettle of one place or people against another. Sports provided a cultural way of expressing, asserting, and confirming social status too. Across Europe enthusiasm and devotion to sports by emperors, kings, princes, electors, and dukes defined and encouraged sports. Young rulers found in sports like horse racing or tennis a legitimate outlook for their physical energy (Behringer 2009: 344–8). Courtiers found involvement a way of advancement. In Britain, Charles II and his court spent weeks at Newmarket racing their horses and hunting. Such activities fostered political allegiances.

FIGURE 1.2: Racing Scene, 1792, by Samuel Howitt (1756–1822). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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For the first half of the eighteenth century, Whig power in Parliament was mirrored in Whig Jockey Club power at Newmarket, where racing encouraged political maneuvering (Huggins 2018: 138–40). Enlightenment society was competitive, and achievements in sports provided another way of asserting manhood, honor, credit, wealth, and reputation to other men. For the betteroff social status was affirmed by demonstrating that one had the time, money, and energy to devote to sports instead of work. Likewise, even if not participating directly, becoming a patron and providing lavish funds for a sport reinforced status relationships and demonstrated economic, social, and political standing. So those with titles might provide money for horse race prizes, or be patrons of a cricket team. As Underdown (2000) points out, those dukes and other elite figures who got involved in the running of eighteenth-century cricket teams were also helping to advance their own political influence. A successful horse or a successful team allowed the wealthy to assert position, gain fame, and win large sums through gambling. For Britain, by the later eighteenth century, the elite and middling groups of clergy, businessmen, and officials were increasingly withdrawing from participation in “uncouth” and less refined proletarian sports (Malcolmson 1973: 118–57). Further down the social scale, bodily sports performance could also gain admiration. One study has demonstrated the ways in which during the late eighteenth century, in the geographically marginal county of Cumberland in north-west England, young men engaged in a wide variety of physical activities and popular athletic sports, including cockfighting, fighting, flinging the “geavelick” (similar to a javelin), football, foot racing, handball, horse racing, hunting, leaping, quoits, shooting, throwing the stone, and wrestling. Such sports allowed them to contest their worth, and to bond with and bind themselves to their contemporaries. Winning of even symbolic prizes gained status from wives and sweethearts. All-round athleticism was strongly valued as a signifier of manliness, and it attracted potential marriage partners. Even old men were remembered for their youthful successes (Huggins 2012). Associativity A number of recent writers have seen the origins of modern sports in the emergence of forms of associativity in the public sphere that gained importance in the Enlightenment (Riess 2008; Szymanski 2008; Huggins 2017). In Britain and North America, the eighteenth century saw a broader expansion of private associative cultures in which the state did not take part, and sports provided a natural focal point for this. In France and Germany, voluntary associations were also beginning to emerge. There were associational forms such as clubs, academies, and universities, where people regularly participated and socialized together. Other associational

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forms were highly temporary, just for the duration of the sport concerned, with men sharing social and cultural background or political allegiance meeting together at taverns and inns, town or country houses, or hunting lodges, variously for annual race weeks, hunting, cockfights, or coursing. Its roots were social, but it fostered shared sporting interest, and encouraged eating and drinking, jollity, and good fellowship afterwards. Such association was informal, seasonal, or short-lived, and has left little historical trace. The sharply increasing trajectory of voluntary society and sports club formation in the English-speaking world during the eighteenth century has been tracked by several historians (Clark 2000: 123–6; Riess 2008; Szymanski 2008). Access to these organizations was often controlled, limited by high membership fees and by blackballing the unwanted. Many clubs were led by the better rather than the middling sort, and membership helped the accumulation of social and cultural capital, fostered by regular meetings with mutual acquaintances and social recognition. Numbers of voluntary sports clubs in Britain and North America grew over the eighteenth century, initially oriented towards cricket, horse racing, and golf. London’s dynamic leisure economy encouraged the formation of a few elite cricket clubs, with several titled members, in the early 1700s, and the rural Hambledon Club, initially a social club for gentlemen members, was formed in the 1750s and became the leading club of the 1760s before being overtaken by the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1787. Golf clubs emerged first in Scotland, with clubs such as the Royal Burgess Golfing Society of Edinburgh (c. 1735), the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith (c. 1744), and the Society of St. Andrews Golfers (c. 1754), all composed of noblemen, gentlemen, merchants, and the middling sort. In England, the Blackheath Club was in existence by 1766. In horse racing, historians have conventionally dated the formation of the Jockey Club, with its titled and esquire membership, to circa 1750, but there are tantalizing references to an earlier Jockey Club who met at William’s Coffee and Chocolate House in St. James in the 1730s. In 1729, the Jockey Club, which consisted of several noblemen and gentlemen, reportedly met at Hackwood, the Duke of Bolton’s seat in Hampshire, to consider methods of the better keeping of their respective strings of horses at Newmarket (Huggins 2018). In North America there were similar organizations such as the Maryland Jockey Club, founded in Annapolis in 1743, a club dedicated to horse racing, presumably emulating the English model, and similar clubs developed in South Carolina, Virginia, and New York around the same time. Towards the end of the century other racing clubs began to appear in southern England. Hunt clubs—chasing foxes or less often stags, and often run on a subscription basis—quickly became one focus of British rural associational life. Another largely elite clubbable sport was hare coursing with greyhounds. Such clubs began emerging toward the end of the eighteenth century. Swaffham Coursing

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FIGURE 1.3: The Jockey Club, 1811, by Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827). Many of these owners and gamblers had been involved with Newmarket racing from their youth in the later eighteenth century. Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust, @ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Club in Norfolk was formed by George Walpole, Third Lord Orford, in 1776, initially with twenty-six members, each naming their greyhounds after a different alphabet letter. These clubs quickly began developing organized competitions, first within clubs then later with regional clubs competing against each other (Griffin 2007: 119). In Britain, angling clubs became more formalized in the later eighteenth century, although in North America the Schuylkill Fishing Club of Pennsylvania, which sought to promote conviviality among gentlemen who liked to fish and hunt, was founded as early as 1732. Convivial, smart archery clubs, once unfashionable, began reviving from the 1780s right across England, with annual tournaments for the best. By contrast, sports like cockfighting and boxing where associational forms were less formal began to struggle, in part since they lacked organizational support (Malcolmson 1973: 89–157). Gambling One key purpose of sport was to facilitate betting. For much of the period, gaming and wagering were ubiquitous, a deeply embedded part of social life and culture.

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Such “play” was encouraged by the emerging forms of gambling-inspired venture capitalism, the reliability of banknotes, and increased financial speculation. Some gamblers enjoyed the heavy betting, demonstrations of their wealth, and the adrenalin rush of watching a contest on which their money rested. Others enjoyed the way betting success could demonstrate their mental superiority and sporting expertise, and some enjoyed outsmarting others, being cunning and profiting by whatever means. Gambling was further fostered and encouraged by the cultural components of the eighteenth-century urban renaissance, which encouraged a public sphere independent of government control where examples of prestigious urban improvement included assembly rooms, theaters, racing grandstands, cockpits, inns, and coffee houses. The upper classes dominated gambling in Britain, where aristocrats were betting on horse racing from the accession of Charles II and on cricket by the 1690s. Gambling had major cultural significance among American gentry in Virginia, and wagering on horse racing provided them with a viable and highly visible way of establishing themselves as a leading local aristocratic society (Breen 1977). The British aristocracy and gentry had the resources and immense appetite for gambling to undertake the most extravagant and reckless wagers, gaining a reputation for winning or losing vast sums. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973: 437) saw such “deep play” as symbolizing the dramatization of status concerns. Some contemporaries saw the high stakes of deep play as entirely irrational gambling, where bets could lose an entire estate. In Britain and America, religious opposition was strongest to sports that appeared linked to gambling, which allowed men and women to win or lose money without working for it. Certainly wealthy gamblers in Britain and North America promoted some sports as a means to allow them to wager. Much wealthy wagering came in the form of matches, two-sided challenges between two horses, game cocks, boxers, runners, wrestlers, or cricket teams, where the two owners, the contestants, or their wealthy patrons each put up a substantial stake, taken by the winner. These could have further substantial recorded “byes” (side-bets perhaps at odds) associated with them. Horse racing matching peaked in the 1770s. At Newmarket in 1771 there were 109 matches run at an average wager of £306, while matches at other race meetings averaged £263 (Huggins 2018: 84). For a two-horse match at Newmarket in 1779 for 1,000 guineas a side, one further side bet was 6,000 against 3,000 guineas. Cockfighting was a sport saturated with symbolic meaning, concerned with status, prestige, honor, dignity, and respect through successful ownership and wagers, though money staked here was generally less (Jobey 1992; Middleton 2003). Cricket likewise attracted large wagers. As early as 1735 it was announced that a match between the teams of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and the Earl of Middlesex for £1,000 was to be played on Bromley common. In 1776 when the Hambledon

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club came to prominence it played matches against “England” in June for £525 and Surrey in August for £1,050 (Light 2011: 30). The Duke of Cumberland lost £10,000 gambling on a 1750 pugilistic encounter. Sports promoted for betting reasons could attract large cross-class crowds, betting among themselves, with people they knew, in a period before the appearance of bookmakers. In horse racing betting, support was sometimes based on local, class, or ethnic identities rather than purely on form. In Georgian London there were perhaps 20,000 Jews, some of whom lent support to Jewish pugilists, while the Irish inhabitants of the London parish of St. Giles gave strong backing to the Irish pugilist Peter Corcoran in the 1770s (Chill 2017: 28–32). Making Money from Sport Commercialized sports during the Enlightenment developed more rapidly in England than on the continent, thanks to higher wages and the emergence of a more commercialized leisure culture that demanded entertainment. This coincided from the 1690s onwards simultaneously with an “urban renaissance,” which saw the flowering of a leisure economy based on towns (Brewer et al. 1983; Borsay [1989] 2002; Porter and Roberts 1996; Clark 2015). These were centers of commercialization, leisure, marketing, and trade. By the 1750s this consumer revolution had spread to colonial America (Struna 1991). Two groups played a major role in sports’ commercialization. The first group, found in Britain and colonial North America, was composed of innkeepers and alehouse and tavern landlords. These and other cultural entrepreneurs appear to have been committed to and more competent at promoting sport, offering early venues for a range of sports, from bowls to boxing and cockfighting to cudgel fighting (Birley 1993: 117–21). They built facilities such as cockpits and encouraged gambling. Cricket, foot races, and prizefights soon attracted a popular audience, generating a thriving commercial leisure culture in London. The commercial catalyst at Finsbury’s Artillery Ground from the 1730s was George Smith, who enclosed it and charged two pennies for admission. He offered “great matches,” single-wicket competitions, and other commercial events. His relatively sophisticated business strategy attracted aristocratic patronage and a cross-class crowd including artisans, tradesmen, apprentices, and servants (Underdown 2000: 88–92). Thomas Lord, a cricketer, astute businessman, and wine merchant, made his money from admission fees, food and drink concessions at the cricket ground that he provided, along with astute advertising, for the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1788 (Birley 1999: 55). Richard Tattersall’s Turf Coffee House created a major betting market for horse racing in the 1780s (Huggins 2018: 92). In mainland Europe, guilds and fraternities played a more prominent role, but they were less commercially oriented. The second group crucial to commercialization was the print industry and its culture. In Britain, from the beginning of the eighteenth century promoters were

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ever-increasingly able to advertise, market, and dramatize sports like horse racing and cricket in the national and regional press, officially now uncensored, though taxed and so expensive. Once crowds were willing to pay for their amusement it further promoted the development of sporting professionals, and press advertising gave these a further boost. Sport has always offered event hosts, players, and refreshment providers opportunities to make money. Their sporting prowess gained sportsmen increasing recognition. Jockeys and pugilists in particular could earn substantial amounts and enjoy a wealthy lifestyle during their peak years. Boxers such as James Figg, Jack Broughton, and Daniel Mendoza were all astute self-publicists who claimed titles like “British champion,” talked up their skills, and attracted audiences to their halls and public houses to gain audiences and profit. In some towns, innkeepers, hotel keepers, and others with an interest in bringing in outside revenue and promoting a town’s prestige organized horse races, collected money for prizes, and profited as a result. European sports celebrities were also gaining more attention by the late eighteenth century. In Spain, for example, Pedro Romero was widely celebrated as a matador from the later 1770s to his retirement in 1799 (Hosseinpour 2014: 104, 160). Carnivalistic Enjoyment Before the Enlightenment, sports were sometimes associated with carnival, where the normal goals of society were set aside, authority and social position were briefly challenged, ridiculed or robbed of their dignity, and working people were free to use their time in displays of non-utilitarian activities. In Britain this association was in decline by the eighteenth century and no longer a primary link. Even so, some aspects of popular sports were still seen as disorderly, disruptive, and carnivalesque, with a contained, sanctioned breaking of social codes and taboos, which helped the maintenance of the normal order. Shrove Tuesday in Britain, often a holiday for laboring people, attracted activities like throwing at cocks or local varieties of mass football, and was sometimes described as “a sort of little carnival” (Malcolmson 1973: 28). But such customary events in Britain became more problematic. Throwing at cocks, for example, indulged in by schoolboys and apprentices, came under increased attack in print and preaching, described as an absurdity, a barbarous or cruel custom, and a reproach to human nature. A long sermon by a Norwich cleric reported in the Ipswich Journal on February 28, 1756 described it as an “unmanly, cruel, shameful and wicked practice.” From the 1770s, as public order became more important, such events were starting to fade. By contrast, carnivalistic behavior at British race meetings remained acceptable since it was supported by leading figures in society. In more Catholic countries, however, formal carnival often retained its hold. Carnivals in Italy in cities such as Genoa, Milan, and Rome sometimes included horse races, while at Venice there were regatta-like activities.

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Negative Views of Popular Sport Griffin (2015) has argued persuasively that over the period, many of the elite were relatively indifferent or even indulgent towards sport. But even if sports had purpose, not all sports’ purposes were positively viewed, most especially by the more reformist and radically puritanical, the clergy and lay reformers, motivated by the desire for moral and religious reform. Such people could be austere, sincere, purposeful, militant, zealous, egalitarian, and moralist, wanting to assertively police, purify, and repress all nonspiritual, sinful forms of recreation. For such groups, more restrictive in their attitudes, the purposes for which sports were played were always important, and so were the issues of when and where they were played. In Samson Agonistes, published in 1671, John Milton was ambivalent about sports; sports for the sake of mere spectacle were inappropriate, but those sports that promoted individual strength and wisdom were worthy of praise. Sports held on Sundays, or held in the open space of the churchyard, came under the strongest opposition. Sunday was for worship, quiet contemplation, good works, and reflective spirituality. It was not for any form of sporting play that could be considered in any way immoral. Sports became a moral, religious, and political battleground for Quakers and other more puritanical groups in Britain and North America. In Massachusetts in 1726, any person caught engaging in games, sport, play, or recreation on Sundays laid themselves open to a fine of ten shillings for a first offense (New England Legislation 1726). To puritans, sport was a frivolous pleasure, linked to “mere idleness” and destructive self-indulgence rather than proper purpose. Catholic and Anglican churches were often more liberal in attitudes to the Sabbath. In Pennsylvania, by the late 1730s, many sports and amusements hitherto discouraged were becoming liberalized among some segments of society (Jable 1974). There was an ambivalence in American puritan thinking. As American society became more complex, the cautious restrictions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with their many disapproved-of weekday sports, supposedly wasteful of time that should be devoted to hard work and family, slowly gave way to an acceptance—or at least a tolerance—of those which were perceived as “moderate and useful” (Daniels 1995: 166) such as fishing, hunting, or the martial arts. Sports were more acceptable if they were merely for recreative reasons. To the divine Isaac Watts, in 1734, excessive love of sports and pleasure was a sin because “sports and recreations were not designed to be the business of our lives, though they may be used to refresh us, and fit us better for our business” (Watts 1734: 40).

TWO CASE STUDIES: HUNTING AND BULLBAITING These contrasting case studies, focused on the animal sports of hunting and bullbaiting, provide interesting examples of the way sports’ purposes had to be

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teased out. Hunting was an elite rural sport, while bullbaiting was a popular urban one. Each demonstrated particular power relationships while roles within each gave status and some power. Each had origins that were in part, like angling, related to the provision of food as well as to their provision of opportunities for sporting leisure. Hunting was found all over Europe and colonial North America, and in Britain, where first the deer and then the lowly fox was pursued, it has attracted the bulk of research attention (e.g., Carr 1976; Itzkowitz 1977; Griffin 2007; de Belin 2013; May 2013). It offered those mounted riders who took part the thrill and challenge of the chase. For such hunting, open land was essential, and the activity was always associated with the wealthy, most especially the landed classes, and became more popular in the eighteenth century as the economy grew and more men had the wealth to get involved. Hunting and its associated horsemanship provided powerful status symbols for the nobility. In Ireland, hunting was “the premier sport of the social, religious and ruling elite” (Kelly 2014: 154). Hunting in eighteenth-century France functioned as a rite de passage in court culture. Across the Holy Roman Empire, rulers’ occupation of royal forests exclusively reserved for their hunting allowed them to display their wealth and power, and the building of hunting parks on large estates became fashionable. In terms of social relationships among the elite, gifts of venison, boar meat, fish, or game birds were always highly acceptable. Meat supply from deer and boar might be important for the lesser nobility, but for royalty hunting ceremonial visually demonstrated their dominance and absolute power through its expense, extravagant techniques, and its splendor (Knoll 2004). Hunting’s followers attempted, usually successfully, to limit who could hunt such prey and when, and so restrict all such hunting to their own social group. The Black Act of 1723 in England created the death penalty for deer theft. Game laws from 1671 onward restricted hunting of game to those qualified by land ownership and birth: about 1 percent of the population (Griffin 2007: 110–14). Stag hunting represented the noblest form of hunting in Britain, but the English Civil War, two decades of fighting and riot, and the shrinking of royal forest and deer park spaces through increased economic exploitation saw a drastic reduction of the deer population. In some areas its hunting continued, with packs of specialist staghounds maintained. But in many areas deer had become scarce. Over time this led to the fox replacing the deer as the prime quarry. In Leicestershire the Quorn Hunt was established in 1698, using foxhounds. In the 1750s, Hugo Meynell bred hounds with speed and endurance, better able to track the fox by scent. The faster horses then becoming available allowed good riders to keep up. The fox became a highly respectable prey, hunted by the nobility and gentry using foxhounds, although less-fashionable harrier packs sometimes pursued the hare.

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FIGURE 1.4: Lord Bulkeley and his Harriers, his Huntsman John Wells and Whipper-In R. Jennings, 1773, by Thomas Stringer (1722–90). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

It was usually the chase, and not the kill, that was the real appeal. In 1750 foxhunting’s attractions were described as “hard riding, the pleasure of clearing some dangerous leap, the pride of striding the best nag, and showing something of the bold horseman, and (equal to anything) of being first in at the death after a chase frequently from county to county” (Gardiner 1750: 2). The ability of riders to leap their horses over gates, fences, and walls became more necessary as enclosure began to limit open countryside. The exhilaration of the chase, despite the occasional fall, found expression in hunting songs, often a feature of the hard drinking in the evenings after the hunt. Such songs clearly appealed to landowning groups of friends who enjoyed hunting, shooting, coursing, fishing, and other such rural pursuits. In The Vocal Miscellany: A Collection of Above Four Hundred Celebrated Songs (1738), for example, most references to sport couple hunting with the post-hunt drinking. An Irish hunting song composed by Charles Dibden for his 1790 entertainment at London’s Lyceum Theatre, quoted in the Hampshire Chronicle, December 20, 1790, extolled and wryly ridiculed Tory huntsmen’s willingness to suffer unhorsing and injury to enjoy the pleasures of hunting:

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Then when our mettles at its pitch While tally-ho we’re bawling Safe landed in a muddy ditch To be genteelly sprawling, ‘A mushta gra, than wine and love, The joy of hunting’s far above. Can either Cupid or the bowl Such pleasure give? Ah by my soul – Let muddy ditches wash your face Still great’s the pleasure of the chase. Hunting was supported as both a “manly” and healthy form of exercise, encouraging men to rise early in the morning (although this also ensured their quarry was still digesting earlier food and so slower). A hunting cantata sung at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and reported in the Leeds Intelligencer, July 24, 1770, told the audience: A hunter, no more you’ll complain, No spleen-brooding cares shall you know, A stranger to sickness and pain, With life and new vigour you’ll glow Then fly from the pleasures that pall, That languor most certainly yield, But wake to the horn’s early call And haste to the sports of the field. Hunting also provided a key source of associativity. Initially private individuals had formed packs of hounds and asked friends to join in, paying the costs themselves. Hunt clubs were beginning to be formed in Ireland in the 1730s and 1740s, with the Kildare Hunt flourishing from the 1750s, contemporary with the famous Quorn Hunt in the English Midlands (Kelly 2014: 142). Private packs, run by rich owners, often offered generous hospitality and posthunt evening heavy drinking. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, hunting was becoming an increasingly “regular and a public activity” (Carr 1976: 45). These new hunts, hunting more regularly than previously, and sometimes organized on a subscription basis to generate funds, attracted more followers, both high-status and some slightly lower down in the social scale, such as tenant farmers, in a context where roles, rituals, performances, etiquette, and socio-cultural relationships were rarely explicit but usually well understood. Some clubs demanded appropriate clothing too. Though hunting rationales often specified its “manliness,” there were very occasional women who rode to hounds. The Marchioness of Salisbury acted as Master of the Hatfield Hunt

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after her husband died in 1793 and was frequently there at the kill. In North America even in the seventeenth century, some wealthy immigrants brought scent-hounds with them and tried to emulate the recreational patterns of the English country gentry (Recum 2003: 30). They developed their own codes of wildlife and hunting ethics and ritualistic sporting activity. But over time a slow shift was taking place in the complex relationship between mankind, animals, and nature, and conflicts over land use, ownership rights, and cruelty to animals were beginning to emerge by the end of the period. There were occasional attacks on hunting on the grounds of its “barbarous” animal cruelty, and its feudal tyranny in riding over the cultivated lands of tenant farmers and husbandmen (Cartmill 1993: 103; May 2013: 4–11). Even so hunting itself, as an elite occupation, was still only rarely challenged. The hunting fraternity argued that lower-class hunters killed game in search of food or financial gain with little regard for wildlife, but by contrast their hunting took care of the countryside. Bullbaiting offers a strong contrast to hunting, urban rather than rural, with an appeal not to the elite but to the common people, most commonly working men, though women, children, and a few of the middling group also attended, and very occasionally, as when associated with a Beverley mayoral ceremony, it might attract support from aldermen (Malcolmson 1973: 67). Bullbaiting was an activity involving a bull being tethered to an iron stake with a rope between 10 and 15 feet long, in a specially constructed ring. It was then baited—bitten, scratched, and savaged—by dogs, usually bulldogs or mastiffs especially bred for the sport. Bulls could be passive so the bull’s nose might be full of pepper to enrage the animal before the baiting. Several dogs might take part, or might be set upon the bull one at a time, a successful attack resulting in the dog fastening his teeth strongly in the bull’s snout or testes. The bull was a symbol of strength and fertility, and baiting was a customary urban activity. Griffin (2005: 59) notes that in the seventeenth century the status of bullbaiting as a sport was unquestioned. By the later eighteenth century it still largely retained its hold, and was central to popular culture in the West Midlands—the so-called “Black Country” surrounding Birmingham. It was also found in parts of south-east and northern England (Malcolmson 1973; Reid 1990; Griffin 2005). Baitings were staged publicly and centrally in large towns such as Liverpool, Chester, or Preston, and could be linked to mayoral ceremonies or to wakes and other public holidays. In Ireland it could be found in Dublin and other Irish cities (Rouse 2015: 55–9). In New York in 1781 publicans still laid on bullbaiting in “the true English manner,” one hoping that “because the bull is active and very vicious” the spectators would have “satisfactory diversion” (Kroessler 2010: 15). It could attract large crowds. In early July, 1772, a grand bullbaiting in Tothill Fields, Westminster afforded excellent sport for an estimated crowd of 10,000 spectators.

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Bullbaiting’s purposes differed according to the cultural beliefs and ideological arguments presented by those taking part. To some it was legitimated by earlier bylaws, which had seen baiting as having culinary benefits, improving the quality of the meat, with tough bull meat supposedly tasting better after its blood had been thinned (Collins 2005: 51–3). To some it had gambling attractions, betting on the performance, success, or failure of a particular dog or bull. There were commercial dimensions, with publicans involved in putting on baiting, and dog owners breeding and training dogs to gain profit and respect. Indeed, “the testing of the dogs’ skill and courage was one of the principal points of the exercise” (Malcolmson 1973: 47). To many supporters it was a rough and unrefined form of sporting entertainment, offering spectacle, uncertainty, and excitement, and its violence was celebrated in street ballads and broadsides as “rare good sport,” “good fun,” or “noble sport.” In 1800, when a Bill to ban bullbaiting with dogs was introduced but was rejected by the British Parliament (as it was also more narrowly in 1802), the future prime minster George Canning declared that the amusement “inspired courage and produced a nobleness of sentiment and elevation of mind” (Ritvo 2002: 106). Bullbaiting attracted increased hostile criticism in the late eighteenth century, as its purpose and relevance was questioned. To a certain extent this was linked to factors such as religious piety, bourgeois sensitivity, humanitarian sentiment, and more compassion for the suffering of bull and dogs, but Griffin (2005: 36–7) argues that the key factor was a growing concern for public order and control of potential drunkenness and unruliness in market squares and streets by street commissioners and other local elites.

CONCLUSION The Enlightenment period saw both change and continuity in terms of sports’ purposes. Sports still provided leisure, recreation, and an escape from responsibilities. They aided health. They played a role in the assertion of manliness. Sporting competitiveness continued to be important, and some sports conveyed status or allowed the acquisition of social and cultural capital. Over the period some of sports’ purposes changed. There was often less emphasis on the religious ritual aspects of sports (Muir 1997), though evangelical and social opposition to some sports continued. Sports’ military purposes and the links to carnival were much less foregrounded in Britain, though both continued strongly in parts of mainland Europe. Other purposes grew in importance. Associativity was becoming a main driver of sporting expansion, especially for the elite and middling sort, and gambling was a key purpose aiding the popularity of sports such as horse racing, pugilism, and cockfighting, which all allowed people to make money from sports.

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CHAPTER TWO

Sporting Time and Sporting Space REBEKKA VON MALLINCKRODT AND ANGELA SCHATTNER

Time and space are among the indispensable prerequisites, the conditio sine qua non, for any sporting activity. Sports are impossible without leisure time or leisure space, unless they are pursued professionally, which is where the difficulties begin. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a sporting performance—during a hunt or a dance, for example—may have been so important for aristocratic representation that it could hardly be described as a pastime. Learning these physical skills—which, for men, included the so-called noble exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing—had a correspondingly prominent place in education. At the same time, as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were professional sportsmen and women in the narrower sense, who practiced sport for a living, whether as teachers or training partners or in public competitions. Hence, social status alone did not determine whether sports were regarded as a profession or a hobby. Nevertheless, the opportunities to pursue such activities were much greater for the higher estates than for the lower ones and at the same time a characteristic of their privileged status. While members of the former group had, from today’s perspective, an infinite amount of free time and were therefore described as the “leisure class” (Veblen 1899), the latter were long assumed to have hardly any power and resources to spare and shape their time. Similarly, daily routines and spatial scope were more tightly regulated for girls and women than for boys and men, especially since the former, if they did not belong to the upper classes, were generally responsible for housework. 51

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It would, however, be wrong to speak of sports in the period from 1650 to 1800 as an exclusive phenomenon of the male elite. As early as the 1990s, scholars had qualified the view presented in older research that leisure time for a broader class spectrum was a modern phenomenon that only developed with the Enlightenment and industrialization (Burke 1995; Marfany 1997). Likewise, the juxtaposition of premodern “festival culture” and modern “leisure culture” has proven insufficient to encompass the range of early modern leisure activities, for these were not limited to just Sundays and feast days, as will be shown below. Nevertheless, the great importance of religion and the associated conflicts over venues and occasions for sports point to typical premodern phenomena, while others—such as the commercialization of sports and the associated establishment of sporting facilities—marked the starting point for modern developments. Finally, a number of fundamental changes that took place during this period, such as the privatization of common property or the increasing separation of places of work and working time from other activities, had direct consequences for sporting practice. This shows that time and space should not be understood as ahistorical categories but should be historicized as social constructions that were as amenable to change as they were controversial. The points of conflict not only included the boundaries between work and leisure as well as the accessibility and function of spaces, but also concerned who possessed the power to define them and who was able to put their ideas into practice. In the following, we therefore discuss—first with reference to time, then to space—the individual and societal demands and interests sports were competing with in the early modern period and how sports not only made use of gaps but also created “free spaces.” For although many things took a different form in the period between 1650 and 1800 than they do today, sports—even if they were practiced as a profession—needed their own temporally and spatially defined area in order to be recognized as such and distinguished from an instrumental use of the body. The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) referred to this phenomenon in his essay “Homo ludens”: . . . play is not “ordinary” or “real” life. It is rather a stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own . . . It thus has its place in a sphere superior to the strictly biological processes of nutrition, reproduction and self-preservation . . . Play is distinct from “ordinary” life as to locality and duration . . . It is “played out” within certain limits of time and place . . . Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. —Huizinga [1944] 1980: 8–10 Huizinga rejected modern sports, with their refined rules and optimized performance, as “too serious” and thus soulless (Huizinga [1944] 1980: 197–

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9). Yet despite this difference postulated by Huizinga, sports and play share the character of an autonomous realm, whose boundaries must be conveyed to participants and spectators via certain temporal or local marks. This chapter shows how controversial the limits of these sporting worlds were, with even their basic legitimacy being questioned at times, and to what extent they reflected religious and social conflicts. At the same time, we want to discuss in the concluding section whether the growing institutionalization of sports between 1650 and 1800 increased its accessibility or restricted it.

WORKING TIME—LEISURE TIME—SPORTS TIME If we leave out the small number of people who used sports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries either as a means of displaying power or of making a living, for most other people, participation in sports as spectators or players was linked to free time. In the early modern period—an era in which holidays and leisure were a privilege of the higher nobility, the wealthy middle classes, higher civil servants, scholars, and students—this free time primarily arose on Sundays and church feast days. To modern ears, this may sound very limited, but it misjudges the far greater number of church holidays: in the late Middle Ages, it is assumed that there were about one hundred nonworking days per year, including Sundays and feast days. In addition, there were typically shorter working hours on the eve of high holidays, whereas Sundays and feast days were not always work free. Instead, a differentiation was made according to the significance of the festive days: on less important holidays, people were permitted to work after attending church services (“half holidays”), while high holidays were sometimes celebrated over two to three days. Often, opportunities for leisure, sports, and play did not arise on the feast day itself but rather on subsequent days (Marfany 1997: 189f.). Thus, in purely mathematical terms, working times in the late Middle Ages came close to a modern five-day week (Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 569f., 2006: 869). In addition, people customarily attended the annual festivals, carnivals, fairs, and parish celebrations in neighboring towns, and employers were expected to give their laborers, journeymen, and apprentices time off on these occasions. Finally, there were also secular festivals such as harvest celebrations, coronations, and royal birthdays (Griffin 2019: 181f.). With the Reformation, Lutherans abolished many saints’ days, and Henry VIII reduced the number of feast days in England to twenty-seven per year in 1536—albeit for explicitly economic reasons. Calvinist theologians and church authorities were even more radical and allowed only a few holidays. Although the Catholic Church also canceled a number of more recently introduced church festivals in the course of confessionalization, the gap between the Protestant and the Catholic church calendar only narrowed when Pope Urban

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VIII reduced the number of Catholic holy days in 1642 to only thirty-seven obligatory feast days and at the same time deprived the bishops of the right to introduce new feast days in their dioceses (Münch [1992] 1998: 361f.; Dohrnvan Rossum 2006: 870). In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment ideas and economic considerations gave new impetus to reduce the number of feast days in Catholic states: in 1727, the Curia allowed the abolition of individual feast days or work after mass attendance in parts of Spain, Italy, and France. Similar reforms took place in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: on Maria Theresa’s initiative, the ban on work (after mass attendance) was lifted on twenty-three holy days in Austria in 1754. In 1771, the requirement to attend mass on these so-called half holidays was done away with, so that they entirely ceased to be days off. Pope Pius VI made this regulation binding for the entire Catholic Church in 1788 (Tanzer 1992: 101–3; Münch [1992] 1998: 363; Dohrn-van Rossum 2006: 870f.). The reductions also spread to Protestant states, where feast days that had been tolerated by the reformers were now abolished or reduced in duration (Münch [1992] 1998: 364). At the same time, however, secular holidays were proposed, because economists clearly recognized the need for recreation in order to maintain workforce. The German physician Johann Peter Frank and the political economist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi therefore recommended the introduction of so-called “refreshment days” and gymnastic exercises on these occasions (Justi 1761: 38; Frank 1783: 790; Tanzer 1992: 34, 105; Münch [1992] 1998: 367, 370; for France, see Beck 1997: 86). Overall, however, the reduction in the number of feast days after the Reformation led to an increase in the number of annual working hours and to growing demands for the remaining holy days to be exclusively religious in character (Tanzer 1992: 105; Beck 1997: 127–30; Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 569). What was more decisive for sporting practices than the extension of annual working time, however, was this idea that Sundays and holy days were to be dedicated to worship alone and that individuals were not free to spend them as they wanted. This points to a fundamental conflict between church and sports during the period under study that concerned Catholics and Protestants alike, but the extent and implementation of Sunday observance differed considerably. For Catholics, Sunday mass attendance was mandatory, whereas in Lutheranism, participation in Sunday church services was not obligatory, and Martin Luther rejected strict work prohibitions. By contrast, Martin Bucer demanded severe laws to maintain rest from work and thus contributed to the more rigid understanding of Sunday observance that was characteristic of Calvinism (Beck 2000: 2; Spehr 2010: 210). In addition, Sunday observance was not only about attending mass and worship, but also about not wasting the time given by God (Mallinckrodt 2005: 149). Religious criticism was furthermore directed at the betting often associated with sports, the brutality of some sports (against

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humans and animals), and the disorder, noise, and extreme emotions that the competition evoked. Attempts by Calvinists in the Netherlands and the Lower Rhine region to impose the radical views of English Puritans, who rejected any form of pleasure or work on Sunday, failed, however. Many Lutheran and Catholic authorities were content with mass attendance, leaving the rest of the day free (Spehr 2010: 210). In addition to such denominational regional and national differences, temporal developments must be taken into account. After Puritans burned the royal “Book of Sports” in protest, because it allowed “lawful sports” on Sunday (Behringer 2012: 12, 70), a more sports-tolerant era commenced with the Stuart Restoration in 1660. According to Peter Borsay, a new era in the British history of leisure even began (2006: 14). Emma Griffin likewise stresses the relief about the relaxation of the strict morality and the enthusiasm about the revival of traditional festivals and the associated games and sporting competitions. This applied both to the direct participants and to the elites, who now perceived popular sports and pastimes with greater tolerance and pragmatism than before as “harmless, rustic fun” (Griffin 2015: 20–2). Although there were still arrests in Lancashire in 1714 for playing football when church services were underway (Brailsford 1984b: 172), William Stukeley, for example, wrote: “the last age had discourag’d the innocent and useful sports of the common people, by an injudicious zeal for religion, which has drove them into worse amusements” (1724: 91; Griffin 2019: 177). Likewise, Henry Bourne, a Newcastle clergyman, explained that handball was not problematic even during Easter week: “when the common Devotions of the Day are over, there is nothing sinful in lawful recreation” (1725: 215, 198; Griffin 2015: 23). The supporters of dissenting religions, who perceived sports and related pleasures as problematic and vigorously defended Sunday observance, were clearly in the minority in the eighteenth century (Griffin 2015: 29) and only regained influence at the end of the period under study. The situation was different in the New England colonies to which the Puritans had fled in the seventeenth century: sports on Sunday remained a taboo in the eighteenth century. The emigrants not only preserved their notions with regard to appropriate times to play sports but also with regard to acceptable kinds of sport. While the Puritans rejected ball and blood sports, they tolerated hunting, fishing, fowling, and martial competitions as moderate and useful recreations. Wrestling (but not boxing) contests were acceptable, and fishing became New England’s most popular sport in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with specially organized fishing competitions. Horse racing, which was justified by its military utility, was the only organized spectator sport in eighteenth-century New England. By contrast, it was only at the end of the Revolutionary era in 1790 that ball games started to become respectable. This cultural change was brought about by soldiers from other states who had fought

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together with New Englanders during the American War of Independence. Likewise, foreign students and visitors who were attracted by the universities of Harvard and Yale in the 1760s and 1770s led to the spread of bowling and football. No laws were needed to ensure the persistence of puritanical ideas; public contempt was sufficient to nurture a very specific sporting profile in this region (Daniels 1995: 166–74). A similar phenomenon can be observed in Great Britain, where sporting events were officially allowed on the “Lord’s Day” until 1780. De facto, however, most organizers avoided Sunday as a day for official competitions. An analysis of more than 500 cricket matches from the eighteenth century showed that none took place on a Sunday; the same was true for formal prizefights in boxing and horse racing (Brailsford 1984b: 172–4, 1999: 82f.). There were exceptions, however; powerful participants and sponsors or high bets could ensure that competitions were held on Sundays—for instance, long-distance horse racing that would otherwise have been rendered impossible by traffic (Brailsford 1984b: 173). Sunday was also often used by the local population as a day for informal sporting encounters (Brailsford 1984b: 172, 178). Rowing seems to have followed a different logic, as rowing regattas—both formal and informal—often took place on Sundays. This was due to the fact that, in the eighteenth century, apprentices and professional watermen typically competed against each other. In contrast to the master craftsmen and journeymen, who took more liberties, Sunday was indeed the only free day of the week for apprentices. Thus, rowing regattas only ceased to be held on Sundays when, in the nineteenth century, it became a sport practiced by students and the middle classes (Brailsford 1984b: 179). From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, there was a decline in Sunday church attendance in Germany and France, especially among men in the cities, that seems to indicate less rigid attitudes. Thus, tennis teachers, for example, offered lessons when church services were underway (Beck 1997: 87, 109, 111–26, 132; 2000: 3, 7). By contrast, the British Sunday Observance Act of 1780 makes clear how long the conflict over Sunday observance persisted and how it was even revived in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It declared that any house, room or other place which shall be opened or sued for public entertainment or amusement, or for publicly debating on any subject whatsoever upon any part of the Lord’s Day, called Sunday, and to which persons shall be admitted by the payment of money or by tickets sold for money, shall be deemed a disorderly house or place. —Brailsford 1984b: 176 Even alternative financing options, such as subscription or the sale of food, were banned, and penalties of £200 were imposed not only on the organizers

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themselves but also on the printers of event posters. Although this law was not aimed at sporting events but at political gatherings and clubs, in practical terms it meant the end for Sunday sports (Brailsford 1984b: 176, 1999: 82). Together with the strengthening of dissenting religions at the end of the eighteenth century, this regulation, which applied to commercial events (and thus above all to cities), apparently also had repercussions for rural areas, as an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1783 implies: “rural Games and Athletick Exercise” sometimes took place on Sundays, but “to avoid unseemly noise and disturbance upon a day of holiness, the sports and diversions are now in many villages prudently deferred until the Monday after; and I wish this regulation had been made in all parishes” (Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1783: 523; Brailsford 1984b: 172, 1999: 79). In other European countries the conflict over Sunday observance was a permanent issue, too, and, at the same time, proves continuous sporting practice. The Austrian theological writer and preacher Abraham a Santa Clara (1644–1709), although not a moral rigorist, rebuked those who missed divine service in order to play bowling all day and pointed specifically to the Austrian bourgeoisie, who had started to use Sundays for their day trips to the gardens in the surrounding areas, where public houses offered short and long bowling alleys for their guests to use (Tanzer 1992: 95). From the eighteenth century onwards, the Austrian government continuously issued edicts to regulate Sunday observance more strictly: until the 1730s, public houses had to be closed during divine service and religious instruction; from 1730 on, inns had to shut down all morning. A measure from January 3, 1772 represents a peak in a string of increasingly stricter legislation: taverns were only allowed to open on Sundays after 4 p.m. and all participation in games and sports—even strolling—had to be postponed until afterwards, while “public spectacles” were completely forbidden (Tanzer 1992: 95–6). Apart from the conflict over Sunday observance, the temporal organization of agricultural work, which still provided a livelihood for the vast majority of early modern people, exhibited great continuity during the period under study: it was strongly seasonal and thus may have left greater freedom than urban working rhythms. Hence, the carnival period was not only popular because the festivities included sporting events, but also because the days were getting longer and farm work did not require great investments of effort at that time of the year (Behringer 2012: 125). This also allowed for sports and play after work, as a farmer wrote: “As the days lengthened, in the evening after our work was done, we assembled on our village-green to spend our time in some rustic amusements, such as wrestling, football, etc.” (Denson 1830; Griffin 2019: 177). There was more free time after spring sowing and after harvest as well. In many places, the cricket season began after the first hay harvest, which means it began later in the north than in the south. This was partly for practical reasons

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if the field in question was used for the game (Brailsford 1999: 77, 87). Conversely, urban sports managers avoided organizing important events like boxing matches with particularly prominent participants in the summer months, because wealthy sponsors spent the hot days in the countryside. Instead, the organizers themselves traveled with the athletes to summer attractions such as horse racing weeks or used the months between December and March to host public competitions in the city (Brailsford 1999: 87). Overall, the climate and time of year determined which sports were practiced and when much more than they do today, since few sports disciplines were practiced in covered structures. In York, for example, horse races took place between April and October and cricket matches from May to September (Borsay 2006: 204). The hunting season, on the other hand, was limited to the months from September to February, and sometimes until Easter (Brailsford 1999: 88). While bathing and swimming required at least a temperate climate, skiing and ice-skating were simply impossible without snow and ice. The early modern “Little Ice Age” favored the spread of these sports. Ice-skating in particular not only enthused children and young people, but also inspired adult citizens and nobles with its elegant movements. Thus, in the winter of 1662/3, the English

FIGURE 2.1: Frozen river with ice-skaters, unknown Dutch painter, seventeenth century. Photograph by Dea/G. Dagli Orti, courtesy of Getty Images.

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King Charles II introduced ice-skating, with which he had become acquainted in exile in Holland, on the new canal in St. James’s Park (Behringer 2012: 197). Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth also reported on the Dutch skating tradition and included the sport in his Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen (Encyclopedia of Physical Exercises) at the end of the eighteenth century: [Skating] is without a doubt one of the most beautiful physical exercises, in which the dexterity of the body and good decorum can be shown in an excellent way, and it deserves to be learned regularly and to have a few pages dedicated to in a treatise . . . This art deserves to be placed parallel to [the art of horsemanship]. —1794–1818, 2: 320 While the conflict over spending holy days, the influence of the seasons, and the agricultural working rhythm constitute major points of continuity between 1650 and 1800, a more brisk rhythm spread from the cities. Drum watches and then pocket watches, still prestige objects for the few in the sixteenth century, became more and more common and also increasingly precise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dohrn-van Rossum and Popplow 2011: 887–9). In the 1740s, a third of the wealthier inhabitants of Bristol owned a clock and a quarter even a pocket watch (Clark 2000: 170). According to Gerhard Tanzer, it even became fashionable in Vienna to wear two watches to extravagantly counter their rapidly increasing dissemination towards the end of the eighteenth century (1992: 29). At the same time, street lighting, which had spread from the large cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reduced the hours of darkness and rendered the structuring of the day increasingly independent of the position of the sun (Koslofsky 2011: 128–57). Still, the two forms of measuring time existed in parallel, and information provided in advertisements for sporting events only changed gradually: in addition to relatively general indications such as “dawn,” “early morning,” “noon,” and “afternoon,” or “after Sunday afternoon prayers,” and “after the conclusion of the service,” exact times were increasingly mentioned (Borsay 2006: 198). Ultimately, the more precise chronometry changed not only the conditions under which sport took place but also the sports themselves. By showing the time to the minute and later to the second, watches allowed comparisons of races that went beyond determining the superiority of a physically present opponent and enabled abstract records to be set and surpassed elsewhere—even without a competitor. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, races “against the clock” were recorded for posterity, and from 1776 onwards, watches also showed the seconds (Behringer, Chapter 4 in this volume). In addition to this temporal regime, which increasingly measured time in a more detailed and mechanical way and identified it as a precious, not-to-be-

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wasted commodity, the growing separation of the domestic sphere and the workplace had fundamental effects on the development of leisure time and thus also of sport. While, in the past, work tasks and informal, irregular breaks had alternated more frequently, working time was now more clearly separated from free time. On the one hand, factory owners enforced a stricter working discipline, and on the other hand, working time regulations created a free time that was clearly separated from work: leisure. In connection with the increasing tendency to pay wages in money (and less and less in natural produce) and with it greater purchasing power for more and more available consumer goods, modern sports developed within the context of the commercialization of early modern society as a whole and the emergence of a consumer society that, for the first time, also encompassed the middle and lower classes and offered women new opportunities to act. The reason for this greater autonomy was both the separation from the domestic sphere (and thus from constant supervision by husbands or master craftsmen) and the higher incomes. Whether this change was associated with an increase in working hours that virtually destroyed the free time thus gained is controversial in research and must be differentiated according to region and trade. On the one hand, working days for wage earners and journeymen, for whom we only have information on a large scale, were already extremely long from a modern perspective: in summer, they worked an average of twelve hours a day, while in winter usually eight to nine hours were dedicated to labor (Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 568f.). Thus, an average working day in the industrial regions of the eighteenth century—from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a two-hour lunch break—might even have represented a reduction compared to the situation before (Borsay 2006: 193). On the other hand, fixed working hours did not mean continuous working intensity. In the traditional trades, this could vary greatly depending on the weather, raw materials, and number of orders, as well as rites and customs that interrupted labor (Tanzer 1992: 36–9; Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 569). Furthermore, Emma Griffin has recently referred to the endemic problem of unemployment and underemployment in Western Europe. Many workers were only hired seasonally (Borsay 2006: 195). In addition, differences between urban areas, which were affected by the onset of industrialization, and rural areas have to be taken into account: only the former increased their working hours (and thus often their income), while the latter remained stable (Griffin 2019: 171f., 174f., 180). After all, lawyers, merchants, teachers, professors, and students, for instance, had significantly more free time and, above all, the freedom to manage their time compared to craftsmen and laborers. Therefore, all generalizations are problematic (Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 570; Borsay 2006: 194). For example, independent and salaried employees combined shopping or negotiations in another city with horse races or bathing excursions, or they organized their trips in such a way that they coincided with the hunting

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season (Vickery 1998: 272). On a smaller scale, (purported) church visits or shopping trips by servants were used as free time (Tanzer 1992: 54). This may have been the reason why bowling in Bedford was especially popular on market days (Borsay [1989] 2002: 174). If these cases indicate how opportunities for sport and relaxation were used without formally defined and granted leisure time, the picture changes even more when we look at sporting practice beyond early modern norms. Especially in the trades on Mondays and Tuesdays, work was often irregular, and in some cases there was no work at all or it was not as intensive, as Dennis Brailsford explains: “St Monday and Holy Tuesday had long been the workers’ sardonic responses to the disappearance of the old saints’ days from the holiday calendar” (1999: 86). This was not specifically an English but rather an urban and typically male phenomenon throughout Europe. Since the late Middle Ages it appeared under the term “santo lunedi/lunediana,” “Saint-Lundi,” “blaa Mandag,” and “Blauer Montag” in Italy, France, Scandinavia, and German-speaking countries (Beck 2000: 12f.; Buchner 2005: 288; Dohrn-van Rossum 2005: 570; Arcangeli 2006: 1218). In some cases a work-free Monday was even recorded as a right (Tanzer 1992: 36). Before stricter work discipline was enforced in the factories, it was also more common for men to take three or four hours off during a working day to bowl, watch dogfights, or go to the pub (Brailsford 1999: 76). Some early modern economists therefore repeatedly recommended low wages in order to combat the assumed or actual “leisure preference” of the lower classes (Sokoll 2008: 980). Even for inn owners, whose business flourished on Sundays and holidays, it was reasonable to offer sporting attractions on work days in order to bring in more guests. Boxing fights often took place on Mondays. In contrast, Saturdays were extremely unpopular for sports events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most cricket matches likewise began on Mondays (Brailsford 1999: 77, 83–6). However, it should be noted that cricket matches could last several days. To be finished on Sunday, it was necessary to start well in advance (Brailsford 1984b: 177). Such absences of several days, however, were not an option for early modern craftsmen and laborers, which is why this timing indicates a certain exclusivity of sporting practice (cf. also Griffin 2019: 179). Some of the higher estates deliberately used weekdays and mornings to enjoy the grand parks—opened to the public at the end of the eighteenth century— without the popular crowds (Tanzer 1992: 258; Münch [1992] 1998: 374f.; Clark 2000: 189). Thus, for example, Mary Warde rode regularly on Monday and Thursday mornings with the hunt (Vickery 1998: 273). Likewise, the particularly cheap noon price in the first Parisian swimming school makes clear that most people found it difficult to take time off at this hour, even if the swimming pool was only affordable for the middle and higher classes due to the high entrance fees (Mallinckrodt 2019a: 330). Horse races, which usually

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lasted several days and were held in the middle of the week, also had an exclusive aura. The term now used was “race week” to indicate the elaborate program of hunts, balls, theater performances, concerts, and other sporting events that framed the races (Brailsford 1999: 86, 89; Borsay [1989] 2002: 182, 191–3). Due to their comparative rarity and longer duration, horse-racing events therefore corresponded more to the rhythm of annual festivals than to everyday leisure time. On the whole, the timing of sporting events and their duration were much more variable and diverse for all ranks and classes before the Industrial Revolution than after it, when sports gradually became concentrated on Saturday afternoons, which employers gave as a day off in the hope of obtaining greater work discipline on Monday (Tranter 1998: 19f., 34). In the premodern period, free time during the week was theoretically a social privilege of the elites, which the middle and lower classes nevertheless appropriated. This was partly an answer to Sunday observance that continued to be an issue until the late eighteenth century.

SPORTING SPACE As was the case for temporal aspects, spatial developments in sports were also based on evolutions from before 1650. Multifunctional venues and informal spatial arrangements continued to play an important role, all the more since many sports did not require special areas or buildings. This applied to running competitions, which often took place in parks or on country roads, as well as to rowing regattas or jousting competitions, which, in Venice, Nuremberg, Ulm, Strasbourg, Paris, and London, were simply held on the rivers and canals that were otherwise used to transport people and goods (Mallinckrodt 2010: 408–11). Before the establishment of swimming schools in the eighteenth century (and even afterwards), swimming took place in streams, rivers, lakes, and the ocean (see, e.g., Mallinckrodt 2006: 7–26). And for many ball games, simple fields and squares with temporary markings were quite sufficient, which is why in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even in the cities, streets and squares were used for sports and landmarks such as market crosses, church porches, or village wells were converted accordingly (Marfany 1997: 187; Griffin 2005: 42f.; Behringer 2009: 338; Griffin 2019: 178). In rural areas, the church, which was the only stone building with strong and high walls and an inclined roof, remained important for many ball games (Schattner 2016: 71). The expulsion of sporting activities from the churchyard was a long-lasting process that began with the Reformation in the sixteenth century and still led to disputes in cities in the late eighteenth century (Brailsford 1984b: 169). This was not an England-specific phenomenon: for example, in 1690, the diocesan order of Grenoble prohibited believers from playing longue

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FIGURE 2.2: Boat racing on the river Thames in London, 1783. Photograph by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery, courtesy of Getty Images.

paume, boules, or bowling in front of the church or in the cemetery (Beck 1997: 86). From a lay point of view, the square in front of the church was not only suitable architecturally, but was also a central meeting place. While the expulsion was not equally strongly enforced everywhere, in Restoration England, churchyards had started to be replaced by alternative playing fields and places (Schattner 2014). In this process, some sporting games retained a more tenacious grip on the churchyard than others. Games such as fives and tennis, which were dependent upon the specific architecture of churchyards, could not be easily moved to alternative places. In rural areas, alternative structures were often not available, and access to purpose-built tennis and fives courts in towns and cities was either restricted or had to be paid for. Although most parishes had successfully banished festivities and sports from church grounds by the end of the seventeenth century, these games survived illegally for much longer (Schattner 2016: 75). In some Welsh parishes in the nineteenth century, fives was still played in the churchyards

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with the approval of local church authorities and had developed into a local Sunday sports event followed by the whole parish community and the occasional tourist. A vicar’s son in Cumbria nostalgically recalled in his diary how, in his youth, the young men of the parish would assemble at the church after the evening service and finish the day with a game of football (Griffin 2005: 49). Football, cricket, running competitions, or wrestling were easier to move to alternative, often newly created places. This process was often actively supported and even initiated by village communities and local authorities. In the seventeenth century, newly designated sports grounds that had the sole purpose of facilitating communal sociability developed in central locations in different parishes— either close to the church grounds or in the middle of the village or town (Schattner 2016: 75). In East Anglia, so-called camping closes developed, presumably as a response to segregation efforts (Dymond 1990, 1999). Although the name suggests that these were solely used for the sport of camp ball, which can be best described as a mixture of handball and football, these grounds were used in a similar manner as the churchyards and commons. These new playing fields were often private lands that were lent for recreational use at appropriate times, for example, when the harvest was over. In other cases, sites were either bequeathed by individuals to the township for its inhabitants to use or belonged to the local inn. Sporting activities were not only banned from the churchyard but, from the second half of the eighteenth century, they were also ousted from the streets and squares of provincial towns. The point of criticism was not sport itself, but the place and the disorder associated with it, which, it was believed, should no longer be tolerated at the heart of the community (Griffin 2005: 102–4, 251). In contrast, the long-term and far-reaching process of enclosure—that is, the privatization of common property in England following the sixteenth century— had surprisingly little impact on sporting practice. Areas traditionally used for sports were also employed after privatization on the basis of an understanding of customary right, and this was accepted by owners. At the same time, there were still so many fallow areas that it was easy to find alternatives. Many eighteenth-century towns were still surrounded by commons that were used for cricket and football, but also for “prison bars,” foot races, jumping matches, prizefights, knur and spell, bowling, quoits, or horse racing (Griffin 2005: 49– 52, 174, 220). Patronage, which involved providing playing fields, remained an important factor in sport in the countryside, and aristocratic patrons helped to circumvent the temporary boxing ban by organizing fights on their private property (Borsay [1989] 2002: 176; Griffin 2005: 220f., 252; Ungar 2012a: 29). In the cities, the numerous parks that were increasingly opened to the public by royal families and aristocratic houses in the eighteenth century offered new opportunities for physical exercise, such as the former royal parks of Prater, Augarten, and

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FIGURE 2.3: Supporters cheering a group of footballers playing a game on Crowe Street, 1721. Photograph by Rischgitz, courtesy of Getty Images.

Schönbrunn in Vienna, the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, or the Englischer Garten in Munich. The space was used for many new forms of Enlightenment entertainment, but also for sports: pallamaglio/paille-maille fields were often part of larger parks—for example, the one set up by Louis XIV in the Tuileries (Behringer 2009: 339). From 1778, horse races took place on the Prater’s main avenue and later in Simmering Heath. At the peak of their popularity in the 1780s, aristocratic riders actively participated in these races, while at the socalled “Lauferfest” (runners’ festival) on May 1, servants only competed with each other (Tanzer 1992: 271–2; Mallinckrodt 2019b: 149, 156). It would therefore be misleading to judge the prevalence of early modern sporting practices solely by the number of institutionalized sports facilities. Sporting spaces were far more variable in the early modern era than in modern times. For example, public spaces were temporarily or permanently demarcated

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and made accessible to spectators for an entrance fee, as was the case for Belsize Park in London for Whitsuntide foot races (Brailsford 1999: 29), sections of the Seine in Paris for jousting (Mallinckrodt n.d.), or Spanish market places for bullfights (Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 329). Permanent sports facilities were mainly located in urban areas, while rural areas were more often characterized by informal arrangements. At the same time, the distinction between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized sports venues could point to a social difference, because not everyone could afford to join a club or participate in a commercially organized sports event. Sometimes, accessibility was not just regulated financially, but by invitation or rules of the owners relating to rank and status. Moors, heaths, fields, commons, village greens, and churchyards thus remained the most important space for sports for the laboring poor and landless members of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society (Griffin 2005: 49). In many cases, a sophisticated and simpler version of the same sport coexisted depending on the infrastructure available. In both cases, the size and design of playing fields could vary considerably from place to place and from group to group. Therefore, differences in sporting practices between urban and rural areas or between the lower classes and elites were not necessarily categorical, but rather gradual and should be understood in terms of tendencies. For, as Peter Borsay and Emma Griffin have pointed out, an antithetical juxtaposition of city and country does not do full justice to early modern leisure activities. Borsay refers to the often urban venues of sports originally associated with the countryside, such as horse racing or big hunts, and the great importance of towns as “supply and service stations” for such events. The increasingly elaborately staged leisure activities required the urban infrastructure to offer a variety of entertainment and to accommodate and care for the participants (Borsay [1989] 2002: 178f., 185, 195f.). Griffin has pointed to the comparatively high mobility of early modern people, which defies categorical distinctions between urban and rural areas: country people traveled up to ten miles to see sporting events such as wrestling, prizefighting, cudgeling and single-stick, football, cricket matches, or horse races (Griffin 2005: 52–4). The “Society of Cricket Players of Birmingham” invited clubs within thirty miles to play matches against them (Borsay [1989] 2002: 175f.). Due to this mobility, crowds were already comparatively large in the early modern period: in the eighteenth century, boxing matches, cricket matches, and horse races attracted several thousand and even tens of thousands of individuals, not only in London but also in the provinces (Brailsford 1999: 84). Similar spectator numbers have been reported for other European countries: a game of pallone in Verona apparently attracted 5,000 spectators in 1786 (Behringer 2012: 178), and a crowd of 3,000 saw the running competition in Vienna in 1795 (Tanzer 1992: 272). For this reason, organizers sometimes even decided

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not to announce a sporting event in the newspaper in order to ensure a certain degree of exclusivity, such as for example archery contests (Troost 2015: 118), whereas other sporting events relied on incomes from large spectator crowds. Social distinction remained important at major events that were often attended by different classes; ephemeral architecture such as grandstands or tents not only protected spectators from the weather and granted a superior view, but spatially separated the well-to-do from the poorer people as well. However, in view of blurring social differences, clubs that were not open to all and partly used their own sports facilities represented the most effective form of such segregation (Clark 2000: 189f.). Purpose-built sports facilities multiplied during the period under study but were also able to build on existing institutions: between 1650 and 1800, fencing grounds, riding arenas, and ballrooms were still used and were even newly constructed in numerous knight academies and universities in Europe, as the noble exercises had not lost any of their importance. Shooting ranges outside the town or as part of princely facilities continued to exist, while riding halls and bullfighting arenas built of stone appeared for the first time (Behringer 2009: 341f.). However, many arenas for various sports were still made of wood, which does not necessarily point to an ephemeral character, but was also

FIGURE 2.4: Amphitheater in wood for the horse races in Lucca, Italy, eighteenth century. Photograph by De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

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due to early modern construction habits and economic reasons (Vieth 1794– 1818, 1: 300, 329). In towns and cities, numerous commercial providers of ball sports offered their services, often in the vicinity of schools and universities, but by no means only linked to educational institutions. As a London example shows, entrepreneurs often did not dedicate themselves to one sport only, and ballrooms were not just used for tennis: from the 1740s to 1770s, Thomas Higginson owned three tennis courts and two fives courts in London. All of these seem to have been quite successful until Higginson’s death around 1773, when his fives court was advertised for sale. While his fives court in St. Martin’s Street could only be used for that game, his tennis courts were advertised as multi-purpose sporting and leisure facilities, where fives, tennis, and billiards could be played. Players could hire the necessary equipment, such as balls and rackets, or they could buy their own equipment at the court in Holborn and later at the Haymarket court. Gentlemen could also rent the entire court for as long as they wished for an agreed fee. Higginson promoted his courts by announcing that he had the cheapest prices for fives and tennis in London and that his courts were equipped to the highest contemporary standards. The main clientele of these tennis courts were still “gentlemen” to whom he addressed his advertisements. He had apparently had some trouble with the reputation of his tennis courts in the 1760s, and reassured his customers in several advertisements that he was “determined to preserve the utmost Order and Decorum there” and that no “Journeymen, Labourers, Servants, Apprentices, or any inferior Persons, [are allowed] to play there upon any Terms” (Schattner 2014: 204). Tennis and fives courts even regularly hosted large spectator events. In 1714, for example, the fives court in St. Martin’s Street advertised a company of French rope dancers with extraordinary qualities, to be seen there for some weeks “for the Diversion of the Quality and Gentry.” Thomas Higginson hosted a fives match with rackets “between two of the best Players in London” in his St. Martin’s Street court, on which a considerable amount of money was wagered. His direct competitor, the owner of the St. James’s Street tennis court, hosted similar spectator events, such as boxing matches, theatrical performances, and concerts at his premises (Schattner 2014: 205). It would therefore be worth investigating whether ballrooms on the continent were actually converted in great numbers into theaters, opera houses, dance venues, and billiard halls in the course of the eighteenth century or if they rather served as multi-purpose buildings for diverse entertainments (for France see for example Tadié 2015b: 95). This would also explain a certain discrepancy between the assumptions of previous research claiming that jeu de paume experienced a decline in the eighteenth century (see also Vieth 1794–1818, 3: 297 for Germany) and evidence of its lasting popularity: tennis continued to be mentioned very frequently in books of friends (libri amicorum), in which students and pupils of knights’

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FIGURE 2.5: “Paulmerie, Jeu de Paulme et Construction de la Raquette” from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1771. Photograph by Hulton Archive, courtesy of Getty Images.

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academies immortalized each other (Gillmeister 2008: 225). In 1720, the architect Leonhard Christoph Sturm (1669–1719) designed a ballroom, a pallamaglio court, and a “ballon court” as essential facilities for a knight’s academy, in addition to a riding hall, fencing grounds, and a shooting range. Apparently, the construction of ballrooms was still so widespread in Germanspeaking countries in the middle of the eighteenth century that it was included in the training of architects (Penther 1748: 101; Behringer 2009: 341f.). In France, the game was so popular in the second half of the eighteenth century that the Nevers factory created a series of faience plates featuring famous tennis players (Gillmeister 2008: 216f.). And among the entourage of the Count of Artois (1757–1836), brother of Louis XVI, jeu de paume experienced another heyday shortly before and during the French Revolution (Vieth 1794–1818, 3: 300; Belmas 2009: 71). In Vienna, too, the courtly ballhouse, newly built in the middle of the eighteenth century, was still in operation at the end of the century, when Johann Nikolaus Becker counted “Ballschlagen” (ball hitting) among the winter recreational pleasures (Tanzer 1992: 240, note 504). In Italy, a painting by Giuseppe Zocchi (c. 1716/17–67) shows the outdoor version of the sport: the

FIGURE 2.6: Outdoor real tennis, 1751–2, painting by Giuseppe Zocchi (c. 1716/17– 67). Florence, Museo Dell’Opificio Delle Pietre Dure, photograph by De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

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longue paume in contrast to the courte paume that was played in the ballhouse (see fig. 2.6; Vieth 1794–1818, 3: 338). Still, jeu de paume, and thus also the ballrooms, no longer had the same significance as in the Renaissance. According to Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth, the young people now preferred to play “rounders in the open fields, ballon and shuttlecock” (1794–1818, 2: 553). By contrast, the example of the first swimming school in Paris demonstrates how previously controversial sporting practices could see their image improve through institutionalization, become attractive to the elites, and move into the city center. Even before a swimming school was officially established in Paris in 1785, sailors, mariners, ferrymen, and harbor workers gave commercial swimming lessons (Mallinckrodt 2016: 234). Swimming, however, was primarily considered a pleasure for the lower ranks, as an activity that was as dangerous as it was morally objectionable. Therefore Barthélémy Turquin (c. 1720–after 1800) experienced difficulties in getting permission to found such an institution, and the first swimming school was only allowed to be established below the Pont Royal and thus outside of the city center near the port of La Grenouillère (Mallinckrodt 2019a: 306f.). Turquin was obviously aware that he could only attract a wealthy clientele if he countered the dubious reputation of swimming with an exclusive venue. Accordingly, despite the simple wooden construction on the Seine, he founded a comparatively sophisticated facility including swimming lessons, swimming competitions, and a restaurant. Baron Thiébault (1769–1846) recalled in his memoirs his visits in the 1780s and the playful but quality-conscious way in which he and his friends had a snack while swimming: “we held enchanting meals consisting of small pies, cakes, and small glasses of liqueur, draped on barrel bottoms floating in the water, around which we swam, and from which we took whatever we could” (Thiébault 1893: 199). For a firstclass annual membership, Turquin charged ninety-six livres, while holders of the more modest second-class membership still had to pay forty-eight livres. A worker in the Gobelins or a wage worker would have had to invest one to two months’ wages in a second-class membership, which was completely out of their reach given the high cost of living (Mallinckrodt 2016: 244). These measures actually enabled Turquin to attract an exclusive clientele, and in just a few years he not only moved to the center of the city, but also opened several institutions (Mallinckrodt 2019a: 330, 336). The establishment of Turquin’s swimming pool meant that two swimming practices now existed side by side: an informal variant in public waters open to all, and an exclusive variant that attracted the higher estates as well as women. As in this case, where a swimming pool was combined with a restaurant, multifunctionality was a feature of many early modern sports facilities, which were often run by publicans. When the cities of the Holy Roman Empire lost interest in shooting festivals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and stopped their financial support, it was—as in England and France—mainly

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innkeepers who made shooting ranges available for the now privately held competitions (Tlusty 2011: 210). Inns, alehouses, and taverns often had adjacent yards or gardens, where it was possible to play games for which the proprietors provided equipment such as balls, bowls, or cudgels (Clark 1983: 25–34, 152–4). For the innkeepers, the decision to offer several amusements or

FIGURE 2.7: Skittle players outside an inn, c. 1660, painting by Jan Steen (1626–79). Photograph by Art Media/The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

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services that could attract guests was a matter of risk reduction. Numerous newspaper advertisements for public houses that were available to let in London show that bowling and other games such as skittles, shuffleboard, and billiards were still an important feature of the service trade in the eighteenth century (Underdown 2000: 74–8; Borsay [1989] 2002: 173–5). Moreover, as in Great Britain and the Holy Roman Empire, landlords in France offered prizes for such competitions (Beck 1997: 87). Whether innkeepers in England—not least because they enjoyed a higher social status than those on the continent—played a central role in the development of modern sport, as Peter Clark supposes (2016: 82f.), can only be conclusively judged when research for the countries of the European mainland matches that undertaken for the British Isles. The examples of bowling and kolf seem to point in a different direction: in 1711, there were at least 658 short and forty-three long bowling alleys in Vienna, mostly connected to taverns. One inn even had thirty-eight bowling lanes (Tanzer 1992: 236, 241f.). Bowling was mainly associated with tradesmen and members of the lower ranks, who met in pubs in small localities outside of the city. However, this is only partly true: the knights’ academy in Kremsmünster, for example, also had bowling in its free hours and, according to Franz Gräffer, bowling was an integral part of bourgeois Sunday outings around 1800. In Zurich and Geneva, bowling was popular as well (Münch [1992] 1998: 378; see fig. 2.8). Places for playing kolf were equally widespread and closely connected to publicans: Amsterdam counted seventy-four alleys at the end of the eighteenth century and another 136 in the surrounding area. Rotterdam had fifty-four Kolfbaanen and there were forty-six in and around Leiden; twenty-one existed in Utrecht, sixteen in Den Haag, twelve in Haarlem and twenty-four in other places. Altogether, a brochure of 1792 listed 383 Kolfbaanen (Verhandeling 1792: 45–62; Vieth 1794–1818, 1: 357; cf. Behringer, Chapter 4 in this volume), indicating that the quantitative dimensions of sports on the continent have not yet been fully grasped. More and more often, however, facilities not only consisted of one sporting venue, but of entire entertainment complexes. For instance, at the end of the eighteenth century, the tea gardens at the Belvidere in Pentonville Road, London, maintained a bowling green, a racket court, and facilities for skittles, quoits, and billiards, while the proprietor of the Peerless Pool, William Kemp, kept a pleasure bath, where swimming instructors taught the customers, in addition to a bowling green (Curl 2010: 79–81, 144–9; Schattner 2014: 206f.). Similarly, in Manchester, a bowling green, a fighting arena for cockfights, and an assembly room for balls formed an ensemble (Borsay [1989] 2002: 177). Competition between companies was an important motive for offering a wider range of attractions, as the example of London shows. In the 1780s, the Vauxhall Gardens doubled their entrance fee and at the same time added boat

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FIGURE 2.8: Bowling green in the garden at Plainpalais, Geneva, Switzerland, 1796, watercolor by Christian Gottlieb Geissler (1729–1814). Photograph by Dea/G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

races to their entertainments. Other competitors, such as Astley’s Equestrian Amphitheatre, followed suit and began to show boat races too (Brailsford 1999: 106f.). However, the various offerings did not necessarily compete but could also promote each other when entire communities such as spa resorts acted as a collective “leisure industry” (Georgiou and Litherland 2014: 190–2, 195; Schattner 2014: 210, 214f.).

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As this brief overview shows, informal arrangements remained important for sports between 1650 and 1800. New developments originated in particular from the cities, where commercial sports facilities were increasingly to be found. On the one hand, sports architecture detached itself from aristocratic courts as the formerly most important patron and increasingly addressed a free market. On the other hand, in order to be competitive, urban venues were often multifunctional sites that combined various leisure activities and were thus less recognizable as dedicated sports facilities. Nevertheless, there were more commercial sports offerings between 1650 and 1800 than ever before. The coexistence of traditional sports and newly created ones in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made England less distinct from the continent than a retrospective reconstruction of modern developments would have us believe, but only in-depth research for the European continent can show whether urban offerings in other European countries were comparable to those in England or not (cf. the introduction to this volume).

CONCLUSION Did the spatial institutionalization and commercialization of sports expand their accessibility to wider sections of the population or were new exclusions associated with this? At first glance, since there were no financial hurdles to overcome, sports in the churchyard or village green were more accessible to all community members than any of the commercial offerings. At the same time, however, these informal sports never allowed women the same form of participation as men—apart from regular smock races. From a certain age on, women were far more likely to be found among the spectators than among the active participants. In many cases, a distinction was also according to sport: whereas young women and children played stoolball, young and middle-aged men played fives, tennis, or football (Schattner 2016: 72). On the other hand, the sports facilities increasingly associated with inns in the course of commercialization were much more problematic for a woman’s reputation than the churchyard, where everyone—young and old, rich and poor—met in public (Schattner 2016: 78f.). The close connection between inns and sport thus made it more difficult for women to participate, while exclusive sports facilities—such as the Paris swimming school or the British archery clubs—opened up some sports to women of the upper classes for the first time, because they offered a comparatively sheltered space (Thiébault 1893: 200; Brailsford 1999: 156; Mallinckrodt 2019a: 324, 337f.). From a gender-historical perspective, findings therefore have to be differentiated according to age, status, and type of sport. From a socio-historical perspective, numerous commercial sports facilities were aimed at a higher-class public and either excluded the lower ranks explicitly or by imposing financial hurdles. However, this was not the case for

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all sports and forms of participation. Instead, a number of sports providers such as the organizers of boxing fights, horse races, and cricket matches relied on great spectator crowds (Brailsford 1999: 84). The commercialization of sports led to a greater number of sports facilities than ever before, and the increased purchasing power of the middle and lower classes meant that more and more people could also access them—if they were not excluded by explicit regulation. Hence, this development, which mainly originated in the cities, contributed to a greater spread of sports, especially since it did not suppress traditional forms of sports, but rather stood alongside them and only replaced them in the longer term. Translation by Roisin Cronin

CHAPTER THREE

Products, Training, and Technology DAVE DAY

The period from 1650 to 1800 witnessed important transformations in political structures, ideological systems, popular culture, and ordinary life in Britain, primarily as the result of the economic and demographic outcomes of increasing industrialization, which resulted in the development of factories and the expansion of urban conurbations. Although agricultural products continued to be the chief source of income, commercial interests grew in importance as masters in the craft guilds became capitalist employers and the gentry, a concept representing a lower level of the governing class of gentlemen, became more influential. As societal relationships changed, there were concomitant changes in the organization and meanings of games and recreational activities. For Bourg and Gouguet (2005: 4) and Cronin (2014: 30), modern sport emerged in Britain because of an industrial revolution that began in the early eighteenth century and accelerated significantly after the 1760s. However, sports did not develop spontaneously and processes such as emergent capitalism, boundary-making, standardization, codification, and specialization had long been evident (Struna 2000). McClelland (2007) and Kruger (2008) have argued that athletic activities were displaying characteristics of modern sport by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while Behringer (2009) conceptualized this period as a distinct epoch in sports history, due to the high levels of institutionalization and standardization of sport in many western European countries. Tomlinson and Young (2011: 10) suggest that modern sports forms existed well before the eighteenth century and argued that from 1450 sport 77

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became increasingly institutionalized by the creation and codification of rules, the building of dedicated sport spaces, the existence of a European-wide trade in sports equipment, and the emergence of a professional class of athletes, coaches, and officials. Further contradicting the notion that modern sport evolved following industrialization, Guttmann ([1978] 2004: 85) viewed modern sport as a by-product of the scientific revolution of the European enlightenment, and Szymanski (2008) saw this a critical starting point rooted in new forms of associativity. However, Vamplew (2016: 343) has argued convincingly that, while some of its precursors might have originated before widespread industrialization, the institutionalization of sports required further stimuli. As the spatial and temporal parameters of leisure changed for much of the British population and were influenced by the evolution of a triadic model of class, changes in work patterns and religious beliefs, greater urbanization, and increasing societal control, sports became more regulated. Alongside rule development and the growth of sports architecture, there was an increase in the production of sporting goods and equipment, the numbers of specialized teachers, trainers, coaches, and sporting entrepreneurs, and the growth of sports reporting and advertisement (Huggins 2017: 119–20). Allied to this was a change in the perception of the sporting body and an application of industrial discipline to its preparation and presentation. All these factors are considered in this chapter, which reflects Vamplew’s view that the term sports product incorporates the player product, that is, games and their associated rules, equipment and costume, instruction and assistance, facilities, and clubs; the spectator product, supplied by those facilitating the viewing of sports through the provision of grandstands for example; and the associated product, initiatives such as catering or sports newspapers that were attributable to sports expansion but not directly related (Vamplew 2018). The focus here is on the ways in which these factors emerged in Great Britain, widely regarded as the nation that provided the prototype for subsequent global developments, during the Industrial Revolution. This was a critical period in the commercialization and rationalization of existing sports and the emergence of new sports forms.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND COMMODIFICATION In the mid-eighteenth century, the English economy began an accelerated structural transformation in which industry became more prominent. Industrialization affected popular sport because factory work required regular, long hours and necessitated new work patterns (Perkin 1981: 9). The requirements of the capitalist economy for a large, locally available, and disciplined workforce meant that many traditional rural sports and sporting occasions were either impossible in the urban context or were incompatible with the industrial economy. What workers did in their free time was important to

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employers concerned about productivity (Vamplew 1998: 25) and sports without time constraints, such as baiting and cockfighting, were anachronisms in an industrial society dependent upon punctuality (Krzemienski 2004: 171–3). Recreational opportunities in the early industrial cities and towns were few and open space was at a premium, while time free from work was virtually nonexistent. In urban areas, leisure activities increasingly had to be paid for, and early industrial workers barely received a subsistence income. Conversely, urbanization and industrialization also stimulated sporting participation and widened access to commercial leisure pursuits, since cities held the populations, the communication and transportation networks, the discretionary incomes, and the clearer segments of time that promoters needed. Cities were also the focus of concerns about health, morality, and community, which continually served as rationales for new and reformed sports products (Hardy 1997). Although industrialization contributed to the commercialization of sports, many aspects of sports were already commercialized, emphasizing that it was a recognizable industry, overseen by the involvement of promoters as employers of labor (Vamplew 2016: 344). For Vamplew (2018) these sports entrepreneurs were change agents who attempted to increase the output of the sports industry, improve the consumer experience, or raise interest in sports products by developing new markets and creating new products, be they physical or less tangible, such as the formation of clubs and associations. This process occurred as soon as sports had been recognized for their profit potential and a growing demand for purpose-built sporting facilities had given rise to commercialized tennis courts, bowling alleys, and greens for gentlemen in London at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These facilities were embedded in a wider network of similar semi-public facilities such as alehouses, taverns, and inns, many of them having adjacent spaces where it was possible to play games for which the proprietors provided equipment such as balls, bowls, and cudgels (Schattner 2014: 198, 204). Sports such as bowling, riding, and billiards were considered health-enhancing and curative by seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury physicians, and sports facilities provided places where men could meet. In this respect, bowling greens, tennis courts, and dancing-rooms fulfilled much the same function as coffee houses, assembly rooms, or the baths (Schattner 2014: 208). From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the nobility retreated to spa towns for the summer, and sixteen spas were founded during this period, developments that were closely connected to sports provisions since exercise was considered an essential component of hydrotherapy. Along with tennis and bowling, patrons enjoyed ball games like wind ball and yarn ball, hawking and shooting, horse racing, cudgeling and wrestling matches, and foot races (Schattner 2014: 207; Sul 1999: 151–3). These athletic contests, often associated with festivals or fairs and as additional attractions at race meetings or cricket matches, gradually became

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FIGURE 3.1: Early eighteenth-century lawn bowls. Courtesy of Getty Images.

more frequent. Foot racing, or pedestrianism, required no equipment or outlay, and personal diaries suggest that it was popular during the seventeenth century. Pepys watched a foot race in Hyde Park in 1660 and recorded how all of London was talking of another in July 1663, “run this day on Banstead Downes between Lee, the Duke of Richmond’s footman, and a tyler, a famous runner. And Lee hath beat him; though the King and Duke of York and all men almost did bet three or four to one upon the tyler’s head” (Griffith 1997: 237). Eighteenth-century foot races for both men and women, smock races, such as the one in Thomas Marchant’s fields at Hurstpierpoint in June 1721, were the sites of innumerable wagers in towns, as well as featuring in the Cotswold Games. Sometimes races were highly organized, like the two-mile events held during Marlborough Races in 1739, for which men paid an entrance fee of half a crown, women one shilling. By this time, some London tracks were already charging for admission and team races were not unknown, with a Sandwich team easily defeating a Canterbury team in 1769 (Underdown 2000: 27). Running contests became widely publicized events, often attracting crowds of many thousands among whom heavy betting was commonplace, and pedestrianism was a recognized working profession. Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedestrians were servants, tradesmen, or farmers, and the best runners were often retained by aristocratic patrons, such as the Duke of

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Queensberry who reputedly “kept running footmen . . . he was in the habit, before engaging them, of trying their paces . . . up and down Piccadilly . . . watching and timing them from his balcony” (Thoms 1856: 9). He subsequently put them under the guidance of a professional trainer to prepare them for competition, treating them as “he would a running horse, under like discipline” (Sinclair 1806: 10). By the eighteenth century, provision for sport appeared in the form of swimming baths, riding schools, fencing academies, lessons in the pugilistic art, and boats for hire. London promoters saw profitable opportunities in real tennis, and a new court in Great Windmill Street in 1743 charged patrons up to two shillings a set, with the use of a billiard table while they were waiting. Thomas Higginson offered both tennis and fives at his court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he gave lessons and sold balls and rackets (Underdown 2000: 53). Ancient martial traditions were allied to modern commercial practices with wrestling becoming both sport and spectacle, as carnival wrestling existed parallel to wrestling as an athletic contest (Lindaman 2000). Fencing was increasingly promoted as a skill that contributed to the development of a polite gentleman, and Domenico Angelo, whose fencing school was established at Carlisle House in 1763, emphasized its civilizing benefits for persons of rank in “giving them additional strength of body, proper confidence, grace, activity, and address; enabling them, likewise, to pursue other exercises with greater facility” (Shoemaker 2002: 528–30).

PATRONAGE, PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PROVISION Inevitably, social class played a major role in the emergence and development of organized sports. Although urbanization provided sports entrepreneurs with concentrated markets, income levels, even in the eighteenth century, were such that popular sports remained dependent upon patronage. After property, this was the most important factor in determining status, and the number of “friends” he could “oblige” reflected a man’s position in society (Perkin 1981: 23, 45). Sports were both highly political and highly politicized for the English elite. Culturally and politically, sports had many uses and meanings and, if used carefully, could connect a gentleman to the seat of power. Socially, sports were valuable as a method of establishing and consolidating social networks so, while they were expensive in time, effort, and money, sports were important markers for the contemporary gentleman (Williams 2008: 389). Over time, gentlemanly sports became central to the notion of British high culture, and upper-class sports were associated with traditional rural values, patriotism, and national strength by the 1780s. Sporting spirit was supposedly synonymous with national spirit, helping to foster the moral, economic, and physical strength of the landed classes, and the involvement of the social elite gave organized sports a

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high profile (Huggins 2008: 364). Since sporting rituals were an occasion for the improvement of morality and order, the social elite could utilize these to demonstrate their influence. Sharing pastimes with the commoners did not impair their dignity since they could reinforce the hierarchy through a variety of devices, such as physical segregation, with the fashionable sitting in privileged positions close to the action (Sul 2000: 173, 176), in ringside positions at boxing, or paying to sit in the grandstands at racecourses (Vamplew 2018). Upper-class “contentments” demanded large spaces and placed heavy demands on the environment. Horses, hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing, and cockfighting, as well as archery, bowls, and tennis had a substantial impact on the rural landscape, as well as on country-house architecture (Huggins 2008: 364). Great mansions were surrounded by extensive landed estates, which were exploited for field sports, and the stable blocks and kennels attached to many great houses reflected hunting hobbies as well as transport needs. Sometimes private trainers trained horses on the estates and sometimes land was utilized for a stud farm. From the eighteenth century onwards, hunting, shooting, or fishing lodges, with up to twenty beds and stables for fifteen to twenty horses, were built on estates, and billiard rooms began to appear in country houses. Access to such spaces marked out and maintained the hierarchy, sustaining social and gender order (Huggins 2008: 372–5; 2017: 120–2), although there are hints that aristocratic women could take up falconry and play tennis as well as enjoying coursing, deer hunting, angling, and archery. Queen Elizabeth I was a keen sportswoman, a capable and enthusiastic rider who regularly hunted and shot into old age. Queen Anne kenneled the Royal Buckhounds in Windsor Forest and hunted herself, while the royal court, including women, hunted deer in Richmond New Park in October 1734 (The London Journal, October 19, 1734). However, while the succession of these two queens had an impact both on the structure of the court and the delivery of royal sports, it is questionable that this had any significant impact upon the participation of elite women in sports. While there does not seem to have been any rigidly prescriptive code limiting women’s participation, although they were expected to ride side-saddle, women do appear to have occupied a marginal position on the hunting field, and during the eighteenth century, when the new sport of foxhunting emerged, there was some opposition to their presence. Although horse racing always attracted upper-class women spectators to the more exclusive grandstands, their open active participation as jockeys or trainers was unacceptable (Huggins 2008: 381–2). Clubs and Associations Szymanski (2008) locates the origin of English sports within eighteenth-century associativity rather than in nineteenth-century industrialization and, from the

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late seventeenth century onward, the voluntary associations and clubs formed by the elite and upper middling groups facilitated the construction of a sporting culture. Whether they were dedicated to debating, the delights of passing wind, or to sporting activities, voluntary associations generated spaces which helped to construct relationships of rivalry and bonding between males. Coursing clubs emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century with Swaffham Coursing Club in Norfolk being formed by George Walpole, the third Earl of Orford, in 1776, Ashdown Park Club was founded by Lord Craven in 1780, and Yorkshire’s Malton Club in 1781. A skating club was established in Edinburgh in 1742, and the first handbook on figure skating was published in London thirty years later. In curling, one of the earliest recorded clubs was Muthill, of Perth, founded in 1739, while England’s first yacht club, the Cumberland Fleet, later The Royal Thames Yacht Club, came into being in 1775. Falconry was revitalized when Walpole and Colonel Thornton founded the Falconers Club in 1771. The Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was established in 1744 and golf clubs such as the Knuckle Club, which became Blackheath Golf Club in 1822, were formed in England. Archery societies were created in Darlington in 1758, in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1755, and in Wharfedale in 1737, and Sir Ashton Lever subsequently formed the Toxophilite Society in 1781. By 1791, the now Royal Toxophilites had a membership of 168 and a small cottage industry had developed manufacturing bows, arrows, and other equipment (Johnes 2004: 195–6). The driving force behind the establishment of rules, clubs, competitions, specialized venues, and professional performers was a passion for gambling. Aristocrats and gentry set out to win and the prospect of winning a bet could add to the excitement of watching the contest, but only if the initial odds of winning were evenly balanced. This required a high organizational level so the first codifications of sporting rules—Broughton’s rules for boxing in 1743, the Cricket Club’s laws of 1744, and the Jockey Club’s rules of 1752—were by eighteenth-century clubmen for games that involved serious betting. Horse racing began to be controlled by the Jockey Club, formed about 1750, by owners and breeders meeting at the Star and Garter coffeehouse in Pall Mall, after which racing became more regulated, and the St. Leger (1778), the Oaks (1779), and the Derby (1780) had been established by the end of the century. In 1766, Richard Tattersall opened premises to auction horses at Hyde Park Corner, London, then purchased the adjacent Turf Inn and rebuilt it to include a “subscription room” in which clients could place and settle bets. The English Racing Calendar was established in 1773 and the Stud Book was first published by Messrs Weatherby in 1791. Cricket had been played under unwritten rules before they were written down in the articles of agreement for a match in 1727, which specified time, place, stakes, numbers on each side, and how to settle disputes. The White Conduit, an offshoot of an aristocratic club that also met

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at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, issued both the 1744 Laws of Cricket, which proscribed features such as the length of the pitch, size of the wickets, and forms of dismissal, as well as the 1774 revisions, while their ground at White Conduit House in Islington became the venue for big matches in London (Underwood 2000: 158–9). The club eventually became the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which, like the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R and A), was not set up initially to govern the sport, but, because of the prestige of their members, they invariably settled disputes, drew up agreements on rules or etiquette, and gradually assumed control. Commercial Provision During the eighteenth century, British elite patronage of popular recreation declined, partly because of enclosure and other changes in the agricultural economy that weakened gentry-tenant bonds (Holt 1989 [1992]). The middle and professional classes in cricket and the commercial entertainers in prizefighting took over as promoters, making both players and paying spectators more important. Cricket, pedestrianism, prizefighting, rowing, and horse racing had “a long history of mass spectating, profit-seeking promoters, paid performers, stake-money contests and gambling” (Tranter 1998: 14–15) and they could draw five-figure crowds by the 1760s, although crowds at these pre-railway events were large partly because they were rare occurrences and partly because they were held on unenclosed land, where attendance was free (Huggins and Tolson 2001). However, specialist facilities which required payment were already in existence in and around major cities. There were indoor riding arenas, bear and bullbaiting arenas, cockpits, bowling greens, inns, and taverns, and sports buildings erected specifically for ball games (Huggins 2017: 120–2), while marathon pedestrian events gradually moved away from point-to-point challenges, with their varying terrains, gradients, and surfaces, to the use of measured courses and specialized running areas (Brailsford 1999: 204). The recreations of working-class males had traditionally been restricted to the pleasures of the tavern. Urban inns and alehouses were often specialized in terms of their clientele, not merely stratified in serving different ranks of society but specifically catering for occupations and trades, and they were places where men were paid as well as where they spent some of their wages. Eighteenthcentury landlords were significant leisure entrepreneurs, motivated by the profits from the sales of food and drink that accompanied sporting activities, and they catered for a repertoire of amusements, including cockfighting, bullbaiting, horse racing, dancing contests, and games of skill and strength. Ten prison-bars enjoyed popularity in London in the 1740s, and contestants took the game seriously. When two Cheshire champions played ten of the rest of England in 1744, the Cheshire men walked off and would only agree to a rematch if their opponents promised to accept the umpires’ decisions

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(Underdown 2000: 81–2). Aficionados of the turf or prizefighting found pubs which were centers for these activities, and increasing numbers of boxing and wrestling contests were promoted and advertised (Golby and Purdue 1999: 40), while alternative pedestrian facilities were frequently provided by innkeepers as the countryside was industrially developed (Lile 2000). Sunday was the busiest day of the week for the inns and alehouses on the outskirts of London, many of which provided sports such as duck hunting, dogfighting, and badger baiting (Brailsford 1984b). Continuity and change were closely intertwined in martial practices, which were susceptible to variations in the social climate and context, as well as technological developments. The decline of archery as an essential skill, for example, was the result of a reduction in the bow’s usefulness as a weapon of war, although public swordplay performances remained visible at fairs and in many provincial towns after the Restoration. Prizefights for money attracted large crowds as professional swordsmen developed traveling companies, holding contests in inn-yards and on the stage. Bands of “gladiators” paraded the streets, preceded by a drummer, and fought shows with blunted, flat swords and bucklers (Misson [1697] 1719: 307). Though governed by strict rules, the contests were often bloody affairs. Pepys describes seeing one man so cut about the head and legs in 1663 that “he was all over blood” while another match in 1667 resulted in a brawl between rival supporters (Griffith 1997: 218, 534). In 1705, Thomas Brown graphically described an exhibition at the bear-garden when two men “cut large Collops out of one another to divert the Mob, and make Work for the Suregeons [sic]” (Guttman 1985: 114). Sporting Animals Given the levels of violence tolerated between sporting humans, it is little surprise that animals were treated as objects for sport and entertainment. Hunting wild animals as a pastime had evolved into sharply divided classconscious sports, and hunting knowledge had become a signifier of gentility. The Duke of Norfolk had drawn up rules for coursing with greyhounds during Elizabeth’s reign, and coursing matches, properly judged by the “Laws of the Leash,” were frequent, while angling was increasingly supported by informed and technical literature. Sports facilities needed specialized staff and animal sports were labor-intensive, with hunting requiring kennel staff and huntsmen, along with park-keepers to maintain the hunting grounds. In addition, a wide range of specialist sporting equipment was essential, and supplying the needs of the sporting elite became big business. Falconry was notable for its international trade in hawks, and there was a market in providing the tools associated with the sport (Williams 2008: 398). Hawking vied with hunting as a noble sport, and falconry retained its high status for some time, aided by a printing press that produced treatises on manning, feeding, hooding, and training, but the

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FIGURE 3.2: London, bullbaiting, print, 1816. Photograph by Universal History Archive, courtesy of Getty Images.

sport had declined by the end of the seventeenth century when estate workers were diverted towards gamekeeping and servicing guns and dogs as gentlemen began to compete as marksmen (Grassby 1997). The training of animals for baiting by dogs was undertaken by “jugglers,” professional entertainers, and several places in London were specifically set aside for baiting, with the Paris Garden in Southwark containing two bear gardens. Although curbs were introduced during the Commonwealth, bearbaiting, bullbaiting, and dogfighting were all revived as popular pastimes after the Restoration (Taylor 2004: 45). Considerable care was devoted to the breeding and training of dogs for ratting contests and dogfights, which might last up to six hours. Bulldogs were crossed with terriers to obtain the best strain and dogs were trained so finely that it was necessary to blanket and muzzle them during their exercise (Wymer 1949: 211). Houghton (1694) noted that large wagers attended bullbaiting contests and that members of the aristocracy, as well as the general populace, traveled great distances to spectate. Cockfighting also attracted aristocratic as well as plebeian spectators. It was a highly organized sport, with regular matches fought on a county basis, and one which offered little opportunity for cheating. While each fight was termed a battle, several battles, taken collectively, constituted a main. Before the first battle, owners

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provided the referee with lists showing the names and weights of their contestants, and he would match them to prepare his “match-bill” (Wymer 1949: 84–92, 210–11). In horse racing, the first professional trainer, Tregonwell Frampton, appeared at Newmarket in the time of Charles II and he dominated the Newmarket scene for almost fifty years, receiving an annual stipend of £1,000 to look after the royal horses from 1700. Equestrian training was not limited to patrons of the turf. Philip Astley capitalized on his army training by working as a riding instructor and by performing as a trick-rider. By 1768, his company had established a new genre of entertainment comprising feats of physical skill based in an equestrian circle, the fifth display of trick-riding to be set up around London since Thomas Johnston had exhibited feats of agility on horseback ten years earlier. Circus equestrians advertised riding lessons at a price affordable to many and published popular riding and horse-breaking manuals. Their skills were widely appreciated, and they derived honorary status from being experts and tutors in a prime accomplishment of gentlemen. They also reinforced notions of effective progress through rational training techniques and a more enlightened understanding of animals than their predecessors (Kwint 2002: 75, 77, 84, 89).

FIGURE 3.3: An eighteenth-century horse riding school. Photograph by Lebrecht Authors, courtesy of Alamy.

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PROFESSIONAL SPORTSMEN AND ENTREPRENEURS While equestrian events continued to be supported by all levels of society, animal blood sports ran counter to the bourgeois work ethic by encouraging drunkenness, gambling, and absenteeism. By 1800, the cockpit at St. James was being used for state meetings, the two bullrings in Nottingham had gone out of use, and butchers were no longer providing bulls for baiting. As blood sports came under pressure from changing sensibilities, the human performer moved to center stage. Making a living as an athlete often became a feature of most sports as soon as they achieved some form of organization. Real tennis professionals were working in France by the late sixteenth century, and the existence of seventeenth-century professionals in billiards and tennis suggests that these activities could be profitable. Bowls was a game where skilled players and matchmakers made a living from its regulation in the Stuart period (Henricks 1991: 114–15), while eighteenth-century fives player John Cavanagh made money by playing matches at Copenhagen house for wagers and dinners (Watson 1903: 419–21). Other exponents included Powell, who filled his gallery in the court in St. Martin’s Street at half-a-crown a head, and John Davies, the racket, tennis, and fives player (Egan 1823: 42–7). Sports were a way of augmenting incomes for gentlemen of limited means, such as Richard Bouchier, who “if he could have lived upon two or three hundred a year the tennis courts might have maintained him” and who won considerable sums not so much by his skill, but by “his dexterity in hiding it” (Birley 1996: 16). By the eighteenth century, the practice of making money from sport as a promoter or a performer was commonplace. The growing importance of gate money led naturally to greater numbers of professional performers, and the best players were in increasing demand so that, by the end of the century, the freelance professional sportsman was as common as the hired man. The aristocracy had no problem with the fact that lower-class men could earn a living by their sporting prowess, since this was merely a natural extension of a social order full of inequalities, and so professional sport was neither morally nor socially suspect. Rowing races began with professional watermen competing against each other for wagers and, as their skill developed, watermen began to challenge one another to matches of £200 or more a side. They also instituted regattas, with the annual Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race, rowed first in 1717, becoming notable for its fine livery prize. In June 1775, several watermen held an open regatta before Ranelagh Gardens, and formal elite regattas, frequently using watermen to steer, became popular on the Thames in the late eighteenth century (Wymer 1949: 173; Underdown 2000: 82). Golf, horse racing, cricket, pedestrianism, and pugilism all had paid performers by the mid-eighteenth century, controlled by an aristocracy who often made money from sport but who could also afford to lose it.

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Boxing As a sport, prizefighting was further advanced than pedestrianism, because it had nationally recognized written rules and a championship, and pugilism gained a strong hold upon men of all classes in eighteenth-century Britain at a time when “manly males” were supposedly under threat from the dissipating effects of luxury and its effeminizing consequences. During the century, a strong link developed between boxing and national identity, as England, especially London, became a cosmopolitan capital of the boxing world. Through their powerful physiques and calm attitudes, fighters represented an ideal of English manhood that for some commentators highlighted sturdiness, courage, and manliness (Krzemienski 2004: 166–7, 170). Ruti Ungar argues that boxing played a role in constructing and contesting class hierarchies at a time of heightened social tensions and that it inculcated supposedly English manly characteristics of humanity, fairness, and magnanimity towards a fallen enemy (2011: 368, 375–6). Boxing was viewed as an antidote to the effeminizing influences of corruption and money on the nation, and as an important means to national military strength. It became a fashion perhaps experienced as keenly by contemporary men of all classes as the “culture of sensibility” that describes this period of increasing politeness in society. Paradoxically, although gentlemen would not

FIGURE 3.4: Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836). Photography by Jewish Chronicle, courtesy of Getty Images.

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countenance prizefighting, knowledge of how to fight was an essential skill for those who wanted to be considered part of the fashionable world and to demonstrate their masculinity (Radford 2001: 61–2). Downing (2010: 328–9) has argued that men across the social spectrum found in the “gentleman boxer” a resolution to the dichotomy between politeness and manliness and that boxing provided an arena in which men debated the very nature of masculinity, leading to a change in attitudes towards violence. Shoemaker (2002: 525–35) found that new rules and conventions and the changing role of seconds led to fewer injuries and fatalities in duels, and boxing practices underwent similar changes. Elias and Dunning (1986: 150–1) call this process of civilizing pastimes “sportization,” a concept that encapsulates an increasing emphasis on fairness, rules, orderliness, and self-discipline. For Elias and Dunning, the introduction of sports demonstrates a clear civilizing process in the modern era because sports, through their codes of conduct and ordered structures, tend to transform violent and barbaric nature into a more civilized manner. Cricket In the eighteenth century, the substantial financial support given by aristocrats and gentry to cricket was central to its acceptance as a sport. The key period was from the early 1740s, when Charles Lennox, the second Duke of Richmond, sponsored the village team of Slindon, Sussex, and used cricket to court

FIGURE 3.5: The Royal Academy Club playing cricket in Marylebone Fields, engraving after Francis Hayman (1708–76). Photograph by Universal History Archive, courtesy of Getty Images.

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popularity with county voters. Noble involvement transformed cricket from an informal, rural pastime into an organized, professional sport. The Marylebone Cricket Club, with aristocratic and gentry members, was founded in 1788 (Huggins 2008: 369), by which time cricket was professional, popular, and commercial. Hambledon Cricket Club in Hampshire regularly played for stake money of £500 to 1,000 guineas and they drew crowds of up to 20,000. Comparable crowds could be seen at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury Square, while similar stakes were played for at Goodwood, Guildford, Chertsey, Moulsey Hurst, Sevenoaks, and London (Radford 2001: 56). Generally, though, cricket clubs were formed for the benefit of members who paid annual subscriptions to maintain them. Clubs might play competitive matches or there might only be weekly games in which members played against each other, sometimes incorporating professionals to improve the standard of play. At Coxheath, near Maidstone, members decided how professionals should be paid and made other regulations about the weekly sessions. The club paid 5s to each professional on the winning side, 2s.6d. to the losers; they would also get their expenses for horse hire, plus 1s.6d. for food and drink. In 1787, Thomas Lord laid out a ground near Dorset Square, the first of three locations for Lord’s Ground, moving in 1814 to the present site off St. John’s Wood Road. Like George Smith at the Artillery Ground, Lord did well out of selling refreshments at the tavern adjacent to the cricket field and the cricketing contacts he made helped promote his subsequent wine business (Underdown 2000: 126–9, 160). Noblemen strengthened their own cricket teams by employing individuals because of their cricketing ability, and these players were among the earliest full-time professionals. Thomas Waymark, a groom who was paid 7s a week plus board, played for the Duke of Richmond as early as 1727 and at Christmas 1729, he was given 10s.6d. “to buy shoes and stockings” (Underdown 2000: 69). The Duke of Dorset engaged cricketers Brown and Miller as gamekeepers, Minshul as a gardener, and William Pattenden, who was paid £9 a year, as a shepherd, while the Earl of Tankerville employed William Yalden, a wicketkeeper for Surrey and England, “Lumpy” Stevens as a gardener, and William Bedster as a butler (Sandiford 1998: 101). There were also independent players, and as spectatorship numbers rose the cost of hiring professionals and paying bonuses increased. William Beldham received five guineas for a win and three for a defeat in the 1780s; twenty years later, this had increased to six guineas for a win and four for a defeat. Five guineas for three days’ work in the 1780s was five times what a London artisan and more than twenty times what an agricultural laborer would have earned in the same time. This was enough to take some cricketers out of menial occupations, although many professionals ensured they first mastered another craft or trade. By the 1790s, Beldham considered that serious cricket was nearly completely professional and that even some of the gentry had made it their profession by

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betting on their own or others’ performances. Lord Frederick Beauclerk, the best amateur batsman of the day, said that he made roughly 600 guineas a year out of the game (Underdown 2000: 69–70, 119–20, 149, 160, 163).

PEDAGOGY, TRAINING, AND INSTRUCTION One innovative feature of the Hambledon Cricket Club was the attention given to improving performance, through carefully organized practices and coaching from gingerbread baker Harry Hall. As the amount of competition increased, the numbers of professional sportsmen grew and the need to prepare properly under a coach or trainer became more important, both in terms of skill development and in respect of physical and psychological training. Instruction and assistance came as goods, in the form of manuals, rule books, and performance enabling substances, and as services, such as coaching, teaching, and scientific advice. Manuals and Newspapers The aspirations of the middling and “better” sorts of eighteenth-century provincial society brought together notions of gentility and “politeness,” a contested concept with fluid meanings that changed over time, but which remained a model of behavior that distinguished and justified the position of a gentlemanly elite. Courtesy writers suggested that gentlemen should maintain their rank through manners, highlighting dignity, easy assurance, repression of emotional display, and distinguished speech, while gentlewomen should have “dignified ease and graceful control,” good table manners, and diverting conversation (Vickery 1998: 202). Even with a readership limited to a literate noble and bourgeois clientele, McClelland (2015: 26–7) has already traced at least 400 instruction manuals available in Europe between 1400 and 1650 and treatises on recreation continued to multiply with books on falconry, chess, poetry writing, and meat carving that taught gentlemen how to do some of the things a gentleman ought to know (Marfany 1997). The importance of knowing “how do the right thing” was reflected in later manuals on dueling etiquette, which taught people how to “kill one another politely” (Marshall 1993: 279). The existence of a substantial literature in many sports suggests that those involved, including trainers, were literate. Even in the later seventeenth century about 60 percent of the emerging middle classes were literate, and about 15–20 percent of Englishmen from the lower classes could sign their names, while many more could read than could write (Cressy 1977). Huggins (2018: 254– 66) notes that some horse trainers were highly literate and numerate, and that these specialized, professional individuals were often able to generate sufficient wealth through a variety of business strategies to become landowners and join the lower gentry.

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The expansion of the printing presses helped disseminate sporting knowledge, not least through the medium of newspapers, which first appeared in mainland Europe and then in Britain, where there were twelve London newspapers and twenty-four provincial papers by the 1720s (Huggins 2017). Stobart (2008) drew on a survey of newspaper advertisements and trade card articles to examine the ways in which eighteenth-century advertisements helped to spread notions of politeness. While advertisements for books and patent medicines formed the largest proportion, Ferdinand suggested that they declined in relative numbers through the middle decades of the century, while notices placed by local tradesmen and professionals offering goods, services, or leisure activities grew from 17 percent to 28 percent (Ferdinand 1993: 398). Newspaper advertisements for public houses to let in London show that bowling and other games such as skittles, shuffleboard, and billiards remained an important feature of the eighteenth-century service trade. The proprietor of the Peerless Pool, William Kemp, kept a pleasure bath, where swimming instructors taught the customers, in addition to a bowling green, while Thomas Higginson placed enough newspaper advertisements for tennis and fives in London between 1742 and 1760 to suggest he was a successful leisure entrepreneur (Schattner 2014: 203–6). Specialized sporting magazines also emerged in Britain from the late eighteenth century, although they were expensive, catered for a select market, and were London-based (Vamplew 2016: 346). Coaching and Teaching In the early part of this period, it was the courtly arts that benefitted from specialist instruction. The royal families of Europe recruited Italians as masters of ceremony, fencing masters, and riding instructors, and at the French court before the Revolution, dancing masters taught young gentlemen how to control their movements and to perform gestures elegantly and gracefully (Perkin 1981: 24). Fencing became a difficult, exclusive, and highly cultivated sport as the course of a fencing match was analyzed and broken down into individual and combined movements. The rules were precise, and emphasis was laid on elegance and graceful harmony of movement. In riding schools and academies, private riding masters taught new fashions to aristocrats. To achieve elegant horsemanship the horse was expected to perform precisely measured steps as though dancing. This required riders to undertake special exercises, voltige, training for which focused on skill and agility using various types of equipment, including a wooden horse that eventually evolved into a gymnastic “horse” with two handles (Charles 1981: 45). Notions of achievement, discipline, and measurement are all discernible in the approaches taken to prepare the sporting body, a process of instrumental rationalization of the human body and movement linked partly to the industrialization of the workplace, that had been stimulated by Descartes’ A

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Treatise on Man (posthumous 1662/1664). Within the animal sports, trainers focused on a disciplinary process that involved balancing humors by removing wastes and establishing an appropriate diet. Humoral theory held that bodies were comprised of the four humors of earth, fire, water, and air, each having its associated characteristic of melancholy, choler, phlegm, or blood. The work of the trainer was to identify humoral imbalances and redress them through a program of diet, exercise, and medication. In more advanced cases, humors were removed rapidly through bloodletting or purging to facilitate solid elimination. Writing at the end of the seventeenth century, Gervase Markham suggested that it would take between one and two months to get an overweight horse into racing condition, and six-week preparatory periods, divided into two-week phases, were often used to get a horse ready for hunting or racing. Over the course of the next century, horse training developed established discourses about horse care and preparation, articulated in several texts that were available to owners, farriers, grooms, and trainers (Curth 2013). Horses were regularly “purged” to clear the inner gut, done mildly after a gallop or more intensively to get rid of infections and reduce weight. Andrew Cockinne was “physicking” horses at Newmarket in 1675, and training reports show that trainers would administer doses of physic and use liniment and medicines (Huggins 2018). Exercise and diet were important since diets were designed to minimize the build-up of gross humors while exercise allowed the processes of nutrition to work properly and for humors to be eliminated naturally. The systematic use of sweats, either through exercise or artificial

FIGURE 3.6: Hambletonian by George Stubbs, c. 1800. Photograph by Picturenow, courtesy of Getty Images.

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heating, was also critical. Three- or four-mile sweating gallops at about half pace under heavy blankets reduced fat and cleansed the pores of dirt. Afterwards the sweat was scraped off with “sweat slippers” at a stable or rubbing house. The more that the horse was exercised within its capabilities, the better that wastes were flushed out, thus restoring humoral balance, maintaining good health, developing wind, and improving racing performance. Gamecocks were also rigorously trained, and when only a few months old they would be sent out to “walks,” or training-farms, before starting a fighting career in their third year. One method of sparring was to cover the heels with “hots,” rolls of leather, and set them on a straw bed to fight just long enough to be sure of heating their bodies and breaking down surplus fat. This would be followed by a course of “sweating,” when they were fed with a mixture of sugarcandy, chopped rosemary, and butter, before being shut in a deep basket of straw until early evening, when the “feeder” would lick the eyes and head of each before placing them in their pens. Finally, the feeder would fill the troughs with square-cut manchet and “piss therein and let them feed whilst the urine is hot; for this will cause their scouring to work, and will wonderfully cleanse both head and body” (Wymer 1949: 91). For thirty to fifty days before a main fight, the bird was specially conditioned. To toughen its body, it was given daily baths and massaged with a mixture of alcohol and ammonia; to increase stamina and aggressiveness, it was fed a special, often secret, diet, while in competition, cocks had silver spurs and their beaks and claws were sharpened (Brasch 1986: 78). As a more competitive sports body culture developed, traditional training practices were replicated by many trainers of pugilists and pedestrians. Professional fighters were the focus of fierce regional loyalties and a champion could make a good living, not simply from purses and the rewards of his backers, but by setting up a gymnasium and instructing the wealthy in the science of selfdefense or by retiring as the owner of a public house frequented by supporters of “the fancy” (Golby and Purdue 1999: 74). Popular portraits of boxers displayed both male poise and power, and boxers marketed their diet and training regimes to elite men as a means of producing a muscular but elegant physique (Begiato 2016: 140–1). James Figg, who kept the “Adam and Eve” inn in what is now Tottenham Court Road, taught “Ye Noble Science of Defence,” a realistic form of fighting with cudgel and fist. His business card, engraved by William Hogarth, advertised that he taught small-sword, backsword, and quarterstaff, and he exhibited “Foil, Back-sword, Cudgel, and Fist” at the amphitheater he opened in 1719, as well as at Southwark Fair, to audiences that often included British and continental aristocrats (Guttmann 1985: 115). One of his pupils, John Broughton, a waterman and the 1730 winner of Doggett’s Coat and Badge, subsequently formed his own amphitheater near Tottenham Court Road, offering fencing matches and cudgel-play, “to divert the men till the house fills” (Underdown 2000: 79). Prizefighting also took place at the

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tennis court in St. James’s Street. When Broughton fought Jem Slack in 1750, 200 reserved tickets at £1.10s.6d. each had been sold and £130 taken at the door, all won by Slack, plus another £100 from a wager (Underdown 2000: 79). Another entrepreneur, George Taylor, second only to Broughton as the best boxer of the age, became proprietor of “The Great Booth at Tottenham-Court” but relinquished it following the success of Broughton’s establishment (Gee 1998: 19). All these men made money from teaching boxing skills and conducting training regimes (see Day 2011, 2012, 2016). The seriousness of pedestrian competition at the end of the eighteenth century meant that there was an increasing demand for the services of exathletes such as Jacky Smith, who lived in the North Riding as a tenant farmer where his father had bred racehorses in the 1750s. Smith made a good living in and around sport for well over thirty years. He had won cups at the Artillery Ground in the 1760s and then gained a considerable reputation as a coach, having acquired a reputation as an expert on training, and he expected his athletes to work hard. After a gentleman “well known amongst the young men of fashion” (Sporting Magazine 1798/9: 165) wagered 500 guineas to walk fifty miles in ten hours over Malton racecourse on January 1, 1798, he underwent a course of training with Smith, who was optimistic of success despite the high odds against him. His principal food was raw meat and eggs, with a pint of Slape ale, and a glass of white Lisbon every morning and evening; he was only allowed to sleep five hours every night, and that with at least half a dozen blankets over him; the remainder of the night he was obliged to spend in a hammock by way of exercise. Commentators wished him success but reminded him that more than one gentleman had “lost their lives by breaking a blood vessel, from too great an exertion” (Sporting Magazine 1798/9: 166).

CONCLUSION During this period, there were elements of both change and continuity in the playing and organization of sports in Great Britain. The process of industrialization clearly stimulated sporting products in all the categories proposed by Vamplew (2018) and involved a shift in the balance of power between classes, but the manly mores underpinning popular recreations continued to find expression and, while new sports and sporting organizations developed, other older, less industrialized forms of sporting activity persisted (Maguire 1986: 266–8). Given the limited range of sources available at the present time, especially with respect to the skilled and unskilled working classes, it is little surprise that many of their histories remain hidden from view. That may continue to be so for the foreseeable future and represents a gap in the historiography that colors the ways in which historians write about sports and leisure in this period. This affects not just the understanding of how leisure

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FIGURE 3.7: A Party Angling, 1789, after George Morland (1763–1804). Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

activities were fitted around working lives but also clouds the narrative surrounding regional and national differences, leading authors to resort to generalized statements that communicate a standardized, and often quite parochial, view of continuity and change. The Anglocentric perspective often proffered for Britain as the originator of organized sports is an example of this approach, as is the widespread assumption that women lacked leisure or sporting opportunities. Gender roles were clearly defined by society at large and, in many cases, this applied to sports (Williams 2008: 406–7), but it is evident that women’s sporting participation in this period has yet to be fully understood. Bath corporation built the Queen’s Bath in the late sixteenth century strictly for the use of women (Sul 1999: 155) and it seems that seventeenth-century licenses for bowling alleys and tennis courts, issued initially to upper-middle-class couples, could be retained by widows to allow them to run the premises on their own, making them very early examples of female sporting entrepreneurs (Schattner 2014: 202–3). At the other end of the social scale, festivals, carnivals, and commercial sports sometimes offered opportunities for plebeian women,

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and there were individuals such as pugilist Elizabeth Stokes who established a professional reputation at the end of the eighteenth century. As the extensive research already conducted into nineteenth-century sports is gradually extended back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as more relevant resources are exposed some of these questions over women’s involvement, the trajectories of global sports processes, and the sporting lives of all those who lived through the period, will hopefully be resolved. An expanding evidence base will also help to inform the debates surrounding the impact of industrialization on the formation of modern sport.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rules and Order WOLFGANG BEHRINGER

Generally speaking, active sportspersons did not consider it necessary to write down or publish the rules of their sports. Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) describes hundreds of disciplines of sport around 1800, in many cases as an eyewitness, and sometimes wonders why nobody ever wrote about that sport (Strutt [1801, rev. 1830] 1898: 156–7). Published rules or orders were the exception, not the rule. On the other hand, more rules and rule books were published between 1650 and 1800 than ever before. But who defined and published these rules, and why? The rules and orders of sports between 1650 and 1800 have not yet been explored systematically. There is not a single publication on the subject. In this chapter I will try to make sense of the sparse evidence and find out how it fits together with our general understanding of the history of sports and society. The organization of sports relates to given infrastructures, media, and the social organization of society. In 1650 the first daily newspapers were printed, focusing on political news, but from 1792 the first sports periodical worldwide, The Sporting Magazine, appeared every month. At the beginning of the period examined here, mail coaches had just been introduced in France, but by its end you could travel from Stockholm to Palermo on schedule. At the beginning the “Providence Plantation” had just been founded and the Dutch had discovered “New Holland”; at the end of the period, the “New England” colonies had constituted themselves as the USA, “New Holland” was about to become the British colony “Australia,” and London had developed into the capital of an empire, the first European city with a million inhabitants. Clubs had become the preferred form of sociability, and sports clubs had started defining the rules of their sports. London harbored up to 3,000 clubs in 1800 (Clark 2000: 131), but freedom of private association was granted in many countries on the 99

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continent only in the course of the nineteenth century (Gierl 2011: 42–57). All these aspects influenced the development and publication of rules.

ORIGINS OF RULES Local sports usually did not need printed rules. The famous sports of central Italy, the palio (Heywood [1904] 1969), bridge-fighting (Davis 1994), stonethrowing (Davis 2004: 113–29), and even competitions like the Venetian regatta, lack any normative records (Crovato and Crovato 2004), though perhaps there are written rules somewhere in the archives, still to be detected. From the sixteenth century onwards we find increasing numbers of rule books being printed, but many of these are prints of earlier manuscripts—for instance, on fencing—or updates of earlier prints, although in modified, amplified, or improved form. This can be demonstrated by the example of football. There are lots of prohibitions of football in English and French sources from the Middle Ages, but rules for these games have never been published, and were only printed for the first time by the student Antonio Scaino (1524–1612), later a famous philosopher, together with the rules of other ballgames such as pallacorda (tennis), pallone, and pallamaglio ([1555] 1984). Scaino points to the fact that calcio fiorentino was a different, more elaborate game, and soon after, the first description of Florentine football—including the rules—was published by Giovanni de’ Bardi, Conte de Vernio (1534–1612), a high-ranking nobleman responsible for court festivities at the court of the Grand-Dukes of Tuscany ([1580] 1978: 127–62). Bardi’s Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino was reprinted several times, with the second edition in 1615 and a third one in 1673. To this latest edition was added a systematic update of the rules by Orazio Capponi, who discusses the appropriate venue, playing time, ceremonies, squad, rules and moves in thirty-four paragraphs (Capponi 1673: 1–4). Bardi’s description was then reprinted, together with Capponi’s update, as part of a massive source collection on Florentine football by the gentleman Pietro di Lorenzo Bini (1689: 1–29). Bini’s collection was published on the occasion of the royal wedding between Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici (1663–1713) and Princess Violante Beatrice of Bavaria (1673–1731), celebrated by a tournament and a football match between a “European” and an “Asian” team; the Europeans won (Bredekamp 2001: 204). However, Florentine football developed further, and in 1718 Settimo Alessandro Salvini published another set of rules (Salvini 1718). Twenty years later Salvini’s rules were published again with some modifications: the scontiatori (destroyers) were now divided into diritti and traversi, and an additional type of player was introduced, the tenitori di palla (Salvini [1739] 1945: 15–20). Presumably the many printings of the rules for Florentine football were due to demand from tourists, Florence being one of the main attractions in Italy on the Grand Tour. In 1739 games were

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staged for the wedding of Maria Theresa of Austria and her husband Franz Stephan of Lorraine, the later Holy Roman Emperor, who had just inherited the Grand Duchy of Tuscany after the extinction of the Medici dynasty. Florentine calcio seemed so extraordinary that its rules were even printed in European handbooks for political ceremonies (Lünig 1720: 1070). The printing of rules still does not say much about their origins. Rules—as still common among many amateurs—were agreed upon by the players, and then turned into local customs. This could be done privately, within urban confraternities, or within widespread semi-official organizations, as early modern shooting and fencing societies. Clubs or national and international organizations did not yet exist. On the occasion of regional or interregional sports meetings, the rules were compiled and published by the organizing committees. Since modern means of communication did not yet exist, the rules—set up by organizing committees for transregional, official events—were simply added to the letters of invitation or published in the form of posters, sometimes even including a copy of the target used in shooting contests. Large shooting contests of the Free Imperial Cities, which were held well into the eighteenth century, comprised athletic contests such as running, jumping, triple-jump, climbing, wrestling, throwing weights, and fencing as well. The rules were ultimately set by the magistrates, receiving feedback from a network of towns all over Central Europe (Tlusty 2019). Another means of transmission was by itinerant players, who were frequently hired as trainers by courts or urban communities. Sometimes they could even set up schools, for instance, for fencing. Wealthy merchants, noblemen, or princes appointed them for a limited period or permanently as teachers or trainers for their children or themselves. In Germany, courts and towns had a preference for hiring French players to teach tennis, and Italian players to teach pallone or pallamaglio. These itinerant players/trainers could be considered professionals, since they earned their living through their sportive expertise, winning prize money, and taking fees and salaries for performing and teaching their respective disciplines. These professionals were disseminating the rules of sporting disciplines throughout Europe (Behringer 2012: 187, 193, 212–4). At early modern courts, the rules could be set up by a master of ceremonies, like Bardi, or an organizer of the football games, like Capponi, or they could also be recorded by chroniclers such as Bini or Salvini. Only in a few cases do we know anything about the particular conditions under which the rules were written down or printed. In the case of tennis we know from the mode of scoring that the rules must have emerged in late-medieval northern France, by then united in the Duchy of Burgundy (Gillmeister 1989: 88–99). Scaino in his book on ball games provides his motivation for writing down the rules: this was in order to secure fair play in his matches with the young prince of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este (1533–97), at whose father’s court he was serving. Whenever the

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crown prince tried to bend the rules, Scaino would be able to refer to the agreed rules, written down and fixed in print by himself (de Bondt 2002: 81–102).

PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SPORTS The bulk of rule books were compiled and published by sports professionals: owners of sports schools, office holders, sports instructors, or trainers. These publications were meant to serve as textbooks and advertisements. Antoine de Pluvinel (1555–1620), the riding instructor of King Louis XIII, who founded the Académie d’Equitation in 1594, published two books on riding and his riding school (both posthumous 1623 and 1625). These standard manuals were reprinted until the end of the seventeenth century and were used in riding schools all over Europe (Pluvinel 1624, 1626, 1628, 1640a, 1640b, 1660a, 1660b, 1666, 1670a, 1670b), until they were replaced by newer rule books. Usually the publications were not commissioned by a prince, but were a private enterprise. The instructors could earn some additional money, but also advertise their services or institutions, and eventually recruit wealthy clients. One reason for the increasing number of rule books was, of course, the increasing number of instructors employed by the aristocracy (Bayreuther 2014: 226–324), as well as more institutions teaching sports, employing more professionals. Many pedagogic institutions required permanent teachers of tennis and other ball games, as well as fencing, dancing, riding, and shooting. Universities tried to attract students by offering exercitia corporis, sports facilities with professional instructors, as did public and private gentlemen’s academies as well as private sports schools established by fencing or dancing masters in large towns or near universities. In Tübingen the gentlemen’s academy (Ritterakademie) and the university shared ball- and dancemasters, as well as fencing and riding teachers, and a recent dissertation suggests that all of them were in place without any interruption from 1594 to 1819, during which time several of the instructors published rule books for their respective sports (Schöttle 2016). Usually sports instructors received a considerably higher salary than academic teachers (for mathematics, languages, architecture, military strategy, etc.), just as their playgrounds, ballhouses, pall-mall fields, fencing and riding halls, or shooting galleries required much more space than the libraries, reading rooms and classrooms. This is true in the academies of Paris (e.g., Pluvinel’s academy), La Rochelle (France), Tübingen (Duchy of Württemberg), and Sörö (Denmark) (Conrads 1982). Furthermore, teaching the exercitia corporis occupied more time in the daily schedule of the students, as we know from diaries kept at academies in Doubs (Burgundy), Torino (Duchy of Savoy), and Vienna (Austria) (Heiss 1990: 155–81). All Italian universities—which were particularly important because the peerage and gentry from across Europe sent their sons to Italy, expecting proper

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education in fencing, dancing, and ball games—offered sports lessons from the early fifteenth century onward (Grendler 2009: 293–316). Sports schools were frequently located in the vicinity of the university, and were often run by private entrepreneurs, with or without a contract with the university. In many cases these sports schools were founded in the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries and flourished until the period of the French Revolution, sometimes well until the First World War. Often these schools were run as a family business, as was the case, for instance, with the tennis school at Marburg. The office of fencing master could be inherited within the same family, as can be seen by the example of the University of Jena, founded in 1558. From 1567 a school of fencing is mentioned in the sources, but from 1620 until 1780 the business was inherited within the Kreussler family, from 1669 as a privilege of the Dukes of SachsenWeimar. Other branches of the family founded fencing schools elsewhere, for instance at Gießen. Students of the Kreusslers founded additional fencing schools, for instance Anton Friedrich Kahn (1713–97) at the University of Göttingen (Kremer 2008: 40–54). Students of the Kreusslers inherited the school in Jena, and in 1857 still published rule books memorizing the art of Kreussler (Roux 1857). We know from diaries that even non-academic travelers were taking sports lessons in the anonymity of major cities such as Paris, London, or Rome, and the possibility to do so was part of their attraction (Kiechel 1987: 40, 52). Even in middle-size towns like Nuremberg, private sports schools were opened, as we know from an advertisement of a master of the ball games in 1680 (Bender [1680] 1996: 271–9).

RULES OF BALL GAMES After Scaino’s Book of Rules of 1555, wherein rules for calcio (football), pallone, pallacorda (tennis), and pallamaglio (pall-mall) were suggested, only the rules for Florentine football continued to be updated. From many other Italian towns (calcio), and also from France (soule) and England, we know little more than that football was a rough game, with occasional fatal accidents. Obviously there was no general need to fix the rules or to spread them in print. In the case of pallamaglio/paille-maille/pall-mall there were updates from private authors. The first came from Italy in 1626 (Giustiniani [1626] 1978: 326–32). In France the rules were published in 1654 by an author, whose initials “D. L. M.” were decoded as “De la Marinière” ([Marinière] 1654). There followed a 1655 print Les Loix du Paillemail, which now sits in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and another one in France by Joseph Lauthier in 1717. It seems that these rules were reprinted by local owners of pall-mall alleys without mentioning the author (Nouvelles règles 1717). These printed rules may have replaced earlier handwritten orders of pall-mall alleys as were customary in the Netherlands in the seventeenth-century Maliebaanen. There are handwritten

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Ordonnaties from The Hague in 1609, Leiden in 1637, and Utrecht in 1637 (Webmuseum Colf & Kolf, n.d.). Undated, but seemingly from the beginning of the nineteenth century, is a French order from Montpellier, which was reprinted in 1822 (Sudre [1772] and [1822]). In the case of tennis there was a continuous flow of rule books. All of them, after Scaino, are in French and relate to the French term jeu de paume. Precise rules were provided by the tennis teacher of King Henry IV, Jean Forbet L’Aisne (1592; 1910), which were reprinted in the massive rule book of Charles Hulpeau (1632: 21–4). Even in 1800 there was another book on the jeu de paume (Barcelon 1800). In England ball games were largely ignored, except for accounts of other “gentlemen’s sports.” Gervase Markham (1568–1637), who wrote about almost all sports in his Country Contentments, also touched upon bowling and tennis (Markham [1615] 1973). Charles Cotton (1630–87) provides first instructions for bowling and two indoor ballgames, truck and billiard, in his Compleat Gamester of 1674, eventually ending up with the most important “Gentleman’s Diversions”: riding, racing, archery, cockfighting, and bowling. Regarding bowling, Cotton warmly recommends the healthy sport and offers advice for the construction of bowling greens and bowling alleys, but not for the game itself: “There is no advising by writing how to bowl, practice must be your best tutor” (Cotton 1674: 52). However, as soon as formal bowling clubs were established, the necessity for rules was felt. The Edinburgh Society of Bowlers in 1771 codified the rules (Tames 2005: 30). In the later seventeenth century cricket developed as another game that involved hitting a ball with an instrument. It came frome the English countryside, involving increasingly high stakes (Underdown 2000). For an important match between two noble stakeholders in 1727, Articles of Agreement were set up; these were the first written rules. Another set of rules, dubbed the Laws of Cricket, was compiled in 1744 by the London Cricket Club at the Artillery Ground and printed in 1755. In 1768 Hambledon Club became the focus of cricket activities, as John Nyron, the son of the Hambledon team captain Richard Nyron (c. 1734–97) emphasized a generation later (Nyron [1833] 1998). In 1774 a protest of the Hambledon team led to a revision of the Laws of Cricket, which appeared in print immediately (New Articles 1774). In the 1780s there was a shift from the countryside back to London, and in 1787 the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was founded, which immediately took responsibility for the rules and assembled a new version in 1788 (Laws 1788). The MCC remained in charge of cricket rules worldwide until 2006. Golf rules are said to have been inspired by mid-seventeenth-century French pall-mall rules. They were first fixed by the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744 (Clapcott 1938). In 1792 we have an anonymous Dutch publication about the history of Kolven, including an instruction on how to play the game, and the rules of the game (Ordonnantie op het Kolven). Although

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the Kolfbaan and the Maliebaan (pall-mall) are closely related, in an annexed Dutch/French wordbook kolf is translated as la crosse, and kolver as crosseur (Verhandeling 1792: 22–8). At the end of this treatise all venues for Kolf are indicated on seventeen pages: within Amsterdam alone there were seventy-four Kolfbaanen, and a further 136 in the surroundings—altogether 210 venues! At some places, the closeness to other games is evident, since two Kolfbaanen were at the Maliehaus (pall-mall). A small one (baantje) in the form of a trucktafel, where the game was played with balls of ivory, was not counted. In Rotterdam there were fifty-four Kolfbaanen, forty-six in and around Leiden, twenty-one in Utrecht, sixteen in The Hague, twelve in Haarlem, and twenty-four in other places. Altogether 383 Kolfbaanen are listed, about half of them covered with a roof (overdekt) (Verhandeling 1792: 45–62). In 1800 came the next declaration of the rules of Kolf, again from Amsterdam (Reglement [c. 1800]). Amsterdam clearly was the capital of Kolfen, as Paris was for jeu de paume, and the rule book was designed and spread by the owners of the venues.

RACING Seemingly there are no rule books on racing between men, women, or children, although we know from all kinds of sources that these competitions were frequent. Samuel Pepys tells us on Thursday, July 30, 1663 that “The town talk this day is of nothing but the great foot-race run this day” (Pepys 1663). In Britain, as well as in Germany and presumably elsewhere, aristocrats were pitting their servants against one another for the purpose of betting. From the mideighteenth century, running against the clock was introduced, and from 1776 stopwatches were already indicating seconds. Foster Powell (1734–93) is the first recorded long-distance runner who became a national celebrity in Britain. In 1773 he walked 400 miles from London to York and back, and in 1788 he walked 100 miles (about 160 kilometers) in twenty-one hours and thirty-five minutes (Seccombe 1896; Short Sketch 1793). The Scotsman Robert Barclay Allardice (1779–1854), celebrated by Walter Thom (1770–1821) in the first publication on pedestrianism (Thom 1813), became a national hero in 1809 for walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours to win 1,000 guineas. Some publications are devoted to races that we would no longer classify as such, for instance, tilting at the ring and similar exercises (Del Campe [c. 1670]; Misselhorn 1685). Most publications are related to horse racing. Gervase Markham starts with an instruction in How to chase, ride, traine . . . hunting and running horses (1599), continuing with a larger work about the same subject (1607), and particular instructions for jockeys ([1680] 1933). After a break of more than twenty years, Markham’s ideas on the subject were reprinted (c. 1649). In 1654 the Commonwealth forbade horse racing. To work with horses traditionally meant dressage, but in the eighteenth century increasingly meant racing. A

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book by William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, who had his own racecourse on Welbeck Abbey, alludes to racing in the title of the German translation, but the text first had to be published outside Britain, in Antwerp (1658, 1667, 1671, 1700). In 1665 the racecourse in Newmarket was restored, and King Charles II laid down rules for the running of the Newmarket Town Plate (Huggins 2017: 119). In 1674 The Compleat Gamester provided rules and orders for racing (Cotton 1674, 1725: 186–93). A new era of media coverage started from 1727, when John Cheney published the Racing Calendar (Cheney 1727). The Jockey Club, founded around 1750, passed its first resolution in 1758 and became the leading organizer of horse races in Britain (Black 1891), setting the rules until 2006. The Sporting Magazine, started in 1793, was largely dedicated to horse racing in its first years.

ATHLETIC SPORTS: GYMNASTICS As a medical doctor, Hieronymus Mercurialis (1530–1606) left a legacy to the whole period by proposing exercises such as ball games, dancing, wrestling, boxing, walking, running, jumping, acrobatic exercises, throwing, weightlifting, climbing, swimming, sailing, riding, and hunting (1569a, 1569b, 1573, 1577a, 1577b, 1577c, 1587, 1601, 1604, 1644, 1672). To a certain extent—not everywhere, but in a good number of places—gymnastics were included in early modern school constitutions (Schwerd 1949: 56–131). In the seventeenth century the Alsatian teacher Georg Gumpelzhaimer (1596–1643) proposed systematic exercitia corporis in higher schools, with the title page of his publication showing fencing, crossbow shooting, riding, hunting, rowing, swimming, tennis, and pallone (1621, 1652, 1656). After 1650 there were a number of authors proposing acrobatic as well as equestrian vaulting, particularly the Saxonian page-boy-teacher and master of the exercitia corporis Johann Georg Pasch(ius) (1628–78) (Pasch 1657, 1658, 1659, 1661, 1664, 1666, 1667, 1673; Pluvinel 1660c). Medical dissertations agreed on the healthiness of gymnastics (Boerner 1748a), and language scholars pointed to gymnastics in the ancient world (Platner 1749), but also proposed “new gymnastics” (Boerner 1748b). In 1753 Giustiniano Borassatti—a pseudonym for Giovanni Battista Rossi—published his Gimnasta in pratica, ed in teorica, which referred to the experience of professors at the Academia Gimnastica de’ gran saltatori di Parigi, e Londra (1753, 1755, 2012). Enlightenment “gymnastics” were meant to be extended to children and youth of all ages, and to their teachers as well, so virtually for everybody, as shown in the publications of Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839). As a teacher at academies and philanthropic schools, GutsMuths proposed running, jumping, throwing, wrestling, climbing, drawing, dancing, swimming, and some military exercises (1793; 1796). In 1793 Gerhard

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Ulrich Anton Vieth (1763–1836) summarized all kinds of bodily exercises in an encyclopedia and added skating to the list of desirable exercises (1794–1818).

FENCING, WRESTLING, BOXING To see these sportive disciplines grouped together may seem strange, but follows an intrinsic logic. Fencing was an exercise in self-defense, and early treatises included self-defense without arms, such as boxing and wrestling. There is a long and strong tradition of fencing manuals, which were indeed the first of all printed rule books. There were French, German, and Italian, as well as later Spanish and English fencing schools, but in Italy alone more than six traditions (Imperial, Bolognese, Florentine, Venetian, Agrippa, Marcelli, and other masters) coexisted. Among these many schools, the Bolognese or Dardi school— related to the first university fencing master Lippo Bartolomeo Dardi (c. 1390– 1464) and his fencing school—proved most influential concerning terminology and style, and its earliest printed accounts by Antonio Manciolino, Achille Marozzo (1484–1553), and Camillo Agrippa (c. 1535–98) were quoted until the late seventeenth century (Manciolino 1531, [1531] 2010; Marozzo 1536, 1546, 1550, 1567, 1568, 1615), particularly transmitted by the Italian Salvator Fabris (1544–1618), fencing master to the king of Denmark, whose bestseller Lo schermo, overo Scienza d’Arme was translated and reprinted until 1713 (Fabris 1606, 1615a, 1615b, 1617, 1619, 1624, 1676, 1677, 1713, [1606] 2005). Anton Friedrich Koch, fencing master of the University of Göttingen, explains in his fencing book that a good number of university fencing schools (e.g., Jena, Gießen, Göttingen, Rostock) followed the Italian style of Salvator Fabris (Koch 1739). Shortly after 1660 there was a sudden upsurge in publications. Johann Georg Pasch (1628–78), fencing master at the court of Saxony and another follower of Fabris, published a textbook on fencing and wrestling, which was reprinted six times over sixteen years until 1673 (Pasch 1657, 1658, 1659, 1664, 1666, 1667, 1673; see also Pasch 1661). In 1674, a rule book for urban self-defense by the famous wrestling master Nikolaus Petter (1624–72) from Amsterdam was published posthumously by his widow in Dutch and German, soon to be translated into French, with reprints until 1712, and which was republished until 1815. This book became famous through its seventy-one exciting illustrations by the engraver Romeyn de Hooghe (1645– 1708). Petter saw it as an English version of wrestling to run into the opponent with one’s head (1674a, 1674b, 1675, 1680a, 1680b, 1712, [1680c] 1815, [1674a and b] 1887, 2011) as did his successor, the Nuremberg fencing master Johann Andreas Schmidt (1713–49), in his book on fencing and wrestling, which was first published in 1713 and reprinted at least five times before 1780 (1713: 320 and 338, 1749, 1750, 1760, 1780a, 1780b). Schmidt—who traveled widely in England, France and the Spanish Netherlands—had learnt his art in

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Amsterdam with Petter’s successor Johann Georg Bruchius (1630–1718), formerly fencing master at the Academy of Leiden, who in turn had studied with the French university fencing master Jean Daniel L’Ange at Heidelberg according to the method of Salvator Fabris. The publications of all these authors on selfdefense have much in common (L’Ange 1664, 1708, 2014; Bruch 1671, 1676, [1671] 2010). The new career of wrestling for sport started when Baronet Thomas Parkyns (1664–1741) established an annual wrestling match on his estates, Bunny Park near Nottingham. Parkyns himself had received wrestling lessons as a student at Grey’s Inn from 1682. Back at his family estates at Bunny, he started employing wrestlers as servants, and wrestling was his main diversion until the end of his life (Seccombe 1895). In 1713, Parkyns published a booklet on the theory and practice of wrestling, which was improved the following year, and reprinted until 1810, when the events at Bunny ended (1713, 1714, 1727, 1810). Quite illuminating is the publication of wrestler William Litt (1785–1847), who reviews the development of wrestling as a contemporary, including wrestling matches between Polynesians of “Tongataboo” and seamen of Captain Cook (third voyage), who had no chance because of their lack of practice and exercise: “probably not one of his crew was either a scientific wrestler or boxer” (Litt 1823: 23–5), although wrestling from the 1770s was practiced more and held in higher esteem than ever before (particularly in Cumberland, Westmoreland, Yorkshire, and Northumberland) (Litt 1823: 110). After considering all kinds of sports, not just fencing and boxing, but also running, leaping, football, horse racing, hunting, and cockfighting, Litt arrives at proposing decent rules for wrestling (Litt 1823: 72–108). Litt’s Wrestliana was of course an answer to Pierce Egan’s (1772–1849) contemporary reports on boxing, the Boxiana (1812). Publications on boxing start with a simple poster by Jack Broughton (1703– 89), who published his Rules to be observed in all battles on the Stage . . . as agreed by several Gentlemen at Broughton’s Amphitheatre, Tottenham Court Road, August 16, 1743 (Broughton 1743). Commercial boxing had started at the beginning of the century, with James Figg (1684–1734) as the first reigning champion from 1719 to 1730. In 1719 he started an “Academy of Arms” and a boxing school, and built an amphitheater for his spectacles. This was later run by his student George Taylor, who ceded the championship to Jack Broughton after a heavy defeat. The satirist Paul Whitehead (1710–74) ridiculed the pugilistic fancy of the day (1744), recently characterized as The Age of Regency Boximania (Ford 1972). Independent contemporaries like John Godfrey, a sword fighter and student of Figgs, commented in their own booklets on the Science of Selfdefence and tried to enhance its effectivity by explaining the mechanics of boxing through the examples of Broughton, “the captain of the boxers,” and other contenders of the period (1747). Broughton built his own amphitheater in Oxford Road, but in 1750 lost a sensational fight against Jack

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Slack (1721–68), the “Norfolk Butcher,” and afterwards retired. It took thirty years and another boxing champion, the Jewish prizefighter Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836), before boxing became as famous as it used to be, and a textbook informed readers about the discipline (Mendoza 1789, 1790, 1816). Several publications sprang up almost at the same time, advertising boxing as a trademark of Englishness and manliness, as well as discussing training methods and rules. Some of the authors labeled themselves as “amateurs” in contrast to boxing professionals (Lemoine 1788; Complete Art 1788; Fewtrell 1790; Manual Defence 1799). Broughton’s rules for prizefighting and bare-knuckle boxing remained in place for almost a century, and provided the basis for later boxing rules, such as for instance the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 (Rodriguez 2009).

BLOOD SPORTS: BULLFIGHTING, BEARBAITING, COCKFIGHTING, ETC. Blood sports were among the most popular pleasures of the early modern period worldwide. During Magellan’s circumnavigation, Antonio Pigafetta described cockfighting in the Philippines, and despite prohibition the spectator sport still carries on as “deep play” in Southeast Asia (Geertz 1973: 412–53). The first publication on the subject came in 1607 (Wilson 1607). Although some of the older cockpits were converted into theaters and blood sports forbidden in England in 1642 (Ordinance [1654] 1911: 831), cockfighting came back with the Restoration. The Royal Cockpit was refitted in 1662, and the sport in 1674 still counted among the gentlemanly pleasures. In 1674 Cotton provided instructions for the tyro (1674: 207–28, 1725: 197–221). According to the Edinburgh fencing master William Machrie, who dedicated his rule book of cockfighting “to the nobility and gentry of Scotland,” it was still among the royal recreations in 1705 (Machrie 1705), but the cockpit in Whitehall, although it survived a fire, was discontinued after 1698 and not revived by Queen Anne. Cockfighting rules were again published in 1743 in the Racing Calendar (Huggins 2017: 119). London’s bearbaiting arena was famous abroad (Daigl 1997), and attracted spectators well into the eighteenth century, but no rules for the spectator sport were ever published. When the Scottish fencing master William Hope (1660– 1724) discusses Fighting for Prizes in the Bear Gardens, he is certainly talking about fencing, boxing, and wrestling, not bearbaiting (1715). In Britain there was considerable attention paid to the types of dogs—bulldogs, mastiffs, etc.— who did the actual baiting, but rules were no concern here (Caius [Kay] [1570] 1729, 1576; Harris [1582] 1907). Increasing concerns about animal protection hampered the interest in blood sports in the last third of the eighteenth century (Darby 1769, 1770; Primatt 1776; The Hare 1799), perhaps foreshadowing the

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abolition of bullbaiting and similar sports in 1835 (Boddice 2008). Bullfighting was famous all over Europe, and was exported to Spanish colonies worldwide, but there are only antiquarian reports from Britain (Pegge 1773: 86–91), and it took until 1796 for a treatise on this sport to be compiled and published. The author José Delgado y Gálvez (1754–1801), a famous matador, wanted to advertise a novel, more civilized form of the corrida. He succeeded, and this reformed type of bullfight is still alive in many parts of Spain and Latin America (Delgado y Gálvez 1796, 1804).

ARISTOCRATIC SPORTS: TOURNAMENT, RIDING, HUNTING, HAWKING, DANCING, SHOOTING Publications on aristocratic sports clearly dominated the book market on sports in the early modern period. Only the most important rule books can be mentioned here. Again, publications of the first half of the early modern period structured the field and were reprinted after 1650, for instance Pluvinel’s (1552–1620) Maneige Royal, the instructions to King Louis XIII of France and textbook for his Parisian academy and many similar institutions (1660a, 1660b, 1660c, 1666, 1670a, 1670b). The son of another former student of Pignatelli, Francisco Del Campo (c. 1600–1662)—who studied under Pluvinel, became his successor, and changed his name to François Delcampe—continued the nonviolent school of dressage and published Le noble Art de monter à Cheval. This book was edited and republished by another successor, Samuel Fouquet, Sieur de Beaurepaire (Delcampe 1664, [c. 1670], 1671, 1688: 341–73, 1690). In Britain, William Cavendish, the First Duke of Newcastle (1592–1676) set the tone after the Restoration (1658, 1667, 1671, 1700). Another successor, the French king’s instructor (Ecuyer du Roy) and director of the riding academy as well as the Grande Ecurie, François Robichon de la Guérinière (1688–1751), referred to Pluvinel and Cavendish, but in his own work superseded all earlier rule books for the training of horses and riders, and is nowadays considered the origin of the “modern” tradition of dressage, training, and riding (1730, 1733, 1736, 1740, 1741, 1742, 1754a, 1754b, 1768, 1769, 1791a). His book was translated into German by the Prince of Nassau-Orange’s riding master at Dillenburg in 1791 (Guérinière [1791b] 2013). In 1651, the publisher John Playford (1623–86) brought out The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, which proved so successful that no less than eighteen editions were printed until 1728—this was one of the most successful sports treatises of the period. After 1650 a number of authors tried to present aristocratic sports in a comprehensive form. Gervase Markham—the most prolific author on aristocratic sports in the first half of the century—was still on the market, and his books were being reprinted, but he had successors both in France and in England. In France it was

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Charles Sorel (1602–74), who offered a whole range of sports and sports rules in his La Maison de Jeux (1643, 1657). Maybe the title sounded too childish, since there were other books on children’s games (Comenius 1657, 1658; Stella [1657] 1969), so it was replaced by Les Récreations Galantes (Sorel 1671). Another way to dignify sporting games was to link them to the academic world, as the French author Goy or Denis de la Marinière did (1654, 1665, 1674, 1697, 1718, 1768). Some of the works on children, for instance by Jacques Stella (1596–1657), are not really childish either, since we find here illustrations of tennis, fencing, sledging, badminton, bowling, skittles, somersault, jumping into the water, skating, la crosse (here a kind of hockey), darts, crossbow, longbow, pallone, dancing, and wrestling (Stella [1657] 1969). By contrast, the Book of Games by the botanist Francis Willughby (1635–72), compiled in 1665, was not published until the twenty-first century ([c. 1665] 2003). In 1674 Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester provided rules for sports such as shooting with the longbow, bowling, billiards, and many other games, and became the English standard reference work for the rules of games (1674, 1725: 194–6). Cotton contributed also to later editions of his friend Izaak Walton’s (1593–1683) Compleat Angler (1653, 1655, 1661a, 1661b, 1668, 1676). Nicholas Cox (1650–1712) in his Gentleman’s Recreation, focusses on hunting (1674, 1677, 1686, 1697, 1706, 1721). In Germany, Valentin Trichter, Royal British riding master at the University of Göttingen, in 1742 published an encylopedia for gentlemen—still called “Ritter”—on the pleasures of their social sphere, here called “Exercitien”: riding, hunting, fencing, dancing, and related exercises such as tennis and pallone, jumping on the horse, etc. (Trichter 1742). In 1750 a rule book for The art and pleasure of hare-hunting appeared in print, which also touches upon the subject of foxhunting (Gardiner [1750] 2010, 1781), and an update of this book appeared some years later by William Blane (1781, 1788).

WATER SPORTS AND WINTER SPORTS Our knowledge of early modern instruction books on swimming has improved considerably over the last years. Since swimming was strongly recommended by the most influential Renaissance scholars, Vittorino da Feltre, Baldassare Castiglione, and Hieronymus Mercurialis (Krüger 2009), it is hardly surprising that a tradition of swimming instructions emerged. The most influential publication for 200 years was Everard Digby’s (c. 1550–1605), who wished to provide not just the rules for the Ars natandi in 1587, but furthermore demonstrate—as a philosopher—that it is possible to teach a previously unknown subject (Digby 1587). His systematic and well-illustrated text was translated into English by Christopher Middleton soon after (1595). In 1658 William Percey published instructions for the Art of Swimming, demonstrating the rules and practice thereof, based upon Digby, whose work is not credited.

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Swimming is healthy for men as well as women, since it is “sporting our bodies” (Percey 1658: preface). The scientist Melchisédech Thévenot (1620–92) translated Digby’s treatise into French, marking the first French treatise on swimming in 1696. This book was retranslated into English in 1699, with an addition on “artificial swimming or keeping oneself above Water by several portable Engines, in cases of Danger” (Thévenot 1699). Later there were translations into Italian, Dutch (Handleiding 1825, 1828), and Spanish (Nuovo arte 1848). Nikolaus Wynmann (1510– c. 1550), professor at the University of Ingolstadt, had published the first treatise on swimming (1538), but lacked any influence, as did the Dutch booklet about the Swemmerkunst from 1559 (van Norden 1559). In Spain the medical doctor Pedro Gerónimo Galtero published his Discurso . . . del uso de nadar in 1644 (Galtero 1644). In the eighteenth century there was an upsurge of interest in swimming. In 1742 another Art of Swimming was published by Johann F. Bachstrom (1686–1742), medical doctor and supervisor of all factories of the Duchess de Radziwill from Lithuania. Bachstrom, who had traveled through Britain and the Netherlands in 1733, published his booklet first under the title L’Art de Nager, aligning himself seemingly to the Digby-Percey-Thévenot tradition, though this book is more about artificial swimming and transportation (Bachstrom 1741). In the 1780s a kind of swimming explosion seems to have happened: in 1783, under the pseudonym “Nicolas Roger,” Gabriel Feydel (1756–1840) published a quick-learners’ guide to swimming and four years later yet another rule book (1783, 1787). JeanCharles Poncelin de la Roche-Tilhac (1746–1828) edited no fewer than three reprints of the Thévenot treatise of 1696 (Thévenot 1781, 1782, 1786). Swimming became part of the academic tradition and was treated alongside riding, fencing, and dancing (Encyclopédie méthodique 1786; Mallinckrodt 2016: 231–51). In 1796 the Italian scientist Oronzio di Bernardi (1735–1806) discovered that the human body floats in water (1794). His book was soon translated into German by the teacher Friedrich Kries (1797), and was followed by an instruction through the pedagogical reformer and sports instructor Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1798). Diving was not yet considered a sport, but rather as a field of experimentation (Mallinckrodt 2017). Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) remarked that although he personally had seen many competitions of rowing and sailing on the Thames and elsewhere, and rowing matches were exceedingly popular, nothing had been published on the subject (Strutt [1801, rev. 1830] 1898: 156–7). Moreover, although the Venetian regattas were famous throughout Europe, no rules were published (Roffare [1931] 1999). Winter sports were likewise neglected, although there are numerous paintings that show skating, ice hockey, snowball throwing, skiing, sledging on the ice, etc. The Edinburgh Skating Club of 1742 seems to have been the first organization devoted to this sport. The first book on skating was

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only published in 1772 by Robert Jones on the occasion of his invention of skating shoes (Jones 1772). Another publication came on the market in Germany (Vieth 1790), and the next one, in France, only after 1800 (Garcin 1813).

GENERAL TRENDS As a general trend we can see the sportification of the martial arts and games. Excessively dangerous sports had largely disappeared by 1650 and were replaced by disciplines requiring the skillful handling of the equipment. Scoring replaced fatal outcome. Referees and prize committees helped in civilizing the rough sports. More rule books were written and published than ever before, alongside a rising number of schools, academies, and universities with standardized sports facilities and professional sports coaches. Many medical doctors recommended sporting activities, since Mercurialis’ publication De arte gymnastica neatly referred to ancient authorities like Galenus (Mercurialis 1569b, 1577b, 1577c, 1587, 1601, 1604, 1644, 1672, 1677). Between 1620 and 1660 fierce wars in Central and Eastern Europe hampered sports. At the same time Christian fundamentalists increasingly tried to stop sporting activities, with a low point in England between 1642 and 1660 during the preponderance of the Puritan Party, when most sports were outlawed (McIntosh 1963: 34–45). London’s biggest sports venue, the “Bear Baiting Arena (Bear Garden) was pulled down in 1655 and the bears shot dead by a squad of soldiers” (Tames 2005: 25). Maybe it is not by coincidence that the most powerful medical support for sports came from England afterwards, with Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) and Francis Fuller (1670–1706) strongly recommending bodily exercises and movement in the open air (Fuller 1705, with nine editions until 1777 plus translations). After 1650 sporting activities were increasing rapidly, and reprints or new rule books were in demand. Britain joined in forcefully after 1660, with new sports grounds constructed, and former pleasures like cockfighting and bull and bearbaiting revived. After the “Glorious Revolution,” the liberal atmosphere contributed to new developments. Authors such as Cotton encouraged all kinds of sports by publishing their rules. Commercialization served as a motor for development. England—and London in particular—became the hotspot of sports. Racing calendars were published on a regular basis from 1727 onward. In many cases we can reconstruct how the business of sport was rooted in older structures. The Italian Domenico Angelo (1717–1802), for instance, born in Livorno near Florence, received his education in riding, dancing, and fencing from Europe’s leading instructors in Paris. He migrated to England, was appointed riding and fencing instructor to the future George III in 1758. However it was a public event—a show fight with an Irish master fencer at the “Thatched House Tavern” in St. James’s Street—that made him famous. He set

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up his own business and published his own fencing rules (Angelo 1763, 1765, 1767). Later he retired to Eton, where he gave lessons at the college, with the fencing school carried on by his son Henry Charles William Angelo (1756– 1835), and thereafter by his grandson Henry Angelo (1780–1852) (Tames 2005: 20–1). Many pioneering works on sports and their rules were published between 1550 and 1625, particularly concerning riding, ball games, shooting, fencing, wrestling, swimming, dancing, gymnastics, acrobatics, hunting, blood sports, as well as recreation and playing in general, and on medical aspects and the history of sports. Most authors of these books were Italian, German, Spanish, or French. For instance Federico Grisone’s Ordini di cavalcare (1550) had seven Italian editions until 1559, when the first French translation appeared in print. Its English translation The Art of Riding of 1560 was the first English publication on the subject. Thomas Blundeville (c. 1522–c. 1605) merely offered a translation of Grisone (Blundeville 1565). The last reprint of Grisone’s book on riding was the eighth German edition of 1623, the very year when this normative work was replaced by Antoine de Pluvinel’s publications (Pluvinel 1623, 1625), which were reprinted until 1685. Everard Digby’s De arte natandi (1587) was the first British contribution of substance. It was plagiarized by Melchisédech Thévenot (1696), retranslated into English (Thévenot 1699), and reprinted until 1786. Due to warfare and religious strife there was a hiatus in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. A general drop in publications on sports was accompanied by amnesia, maybe caused by discontinuity in institutions, deaths of authors, and generational breaks. With some exceptions, the earlier authors were no longer reprinted, and they were replaced from 1650 by a new generation treating the same subjects with similar frequency. Clearly they were building upon the pioneering works, frequently without saying so, but they were also refashioning their subjects in a more aristocratic world. William Cavendish, for instance, although admitting his indebtednes to Italian predecessors, claimed that his was A new Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses (1658; 1667: 1–3). British authorship became much more frequent and successful than ever before. John Playford’s The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances (1651) was reprinted eighteen times until 1728. Francis Fuller’s Medicina gymnastica (1705) saw nine editions until 1777, and was translated into German and other languages. Gervase Markham posthumously became a superstar: his Ma[i]sterPiece (1644) concerning the proper treatment of horses, compiled from his other texts on horsemanship, saw no less than nineteen editions until 1717. The reason why Britain became dominant in defining sports—including the very term—was clearly related to the rise of the gentry, as numerous publications indicate (Cleland 1607, Markham 1615; Peacham 1627; Cotton 1674). Nicholas Cox’s (1673–1731) The Gentleman’s Recreation (1674) had at least six editions

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until 1721. Robert Howlett’s The School of Recreation: or, The Gentlemans [sic] Tutor to those Most Ingenious Exercises of Hunting. Racing. Hawking. Riding. Cock-Fighting. Fowling. Fishing. Shooting. Bowling. Tennis. Ringing. Billiards (1684) saw seven editions until 1736. It was the institutions of gentry sociability, the clubhouses and the sports grounds, where the rules of sport were generated or recorded. New communications served this development: from 1727 the Racing Calendar, from 1739 the Gentleman’s Magazine, and from 1793 The Sporting Magazine. The very term “gentleman” seemingly became identical with “sportsman”: writing maniac Markham had served as a trailblazer. His tiny Young Sportsman’s Instructor had reprints in 1652, 1705, 1706, 1712 and still in 1820 and 1829. The text was simply taken from his Country Contentments, or, the Husbandman’s Recreations (1611), which received eleven reprints until 1675. Some authors preferred the term sportsman, like Thomas Fairfax in The Complete Sportsman, or Country Gentleman’s Recreation (1758; 1760; 1764, 1795) or William Augusts Osbaldiston with The British Sportsman, or Nobleman, Gentleman, and Farmer’s Dictionary of Recreation and Amusement (1792), which turned soon into The Universal Sportsman (1795). Another peculiarly British development was the commercialization of sports, allowing for the participation of a wider stratum of society: people short of time and money. William Hope of Kirkliston (1660–1724), who had started with a scholarly dialogue on fencing (1687), reinvented himself and offered to a wider public a New Short and Easy Method of Fencing . . . Wherein the Practice . . . is reduced to so few and general rules, that any Person of any different capacity . . . may in a very short time attain to . . . a considerable Adroitness in Practice (1707). Furthermore he published A Few Observations upon the Fighting of Prizes in Bear-Gardens (1715), which related to those popular competitions in fencing, wrestling, and boxing that were attended by thousands of residents and tourists in London amphitheaters every week. Not the gentlemen but the entrepreneurs in prizefighting set the rules, as with Jack Broughton in 1743. Successful prizefighters like him received support from noble fans and could set up their own businesses. Fighters like the aforementioned Daniel Mendoza turned into superstars and published treatises on boxing (Mendoza 1789), and even their memoirs (Mendoza 1816). Why were there printed rules for some sports and not for others? First of all, performing sports without rules is impossible. For local sports a simple agreement suffices. Football left few traces before the constitution of the Football Association in 1869 because it was not necessary to write down rules, let alone put them into print. The great exception is Florence, or rather the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, whence thousands of tourists came to watch Florentine calcio, a spectacle promoted and instrumentalised by the ruling dynasty. Similarly, jeu de paume (tennis) was considered the royal game of France, and almost all rule books were published in Paris. The rules were neither decreed by the rulers of

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the states nor their governments or parliaments. In many cases the rules of particular sports were published in the hope of future profit, by owners of sports schools, sports masters, or owners of the venues of sports, as with Jack Broughton or Daniel Mendoza. Most of them were offering lessons or courses in the service, or in the vicinity of universities, or gentlemen’s academies, as with Johann Georg Paschius. Some were sports instructors in the service of kings or of the aristocracy, as with Antoine de Pluvinel, Charles Hulpeau, or William Cavendish. Some authors tried to serve or maintain their career at court, like Giovanni de’ Bardi. Some were aristocratic fans, like William Hope and Thomas Parkyns. And some tried to promote sports in schools and to advertise their institutions (Basedow 1774, 1785; GutsMuths 1793). All these motivations seem to have more to do with business or selfpromotion than with sports. But we must keep in mind that the authors of the second half of the early modern period, 1650–1800, are not as well explored as earlier authors. Biographical data are lacking in many cases, and the same is true with proper bibliographies. De la Marinière’s Maison Académique, for example, was not just reprinted in Paris, but also several times in Lyon and The Hague, maybe in other places as well; and there was an English translation, published in 1768 as The Academy of Play, translated by the French actor JeanClaude Gilles Colson “Bellecour” (1725–78) (Willughby 2003: 331). Working on this text, I came across many publications never yet mentioned anywhere. Whenever you start searching you find something new and unexpected. So this is only a preliminary synthesis. My guess is that the more library catalogues will be put online, and the more early modern books will be digitized, the more publications by Gervase Markham, Georg Paschius, Charles Cotton, Nicolas Cox, Robert Howlett, Nicolaes Petter, François Robichon de la Guérinière, William Augustus Osbaldiston and similar professonal writers we will discover. The field for research is open, and we have just started.

CHAPTER FIVE

Conflict and Accommodation ELISABETH BELMAS

“Regulating sociability and aggression, sport provided an outlet for impulses which could not be expressed elsewhere,” wrote Georges Vigarello (Vigarello 2002: 8). He viewed sport as a “factor in the order and stability” of preindustrial Europe, where tradition had long competed with the law before eventually yielding to it (Vigarello 2002: 18). The phrase is particularly applicable to historical recreational sports/physical games, which were referred to in France as “exercise games.” These activities were an integral part of festivities and of everyday life, performing a cathartic function in a western world steeped in violence: situated beyond the normal rhythm of life—labor, family obligations, and religious duties—they provided a moment of respite— Aristotle’s eutrapelia—in which the underlying tensions present in largely insular communities could be expressed in a concealed, mostly symbolic manner. In this way, they provided an instrument by which to avert conflict, contributing to maintaining and periodically regenerating social ties, creating at least a semblance of social cohesion. The “disorder of the festivities,” as Natalie Zemon Davis emphasizes, represented a “factor in the order” of non-contractual societies (1979: 166–73). However, for a long time, modern recreational sports/physical games were characterized by aggression and brutality. Confrontation, competition, and training between men, against animals or using objects were the principal manifestations of these activities, reflecting the inherent violence of rural and urban communities in modern times. Their evolution between 1650 and 1800 should be considered in conjunction with 117

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the decline in violence in western Europe, which is appreciable from the midseventeenth century onwards (Muchembled 2008: 309–75). Throughout this 150-year period, violence in this part of the world was tamed. This phenomenon, theorized by Norbert Elias, had an impact on recreational sports/physical games and the use of brute force in these sports (Elias [1939] 1973, [1939] 1976). Indeed, recreational sporting activities follow their own internal logic: they must be linked to the conventions preferred, disfavored, or rejected by the various social groups, especially those that are dominant. The latter are more likely to adopt a recreational sport/physical game if it does not contradict their relationship to the body and if it takes into account some of their preferences, while it is condemned to vanish if rejected by these same groups (Parlebas 1982: 166–7). Thus, there was a shift from the brutal games of the sixteenth century to the more “civilized” exercises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the authorities extended their powers of political and social regulation, going some way to preparing the conditions conducive to the “sportification” of conflict (Turcot 2016: 404).

RECREATIONAL SPORTS: A RITUALISTIC EXPRESSION OF CONFLICT The nature and role of the particularly vigorous recreational sports enjoyed by the “upstanding men of nature” of the early modern period are well known today (Febvre 1968: 394). Noblemen, city dwellers, and peasants shared a common love of games involving competition and confrontation during the Renaissance. The gentry—particularly in France, according to courtier Baldassar Castiglione (Jusserand [1901] 1986: 134)—appreciated the knightly exercises which both prepared men for war and resembled it: quintain, fighting at the barriers, the passage of arms, and fights with swords or lances in the jousts that gradually came to replace medieval tournaments throughout the sixteenth century (Belmas 2011: 447). Rural areas and cities alike were the sites of fierce, even bloody battles setting the boys of neighboring parishes or the married men and bachelors of a single district against one another. At once ritual and spectacle, they were the main events at both religious and secular celebrations: the Feast of Fools, Carnival, the festivities in May, the St. John’s Eve bonfires, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, the Christmas period, Sundays, and patron saint festivals were supplemented by celebrations of crop and grape harvests in the countryside and by fairs organized by guilds and aldermen, and royal entries in the cities. The abbayes de jeunesse, bachelleries, and other royaumes de jeunesse, which were present almost all over Europe, with the apparent exception of Britain (Muchembled [1994] 2003: 87–93, 2008: 92), brought these celebrations to life with their excitement and energy, as the recreational battles allowed young bachelors to assert their masculine power over the territory and

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over marriageable girls from the community in response to the pretensions of their potential rivals from neighboring towns (Muchembled [1994] 2003: 108–9). The battles were held on water, at the widespread nautical jousts (Trémaud 1972: 14–16), on horseback, as in the pallio in Sienna, which set the barberos representing the contrades against one another in a wild race through the city’s streets (Merdrignac 2002: 178–9) , and on land, where they took various different forms. Alongside numerous others, jeu des barres was among the oldest and most popular battle games in France, the Spanish Netherlands, and Italy; of ancient origin, documented from around 1300 onwards, it symbolized the political struggles between two rival groups of equal strength, with supporters liable to threaten the security of the state banned from participating (Béart 1967: 270). Two teams of around ten adults or children lined up face-to-face on a rectangular area of open land of approximately twenty meters in length and attempted to catch one another, following a set of rules and rituals that covered the challenge, the draw, and mutual assistance during the game (Lhôte 1996: 52). A random draw, intended to resemble the Greek ostraxismos, identified the player who would start the match by crossing the “bar” traced across the middle of the field to call upon one of his opponents. The latter would extend a hand, which the challenger would strike three times before running as fast as he could back to his own side in an attempt to escape the rival protagonist, who had authority over him. Another player from the aggressor’s side would then move forward to attempt to catch the opponent. Therefore, the last player to cross the line could still “capture” the players who had entered the field before him, without being intercepted by them; the last player to join the game had authority over the rest of the players. As soon as a player was taken prisoner and led away by the adversary, the players would stop running and return to their respective sides. In order to free prisoners, team mates had to touch the prisoner’s hand while evading their pursuers. At that point, the teams would change sides and the process of challenges and chases would begin once again. The match came to an end when one team had lost too many of its members to have any hope of freeing them, or when a pre-established quota of prisoners had been reached (Lhôte 1996: 53). The mahonage in Amiens, Picardy, was a collective fistfight held during Carnival, involving almost every male inhabitant of the city, from children to adult men. It served as training in territorial defense and fighting skills (Gervoise 1990: 168–70). Several times a year, the Venetian guerra di canne set two groups of inhabitants, primarily laborers and merchants, against one another; equipped with shields and helmets, they would spend hours dealing each other blows from wooden poles on the bridges of the city of the Doges (Turcot 2016: 334–7). In many regions, two rival groups would jostle fiercely for a wooden or leather ball filled with hay, bran, moss, or air. The best-known of these crude ball games—and one of the most extensively studied—was soule or choule; played with the

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hands or feet, or using a stick or pole, the game set young married men against bachelors from a parish or from neighboring villages in rural areas, in northern and western France, and in England from the Middle Ages, during the Christmas period, the Easter season or Mardi Gras. Until the end of the sixteenth century, these vigorous ball games attracted enthusiasts from all social classes; while the aristocratic Florentine or Bolognese calcio was played by local nobles (Merdrignac 2002: 30), the more vulgar street football was a sport for young craftsmen in English cities (Merdrignac 2002: 231–2). The brutality displayed in soule and in the various battle games played a role in redirecting the debates inherent in modern societies towards symbolic targets, helping to maintain and periodically restore the balance within communities torn between “solidarity and opposition” (Vigarello 2002: 18). Most recreational sports fell into the category of “deep play,” an expression coined by Clifford Geertz to refer to games which revealed the cultural values unique to each society (Geertz 1973: 412–53). The virile strength exhibited by the winners before the community was a harbinger of success and fertility; the correlation was particularly strong in fights between men and animals, which ended in the death of the latter. As it permeated the soil, the blood of the sacrificed animal provided a symbolic guarantee of fertility for the city (Muchembled 2008: 110). The corridas, of medieval origin, thus spread throughout Spain, where they came to form part of all celebrations from the sixteenth century onwards (Bennassar 1975: 126– 7; Mitchell 1991). During the same era, the male population at festivities held in Champagne, Picardy, Flanders, Birmingham, and Toledo regularly participated in “slaughters” of geese or pigs, using stones, poles or knives (Muchembled 2008: 111; Ruff 2001: 160–83). Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted on the difference between games, which he considered to be disjunctive, and ritual, which he viewed symmetrically and conversely as conjunctive, although this antimony is rather less evident to Jean-Michel Mehl (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 46–7; Mehl 1990: 449–50). Recreational sports for adults indeed appeared to act as vehicles for a complex set of rites: shooting and throwing sports expressed confrontation and rank, while soule related to submission, armed sports and jeu de paume to possession and fistfighting to transition. However, from the sixteenth century, such behaviors began to be reshaped in a slow process that spread across Western Europe. From 1550 to 1650, due to a series of different factors, emotions and attitudes among the population evolved towards greater self-control over violent urges (Muchembled 2018: 64–5). This change, long attributed exclusively to the progress made by the “civilizing process” described in the model established by sociologist Norbert Elias (Elias [1939] 1973), was spurred by the two religious reforms (despite the religious wars that plunged Europe into bloodshed at the time) and by the ongoing construction of modern states. In both centralized and federal monarchies, as well as in city-states whose sovereignty depended on peace and

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economic prosperity, the culture of violence became confined to the military and the police, who received a mandate from the state to defend it (Muchembled 2008: 255–6). Gradually, the other corps were obliged to abandon the traditional displays of violence that maintained the unity of the community but were potential causes of unrest and offended the sensibilities of the rulers. From 1650, conflicts were no longer resolved directly, regardless of whether they were collective or individual, as power had instead been delegated to the authorities. Meanwhile, European courts adopted a code of behavior that redefined the majority of social relationships. Courtiers who wished to succeed had to obey binding rules governing posture in order to avoid becoming a target of scorn or mockery among their companions (Muchembled 1998: 143–6, 156–61). These changes, which reached rural areas slowly and unevenly, quickly took hold in cities such as Paris and in the large commercial metropolises of Europe, including Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, which were booming under burgeoning capitalism at that time. Economic modernization is therefore acknowledged to have played a decisive role in fostering etiquette by mobilizing an increasingly abundant, well-policed workforce that was better equipped for production (Muchembled 2018: 70–1; Beik 1995: 339–40, 1997). At their own level, recreational sports contributed to this transformation as both witnesses and actors; they accompanied and even promoted it insofar as their internal logic depended—and continues to depend—on the values upheld by the social context in which they were embedded. Indeed, the degree of violence present in a society finds “an exemplary inscription” in the structure of the recreational sports that it encourages, as Pierre Parlebas observes (Parlebas 1982: 203–415). The reorganization of recreational physical practices, which took place in synergy with the economic and cultural developments of the time, rejected displays of open aggression as far as possible in favor of restraint, studied composure, and decent posture. Two examples cast further light on the phenomenon: football in England and jeu de paume in France are both indicative of the progress made in terms of violence, “one of the major historic dynamics of ancient physical games” according to Vigarello (Elias and Dunning 1994: 33–4; Vigarello 2002: 15). Patrick Vassort considers the emergence of English football to be linked to the enclosure movement, which entailed limiting both the length and scale of soule matches, with a devastating impact on both playing area and players (Vassort 2006). The development of a productivist, marketoriented mentality rendered intolerable the excesses, in all senses of the term, of this ritual confrontation. It led the brutality of soule matches to be contained within a delineated space, that of the football pitch. While the “sporting rationalization of soule” demonstrates the decisive influence of political and economic powers over the development of an age-old game (David and Oblin 2017: 17–18), jeu de paume, one of the favorite exercise games of the Renaissance, illustrates the “civilizing” role of a recreational sport. Mobilizing

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strength and endurance, jeu de paume also required technical skill and selfcontrol, two values which were favored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both longue paume, played outdoors, and courte paume, played indoors in a purpose-built room called a cage, contrasted with the other ball games of the era: played in an organized space, the game involved an instrument (a bat, and later a racket) which was used to serve and return the esteuf, ball, or pelote. It followed complex rules, which were formalized in 1555 by Antonio Scaino, employing an elaborate gestural technique that had to be taught. The matches were highly codified and were overseen by an umpire, usually the master paumier or his valet, taking place in a structured environment that imposed a series of constraints (Belmas 2006: 164). The asymmetrical design of the cages prompted participants to vary their game depending on whether they had drawn the serving side or the receiving side. As the game progressed, players were obliged to constantly take in information, vary their shots, calculate their responses on the spot, and anticipate the behavior of their opponents. When hands were replaced by bats and rackets, they were also required to control their stance at all times. The constraints linked to the practice of jeu de paume thus contributed to the construction of a habitus in which one of the essential elements was self-constraint, that is, acquiring an inhibition that was fundamental to social and emotional life, which Marcel Mauss referred to as “resistance to the invading upset” (Mauss [1950] 1999: 366–86). The favorite game of the monarchy and the gentry until the mid-seventeenth century, courte paume also won over the bourgeoisie, students, and craftsmen in the cities, despite the cost of attending matches. No other exercise game was as successful in urban areas. However, the popularity of jeu de paume declined during the first half of the seventeenth century, as it no longer reflected the habitus of the burgeoning court society, which advocated new models of distinction (Muchembled 1998: 104–5). The level of exercise it required was deemed excessive, while the clothing worn—breeches, shirt, and hat—appeared scruffy. In its day, jeu de paume had helped to transform the aggressive warriors of centuries past into agile, flexible gentlemen, but by 1650 this era had come to an end. In the social model that then became established, the influence of the two religious reforms, which preached the values of equanimity, modesty, and silence (Muchembled 1998: 103–4), is clearly evident. Collective fights, tournaments, and jousts, still appreciated in the sixteenth century, were thus replaced by tilting at the ring and quintain, which were virtuoso attacks on harmless targets in which no live opponent faced the rider, whose technique was considered more important than “the force of the blow” (Vigarello 2002: 24–33). Tilting at the ring was limited to unhooking a ring suspended by ribbons with the aid of a pole or rod; in the noble version, competitors rode a galloping steed, while in the more vulgar version, they ran towards the target on foot (D’Allemagne 1913: 92–3). In modern quintain, which was in vogue until the eighteenth century, players

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simply struck a revolving mannequin with a pole, attempting to evade it as it swung back to avoid being knocked unconscious (Clare 1983). The same participants, dressed in velvet and plumes, also enjoyed proving their agility and poise in the cavalcades and processions that accompanied the carousels. In Paris, the tilts at the ring, at the heads at the Palais-Cardinal in 1656, and the carousel held in honor of the Dauphin in 1662 were the stage for the spectacle of Louis XIV and the Greats of his court confronting one another, dressed as ancient heroes or as princes from cherished novels (Carré 1937: 73–81). Military references persisted in the background, but were smoothed over by the canons of poise and agility.

TOWARDS A REGULATION OF RECREATIONAL CONFLICT Much has been written about the decline of violent exercise games, which was undeniable in the second modernity, in favor of parlor games and moderate physical activities accessible to women, such as pall-mall, billiards, battledore, promenades, and dancing. From the 1770s, these pastimes were supplemented by gymnastics prescribed by pre-hygienist doctors and pedagogues, especially those working in Switzerland and France—Théodore Tronchin was the first, followed by Samuel Auguste Tissot and his younger cousin Clément-Joseph Tissot, Jean-Charles Desessartz, Jean-André Venel, and Jean Verdier—as well as by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose teachings spread all over Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. The publication of rule books such as Les Loix du Paille Maille in 1655 and Nouvelles règles pour le jeu de mail in 1722 accelerated in Italy, France, and Germany (Turcot 2016: 364; Lauthier 1722). Besides technical information specific to the game they presented, all of the books set out the rules of sporting etiquette to be followed, which echoed the lessons contained in the great treatises on civility by Antoine de Courtin and Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (Courtin 1671; Salle 1702); they celebrated the charms and nobility of the games, emphasizing their ancient foundations and therapeutic virtues (Turcot 2016: 364–5). The civil and religious authorities played an active role in this lengthy process of quelling and regulating traditional recreational sports. Fearing the accidents and unrest that could occur during these activities, the civil authorities also perceived them as a form of resistance to the affirmation of their power; on the other hand, the religious authorities who were wary of the vestiges of paganism conveyed by the ancient games saw in them the work of the devil. Some games and ways of playing were accused of disturbing the moral order commanded by God and the social order desired by the monarch. In France, from 1397, municipal ordinances issued by the police sought to restrict the time allotted to recreation on working days, for fear that craftsmen, laborers, winemakers, and tradesmen would set aside their

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work to distract themselves with jeu de paume, boules, skittles, cards, or dice (Delamare 1722: 456). From 1560 onwards, royal law regularly instructed the landlords of cabarets, taverns, and other drinking establishments to close their doors during mass and vespers, on Sundays and on holy days (Ordonnance [1560] 1611: 1024). Gradually, the games of goose pulling, wooden rods, boules, skittles, and kite-flying, which enthused young city dwellers in the modern era, were banned “from the streets and public squares” because they inconvenienced passers-by and shop owners, who often fell victim to a missed shot, a shove, or a quarrel between players (Fréminville 1758: 293). Although these exercise games were lawful by definition—unlike gambling and games of chance—the authorities sought to confine them to the private sphere as they disturbed the public peace. The civil and religious authorities took it upon themselves to promote a new model of masculine behavior, in which excesses of all kinds were eliminated. To distract young, single men from the bloody confrontational rituals they so enjoyed, the authorities employed a mix of repression, education, and persuasion. Thus began the slow transmutation of entertainment of carnivalesque origin into sport. The participants were transformed from players into spectators, who, identifying with the players, continued to enjoy the suffering of the men and animals on display before them at collective festivities. These celebrations were also an opportunity to express an exuberance usually prohibited in everyday life (Muchembled 2008: 297–8). The evolution of bullfighting, which enthused much of modern Spain, was the product of the “civilization” of sacrificial games via codification. Mentioned in the Partidas code in the thirteenth century and present at all religious, municipal, and scholarly festivals from the sixteenth century onwards, bullfighting changed significantly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether it involved running before bulls released into the main streets of towns and villages, lined with palisades (the encierros), or fights against the animals in makeshift enclosures, it was an extremely popular yet dangerous game, at which numerous common boys and young men tried their hands (Bennassar 1975: 126–7). However, in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy became involved in bullfighting, lending it the social distinction it had previously lacked: intrepid caballeros would pursue a beast on horseback through the streets of Valladolid or tackle it at a rejon in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. Knights and titulos—the titled nobles—launched barbed darts known as rejones into the bull’s neck, leaving combatants on foot to end the animal’s life. Throughout the seventeenth century, 107 corridas were held in Madrid, where the court had been established in 1707. Yet from 1715, the arrival of the French Bourbon dynasty to the throne changed everything. Viewed by Philip V and then by Ferdinand VI as a barbaric form of entertainment, the corridas lost the prestige and royal support they had until then enjoyed. For a while, they became a bloody distraction reserved for the lower classes, which began to engage in the deadly game of tertulia around

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FIGURE 5.1: Bullfight in a Divided Ring, attributed to Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, c. 1816. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

1750, in which a group of unarmed men would blindly attack a wild bull. Meanwhile, during the same period in Andalusia, an innovative method of fighting emerged on the initiative of particularly bold matadors such as Pedro Romero, the inventor of the corrida, the people’s favorite Joaquim Rodriguez “Costillares,” the organizer of the cuadrilla who was preferred by the gentry, and José Delgado “Pepe Hillo,” who was considered to be the founder of the Sevillan school of bullfighting. Equipped with a cloak and sword, and assisted by picadors and banderilleros, they formalized the lethal fight against the monumental beasts, curating its intrinsic violence by dividing it into sequences: the paseo, followed by the three tercios—the lance, the banderillas, and the faena, in which the bull was dealt the final death blow. This novel, highly spectacular ritual explains the success of the corridas among the Court during the time of Charles III (1759–88): eighty-seven royal corridas were held in Madrid during this period, almost as many as the total organized throughout the entire seventeenth century. The caballeros participated once again, as did the great Count of Miranda from Córdoba, who did not hesitate to descend into the arena to sacrifice the bull (Bennassar 1975: 128–9). While the first

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permanent arenas were being built, the corridas, which had become bullfighting shows, drew enthusiasm from aficionados who viewed them as an art. The English and French monarchs endeavored to divert the aggression inherent to war games towards exercises that were useful for the defense of their countries. In England, successive royal ordinances encouraged the centuries-old practice of longbow shooting, since Edward III’s Welsh archers swept him to victory in the Battle of Crécy (D’Allemagne 1913: 80–1). In France, following an ordinance issued by Charles V on April 3, 1369, the monarchs invited their subjects to train in archery and arbalestry, instead of wasting their time and money on dice, tables, trictrac, pucks, skittles, marbles, and boules (Ordonnance [1369] 1726: 172). Guilds of archers and arbalists were widespread in the north of the kingdom, in the provinces of Flanders, Artois, Picardy, and Vermandois, which had experienced the lengthiest exposure to the ravages of war, and began to thrive in cities throughout the fourteenth century, before the francsarchers corps were created in 1448, extending the practice of archery to the neighboring countryside (Mehl 1990: 60–2). These favored companies, which were supplemented or replaced by those of the harquebusiers in the sixteenth century, were organized on an identical model all over the kingdom: endowed with official statutes, they were governed by a hierarchy copied from the military hierarchy with a captain, lieutenant, ensign, or second lieutenant, sergeants, and a treasurer, all of whom were elected. They admitted only inhabitants of the city or village who belonged to the dominant classes: nobles, the bourgeoisie, merchants, and craftsmen. Their members, who took the title of knight of the arbalest or of the harquebus in the seventeenth century, swore an oath that they would never use their weapons against the sovereign. The companies paraded at every local celebration and regularly trained in a garden made available to them by the municipal authorities or in the ditches at the foot of the ramparts. Moreover, they also benefited from fiscal incentives (Belmas 2006: 110). Their main activity was shooting at the butts, or target shooting, aiming at a post or target positioned on a hilltop. This game was rivaled from the fifteenth to sixteenth century by popinjay or papingo (literally, “parrot”), a wooden bird perched on top of a tree or mast. During the seventeenth century, the competition was held in great solemnity once a year, in the month of May (Lamotte 1992: 36). The winner was proclaimed king of the popinjay and received a prize: he was exempt from paying taxes for the following year (Trémaud 1972: 14–16). Over time, the festive, “sporting” nature of the games came to prevail over their military training aspect, for various reasons: epidemics, political unrest, creation of a permanent army, financial difficulties, and changing sensibilities. Although they were still going strong in the first half of the eighteenth century, the companies of archers, arbalists, and harquebusiers subsequently went into decline. The situation was exacerbated by the constant cuts to their fiscal incentives from the monarchy and by the knights’ reluctance to train. The

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FIGURE 5.2: A Group of Peasants Practicing Archery, etching after David Teniers the Younger (1610–90). © The Trustees of the British Museum, courtesy of Alamy.

additional social status conveyed by the title of “king of the popinjay” or the rank of officer no longer attracted influential figures, leading to the appointment of officers belonging to trades that would originally have been rejected from the guild. Other ceremonies and institutions, considered more prestigious, had become more appealing to the elites. One after another, members resigned and the guilds were depopulated. From 1766 onwards, the Chevaliers de l’Arquebuse Company in Paris was affected by a succession of departures, which were indicative of members’ disinterest in the group’s traditional activities. Those who left did not hesitate to explain in their letters of resignation that the rules were “absolutely incompatible” with their plans and businesses, or that they were too busy “to participate in the drills” (Belmas 2006: 109–10). The promotion of judicious gymnastics during the final third of the eighteenth century prompted a number of princes and rulers in Europe to apply their educational skills to military training and to the education of young people. The German pedagogue and philosopher Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724– 90), a philanthropist, admirer of Rousseau’s Emile, and author of Das Methodenbuch für Väter und Mütter der Familien und Völker (1770), suggested that children’s education should be reformed by developing physical strength and the faculties of the soul simultaneously (Roeck 2006: 95–6). Influenced by his work, the German prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau facilitated the opening of the Philanthropinum in Dessau in 1774, a model school that delivered a solid physical education based on swimming, horse riding, jumping, and skipping, in accordance with the principles of Rousseau. In his book Gymnastik für die

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FIGURE 5.3: High jump, engraving from Gymnastik für die Jugend, 1793, written by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, illustrated by Johann Heinrich Lips and Konrad Westermayr. Photograph by Ullstein Bild, courtesy of Getty Images.

Jugend, which was published in 1793 and translated into English in 1796, then into Danish and Dutch, the pedagogue Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths outlined an extensive physical and sports education program, also based on the precepts of Rousseau and Basedow, but supplemented by innovative exercises and popular practices such as skating, skiing, and stilt walking (GutsMuths 1793). It was a genuine physical and moral recovery project, which aimed to rejuvenate the German population after it had been devastated by the Napoleonic Wars (Turcot 2016: 373). These ideas also achieved great success in Sweden and Denmark, where Franck Nachtegall introduced physical education

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into the kingdom’s schools at the dawn of the nineteenth century, after encouraging its use by the army. Gymnastics based on knowledge of the anatomical mechanisms of movement, accompanied by moral and intellectual instruction, became an academic discipline that aimed to forge citizen soldiers able to defend their country (Ulmann 1965: 259–61). It channeled recreational violence for the collective interest. In this way, the function of physical exercise, whose benefits were praised by an extensive body of medical and pedagogical literature, was transformed to make way for the progressive adoption of English-style sport (Turcot 2016: 375).

CAN WE TALK ABOUT A “SPORTIFICATION” OF CONFLICT? Although contemporary physical practices are rooted in a distant past, the movement which gave rise to sport from the eighteenth century onwards is now believed to have emerged in England. However, there is little consensus as to the chronology of this evolution, with Vigarello situating its earliest manifestations in the mid-nineteenth century (Vigarello 2002: 55–7). According to Elias, the “sportification of pastimes” began earlier, among the British landed aristocracy and gentry, when the Whigs and Tories in Parliament employed verbal confrontation instead of physical standoffs during the eighteenth century. This general process of “pacification” led them to prefer competitive games which were strictly regulated and less violent, yet still required physical effort and skill (Elias 1994: 236). The rules were set out in manuals and sports grounds were built, while an audience of fans of “physical performances” grew, and societies, clubs, and associations dedicated to sport were established (Turcot 2016: 404–5). Meanwhile, professional players of games such as jeu de paume began to emerge, who performed in front of paying audiences in Italy and France. England was a pioneer in this process, as evidenced by the examples of boxing and cricket. Of ancient origin, both activities bore traces of the aggressive conduct that was typical of recreational sports in the first modernity. Fistfights, both individual and collective, were widespread across northern and southern Europe; while serving as a release valve for the tensions present in urban and rural communities, they also represented a virility “test” imposed upon male community members. Considered to be a children’s game by some, and one of the numerous regional variants of the rustic game of soule by others, cricket— the first mention of which dates back to the mid-sixteenth century—long remained imbued with ritual practices, marking the transition from youth to adulthood or the struggle of two groups to establish supremacy over the village. Before the match began, players would customarily insult one another to assert the symbolic domination of one team over another, until an experienced player interrupted these interactions by appointing himself arbiter/umpire. In the

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seventeenth century, the taste for cricket became established in England, especially in the counties of Surrey and Sussex to the south of London. Brought back to their lands by political convulsions in the second half of the century, the aristocracy and gentry strove to police and organize this popular entertainment, eventually introducing it in London (Turcot 2016: 411). Cricket and boxing took their contemporary form in the early eighteenth century: the rules of the two sports were written up and the playing areas were demarcated. The commercialization of the games also progressed due to the involvement of daring sports entrepreneurs. In 1719, James Figg opened the Figg’s Amphitheatre gym in London, marking the early days of boxing as a sports discipline (Birley 1993: 109–19). An experienced boxer, who soon proclaimed himself champion of England and of the world, James Figg became the teacher of a new generation of champions. The arena for the matches, the rules, and the technique employed were gradually defined: John Figg fought with his bare fists, his legs, and even a cane (Turcot 2016: 406). The year 1743 saw the publication of the London Prize Rules or Broughton Rules, named after their author John Broughton, which established the ring—no longer the paving stones of the streets but a square grassed area, measuring eighty square feet—the sequence of the fight, its ending via KO, and the rules for betting, although the volume did not yet cover the

FIGURE 5.4: Portrait of John Broughton, an English bare-knuckle boxer or “pugilist,” by Robert Cooper, 1822. Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

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duration of the fight nor the systematic use of gloves. By publishing these rules, John Broughton, nicknamed Gentleman Jack, sought to promote a code of good conduct with the aim of preventing the fatal accidents that had already occurred during the brief history of the new sport (Holt [1989] 1992: 19–21). During the second half of the eighteenth century, fighting techniques were perfected by Daniel Mendoza, one of the best professionals of the era and author of The Art of Boxing, a pugilistic treatise which revealed how to strike one’s opponent harder by dodging and counter-punching. Newspapers and caricaturists enjoyed reporting on matches between famous boxers and on the sum of the bets placed by the upper class, such as the Duke of Cumberland (one of the sons of King George II), who lost 250,000 pounds in 1750 on a fight between John Broughton and Jack Slack, known as the “Norfolk Butcher” (Brailsford 1988). While boxing quickly spread beyond the British Isles, the same could not be said for cricket, which continued to expand nationally throughout the eighteenth century (Underdown 2000: 3–13). Gradually stripped of ritual violence and incorporated into all seasonal events, cricket became another recreational activity to be commercialized in the British capital, where leisure entrepreneur George Smith organized paying matches on the Artillery Ground that the press rushed to cover (Henricks 1991: 142). The matches attracted between 2,000 and 8,000 spectators, and even 10,000 was reached in 1738 (Turcot 2016: 412). Despite being reshaped by the English nobility, who produced the first written rules for the sport—the Articles of Agreement—at a match setting the teams of the Duke of Richmond and the heir to Viscount Middleton against one another in 1727, cricket nonetheless remained highly popular in villages, where both men and women continued to play. The presence of women among the audience and on the pitch was one of the most original aspects of cricket. In Sussex villages, it was not rare to see two female teams competing against one another, with married women playing against single women. In London in 1747, two female teams faced one another on the Artillery Ground (Henricks 1991: 411). Cricket quickly took hold in schools, colleges, and universities, where teachers believed that it would teach young people to control their masculine energy. During the final decades of the eighteenth century, the sport became enshrined: new rules, published in 1788, were adopted all over England, while the creation of the aristocratic Marylebone Cricket Club in London in 1787 was followed by the construction of an oval pitch between 1813 and 1814, which expedited the standardization of the game (Brailsford 1999: 42–3). Two styles of cricket thus began to emerge: that of the elitist clubs, reserved solely for gentlemen, who funded the teams in which they sometimes enrolled their domestic staff and subsidized players, which was characterized by elegance, self-control and fair play (Turcot 2016: 407–8, 411–12); and that of rural areas, which was less formal and often accused of brutality and vulgarity by judicial officers and the police, who condemned the outbursts of the players and audiences during

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FIGURE 5.5: Cricket Pose, 1768, portrait of a boy holding a cricket bat by Francis Cotes (1726–70). Photograph by Rischgitz, courtesy of Getty Images.

matches. The fatal accidents and injuries resulting from both boxing and cricket did little to slow their rise to success. Following a particularly bloody fight between John Broughton and Jack Slack in 1750, Parliament banned all professional boxing matches on British soil (Turcot 2016: 407–8). However, Parliament left decisions on the nature of such matches to county judges, the vast majority of whom preferred to turn a blind eye to the matter. Refined, disciplined, and codified in accordance with the standards of the “civilizing process,” boxing and cricket began to metamorphose into sports. Yet the early, rapid transformation experienced by the two activities was an exception in pre-industrial Europe, which was largely dominated by rural areas. In many respects, the countryside emerged as a conservatory for traditional exercise games in which opponents showed no fear of brutal clashes. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, inhabitants of rural areas continued to play pétanque and to fight outside the cabarets on Sundays and holy days. Other pastimes included jeu de barres, which was played by adults until the nineteenth

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century (Béart 1967: 270), battledore, and balle au tamis, played in village squares in Île-de-France, Normandy, and Picardy. Some of the favorite games of the French provinces were throwing a horseshoe over a stake, and sliding a key or esse across a table, ensuring that it did not fall off the other side (Belmas 2006: 116). Despite being banned, soule survived the eighteenth century. Evidence of this can be found in the parish of Brée-au-Maine in the Loire region, where the latest man to marry that year initiated a match between married men and bachelors after vespers on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1761 (Arrêt 1761: 15–16). Meanwhile, Flanders, Holland, and Scotland were still practicing the stick and ball games which influenced golf, played roughly and punctuated by fierce fighting (Jusserand [1901] 1986: 291–4). The ways in which boxing and cricket evolved over time are not, however, representative of all physical activities of the past, as illustrated by the history of fencing. Theorized and perfected in Italy, the modern science of weapons aimed to harden pupils while educating them, in strict accordance with the rules of refinement. The French school of fencing, which expanded rapidly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, taught cool-headed appraisal of a situation, a sense of the appropriate riposte, rapidity of execution, and the art of the feint, which were not exclusively military virtues (Drévillon 1999: 469–78). Despite eighteenth-century police dictionaries repeatedly stating that only the nobility and the military were permitted to bear arms, commoners did not hesitate to violate this rule by carrying a sword at their sides. However, responsibility for the practice of resolving disputes through sword fights which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lay predominantly with the aristocracy. The noble duel, which had become widespread throughout the kingdom as defense heightened by matters of honor, attained an unprecedented status, combining carefully controlled, refined gestures with extreme cruelty. The veneer of politeness derived from the treatises on civility, further reinforced by courtly etiquette, masked the ferocity of the French nobles, who viewed the art of masterfully slaughtering their enemies as a way to assert their superiority over their peers and to proclaim their supremacy over ordinary people. The duels frequently disturbed the public peace in the streets of Paris; they were responsible for one-tenth of the fatal violence recorded in the capital during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Several spikes—from 1722 to 1730, then from 1742 to 1751, from 1762, and again in 1782—may be identified from the records of rulings appealed before the Parlement of Paris. Among the victims delivered to the morgue at the Grand Châtelet in Paris who had succumbed to a duel, half were under thirty years old and very few were older than forty. Seventy percent of the victims had been wounded in the chest, while 10 percent bore stomach injuries. The most frequent bottes struck the area around the nipples, indicating an intention to pierce the torso and heart, and thus to kill (Brioist et al. 2002: 306–9, 323, 343–9). Fatal brawls involved soldiers first and foremost, including

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the rank and file, and nobles. Nonetheless, ordinary citizens from many different professions represented a quarter of the fatalities, suggesting that ancient customs of bloody violence persisted among the population at a time when aristocrats and soldiers were merely concerned with defending their honor (Muchembled 2008: 279). France was the only country in Europe to take the art of killing so far in its aristocratic format (Brioist et al. 2002: 12). Italy produced the most widely renowned fencing masters and treatises, but the practice of challenging honor did not last long beyond the sixteenth century in the country (Billacois 1986: 79–80). It subsequently underwent a rapid decline, which is commonly attributed to the influence of the Council of Trent, but which was also linked to the persistence of traditional models of ritualized violence among young people. A similar situation occurred in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands for the same reasons (Muchembled 2008: 262–3). The duel failed to fully take hold in the Holy Roman Empire, at least at that time. Only England, between 1570 and 1660, imitated the French fury that the islanders, elite heading, then gradually abandoned until the nineteenth century. Several factors contribute to explain this long evolution towards the pacification of individual conflicts. After 1660, duels appear to be less violent and more ritualized in England. Abandonment of the sword in favor of the gun, after 1760, led to a drop in mortality, despite the technical improvements made to firearms: the distance imposed between adversaries and highly codified firing methods had the effect of reducing the number of lethal wounds. At the end of the eighteenth century, the part played by the witnesses before the confrontation was also decisive to reconcile the opposing stakeholders. Prohibited by law, duels were now confined to the private sphere, outside the eyes of the public. Finally and most importantly, the diffusion of an urban culture preaching the social model of the gentleman valorized the male control of the emotions. A gentleman had to show courage, but he also had to know how to control himself under all circumstances: showing his anger in a brutal way was not a gentlemanlike behavior any longer. Honesty became a matter of particular conscience, to be re-established in more restricted circles— clubs, associations—and not in the street. Dueling was thus seen as an ineffective method of settling disputes and defending one’s honor when printed media could be used to safeguard one’s reputation. Although the duel continued in England until the nineteenth century, its form and meaning were profoundly altered in the eighteenth century (Shoemaker 2002: 525–45). The Bourbon monarchs endeavored to suppress these destructive passions through repressive legislation punishing duelers with death. Yet as men of their time, from the same social class as the duelers, they were torn between Christian morals that forbade the spilling of blood and the values of noble honor. This ambivalence explains why attempts to eradicate duels produced few tangible results in France: a small number of exemplary convictions concealed the hundreds of pardons issued for this offense (Caroll 2006: 259; Muchembled

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FIGURE 5.6: Duel between Charles Lameth and the Marquis de Castries, November 12, 1790, gouache by Pierre Etienne and Jacques Philippe Lesueur. Paris, Carnavalet Museum. Photograph by Leemage/Corbis Historical, courtesy of Getty Images.

2008: 272–3). Suppressed by the codes of the civilizing process, the aggression present within French nobles crystallized around a sense of destructive superiority, which prompted them to kill intentionally in cold blood, with finesse and sophistication (Muchembled 2008: 277). The abolition of privileges by the French Revolution did little to stop this deadly proclivity. In every regiment in the revolutionary armies, there was a provost of arms who was responsible for testing the courage of new recruits. Newcomers had to fight an opponent in something akin to an initiation rite, which was clearly inspired by the extremely brutal customs of the old abbeys of misrule (Brioist et al. 2002: 439, 463, 467). Fascination for this type of confrontation continued throughout the nineteenth century and adapted to the weapons in vogue at the time, with the pistol rivaling the sword; it also spread to the bourgeoisie. After 1815, in the years that followed the fall of the Empire, several dozen fatal duels were recorded each year. To refuse to fight was a shameful act. Numerous famous authors and politicians

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thus fought to restore their honor from the real or perceived insults that had stained it: Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas, PierreJoseph Proudhon, and Léon Gambetta all rose to the challenge. Some lost their lives in the process, such as Evariste Galois, a mathematical genius and committed republican, who died in a gallant duel in 1832 at the age of twenty, and the novelist Alexander Pushkin, who was slain in a pistol duel with a French officer in 1837. The belligerent model of the Ancien Régime that sustained this aggressive behavior helped to persuade men to rise up en masse in the French Revolution; it was also useful to nineteenth-century colonizers in Prussia and later in the recently unified German Empire, serving to “produce military heroes at universities and among the bourgeoisie who will guarantee the national victories of the nineteenth century” (Muchembled 2008: 282–3). To conclude this exploration of the relationships between conflict, recreational sports/physical games, and violence, it is evident that such games played a role in the lengthy civilizing process that reshaped the habitus of modern European populations. Recreational sports/physical games performed a unifying function in the sixteenth century; the moments of freedom that they represented and the symbolic power they carried contributed to the temporary abatement of latent conflicts as well as to the restoration of unity in rural and urban communities. The new values imposed by states and churches throughout the seventeenth century gradually and ineluctably eroded traditional practices. Confined to dedicated areas, subjected to increasingly restrictive rules, and monitored by the authorities, who were keen to suppress any excessively high spirits, their former power to reconcile differences was diminished. When the “sportification” of physical games became established, it was no longer a matter of mediating conflicts, but rather of transcending them. Translation by Eleanor Staniforth

CHAPTER SIX

Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation REBEKKA VON MALLINCKRODT

In the early modern period, sports and physical exercise were not only ends in themselves but, like today, also occasions to demonstrate manliness, wealth, or elegance, the superiority of one’s own group or, conversely, to compensate for social inferiority. Moreover, the material prerequisites for some types of sport were such that many people were de facto excluded from practicing them. Access to particular sports was not simply left to the market; authorities sometimes intervened in the process. In keeping with the premodern conception that a person’s purpose and position in life was determined by birth, and that this complementary distribution of roles made a perfect—conflict-free and harmonious—society possible, many European countries prescribed occupations, styles of life, and sometimes recreational activities, too, for each estate and each level in society. Thus, hunting was a privilege of the nobility from which other groups were explicitly excluded and whose arrogation by those of lower rank was punishable. Riding, fencing, and dancing were covered by the term “noble exercises”; though by no means reserved to nobles, these pastimes were nevertheless considered particularly prestigious for the nobility. Early modern elite schools for the scions of noble families, the “Ritterakademien,” accordingly devoted more time to teaching sport than to academic instruction. Conversely, it could be regarded as inappropriate for a nobleman to indulge in certain sports such as swimming, running, or rowing. Apart from such estatist, rank-based notions, which found expression either in legislation or in social norms, gender images also played a role. Women were subject to far greater 137

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restrictions than men, although how much freedom women were given or they allowed themselves also depended on where they stood in the hierarchy of estates. Finally, age, religious affiliation, and ethnic origin came in as enabling or inhibitory factors, too. Hence, what sports were accessible, permitted, or even required and actually practiced by whom depended on many interdependent criteria. Intersectionality studies, in particular, have addressed this phenomenon, that is, the social group as an interface of collective attributions (Crenshaw 1989; McCall 2005; Kallenberg and Müller 2013; Hancock 2016). From a specifically historiographical perspective, Andrea Griesebner and Susanne Hehenberger have shown that these processes did not operate schematically and hence always alike: they were situational and subject to historical change. Categories like “race,” “estate/class,” and “gender” must therefore themselves be historicized and analyzed as social constructs (2013: 111–13). In what follows, I first address the classical triad of categories in cultural studies—“race,” “estate/class,” and “gender”—separately in order to show their early modern dimensions and meanings. Although all three categories are understood in relational terms, that is, as men and women, “black” and “white,” upper, middle, and lower classes, this chapter places compensatory emphasis on groups that have tended to be neglected—in other words, women, “people of color,” and the lower orders. The conclusion embarks on a summary discussion of how race, estate/class, and gender interlocked between 1650 and 1800, and whether general trends are apparent, what factors were most frequently decisive, and, in the event of conflict, which of the categories under consideration dominated or had an only secondary impact. As early modern sports not only reflected societal norms, but were also a domain in which these notions were negotiated and shifted, findings transcend the field of sports history and point to more general developments as well.

GENDER Paradoxically, the sex that early modern medicine considered to be particularly in need of sporting activity was the one subjected to the greatest restrictions. The antique theory of humors, which held sway until well into the eighteenth century, categorized girls and women as cold and humid, so that sweating was necessary to bring their bodies into balance. Physical fitness was also known to be an advantage in childbirth (Cavallo and Storey 2016: 168). Only intensive exercise was considered detrimental to health (owing to dehydration), bad for fertility, and dangerous during pregnancy. Medical treatises dealing with physical exercise for girls and women primarily stressed dangers to fertility— indicating how strongly the female sex was considered from the angle of biological reproduction (Arcangeli 2016: 149f., 153f.; Cavallo and Storey

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2016: 169). Especially among the higher social orders (nobles and burghers), producing offspring was the chief function of women in the sense of family strategy. Childlessness was a ground for annulling marriage. For this reason, passive exercises in which the body was merely mobilized were considered particularly beneficial to women—as well as to children and the elderly (Arcangeli 2016: 151). Girls and women were also ill-advised to indulge in vigorous, strenuous, or sweeping movements, because this was associated morally with a lack of control over one’s own passions as well as calling into question women’s subservience to men in society. To occupy space and show strength was (and still is) a demonstration of power. The ideal of restrained female motion was strongly stressed in dancing manuals and was also recommended for everyday posture and movement such as the length and force of the step, gestural and facial expression, including control of one’s regard (Frieling 2003: 92–103). In the French dance, at the time popular in many European countries, women—unlike men—were expected to avoid brilliant combinations of steps and ornamentations, and especially any leaping. Dancing master Louis Bonin warned against such aberrations, as did Gottfried Taubert, who also pointed to the moral dimension of overstepping the limits: “Nothing can look more brazen and out of place than when a female leaps and capers about” (Bonin [1712] 1996: 242; Taubert [1717] 1976: 960; Mourey 2008: 99f.). Such rules of conduct were not only to be found in normative texts (for instance, etiquette books) but also impacted material culture. Women’s clothing was accordingly much less suitable for engaging in sport than men’s attire (Rizzo 2002: 83). The corset, in widespread use until the end of the eighteenth century, literally forced the female body into shape. Furthermore, gender-specific ideals of movement were disseminated through private correspondence, art, and literature—witness James Thomson’s 1730 poem “Autumn”: But if the rougher sex by this fierce sport Is hurried wild, let not such horrid joy E’er stain the bosom of the British fair. Far be the spirit of the chase from them! Uncomely courage, unbeseeming skill; To spring the fence, to rein the prancing steed; The cap, the whip, the masculine attire, In which they roughen to the sense, and all The winning softness of their sex is lost. —Quoted in Rizzo 2002: 70 A woman who practiced sports with male connotations, that is, involving vigorous movement and force, was, in the view of contemporaries, in danger of sacrificing

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her femininity. In his Slang Dictionary, for example, John Bee defined “fist” as “wholly masculine: when a female makes up a fist, she is no longer a woman, and must be floored like a man” (Bee 1823: 78; Ungar 2010: 98). Vice versa, these very sports were particularly well suited for demonstrating manliness. Sport was thus a form of “doing gender,” that is, constructing/producing gender through action. Depictions of women playing sport therefore often suggest that women acting in a manly fashion were calling the gender order into question and ultimately threatening to dethrone the man. In actual boxing matches between laboring women and men, this could even become a real danger, especially because women were increasingly present in the public sphere and, as industrialization took shape, had also become economic competitors in the labor market. In a series of pictures showing women engaged in sport, John Collet therefore depicted two female boxers as prostitutes—which had nothing to do with the reality, but very clearly conveyed his view of the event (Rizzo 2002: 74f.; Ungar 2010: 96). Connotations of prostitution were presumably also aroused by the fact that spectators of women engaging in sport got to see more of the female anatomy than they usually did in daily life. In 1725, two women “clad in white Waistcoats and Drawers, but without Shoes or Stockings”—that is to say, in their underwear—competed against one another (The Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, October 23, 1725). Owing to the lack of proper sportswear, men also often resorted to their underclothes, but with women the connotations were clearly erotic. Attempts were sometimes made to counteract this by prescribing full clothing, an almost life-threatening solution for swimmers, for instance (Thiébault 1893: 201 reporting on the 1780s). Similarly, the author of a newspaper report on a skating Dutchwoman in London remarked not only on the grace of her movements but also noted that “she displayed very little of her legs” (London Courant 1780; Rizzo 2002: 83). On the other hand, the scantily dressed or even naked female body was used to great effect in newspaper advertising for sporting events in the eighteenth century (Harris 1998: 21; Litherland 2014: 47f., 2016: 119; Mallinckrodt 2019b: 152). These examples show that women often disregarded early modern normative notions. Apparently women from the higher nobility—at the apex of the social hierarchy—as well as women from the lower orders had an easier time than those from the lower nobility or bourgeoisie, who were subject to stronger social expectations and were at the same time socially dependent. As Allen Guttmann has noted, rank and class seemed to be more decisive than gender in this regard (Guttmann 1991: 81). The delicacy expected of the bourgeoise and noblewomen served not only to distinguish them from men but also from lower-class women with their often physically demanding work. At a time when the boundaries between estates and classes were becoming more permeable, they had to “substantiate” their noble descent. Women’s weakness was thus also a mark of prestige, demonstrating physically that the family did not have to rely

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FIGURE 6.1: Miss Wicket and Miss Trigger, caricature of sporting women, 1770. Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

on their labor, that they could afford idleness, and leave toiling to the servants (Rizzo 2002: 71, 73). At the same time, the enforced passivity of noblewomen and bourgeoises was increasingly recognized as a source of mental and physical health problems. While in the sixteenth century noble Spanish women were still recommended to take walks to combat idleness, by the eighteenth century swinging, singing, dancing, riding, hunting, fishing, running, and jumping had been added to the list (Desessartz 1760: 406–19; Arcangeli 2016: 158, 163; Kleiman-Lafon 2018: 242–5). Educational manuals increasingly proposed exercises for girls, and specialized literature even developed (Turcot, Chapter 7 in this volume). Some enlightened French fathers taught their daughters to swim, and from the late eighteenth century there are many reports of swimming women—even from among the upper classes—in Paris (Mallinckrodt 2019a: 314, 324, 337f.; 2019c: 220, 225–7). In Britain, archery was considered eminently compatible

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FIGURE 6.2: Archers, c. 1799, after Adam Buck (1759–1833). Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

with female ideals of movement: over and above the exercise of strength, it involved graceful motion calling for technical knowledge and skill. By this time, archery had long since lost its military function and, unlike boxing and shooting with firearms, was not perceived as martial and aggressive. In the late eighteenth century, archery developed into an exclusive sport especially among the nobility and gentry, not least when the Prince of Wales developed an interest in it. While some exclusive archery clubs accepted women as equal members, other all-male clubs only allowed wives and sisters of members to join (Rizzo 2002: 89; Troost 2015: 105, 111–17). By contrast, the socio-economic gap was so wide between women and girls of the high nobility and the working classes that there was no need to mark the distance. At the same time, engaging in recreational pursuits in keeping with their rank allowed noblewomen, like their menfolk, to demonstrate their membership of the elite. Lieselotte von der Pfalz (1652–1722), for example, rode to the hunt with great enthusiasm and enjoyed the freedom of movement afforded by the male hunting attire then in fashion for women too, whereas

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FIGURE 6.3: Equestrian portrait of Marie Antoinette in hunting attire, 1783, Château de Versailles, France, unknown artist. Photograph by The Print Collector, courtesy of Getty Images.

middle class visitors were disconcerted by such “disguise” (Böth 2015: 205–35). Similarly, Marie Antoinette (1755–93) did not follow constant exhortations to desist from riding astride to the hunt from her mother (Maria Theresa [1770– 80] 1980: 31f.), who feared for her daughter’s ability to bear children—first and foremost the desired dauphin. And Lady Georgiana Dorothy Spencer (1757– 1806) went fishing, riding, foxhunting, and ice-skating (Rizzo 2002: 82, 87). In certain regions, some types of sport were so common and widespread among both sexes that there was no controversial discussion on the subject. Writing about Charleston, for example, the Venezuelan traveler Francisco de Miranda noted that riding was women’s “favorite diversion.” This included informal horse races among women, as witnessed in Virginia by the Frenchman Ferdinand Bayard, up to and including specially organized “ladies’ purses” or races for women on the third and final day of racing events in the Chesapeake. In Salem, Massachusetts, women and men went sailing together, and there were frequent mixed dancing events. Diaries and letters by women in North America also reveal that they fished, skated, ran foot races, and went sledding (Struna

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1991: 24–6). In England, cricket was very popular among women and was played by working-class countrywomen as well as “ladies of distinction” (Rizzo 2002: 84f.). French treatises by Jean-Baptiste Thiers 1687 and Jean Barbeyrac 1737 show that sports such as skittles and badminton were considered acceptable and suitable even for well brought-up ladies, as long as played separately from men (Arcangeli 2016: 149). Angela Schattner also points out that a spatial distinction was made in English churchyards between the sexes: whereas young women and children played stoolball there, young and middleaged men played fives, tennis, or football (Schattner 2016: 72). But when the professional tennis player Madame Bunell from Paris was announced in London in 1767 as “the only known woman tennis-player” (Rizzo 2002: 81) this was probably an advertising ploy as jeu de paume was very popular in France. Eighteenth-century Venetian women, by contrast, preferred to play pallone (Arcangeli 2016: 161). Besides types of sport reserved to the nobility and those played by all, although mostly separately, there were also competitions in which primarily women from the lower working and rural classes engaged. In Venice, regattas between market women from surrounding areas, who normally transported

FIGURE 6.4: A game of shuttlecock, 1751–2, painting by Giuseppe Zocchi (1716/17–67). Florence, Museo Dell’Opificio Delle Pietre Dure, photograph by De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

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their wares in this fashion, were widespread from the late fifteenth until the late eighteenth century (Arcangeli 2016: 161). In Britain and the Holy Roman Empire, foot races between women and girls were even more frequent than between men and boys. Peter Radford found that in an analysis of 50 such [eighteenth-century British local sporting] events, less than one-third had running events for men or boys, but nearly 80 percent had running events for women or girls. Viewed as a folk-event, running races seem, therefore, to have been largely a woman’s affair. —Radford 1994: 56 In the middle of the eighteenth century, the French traveler Abbé Le Blanc reported on female competitors in “smock races,” named after the item of clothing the runners could win: “They are commonly strong robust country girls” (Le Blanc 1747, 2: 76). In Hallein, unmarried young women ran in races to compete for unprocessed cloth (Gehres 1805: 33; Kyselak 1829: 145f.), and Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyklopädie from 1795 reported on an annual race between shepherdesses: In Bretten, a town of the Electoral Palatinate, every year on St. Laurence day, a race of all the shepherd girls takes place in the most celebratory manner, attracting a great many people. The prize is mutton and certain articles of clothing, for which all the shepherdesses compete in light attire. —1795: 69f Tellingly, it was the unmarried masters’ daughters and sons who competed— just like the unmarried young women in Hallein—thus hinting at the fact that, beyond gender and rank, age and marital status played a role, too, and that the races might have been intended as an informal “marriage market.” Thus, the German philanthropist Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths could take up an existing tradition when he organized annual athletic competitions between 1776 and 1799: The so-called “Dessau Pentathlon” included running races for men and for women, in which male and female youths from the surrounding areas participated (Behringer 2012: 250; Radford 2012: 176). There are indications that women not only took an active part in traditional events at annual fairs and church festivals but also in the new, more strongly commercialized sporting events as well as in novel, health-oriented physical education. Elisabeth Stokes (fl. 1723–33), for instance, was among the first female boxers to live from her takings in the first half of the eighteenth century; she fought not only with her fists but also with weapons such as the sword, dagger, buckler, and quarterstaff (Gee 2004). It is nevertheless worth discussing whether the increasing institutionalization of sport led to women being

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FIGURE 6.5: Women’s regatta in Venice, engraving from Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’huomeni et donne Venetiane, 1610. Photograph by De Agostini, courtesy of Getty Images.

excluded. At the same period, the division between public and private spheres was exacerbated by the shift of gainful employment from the domestic arena, with women—in keeping with men’s views of things—being assigned to this private, domestic sphere. Angela Schattner’s research into English commercial tennis and bowling facilities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lends support to the thesis that the tavern, which in early modern times usually provided sports facilities, was a more suspect venue for a woman’s reputation than the churchyard, where sport had previously been played (2016: 78f.). Likewise, after the enlightenment boom in the eighteenth century, swimming for women was no longer mentioned in France by nineteenth-century authors.

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In practice, the authorities were intent on separating the sexes, on excluding women from existing facilities without providing separate baths to accommodate them (Mallinckrodt 2019a: 324, 337f.; 2019c: 220, 226). Similarly, Benjamin Litherland reports on the exclusion of women from boxing in the nineteenth century (2014: 33). However, a distinction needs to be drawn between public reporting and the evidence of personal testimony. Normative notions of gender and women’s sporting practices increasingly diverged, reconciled not by reformulating gender ideals but by excluding women from sport and generally from the public sphere. Even when, as sport became commercialized, women were discovered as customers, they seemed to be wooed more in their capacity as admiring spectators than as active participants. This was particularly true for women of middle and high rank who could afford such pleasures, and of city dwellers who had access to commercial offers, whereas rural areas were affected only much later (Struna 1991: 24, 28).

RACE The derogatory term “effemination” signaled that womanhood was considered the worse variety of humankind, decrying any deviation from an ideal of manliness that stressed (self-) control, strength, and aggressivity. Ruti Ungar sees emphasis on the manliness ideal in boxing as a defensive gesture against an increasingly dynamic society in which both women and the lower orders were claiming their rights, and which was also showing first signs of globalization (2010: 97, 157). When Pierce Egan stated that “the practice of boxing through the means of the prize-ring is one of the corner stones towards preventing effeminacy from undermining the good old character of the people of England” (Egan 1825: vi; Ungar 2010: 98), he was attacking not only women but everyone who, from his point of view, did not share the “good old character of the people of England.” In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England this could mean homosexuals, Jews, (Catholic) Irishmen, and Scots, as well as immigrants or trafficked people from India or Africa. There were also fears that “nabobs,” newly rich British returnees from India, would foster the adoption of “oriental morals,” provoking the degeneration and “effemination” of the nation—just as the increasing consumption of luxury goods, the spread of sedentary occupations, and the refinement of morals posed a threat to British manhood (Downing 2010: 331–3). In France, “effemination” and “degeneration” were commonplaces for criticizing the nobility, conditions to be remedied through sport and physical exercise (Baecque 1997: 8, 11, 29–71; Mallinckrodt 2016: 235, 2019a: 324). And many countries at war with one another reviled each other as “effeminate” and felt obliged to uphold manly ideals if only in the interests of military morale (Downing 2010: 332, 334, 338; Ungar 2010: 100).

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FIGURE 6.6: Richard Humphreys, engraving by John Young, 1788, after a painting by John Hoppner (1758–1810). Photograph by Culture Club, courtesy of Getty Images.

As between the sexes, relations within a society and between states were concerned with who as a “man” could and should hold sway over whom. “Effemination” was thus a relatively flexible metaphor, a political shibboleth, but also a term used in speaking of groups perceived as a threat to one’s identity, as well as to describe differences between “races.” Although in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was not yet a fully developed scientific racism as there was to be a century later, racist stereotypes were nonetheless omnipresent. While the view of the Jewish communities shifted increasingly from “deviant” religion to “deviant” body, and hence from traditional anti-Judaism to racist antisemitism, when it came to “black” people, “deviant” skin color and associated notions of alterity were soon the center of attention. Although the curse of Ham had provided biblical grounds for discrimination, colonization, and the transatlantic slave trade—which reached its climax in the eighteenth century—a more secularized society required new justificatory narratives. On the one hand, “different” bodies justified social

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FIGURE 6.7: Tom Molineaux (c. 1784–1818), bare-knuckle boxer, undated painting. Photograph by Bettmann, courtesy of Getty Images.

inequality and unfreedom; on the other, at a time when rule and political participation were tied to military prowess, physical fitness justified power. Did sports therefore offer these groups a possibility for recognition, integration, and upward mobility? What do the examples of boxing and swimming tell us about this question? According to Ruti Ungar, boxing was the only sport in eighteenth-century Britain in which athletes from minorities played a prominent role. At first glance we could assume that it was proof of successful integration when British publications praised Jewish and “black” boxers from Britain over boxers from France or Spain (Ungar 2010: 130, 137). Within the country, however, this alliance could dissolve at any time if “white” male Britons had hopes of beating minority fighters. For the Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza (1765–1836) and the “black” athletes Bill Richmond (1763–1829) and Tom Molineaux (c. 1784–1818), sporting success brought fame and economic betterment, but sports reporting was still full of racist stereotypes. Mendoza’s style of boxing, which allowed him to beat stronger and heavier opponents, was said to be “scientific,” that is to say, very technical, but also “low,

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FIGURE 6.8: Illustration of the boxing match between Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux, 1811. Photograph by Smith Collection/Gado, courtesy of Getty Images.

and with cunning” and hence “effeminate” as opposed to “honest,” “fair,” and “manly.” Molineaux, by contrast, was described as “instinctive,” “animalistic,” “driven by passion.” In similar fashion, journalists characterized Irish boxers as “impulsive and violent” (Ungar 2010: 130, 141f., 151f., 2012b). Molineaux was described as much more of a threat than Richmond, who was assigned the role of the childlike and hence harmless “black,” who had never questioned “white” British superiority, even though both were escaped slaves from American plantations. Quite possibly differing marketing strategies were also at play, which transformed the boxers into distinctive brands (Ungar 2010: 151–5). By contrast, Desch-Obi proposed a different explanation: Bill Richmond used a form of defense hitherto unknown in English boxing, originating in African fighting techniques and spreading in the African diaspora through the slave trade. While a British fighter with “bottom” was expected to take blows stoically and fend them off at most with his arms, the ideal of African and especially Angolan fighting techniques was to skillfully dodge attacks. In Britain this was initially interpreted as indicating a “lack of courage,” of being “cowardly” and “unmanly.” Richmond established this technique so successfully in British sports that he came to be called “the black terror” in recognition that he was anything but harmless (Desch-Obi 2009: 99–110). The great symbolic importance a successful “black” boxer had in the heyday of the slave trade should always be kept in mind:

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At a time when the most prevalent images of Black people portrayed either servants or slaves, images such as those of Richmond and Molineaux were remarkable. These Black boxers appeared independent, self-reliant, and manly; they exhibited a remarkable degree of agency; and they not only stood on a par with white men, they contested them. —Ungar 2010: 153 Thus, sports presented not only stereotypes, but were dynamic, a “contested terrain,” a site in which “racial images, ideologies and inequalities [were] constructed, transformed, and constantly struggled over rather than a place where they [were] reconciled or reproduced one way or the other” (Hartman 2000: 230; Ungar 2010: 131). Given these collective attributions, boxers fought not only for themselves but also for the group to which they belonged or which they represented for others. While boxing was considered an English institution by Britons and foreigners alike, we find similar stereotypes at play with swimming and diving. Travelogues, as well as swimming manuals, often depicted non-European swimmers with similar ambivalence, albeit as less threatening. Differences were increasingly stressed in the course of the early modern age: travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had already noted the excellent swimming skills of nonEuropeans. In the eighteenth century, however, the “noble savage” meandered more and more often, amphibian-like and equipped with fantastic abilities, through the writings of the Enlightenment authors: Today you find good swimmers in climate zones where our luxurious lifestyle and our delicacy have not yet advanced. Asia, Africa, and America contain many people of every gender and age and from varied circumstances who highly value this important form of recreation. All Negroes learn to swim at a tender age. Hence we are often amazed at the long distances they can cover, whether to fish or to return to their hometown. Reliable observers have confirmed that they use astonishing power to swim a distance of forty miles. —Thévenot 1782: 16f With the growth of global trade and colonization, European travelers increasingly came into contact with men and women of other nations who clearly had far more experience and hence also greater swimming and diving skills than they themselves (Dawson 2009; Mallinckrodt 2017: 337–40). Their swimming techniques differed too. Whereas breaststroke was widespread in Europe, though arm and leg movements were simultaneous rather than alternate as today, non-European swimmers used freestyle or crawl (Roger 1783: 24f.;

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GutsMuths 1798: 99; Dawson 2009: 83f., 113; Mallinckrodt 2016: 244). By contrast, some European authors still warned against the “coupe” (a sort of crawl with simultaneous arm and leg movements) at the end of the eighteenth century, considering it too strenuous, while techniques that whipped up as little water as possible were the aesthetic ideal (Bernardi 1797, 2: 93). Owing to the frequent (and not unjustified) fear of drowning, diving skills were even less widespread than swimming ability in Europe. Thus, for a shipwreck recovery project in 1687, William Phips brought divers from the Bermudas and Jamaica with him. Robert Boyle reported on pearl divers in Manar (near Ceylon) and female divers in Japan. One of his informants had learned a special diving technique from the Native Americans (Boyle [1670] 1772: 350, 353; Shapin 1994: 263). Jesuit missionaries wrote in the Philosophical Transactions about the diving expertise of Filipinos (Clain and Le Gobien 1708–1809: 196). And in a 1711 compilation of travel reports from the second half of the previous century, Captain J. Wood and F. Marten reported on the extraordinary diving abilities of Greenlanders, who were used as pearl divers on Jutland but who allegedly barely spoke a word of Danish, to say nothing of accepting the Christian faith (Supplement 1711: 209ff.). Thus, from a European perspective, ideas about civilization—which were associated with (their own) language and (their own) Christian religion—appear to have been diametrically opposed to physical abilities such as swimming and diving. Many accounts convey an ambiguous picture, characterizing indigenous people as savage while, often in the same breath and sometimes juxtaposed, expressing admiration for their swimming and diving abilities. A 1718 description of the indigenous population of Brazil represents a typical example: “The Inhabitants are Rude, Cruel, Lascivious, and if they are excellent in any thing, it is in Diving under Water” (Geography 1718: 216). In a similar way the Flemish traveler Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin (c. 1645–1707) portrayed Native Americans: The Islands de las Pertas are inhabited by Savage Indians, not having known or conversed with civil People; they are tall and very nimble, running almost as fast as horses; at diving also they are very dexterous and hardy. From the bottom of the Sea I saw them take up an Anchor of 600 Weight [sic], tying a Cable to it with great dexterity, and pulling it from a Rock. —1704: 75 These and countless other travel reports resembled each other in the way they characterized indigenous people in terms of their physicality, at times even bordering on animality (“running almost as fast as horses”), and thereby distanced them from the “civilized world” (Dawson 2006: 1332; Mallinckrodt 2017). Thus, the irritating superiority of indigenous swimmers and divers did not lead to racial hierarchies being reversed. Instead, exceedingly good skills in

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aquatic motion placed beings in between the realms of the human and animal worlds: Hence Thomas Glover reported in the Philosophical Transactions that hybrid creatures between fish and men in Virginia resembled Native Americans (1676: 625f.). At the same time, such hierarchizations—given men’s power to rule over all animals (and also half-animals)—could serve as a justification for colonialism and the slave trade. Thus, the Dutch slave trader Willem Bosman’s view of black Africans expressed admiration for their physical skills, but characterized them as if without any forethought: You are probably acquainted with the expert Swimming and Diving of these Negroes, which I have several times seen with Surprize. Whenever they were on Board, and I threw a string of Coral, or any thing else into the Sea, one of them would immediately dive after it, and tho’ almost got to the bottom fetch it up again. This they seldom missed of, and were sure of what they brought up as their Reward. —1705: 491 In contrast to this euphemistic depiction, however, Africans were enslaved as early as the sixteenth century on account of their swimming and diving skills and forced into pearl diving, shipwreck recovery, riverbed clearing, and fisheries, especially after the indigenous population of the Americas had been severely depleted by disease and exploitation (Dawson 2006: 1339, 1346; 2009: 81, 89, 109–11). Because of their special abilities, diving slaves were sometimes able to negotiate better living conditions for themselves, especially since the use of diving bells was expensive and therefore rare. Kevin Dawson nonetheless speaks of “privileged exploitation,” since the sole purpose of rewards was to extract more from the divers who ultimately had no other choice (2006: 1348, 1352, 1354), all the more as diving was considered and remained a dangerous practice until the end of the early modern period (Mallinckrodt 2017). Nonetheless—or because of this—free and unfree people of African descent competed in informal as well as formal swimming and diving matches organized by themselves or planters (Dawson 2009: 108). As swimming and diving were not perceived as abilities a European man should master and since they provoked no fear of unrest and turmoil, indigenous superiority was less unsettling than in boxing. Still, athletic skill was unable to nullify racial imaginings: it served rather to justify and reinforce them.

RANK AND CLASS The group of “white” men, so often seen in positive contrast to women and “people of color,” was less homogeneous than the comparisons hitherto presented

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suggest. In Britain, it was not until violence in boxing had been more strictly regulated and the sport technicized in the eighteenth century that manliness could be combined with politeness. Thus, active participation in a sport that was once the domain of the lower orders became attractive for the elites (Downing 2010: 342f., 347f.). Ironically, American settlers in the “New World” considered this British gentleman boxing “unmanly” (Desch-Obi 2009: 101f.). In the late colonial and the early national period, Americans also stayed aloof from other British habits, including fairs and festivals in the Old World style and such traditional sporting activities as cricket and football. Moreover, immigrants from Ireland and Germany brought their own sports with them. The vast distances and, not least, the hot summers made team sports less important in American frontier society. By contrast, horse racing—in which the animals had to do the sweating—and shooting competitions played a greater role than in the mother country because of the immense importance of riding and shooting skills in everyday life (Boulware 2008: 429f., 432–9). For instance, John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth noted: “nobody walks on foot the smallest distance, except when hunting: indeed a man will frequently go five miles to catch a horse, to ride only one mile upon afterwards. In short, their horses are their pleasure, and their pride.” (Smyth 1784: 14; Boulware 2008: 439) Whereas horse racing initially still followed the British model, with the New World planter emulating the British gentry, from the mid-eighteenth century courses began to diverge from the British paragon: they were now oval or round and shorter. Instead of the traditional silver plates, immense sums in prize money were offered. And, unlike in the mother country, professional breeders in the newly founded United States of America usually trusted their prized mounts to a highly trained cadre of enslaved trainers, grooms, and riders, so that elite jockeys were “all boys of color.” These competitions therefore involved slaves as active sportsmen, slaves who, like the slaveholding gentry, laid bets on the outcome, and slaves who were themselves gambled away (Boulware 2008: 439–41). Distinctions in rank and class played a major role throughout the early modern period, even though they were not everywhere and at any time as extreme as they were in American eighteenth-century horse racing that embraced free and unfree persons. According to Boulware, it was exactly this legal distinction that permitted common recreational activities of “blacks” and “whites,” whereas the fear of upward mobility, of limits being overstepped, or of “mixing” led to stronger social segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Boulware 2008: 444). There is no indication, however, that increased social mobility in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to greater divisions in terms of different types of sport or spatial segregation. During the period class became an increasingly more important category than rank or estate, albeit to different

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degrees in different countries, and often with overlap, since the revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not suddenly replace estate-based society with class society but merely accelerated developments already under way. Permeability between nobility and bourgeoisie was not only relatively great owing to ennoblement, but also—despite programmatic pronouncements to the contrary—found expression in the emulation of aristocratic ways of life by the middle classes. In England, nobility and bourgeoisie were traditionally very close, being bracketed together in the “gentry.” Reform groups intent on propagating physical education and gymnastics in eighteenth-century Europe often brought the lower nobility and the upper middle classes together, who in turn distanced themselves from the supposedly “degenerated/debilitated” higher court nobility, for example in the Old Empire and in France (see, e.g., Thévenot 1782: 14f.; Mallinckrodt 2016: 235). Reform programs were therefore always concerned with the relationship between these groups and with the legitimation of power and government, from which the lower nobility and bourgeoisie often felt excluded. Not least of all, it was a question of demarcation vis-à-vis the lower classes. Whether certain sports were played by all ranks and classes or not depended on many factors. In most cases, “by all ranks and classes” did not mean “together.” Several varieties of the same sport could exist (such as horse racing for women and for men, for “white” gentlemen and for enslaved “black” jockeys). To some extent, sporting activities differed in execution (e.g., dancing) or in whether the necessary infrastructure was owned, commercial sport facilities hired, or simply improvised (see Mallinckrodt and Schattner, Chapter 2 in this volume). There were economic obstacles to accessing commercial sport facilities, but sometimes explicit social restrictions were also imposed. In 1760, for example, Thomas Higginson announced with regard to his London tennis courts that no “Journeymen, Labourers, Servants, Apprentices, or any inferior Persons, [are allowed] to play there upon any Terms” (Schattner 2014: 204). To some degree, different social groups assumed different roles and functions in sporting events (such as patron vs active athlete in boxing or horse racing). In other cases, sports were made attractive and acceptable to elites by refining and emphasizing techniques (swimming and boxing). Apart from such developments over time, there were also regional differences. Although cricket had originally been a rural pastime, with the founding of exclusive clubs it also became a sport for the elites without other social groups losing their passion for it (Harris 1998: 22–4). By contrast, fencing in the Old Empire developed with the growing monopolization of state authority by the mid-eighteenth century from a popular sport among artisans and burghers into a privileged activity of the military, the nobility, and students (Tlusty 2016: 218). Throughout the period under study, hunting remained an

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elite pastime, a privilege defended against other groups, even if in England changes in environmental conditions led to a shift from the stag hunt to the fox hunt (Williams 2008: 393). Not least, “leisure” was a resource extremely unevenly distributed in early modern times (see Chapter 2 in this volume). However, rank and class generally had less influence on whether sport was engaged in at all than on what sport was practiced and how. As an element of conspicuous consumption, sport could be very pompously staged or practiced with little or no aids and equipment. Between 1660 and the early nineteenth century, as Emma Griffin has convincingly shown for Britain, the suppression of popular sports and pastimes for the laboring poor was in practice not only relatively ineffective but also never as rigorously formulated by the elites as had previously been assumed (Griffin 2015). On the other hand, there were sports to be eschewed from the perspective of the elites. In Europe, this was long the case with swimming—considered dangerous and morally questionable since it required disrobing. The Frenchman Melchisedech Thévenot (c. 1620–92) noted that while swimming was not widespread, it was nonetheless common among sailors and boatmen as a necessary skill, and among the lower orders as a form of entertainment (1696: preface). Although his suggestion that swimming practices were concentrated in the lower orders is relativized by other written evidence, this popular connotation alone was enough to make it unattractive for the elites. Reports about accidents on the Seine and its banks that were collected and published by the Paris Lifesaving Association (Pia 1773–82) show indeed that swimmers were predominantly young artisans and servants. And before a swimming school was officially established in Paris in 1785, sailors, mariners, ferrymen, and harbor workers apparently gave commercial swimming lessons (Roger 1783: 16f., 1787: 38) and took part in jousting competitions on the Seine (Villefosse 1980: 194, 216, 272; Backouche 2000: 96f.; Cilleßen 2000: 211–13). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who defended swimming in his Emile (1762), explained that it was neglected because it was useless in terms of social distinction: An exclusive education, which merely tends to keep those who have received it apart from the mass of mankind, always prefers the most expensive instruction to the most common, even when the latter is of more use. Thus all carefully educated young men learn to ride, because it is costly, but scarcely any of them learn to swim, as it costs nothing, and an artisan can swim as well as any one. —[1762] 1974: 96 Some types of sport long remained problematic for elites because they were popular among the masses, associated with servile activities or degrading rituals.

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This was the case, for instance, with running. Foot races had a long tradition at fairs going back to the late Middle Ages, but were sometimes also staged as a form of humiliation between prostitutes or between Jews. In Rome, Jews were chased along the Corso until 1668, when they were allowed to buy themselves out of the race by paying an annual sum of 300 écus (Boiteux 1976: 748, 751, 753, 756). In Padua, prostitute races were still being held in 1668; in Breslau, such races were organized until at least 1686; and in Lucerne, they were held until the French Revolution ([Gomolky] 1733: 183f.; Trexler 1984: 886). In addition, because there were no material prerequisites, running was not a suitable way of expressing status and hence did not attract elites to the same extent as hunting or horseback riding. At the same time, at least on the continent, running still carried the stigma of service owing to its (partly) instrumental character: runners were a highly specialized and comparatively well-paid group of servants (Kuhn 1997: 411, 413; Purrucker 1999; Mallinckrodt 2019b: 148f., 160f.). Races in early modern times were thus originally staged by masters among servants to test their prowess, the employers sometimes betting large sums on the outcome. On the European continent, this practice faced increasing disapproval not only because the profession of running servant was criticized as inhumane but particularly because the runners were instrumentalized for the pleasure of their masters: The bets between the masters, as well as between the runners themselves, with regard to the greater nimbleness and agility in running of one over another, must not go unpunished, because too much is inflicted upon one’s nature, and it should not easily be allowed to a wealthy citizen to put horses and men in one class, and use them in order to present to the world in full sweat an insentient weakling. —Krünitz 1795: 87f Thus, the use of runners and the organizing of races between them by members of the aristocracy were increasingly criticized as “slavish” and “against human nature” in the late eighteenth century. In Britain, opening races to other occupational groups led to these events losing their social edge. The runners still primarily came from the lower orders, but the races had lost their social sting, because they were no longer exclusively organized by masters among their servants. The advertising of prize money and opening of the races to all interested competitors meant that the races primarily attracted those who were looking for economic gain. Because of this development, it was no longer objectionable to put man and beast on an equal footing, as was criticized in the German sources, and to organize contests between people in the context of horse races and even on horse racing courses, thereby securing an even greater audience (Mallinckrodt 2019b: 149–54).

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Similarly, rowing, like running, developed out of a functional activity, so that it needed longer than other sporting disciplines to find acceptance among the elites. Until well into the nineteenth century, professional rowers provided an urban transport service. In around 1600, there were some 10,000 gondolas in Venice; in greater London in 1598 there were even 40,000 licensed ferrymen. In 1796 still 12,000 so-called watermen offered their service there, but by 1837 only 2,500 remained. Their decline accelerated after 1800 with the spread of coaches, the introduction of rental boats, the construction of more bridges, and the advent of steam navigation on the Thames (Reckendorf 1991: 37, 45, 50; Dodd 1992: 35). Constant competitive pressure and the habit of some passengers to offer higher fares for rapid conveyance led at the latest in the seventeenth century to races between English watermen. In 1715, Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race, a rowing regatta from London Bridge to Chelsea, was staged for the first time. It was reserved to watermen who had completed their apprenticeship in the preceding year. They could win their master’s qualification without further charge (Halladay 1990: 8, 14; Reckendorf 1991: 25, 38, 56; Wigglesworth 1992: 15, 23f., 28–30; Dodd 2005: 233). It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century that rowing was introduced as a sport at elite schools such as Eton, Westminster, and Shrewsbury and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which competed against one another in the Boat Race for the first time in 1829 (Reckendorf 1991: 149–68, 184–93; Wigglesworth 1992: 43, 61f.). While professional and amateur rowers still competed against one another in the Chester (1733) and Durham (1816) regattas, professional rowers were excluded from the most famous of English regattas at Henley from the outset in 1839 (Reckendorf 1991: 103, 287–9; Wigglesworth 1992: 49, 121; Dodd 2005: 233). Even before that, resorting to professional trainers and coxes was controversial but widespread. The first exclusive clubs for amateurs were established from 1808 in London, and the first big clubs for the middle class from 1856 onwards (Halladay 1990: 44–6; Reckendorf 1991: 98, 107f., 191, 318; Wigglesworth 1992: 62–4). On the continent, too, it was only the final exclusion of professional rowers that brought an upswing in rowing as a sport (Dodd 2005: 234). While at first glance the new rowing clubs sought with their amateur clause to ensure equal opportunities and fend off economic interests, in fact they ensured social segregation. Ironically, the amateur ethic gave expression to a far older ideal of estate-based society, namely the disinterestedness of the cortegiano, who practiced all sports only as a pastime and without ambition, only to excel without effort, and through his success confirm estatist society.

CONCLUSION In early modern society, sports and physical exercise served not only to build community but also to mark distinctions, most notably where, as in competitive

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sport, the superiority of one group over another was at issue and a victory could challenge hierarchies based on estate, “race,” or gender. Normative notions about which sports ought to be practiced by whom continued to play a major role, even though geographical and social mobility grew between 1650 and 1800 and divisions of rank and gender were increasingly called into question. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we therefore find sporting events in which the population gathered across divisions of rank, class, gender, and ethnicity. However, distinctions were then often established through the manner of participation: spectator or athlete, sponsor or bystander, helping hand in the background or sportsperson in the spotlight. In contemporary eyes, women who played “male” sports ran the risk of losing their femininity, and such practices were regarded as an attack on the gender order. The decisive factor was the vigor of movement and how closely it related to combat and/or sexuality. “Decent” dancing, walking, riding, archery, and ball games such as cricket, skittles, badminton, stoolball, and pallone, as well as ice-skating posed no problem. Boxing and other combat sports, swimming, riding astride, and game hunting, by contrast, were often frowned upon. However, this did not prevent women from either the highest or the lower estates from indulging in these and other sports such as rowing and foot races, whereas women from the lower nobility and bourgeoisie seemed to be subjected to the greatest restrictions. In these cases rank was apparently a more decisive factor than gender. However, there were signs that the growing institutionalization of sport together with the naturalization of differences between the sexes tended to exclude women from sport in the nineteenth century. By contrast, “black” and Jewish athletes were apparently unable to escape being viewed primarily in ethnic terms, especially since they often belonged to the lower classes or were even enslaved. Thus, higher social rank could seldom counterbalance their belonging to a “race” considered inferior. That boxers of African or Jewish origin could become British by practicing the “most British of all sports” was apparently out of the question—that is, the category “race” was, it would seem, essentialized/naturalized earlier than the category “gender.” Despite all admiration for athletes, racist stereotypes were rife in eighteenthcentury sports reporting. Even obvious superiority in physical skills such as swimming and diving could not reverse the racial hierarchy; instead, swimmers and divers “of color”—both men and women—were seen as animalistic. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the category “race” thus proved a dominant marker that tended to cancel out other differentiation criteria. The situational framework for the meeting of Europeans and people of African or Asian descent—shaped by colonization, slave trade, and slavery—apparently was too commanding to permit sport to be read differently, let alone to allow a reversal of relations on the basis of sporting success.

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After all, even “white” men found themselves confronted by normative expectations if they wished to have their gender and standing appropriately recognized. However, these norms were less clear if different places are taken into consideration, as contemporary travelers noted in the increasingly mobile eighteenth century: what was seen as “manly” in British boxing was not necessarily regarded in the same light on the American continent. Differences in the shift from estatist to class society also explain why running competitions on the European continent were socially so explosive, whereas in Britain a “rage for pedestrian exercises” (The Craftsman; or Say’s Weekly Journal, July 19, 1788; Radford 1999: 90) had developed: races originally run by servants were opened to other occupational groups, as well. Active participation by a British nobleman in such a race was accordingly judged by a German traveler to be “sansculottic” (Archenholz 1795: 368f.), while the British themselves found it increasingly acceptable. However, class society did not abolish social divisions: rowing was to become a sport for English public schools and colleges only when it gradually lost its practical function in transport. And even then, professional rowers with their knowledge and experience were in demand as trainers and coxswains, whereas amateur clauses forbade them the status of sportsmen. All these dynamics show that sport and physical exercise not only reveal the standards of a society with respect to inclusion, exclusion, and segregation and that is with respect to power and (political) participation, but are also a domain in which these limits were constantly (re)negotiated and even shifted. Translation by Rhodes Barrett

CHAPTER SEVEN

Minds, Bodies, and Identities LAURENT TURCOT

The period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of new physical practices stemming from a transformation of the medical model. In this period humoral medicine was undermined, without the great physicians who contributed to its establishment, namely Galen and Hippocrates, necessarily being rejected. The idea that physical activity helps muscle stimulation, organ contraction, and digestion while at the same time expelling humor, the stagnation of which would be a cause for concern, was reiterated. Following a number of medical discoveries and severe criticism of the humoral model, neo-Hippocratism took hold, whose proponent physicians believed that nature contains within itself all the means needed to sustain good health. A medical approach based on physical activity was thus developed, leading to the notion of medical gymnastics. The latter became one of the eighteenth century’s dominant models for establishing a normative framework for physical exercise, and not long afterwards, for the practice of sports. I intend to give an overview of medical progress between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on Italy, France, and Germany, in order to grasp how the change of paradigm—that is, from humoral theory to nascent physiology—directly transformed the relationship to the body, defining the practice of sports and recreation. Pedagogically, the classic humanities model that the college had lifted to its peak of achievement was wearing out. Renewal attempts were moving in several different directions: toward military schools, with pressure from part of the nobility, or toward educational projects looking to mentor and train children’s 161

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bodies. In both cases, the aim was to make the body healthy, but mostly to link it to the idea of making it socially useful and functional. This effort was accompanied by an attempt to name and regulate the types of exercises.

NAMING SPORTS AND LEISURE ACTIVITIES With the Encyclopédie’s (1751–72) attempt to rationalize knowledge and, more importantly, its spirit of modernization, one might have expected to find a “sports” entry among the 40,000 entries of its seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates; however, this is not the case. Once again, one must find synonyms or deem that the notion is encompassed by countless terms that allow one to establish its uses and approaches. As such, one can find nearly seventy entries on physical exercises in said historical pages, dealing with Ancient Greece and Rome, but also with medieval tournaments and Mercurial gymnastics (Overfield 1996: 7–8). Numerous games are the subject of specific entries, such as the boules game, bowling, jeu de mail, pool, and palm game. Sports expressions are often used to illustrate or help the reader understand the substance of a definition, as is the case in language dictionaries, but more importantly, they translate the language specific to each activity. Such is the case for the expression “tip touching” (“abuter”), which Denis Diderot describes as follows: “In bowling, before starting the game, each player takes one & throws it toward the ball placed at a distance agreed upon by the players; this is tip touching. The player who does this best, or whose pin is closest to the ball, gets to bowl first” (Encyclopédie 1751, 1: 48). We must not forget, “swathing the ball with the palm” (“bander une balle à la paume”), which means “taking a ball that is moving or stopped & sending it in the net” (Encyclopédie 1751, 2: 58). Two more specific entries help to outline a general theory on these practices, namely the terms “exercise,” drafted by doctor Arnulphe Aumont, and “gymnastics,” from the very prolific knight du Jaucourt. Exercise is then explained as being the “action through which animals put their body or any of their parts into continuous motion, for a considerable amount of time, for fun or health purposes.” The perspective was primarily medical, in keeping with the Galenic and Hippocratic traditions, but targets games: “Among the firsttype exercises, some call on all parts of the body, such as the palm game, shuttlecock, pool, ball game or quoits; hunting, making weapons, jumping for fun,” then the second type, “that do not entail any action from those exercising, include the agitation operated by rocking a cradle, gesturing; through the various vehicles such as those on water, litters and the various coaches and carriages, &c.” Finally, the last type “deals with the one we perform sitting down, with no other support, from a hanging & moving rope, which is the swing: riding with various levels of movement, such as the step of the horse, trot, canter, & other means” (Encyclopédie 1756, 6: 244).

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These exercises encompass gymnastics, which Jaucourt defines as “the art or science of various bodily exercises” (Encyclopédie 1756, 6: 244–5). We are close to a definition of sports. Reflection on physical activity targets the medical field as well as research on movement and effort (Tadié 2018: 250–70). It is clear that the word “sport” does not have the same statutory importance. Nevertheless, numerous practices help to outline it.

PRESCRIBING A DOSE OF NATURE Moral prescriptions contained in treatises on civility, particularly widespread in Louis XIV’s court (1643–1715), as well as the proliferating technical treatises on games, both used medical arguments to justify a given game, action, or behavior. The frame of reference inherited from the ancient world nevertheless started dwindling in the seventeenth century. The hegemony of Galen and Hippocrates was undercut by new ideals inspired by recent discoveries (Lebrun 1995: 18). In his Discourse on the Method (1637), René Descartes intended to break with the ancients and rely solely on reason. The objective was to wipe the slate clean when it came to the science of the past and to turn to observable facts, with the principle of “methodological doubt” providing the foundation of scientific methodology. Promoted by Andreas Vesalius, this approach had already been developed in medicine in the previous century. Vesalius harshly criticized the anatomical principles passed down from the ancients, in particular by way of his anatomical plates, created on the basis of dissections. The English physician William Harvey also preceded Descartes by proposing a new vision of the body in De Motu Cordis in 1628. The demonstration he made of blood circulation, a principle that partly invalidated the humoral theory, provoked a major shift in the perception of the body, its structure, health, and relationship to the soul (Sennett 2002: 190–1). The idea that the body is a machine and that the physician’s role consists in repairing malfunction gradually developed. The segmentation of organs gave birth to physiology. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the primarily mechanical medical theory was grounded in anatomical experiments, and supported by tissue observation through a microscope (Porter and Vigarello 2005: 335–72). In his work Man a Machine (1748), Julien Offray de La Mettrie reduced the body to an automaton. It became possible to describe its functioning through rigorous clinical observation, which allowed for the development of a new vision, that of fiber. In Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani (1757– 66), Albrecht von Haller showed that the human body is composed of fiber and that sensation is perceptible in nerve irritability. The works of vitalists, primarily based at the University of Montpellier, simultaneously asserted that the socalled machine could not satisfactorily explain life. In their view, there was, within the human, a vital force, with the capacity to trigger and put an end to

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illness, the physician limiting himself to accompanying the natural healing process by controlling to the best of his ability the iatrogenic effects of his prescriptions (Bourdelais and Faure 2004). These conceptions and approaches combined led to the emergence of neo-Hippocratism, which heavily influenced the conception of health in the social sphere, and consequently exercise and training, throughout Europe. From there followed the development of a rational definition of gymnastics in the eighteenth century. The discovery of blood circulation and fiber had an impact on the medical community, but many practitioners continued to be influenced by the teachings of Hippocrates and the idea that nature encompassed all means to sustain health, as the vitalists understood it. Illness being natural, the physician was to guide the patient towards healing on the path prescribed by nature. In fact, Hippocrates wrote that “nature is the physician of illness” (Aziza-Shuster 1972: 4). A new reading and interpretation of Hippocrates took hold, hence neo-Hippocratism, with emphasis on “natura medicatrix” (healing nature) as a guiding principle and the notion of “primum non nocere” (first, do no harm). The idea that one can become one’s own physician (Aziza-Shuster 1972) by using simple and natural remedies became increasingly popular. The most common prescription at the time was a “dose of nature,” that is, prescribing outdoor physical activities or simply just getting some fresh air. The views expressed by Girolamo Mercuriale during the Renaissance found an enlightened new audience among physicians and philosophers alike.

FROM PHILOSOPHY TO PEDAGOGY This led to the arrival of medical experts who defined new structures for exercise to be performed by patients, oftentimes in bucolic settings, amplifying the ideal of nature praised by philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New practices were framed by, among others, Théodore Tronchin (who was born in Geneva in 1709 and died in Paris in 1781), no doubt one of Paris’s most renowned medical figures of the modern period. The influence of Tronchin’s medical doctrine did not lie in sophisticated theoretical expression—few of his writings are known— but in the fine application of practices tending towards recovering the balance of nature. Among the pieces of advice to be found in his prescriptions are the following: “Lead a more active lifestyle; any kind of exercise is good,” and “any excessive fatigue is harmful; one isn’t born an athlete, but becomes one” (Tronchin 1906: 36). Tronchin recommended walks, a frugal diet, and cold showers to stay healthy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the word “tronchiner” became synonymous with taking a walk. One of his colleagues wrote that “he advises walking, wearing flat shoes, stick in hand, for health purposes” (Tronchin 1906: 50). The tight, tiny mules worn at the time gave way to shoes without heels that molded to the shape of the foot. Petrus Camper made the same recommendation

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in his Dissertation on the Best Form of Shoe (1781). Exercise was also facilitated by the gradual shedding of sack-back gowns that enlarged the hips to allow for free movement. Physicians insisted on the need to preserve the natural dynamic. A new physical aesthetic was taking shape where personal freedom became the order of the day. Men adopted the British frock coat that the French called “redingote,” a garbled mistranslation of “riding coat.” The wig was abandoned to expose one’s natural hair. High leather boots offered protection from the Parisian mud and made it possible to mount a horse without having to change. Let us take the example of going for a stroll to consider the importance of the medical and pedagogical discourse developed in relationship with leisure activities. Strolling was an exercise that satisfied new theories on muscular movement. As such, walking did not help bodily humors as much as moving tissues, airing them out, and purifying them through extensions and releases that facilitated digestion and muscle strengthening. There are a lot of these lessons in the medical publications of the eighteenth century. The idea was to make strolling an ordinary exercise of a health care plan. Antoine Le Camus explained that “we are not requesting work, but rather moderate exercise since we are not requesting lassitude, but true relaxation” (1753: 347), before claiming, with an interposed citation, the need to go for a stroll: “Cicéron often went out for strolls; & while doing this, he dictated his thoughts to his secretaries who walked with him” (1753: 346), thus satisfying exercise that increased perspiration and kept tissues healthy. At the turn of the eighteenth century, doctor Nicolas Andry de Boisregard, in L’orthopédie (1741), dedicated a chapter to the arms and legs, specifically discussing the “flaws in how the legs & feet are carried” (1741: 304). The author considered the notion of maintenance in the French society by citing La Bruyère: “We know what La Bruyère says about this: ‘No fool can ever enter, exit, sit, stand, or be on his legs like a smart man’ ” (1741: 308). Contrary to most of his contemporaries who praised the work of the moralist, Andry removed himself from it, and instead showed that the judgment made by the author of Caractères should be refined: This maxim from La Bruyère is often false, but generally speaking, it complies with the ethics of the time, & must be considered, if we wish to be viewed favourably; I say that it is often false because a fool, & a fool who also deserves to be seen as such, who will have nothing to nurture but his body, will often be more graceful, & better planted on his feet than a smart man who will have spent most of his time, successfully nurturing his reason. —1741: 308 According to Andry, a person’s walk did not have to be in keeping with his social distinction, as it presents itself as an ideal accessible to everyone, for everyone:

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So, make sure they place their feet well, when they walk, sit, stand, &c. but make them understand that this talent is nothing without the qualities of the mind, & that there are pompous fools who stand very well on their feet. —1741: 309 What Andry presented here was not his opposition to La Bruyère, but rather a critical approach whose purpose was to legitimize a medical practice on a social practice. Medicine explained its position, first, through an argument aiming to show that everyone can access this social behavior (worthy maintenance) without the exercises necessarily being liable for any correspondence with the faculties of the mind; and second, that the assumed social transparency is just an illusion: stance did not convey status. Andry incorporated critics against civility, but without attacking the practices that defined it. Thus, strolling was reinvested with knowledge that not only legitimized its use but reinforced it. Andry wanted to include it in the scope of the human body’s natural physiology. Strolling, in compliance with Nature, which is expressed in a medical framework and is a measure of health and vitality, had already been explained by Andry in March 1723 in his thesis supported by the Paris Faculty of Medicine and whose explicit title clearly illustrated the author’s interest in this subject: “Knowing whether moderate exercise is the best way to stay healthy?” Going for a stroll, as he defines it, must then be moderate exercise, composed of a movement alternating the legs & feet, through which we are carried softly, & leisurely, from one place to another. The thighs, hocks, heels & toes also contribute to this movement, making it one in which the entire body is generally solicited. —Andry de Boisregard 1741: 15 The movement grew and strolling was discussed in various works, often in its own separate chapter. Jean-Charles Desessartz explained that parents must remember to have their children “stroll, get some fresh air, waylay, without forgetting to do it at their own pace, to get used to it imperceptibly” (1760: 416). For Armand-Pierre Jacquin, “strolling is an easy and healthy exercise to practice, and there is no better exercise, as long as it is done in fresh air, & with a free and happy mind that is not tangled in other business” (Jacquin 1762: 238). For Anselme Jourdain “strolling is the healthiest exercise one can practice” (1771: n.p.). Finally, William Buchan, an English doctor from the end of the eighteenth century and author of Médecine domestique, a true bible in eight volumes on medical knowledge applicable to everyday life, summarized the appeal and importance that medical professionals gave to strolling, which was “moderate exercise . . . during which they can fulfil duties with family and friends that do

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not tire out the body or the mind. They work a few more hours, after which they get to have fun in society” (Buchan 1780: 120). According to the main parties involved, the problem with frugal diets was sometimes that “Nature does not inspire such dispositions in vain,” but “our love of exercise is undoubtedly the strongest proof we can get of its use” (Buchan 1780: 148; see also Prévassin 1786: 152). Strolling satisfied this idea of natural inspiration as it was a very slight adaptation of the most natural exercise there is: walking. Ultimately, going for a stroll or walking became part of the pattern in European society, and more specifically in Parisian society. This pattern changed soon after; one had not only to walk, but to exercise to be fashionable, and Théodore Tronchin “was the most successful in Paris,” stated Brion and Bellay at the end of the eighteenth century (Brion and Bellay 1800: 223). Tronchin linked strolling, or walking, to a strict natural recovery program: diet and fresh air. About a patient spitting out blood, he wrote: “The patient fares well with horseback riding. I even dare add that after reiterating this for many years, when it comes to fortifying the lungs’ vascular system, there is no better exercise, as long as the horse is trotting slowly” (Tronchin 1906: 46), while for headaches he claimed the following: “Go for a stroll, ride and, as soon as the bad weather sets in, cut your wood; there is no better exercise to do in winter” (Tronchin 1906: 48–9). Whereas riding was less socially accessible than Tronchin presupposed, by advising “exercises” that resembled servants’ tasks, these physical practices also had something bizarre, even revolutionary for Parisian high society, all the more in noble settings where it was customary to link exercise to the person’s social quality: riding, using hunting rights, and carrying and using a sword did not aim to cultivate the nobles’ excellence, to increase it, as it was innate. Rather they served to demonstrate indisputable prerogatives. Also, instead of exercise that respected the body sociably defined by its executor, Tronchin and others like Mrs. de Genlis implemented an exercise meant to transform it. They implicitly stated that there were universal techniques that cultivated the qualities of everyone and had everyone be at the same level, in a “democratic” way: the person exercising recognized, as such, that his condition could be perfected and was thus not perfect. For Antoine le Camus, regent doctor of the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Paris, there were two types of exercises: the more strenuous ones, like riding, and the milder ones. In this latter category he included “strolling, sailing; in other words, various games & occupations . . . that help weaker individuals remain healthy” (Camus 1753: 344). These concepts influenced major pedagogical publications, such as those of Jean-Charles Desessartz (1760), Jean-André Venel (1776), and Jean Verdier (1777). For Verdier, physical education should perfect the body and prepare it to receive moral teachings. He considered five methodological exercises that must make up the basis of all education: maintenance, walking, throwing, jumping,

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and running. Strolling was “the exercise that seems the most natural of them all”; it was at the crossroads between games of the body and the mind: “in compliance with the laws of the union of the soul & the mind, nothing can exercise the mind without exercising the brain & sensory organs. Reciprocally, nothing can exercise the body without affecting & occupying the mind” (Verdier 1777: 9). The medical and educational discourse at the end of the eighteenth century illustrates this new function of strolling. While keeping its physiological advantages, it was reinforced by educational arguments that made it a social practice that helped to acknowledge and appreciate nature’s display. One may claim that education reinterpreted medicine by instilling new foundations so that, more than ever, strolling was considered to be the most natural exercise there is. The opposite was also true: that medicine reinterpreted education. The role that nature’s display now played in publications showed that this concept of a walk in the park now had two purposes: preserving both the walker’s physical and mental health.

TRANSITIONS AND DEMARCATIONS: GENDER, AGE, AND STATUS At the end of the eighteenth century, very original literature emerged. It featured women in a context of exercise education. In 1779, Ambroise Ribaillier claimed, in her De l’éducation physique et morale des femmes, that we must break the chains of “the presumptuous pride of men” that subjugated women whose ignorance and inaction were the causes of their suffering. Women were required to move and exercise, in compliance with existing social standards. As such, Ribaillier wrote: The idleness and numbness in which they are raised, the vanity that we are so intent on inspiring them from their childhood, only serve to degrade them, preparing them for all the pain they suffer throughout their life, unnerving all moral and physical virtues that, according to the Lord’s commandment, must be the common heritage of both genders. —1779: n. p There was a certain willingness to conciliate the genders through the exercise they must perform, in the purest tradition of Rousseau, as claimed Mrs. de Genlis three years later: For now, our children only exercise by jumping and running; in a year, we will get them used to [strolling], as Rousseau advises, measuring a given space with their eyes, how many trees can line up such and such an alley, how many flower pots does such and such a terrace have, etc. —1782: 69

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The call of nature merged with exercise that invigorated and appeased. Although Rousseau referred back to the moralistic approaches of the end of the seventeenth century, making women temptresses and a danger to accepted standards of behavior, he nevertheless conveyed a state of nature, by referring to “American women” (indigenous women) who, being used to the wild life are “compliant, robust and vigorous” (Ribaillier 1779: n. p.). To regain these qualities needed in education, Ribaillier proposed that from a very young age, children regain complete freedom of movement, namely by running. The trained body was depicted as a body that is free and exercised. The author of De l’éducation physique et morale des femmes preached the value of example and encouraged mothers to be more critical and steer away from idleness, softness, and all unhealthy pleasures to which they have become accustomed; they should better educate their children to split their time between exercising their bodies and studying (Sonnet 1987). Ribaillier painted a revolutionary portrait of the feminine condition and went so far as to suggest that boys should learn to pull the needle. Also, Mrs. Campan, in her Traité de l’éducation des femmes, published posthumously in 1824, wanted to change the data of feminine conditions. Her pedagogy was built around cleanliness, bodily freedom, and regularity in health practices; however, this freedom was conditional. Mrs. Campan preferred initiating adolescents to sewing and household chores, qualities that she deemed useful in the proper conduct of their social life. She notes, in Chapter 4 of her book, that to foster the agility of young girls, without offending their sense of modesty, they were dressed as boys for a short while. This trend has thankfully ended. The maintenance of girls was negatively felt from this sort of disguise that accustomed them to strong movements and an assertive attitude that do not suit our gender. —Campan 1824: 23 Only dance found favor in her sight; however, she highlighted the importance of games and leisure activities to make school days more pleasant. Although fragmented, these practical applications show that gymnastics were progressively integrated to pedagogy. Through the independence gained, the child prompted reflections regarding the wise choices that educators must make. Physical education was one of these pedagogical concerns and it was soon integrated to the educational program of children to develop their faculties, forge their ethics, and awake their sensitivity. The cases described by Mrs. de Genlis and Mrs. Campan did not reflect the majority, but there were more and more educated children in the second half of the eighteenth century. A growing number were then channeled into a very

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isolated universe, separate from that of adults. This was a particularization that dovetails with other bodily cues. The appearance, among upper classes, of specific children’s clothing toward the end of the eighteenth century demonstrated these new frontiers that clearly separated them from the adult world; however, this change only affected young boys who had, until then, usually worn attire similar to those of their parents, but suited to their size and more or less outdated. Toward 1770, they began wearing attire inspired by the military or naval uniform, such as the famous “sailor” suit. The gap between children and adults widened in the context of games and physical activities. The palm game, no longer practiced by quality people, was still being played by children in the form of shuttlecock. The same goes for mail or ball games, but also for other types of distractions such as storytelling, which delighted refined society at the end of the seventeenth century but was now confined to the children’s universe. This evolution resulted from a marked boundary between the leisure activities of the elites and those of regular people. The same games that used to bring together people of different ages and conditions suffered, in modern times, a sort of selection that hierarchized their practice depending on allegiances. In the eighteenth century, only common men had the same taste for bowling and ball games as children. That said, throughout this social fragmentation process, although children from all backgrounds had fun in more or less the same way, they no longer played together: splits by age groups among children were now found within the domestic unit and school classes. Common and elite children no longer laughed or fought outside together: the street became a place to fall in with the wrong crowd. Modern society thus continued to wrestle with the confusion among the various classes. It stored, separated, and enclosed bodies in reserved spaces: in the name of laws and natural hierarchies, it assigned an organically suitable place and role according to gender, age, and social conditions.

PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES Medical teaching encouraging the medicalization of the social body also housed a political project: that of perfecting the human species. This movement also engendered the notion of public health, that is, a relationship between the physical and social environments and a political concern for the health of populations. This new approach made cities a medical observatory of predilection. The airing of social and body tissue was to produce a salutary renewal of fiber and muscle. Public health was henceforth approached from a social perspective. The inclusion of the terms “exercise” and “gymnastics” in the Encyclopédie (1751–72) was indicative of this change, but the arrival of another Swiss, Samuel Tissot, further refined the nascent hygienist movement.

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His ambition was to impose a precise regime on the entire population, from the common people to the aristocracy. Together with his colleagues Félix Vicq d’Azir and Antoine-François Fourcroy, Tissot defined a medical practice that was at the heart of the social body. In his Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde (Essay on people’s sicknesses throughout the world), he asserted that “men of letters are victims of all the ills that idleness entails” (Tissot 1770: 32). He concluded that activity is necessary in order to avoid the harm of a sedentary lifestyle. A few years earlier, in his Treatise on the Health of Men of Letters (French edition 1758; 1771) he detailed the practices to adopt to these ends: regular horseback riding, walking, fencing, jeu de mail, paume, and playing ball. This current was particularly strong in the eighteenth century, and a number of publications, such as the Pocket Dictionary of Health, recommended a “regimen for men of letters”: “these individuals should exercise more than others in order to reverse as much as possible the effects of their habitual inactivity; they should go to the baths and walk often” (Vandermonde 1760: 417). The forms of physical conditioning changed, with an abandoning of archaic classical practices such as bloodletting in favor of exercise as the new panacea. This fresh look at the body and the need to keep it active would gradually lead gymnastics to take center stage, as recommended by Clément-Joseph Tissot in Medicinal and Surgical Gymnastics in 1780, who, after publishing a history of gymnastics from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, established a frame of reference for the practice of his contemporaries. It was then understood that the ideal set up by the Greeks, far from declining, was on the contrary newly acquired and appropriated at every period in history. The author also paid heed to the pleasure sought by those who practiced exercise, for “exercises were invented for the pleasure and relaxation of men, subsequently adopted by Medicine, for many, and there is a specific exercise for each of our members” (Tissot 1780: 49). Here the mechanical segmentation of the body was associated with the power of nature, put forward by vitalists and neo-Hippocratists in order to legitimize the comeback of therapeutic, military, and athletic gymnastics—a distinction that was already present in Chevalier de Jaucourt’s article “Gymnastics” in the Encyclopédie (1751–72). Tissot drew inspiration from the great treatises on pedagogy, such as those written by Jean-Charles Desessartz (1760), Jean-André Venel (1776), and Jean Verdier (1777), which established programs with particular precision. He was also influenced by writings such as Nicolas Andry de Boisregard’s Orthopedics (1741), which was partly aimed at correcting the deformities of the body through exercise, but also explained the benefit of exercise on muscle fiber: “Nothing is more beneficial to health than moderate exercise: it has to be adapted to the age, the temperament and the sex of the subject, regular and not excessive.” The author did not hesitate to invoke contemporary games: “Do you want to strengthen your arms and the tips of your feet? What could be better suited to this purpose

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than billiards?” (Andry de Boisregard [1723] 1857: 514). Andry used and drew inspiration from German medicine, in particular the iatrophysical movement, viewing the human body as a machine in order to explain its functioning using the laws of mechanics. In it, he found new arguments in favor of the widespread promotion of exercise. Georg-Ernest Stahl affirmed that “it is through movement that the human soul achieves its purpose within and on the body as potently and for as long as it can” (Stahl [1706] 1861: 211). A colleague of Stahl’s, Friedrich Hoffman, took up this theory of movement from a mechanical perspective. In order to understand the functions of the body as a set of physical practices that trigger a given effect, he asked whether a certain movement was, for instance, capable of healing a given ailment provoked by a certain organ (Hoffmann 1739: 249). The intention was not to rely exclusively on Ancient Greek treatises, but rather to develop a medical approach to exercise that would serve to explain and justify its use. A number of physicians, and an even larger number of pedagogues, engaged in setting enhanced parameters for physical exercise in educational programs. One of them was Jacques Ballexserd, the majority of whose ideas were to be taken up by Rousseau. According to Ballexserd, in the first years of life, bodily activity blends with learning to walk; then around the age of five or six, exercising in the open air becomes appropriate, for instance wall climbing and little wrestling games (1772). Come adolescence, the machine should be pushed to take up moderate running and wrestling. Bodily activity forms a healthy and robust temperament, keeping the soul from passions and vices, and stimulates the working of the brain. This kind of discourse was reminiscent of ancient Greek gymnasiums, a set of views to which Rousseau acquiesced. According to the author of Emile, physical education was a means to establishing a natural contact with things, without which reason sinks and is lost in the realm of the unreal and the immoral (Rousseau [1762] 1992). Rousseau’s influence was considerable in Enlightenment Europe, and philanthropists were particularly sensitive to his teachings. As early as 1770, Johann Bernhard Basedow published Das Methodenbuch für Väter und Mütter der Familien und Völker, in which he paid tribute to Rousseau and attempted to reconcile the rights of nature and the realities of social life (Roeck 2006: 95–6). Four years later, with support from Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, who wished to promote physical education, Basedow opened a school, the “Philanthropinum,” where he applied Rousseau’s doctrine. The focus was on students’ physical activity, including swimming, horseback riding, jumping, and climbing ropes, with a view to strengthening their health, self-confidence, and courage. Basedow wanted to prepare children for a useful, patriotic, and happy life. In this modern gymnasium, emphasis was placed on play as a means to developing their intellectual capacity. The gymnastics developed at the time were taken to a level of theoretical and technical perfection.

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Another aspect, that of patriotism, was brought forward with even greater strength in the last years of the eighteenth century, in large part owing to Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839). In 1793, he published Gymnastik für die Jugend, translated into English in 1796, and subsequently into Danish and Dutch. He introduced more complex exercises involving the horizontal bar, balance beam, and rope ladders at the Philanthropinum first and later at the school in Schnepfenthal, founded in 1784, again drawing inspiration from Rousseau and, henceforward, from Basedow as well. He subsequently divided exercises into three categories: the first involving force (long jump and running), the second requiring a degree of agility (swimming and throwing), and the third category—the most intensive—combining both (dancing, walking, military exercises, and fencing). At age twelve, students had to take six hours of study and six hours of exercise and manual labor, whereas for adult students, three hours of physical exercise were deemed to be sufficient. Some of the training was particularly innovative, such as the exercises for developing the muscles of the thorax and the voice, which consisted of making students hold a conversation at a distance of 50 meters from one another. The educator also used already popular tools such as skates, skis, and stilts. This explains in part the popularity of the GutsMuths method in Sweden and Denmark, both lands of winter. Frank Nachtegall established a similar institution in Copenhagen (Matthews 1969: 72). However, GutsMuths’s program was not hinged uniquely on moral intent, it was also philosophical and nationalistic. This aspect of his theory developed mostly in light of the Napoleonic Wars and the defeat inflicted on Germany by the Emperor’s great army. To the educator’s mind, it was through gymnasiums that power could be regained, for the ancient Germanic tribes, direct ancestors of the German people, were healthy and strong because they lived in nature, whereas those of his time were weak, sickly, and depraved. The seeds of might were still present; all that was needed was to reinvigorate those degenerate beings by tapping into physical strength (Ulmann 1965: 259–61). Physical exercise was therefore essential to regeneration. The correlation between the qualities of the body and those of the soul was inspired by physiognomy that associated physical development with the development of the mind and morality. This theory reached unprecedented popularity with the publication of Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente in 1775–78. GutsMuths’s intention was to forge a humanity dedicated to excellence and the way to achieve this was to recognize gymnastics as an academic discipline in its own right. According to the educator, these developments were tributary to gymnastics’ newly acquired scientific dimension based on the thorough study of anatomical mechanisms, and of muscle flexion and extension specific to each movement. Everything was studied biologically, but there was more to it than mechanics: there was a consideration for the notion of joy that was inherent to the philanthropic system. GutsMuths carried out an outstanding synthesis of

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medical approaches including the mechanistic, vitalist, and neo-Hippocratic thinking, with the overarching idea that the athletic ideal was a means to achieving the improvement of the human race, but more importantly, to be used in the service of the homeland. The new discipline embodied the idea of creating a people of citizen soldiers, reminiscent of Sparta, having the ability to defend its country and surpass its neighbors. Throughout Europe, voices were raised to praise physical education as a vehicle for channeling violent games and laying the groundwork for military preparation (Laty 1996: 186–8). The boom of medical and pedagogical literature transfigured gymnastics and, more generally, the role of physical exercise. This new approach challenged the established social frameworks of medieval times, in particular that of the organic connection between the body and God or the macrocosm that the theory of humors was based on. Soon, other foundational concepts would be called into question, and the French Revolution overthrew—at least temporarily—the former social order. The revolutionary period in France would soon provide a field in which to explore physical practices. Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord wanted physical education to be included in elementary school curriculums to toughen the bodies of children and prepare them for their future work, which required precision, a steady hand, and timely habits. Leisure activities would be used for special exercises that developed the agility, flexibility, and skill of students, and vacation days would be spent walking. For Talleyrand-Périgord, public education had to promote the development of all of the children’s aptitudes, whether they were intellectual, physical, or moral, to give students the widest range of knowledge possible to ensure their happiness (Laty 1996: 201). In 1792, Jean de Condorcet thus intended to propose a project to grow the physical faculties in order to “contribute to this general and gradual development of the human species, as the ultimate goal for any social institution” (1792: 186).

CONCLUSION After centuries of major transformations, namely with Rousseauism and the Hygienists, the first school with gymnastics as part of the curriculum developed under the initiative of Basedow. The eighteenth century was one of scholarly works, the purpose of which was to educate both young and old with great revolutionary statements on self-control. It was a century of reason, with everything decrypted to help further the analysis of the movement. Voices were raised throughout Europe to eulogize physical education. They include the Marquis de Pombal in Portugal, the professors at Austrian academies who taught running, wrestling, jumping, throwing, and the Pole A. Poplawski whose Plan de reorganisation et de perfectionnement de l’éducation civique, published in 1774, sang the praises of body exercises (Turcot 2016: 448–56).

CHAPTER EIGHT

Representation ALEXIS TADI É

While the history of sport has been largely reliant on printed sources and has in turn written this history, sports museums and exhibitions have contributed to different understandings of sport while bringing new publics to sport history. Through collections of objects, artifacts, paintings, and prints they suggest different, and complementary, ways of understanding the history of sport. They have also underlined that the representation of sports contributes to the definitions and perceptions of sports, and that it may rely on material and visual as much as on literary cultures. It is the aim of this chapter to reflect on the definition, circulation, and uses of representations of sports in the early modern period. While the word “representation” may suggest an emphasis on images and visual artifacts, texts ranging from works of literature to instruction manuals also contribute to the perception and consumption of sports. Studying them brings to light the constitution and apprehension of individual, localized sports, as well as of the activities in which people indulged. The analysis will be mainly concerned with sports in Great Britain, but it is hoped that some of the conclusions remain valid for other European countries in the period. Representations of sports chart the history of sport, drawing attention for instance to moments of change in the evolution of pastimes, but they also endow them with meanings, which circulate within communities and beyond. This chapter will not give a historical account of the visual dimension of sports but it will delineate the ways in which texts, objects, and pictures were constitutive of the definition of various sports in the period. While for instance the expression “sporting art” has long been recognized as a category of art history studying depictions of a certain number of rural pastimes, other sporting activities may be investigated in equally fruitful ways. First, a survey of the 175

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different types of early modern representations of sports will be necessary to get a sense of the ubiquitous character of texts and images relating to pastimes. Then, an analysis of “sporting arts,” understood in an inclusive sense, will bring together texts and images, to assess the different genres and traditions in which sports are represented. Some of the uses of such representations will then be investigated to outline the relationships that readers or viewers might have entertained with these depictions. Finally, the chapter will conclude on the way in which sports themselves were construed as representations, taking place in specific spatial and temporal locations, organizing their performance, and building their public.

REPRESENTING THE SPORTS OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD The first part of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) is set in the county of Somersetshire. Most of the action takes place in or around the aptly named “Paradise Hall,” Squire Allworthy’s house, from which Tom is expelled and sent wandering around the world. The contrast between the natural environment of the first part and the corruption of London is one of the defining features of the book and serves both the satirical nature of the novel and the construction of the main character’s education. In the first part, Tom’s relationship with his environment is elaborated upon through his friendship with the gamekeeper, with whom his first misdeed, on the stage of the novel, is to shoot partridges in the adjacent estate. Described as “sport,” the shooting of the partridges leads to various complications, and to Tom taking all the blame upon himself rather than acknowledging the presence of his friend on the expedition. Indeed, poaching was a serious offense in eighteenth-century Britain; conversely, it might not have been uncommon for poachers to gain respectability by becoming in turn gamekeepers. The definition of Tom’s character through the connection with nature is further enhanced in the relationship between Sophia and Tom. The first episode centers on Sophia’s bird, which is released into the open air by the mean Blifil and which Tom tries to recover, ending up in the river, having fallen from the tree where the bird had perched. Sophia’s father, Squire Western, is devoted to hunting, and insists on his daughter riding along with him, in spite of her aversion for the sport, which she finds too masculine—thus pointing to the gendered nature of some of these activities. On one of these expeditions, Sophia is thrown off her horse, just in time for Tom to rescue her, breaking his arm in the process, and the accident of course makes a strong impression on Sophia’s heart. Such events—the shooting of the partridges, or the hunt that is the occasion for Tom’s brave attitude—contribute to the definition of character, while being ordinary features of eighteenth-century life in the country. These scenes connect with, and reactivate, eighteenth-century representations of similar events.

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Numerous prints and paintings focused on different aspects of the hunt, with riders galloping for instance through a number of fields—as permitted since the Game Act of 1671—jumping hedges (known as “swishing a rasper”), generally oblivious of the lands and properties through which they rode. While eighteenth-century Britain witnessed a development of art associated with rural sports, the genre originated in France and the Netherlands. Gaston Phébus’s Le Livre de chasse (Phébus 1387–9) is concerned both with animals and with the practice of hunting. The author extolls the virtues of hunting, which he praises as a way of life, while the book is illuminated with depictions of hunting scenes that are also instructions for hunters. The genre of hunting painting was popular in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands and France, culminating in a focus on the animals themselves in paintings by JeanBaptiste Oudry or Alexandre-François Desportes, in which, in Sarah Cohen’s phrase, they become “heroes of the hunt” (Cohen 2018: 114). British sporting art was itself partly indebted to such traditions. George Gascoigne’s The Noble Art of Venerie, or Hunting (1575) reflects a similar interest in the description of hunting. In the late seventeenth century, the publication of Francis Barlow’s Several Wayes of Hunting, Hawking, and Fishing, According to the English Manner (1671), with plates by Wenceslaus Hollar, constitutes an important landmark in the representation of hunting in England. It is a book of prints whose twelve illustrations depict various hunting scenes (stag, hare, fox, otter, etc.) as well as three scenes of hawking and three scenes of fishing. Thus, the tone was set for sporting art in the early modern period in England. The groupings of images according to the categories of Barlow’s book were often duplicated in subsequent centuries, establishing habits of printing and consumption (Cormack 2013: 8). At the end of the period, in Henry Alken’s The National Sports of Great Britain (1821), there is a single picture of a stag being hunted down by hounds. Far more numerous are the illustrations of foxhunting or hare hunting (“coursing”), underlining, as suggested by Alken, that stag hunting was no longer in fashion at the end of the eighteenth century— in part because of the depletion of stags in the British countryside. Publications such as Nicholas Cox’s The Gentleman’s Recreation contributed to the vogue for such representations, purporting to give a description of rural sports. Hunting, hawking, fowling, and fishing were clearly mentioned on the title page of this 1674 book, which contains a few prints of hawking, for instance, or of the variety of fishes to be found in English rivers. In 1686 appeared another Gentleman’s Recreation, by the cartographer and bookseller Richard Blome, in two parts: the first one concentrated on the arts and sciences, while the second part added to Cox’s categories agriculture and a “Short Treatise of Cock-Fighting.” Abundantly illustrated, it clearly emphasized its encyclopedic ambition. Both publications were reprinted into the nineteenth century, and contributed to habits of representations of the rural sports.

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The categories of hunting, hawking, or fishing featured, albeit slightly differently, in the most celebrated text of English literature on rural sports, The Compleat Angler, which itself of course integrates the findings of previous authors (Walton [1653–76] 2014). While the first edition had two characters discussing the comparative merits of hunting and fishing, subsequent editions had Auceps the falconer, Venator the hunter, and Piscator the fisherman as the main characters, the latter convincing his companions of the superiority of angling over the other pastimes. The text carried engravings of various types of fish; Cox used the same illustrations a few years later in his Gentleman’s Recreation. The complex nature of The Compleat Angler places it slightly apart from the dictionaries of sports and other publications that were beginning to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century. While on one level it is a treatise on angling, it is also a celebration of a way of life, based on the solidarity of the brotherhood of the angle and on the simple pleasures of the countryside— contrasted, of course, with the turmoil of the Civil War when the Royalist Isaac Walton published the first edition. A political reading of the text in its original context of publication may turn into an emphasis on later nostalgia for a Jacobean golden age, but it would be partial to see The Compleat Angler only in this light. It is also an anthology of texts, of poems about rural sports which belong to a tradition, before Walton, which goes back to descriptions of practical arts to be found in Virgil’s Georgics. But, as Frans De Bruyn has argued (De Bruyn 2018), Walton moves away from the emphasis on effort which characterizes agricultural georgic, to celebrate the pleasures of “recreation,” of “recreation of a recreation,” (Walton [1653–76] 2014: 5) of angling, as well as of writing. The conceits that bring together writing and angling were not invented by Walton, but they are woven through the text, reminding the reader at every turn that there is as much pleasure to be had in angling as in discourses about it, in angling as in reading about it. In turn, the text returns to the precision of the sport, to the knowledge to be derived from fishing. The Compleat Angler is also a natural history of the fishes of England and of the English countryside, an encyclopedic treatise on fishing, on the environment, and on the natural world. The text went through five editions between 1653 and 1676; it was reprinted regularly from the middle of the eighteenth century, fueling the nostalgia for a “traditional” rural life also apparent in the visual arts (Deuchar 1988: 154), achieving almost cult status as the most oft-reprinted text in the English language after the Bible. Different times have engaged in different ways with the text, but continued interest testifies to the relevance of the art of fishing, of the representation of the seventeenth-century philosophy of angling, and of a certain idea of what the relationship of humans to their environment could still be. The rural sports of the early modern period are not the only pastimes to benefit from extensive treatment in literature and the arts. Although versions of

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tennis existed in the Middle Ages, and perhaps even in antiquity, the royal game of tennis became extremely popular in the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks to the patronage of kings. It was originally played outdoors and later indoors, and the spread of the game meant that tennis courts were built throughout Europe, in particular in France and England. Its rules were first printed in the sixteenth century. The very first treatise on the art of tennis was published in Venice in 1555: entitled Trattato del giuoco della palla, it is dedicated by the author, Antonio Scaino, to the prince of Ferrara, thus emphasizing its aristocratic connections. The principles of the game, as outlined by Scaino, bring out all the qualities of man, and improve physical abilities as well as moral principles. In 1599, the first extensive rules were published in French by Forbet l’Aisné under the title L’utilité qui provient du jeu de la paume au corps et à l’esprit, the book purporting to be a translation of Galen’s Exercise with the Small Ball. These rules were often reprinted in publications such as La maison académique contenant les jeux du picquet, du hoc, du tricque-trac . . . et autres jeux divertissans. While the game possibly had religious origins, having been played by monks in the Middle Ages, its connections with war, love, and more generally with destiny in the literature of the early modern period are ubiquitous. In literature and discourses about tennis, the game constituted a metaphor for life, from the Middle Ages down to the eighteenth-century novel. The first page of Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random describes, for example, the mother of the hero, who has dreamt that she was delivered of a tennis ball: She dreamed she was delivered of a tennis-ball, which the devil (who, to her great surprise, acted the part of a midwife) struck so forcibly with a racket that it disappeared in an instant; and she was for some time inconsolable for the loss of her offspring; when, all of a sudden, she beheld it return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet, whence immediately sprang up a goodly tree covered with blossoms, the scent of which operated so strongly on her nerves that she awoke. —Smollett [1746] 2012: 17 Through the tennis metaphor, the passage encapsulates the picaresque dimension of the novel, outlining the narrator’s peregrinations, the dangers of travels, the vicissitudes of life and of fortune, before suggesting the possibility of a return home. The presence of the parable at the outset of this eighteenth-century novel testifies both to the enduring presence of tennis in literary language and to a rhetorical tradition acknowledged by Smollett—and by Richardson before him, who described Pamela as a “mere Tennis-ball of Fortune” (Richardson [1740] 2001: 145). Thus, the representation of the sport is not only about coming to terms with its cultural presence, with the importance of the game both at court and,

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increasingly, in non-aristocratic circles. Authors were using the ubiquity of the pastime in the early modern period to reflect on war and politics, to indulge in verbal and literary games, to bring new life to reflections on Fortune, reminding us that we are “meerely the Starres tennys-balls” (Webster [1613–14] 1995: Act V, scene 4, 569). With the transformations of the game, and its gradual disappearance towards the end of the eighteenth century, the potential for disquisitions about the meaning of life were transferred to other sports—lawn tennis, in particular, reactivated some of these metaphors (Tadié 2015a). While the jeu de paume was gradually on the wane, another sport, also played with ball and stick, began to emerge as a favorite pastime: cricket. The game existed in Elizabethan times, but it developed more particularly during the Restoration and later. Derek Birley notes that by 1700, the game, “with big money at stake, had become a spectator attraction, and evidently the social status of the participants had a snob appeal” (Birley 1999: 15). While games were being played in London, cricket took off predominantly in the south, in Sussex and Kent, where it was played on village greens or private estates. Progressively, betting became part of the development of the game, giving rise to two different activities: important games which were fueled by gambling, and local, inter-parish encounters (Birley 1999: 23). The big games attracted sizeable crowds where the stakes could be high, encouraged by the patronage of noblemen. The game spread across the country, and the laws of cricket were published in the middle of the eighteenth century (1744, and printed eight years later in the New Universal Magazine) and continuously revised throughout the century. Disorder was not uncommon at cricket games, and “for the most part the involvement of the gentry in the cricket games of their inferiors was a by-product of their penchant for gambling” (Birley 1999: 29). Cricket made its way into literature and the arts in the eighteenth century— the first literary account of the game being given in Latin verse by a schoolmaster, William Goldwin, In Certamen Pilae (1706)—thereby testifying to the popularity of the game in a school context. One century later, William Wordsworth’s lines “Composed in the Valley near Dover, on the Day of Landing” celebrated the relationship of the game with the Englishness of the countryside: there, on his “native soil,” the poet equates England with the sight of “those boys who in yon meadow-ground / In white-sleeved shirts are playing” (Wordsworth [1802] 1990: 578). In the visual arts, the first illustration is generally ascribed to the French artist Hubert-François Gravelot, who produced in 1739 a picture that was part of a description of the pastimes and recreations of children (The Game of Cricket), but during the following decade, a number of artists, Francis Hayman in particular, painted cricket scenes, later used for engravings and reproductions of various kinds. This brief picture suggests the presence of games and pastimes in the literature and arts of the period, while it indicates ways in which these

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representations might be apprehended. They help us construct a narrative of their emergence, and constitute indicators of the transformations of sports, of the new status acquired by certain games, or of the waning of others, such as stag hunting. They indicate that such texts and images do not so much illustrate the early modern presence of sports but that they must be viewed both in the historical context of their publication and their later appropriation, embodying the cultural meanings of games, both then and now. Changing perceptions of texts and images or the reactivation of certain debates through their visual representations provide an understanding of the possible endurance of such sports.

GENRES AND TRADITIONS Certain sports, like tennis, came to inhabit existing literary forms to display their political or amorous potential and were conversely invoked by writers to reflect on the randomness of life or to suggest more frolicsome encounters. Other sports like hunting or angling gave rise to a significant body of literature that came to constitute a tradition in its own right—the poetry of rural sports, with The Compleat Angler being a significant landmark in the emergence of the genre. In similar ways, prizefighting and horse riding, in its various forms, gave rise to new modes of expression, or transformed significantly existing practices. The practice of sports prompted distinct forms of representation in the eighteenth century, exemplified for instance by sporting art or by sports journalism. But this emergence was not without contradictions. The popularity of sporting art in certain circles, for instance, did not always go hand in hand with artistic recognition of the artists whose works were not considered favorably in the hierarchy of genres. The development of sports journalism, in particular in relation to pugilism, was a significant moment in the evolution of the representation of sports, but also exposed the contradictions of the sport which was portrayed—in particular its illegal character—and therefore the fragility of such literary endeavors. The portrayal of horses has long been identified with a form of artistic representation usually described as “sporting art.” Although the category is a twentieth-century label, various expressions were used in the eighteenth century to describe such paintings or their authors: sporting pieces, horse-painters, etc. In the understanding of the category, sporting painters were primarily connected with the sporting world, hunting, shooting, or fishing in particular, and only secondarily with the art world, thereby pointing to the ambiguities surrounding the genre (Deuchar 1988: 10). Their works were in appearance formulaic, representing sports in a general sense (stag hunts, shooting scenes, horse races, etc.), or portraying individual hunters or animals in the specific surroundings of a particular landscape. In general, sports painters were not considered on the

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same footing as other painters, even though some artists, like George Stubbs, gained widespread recognition. Sporting art tended to provide a celebration of the achievements of sportsmen, as well as of the codes and qualities they displayed, not to mention an insistence on man’s communion with nature. A treatise like Blome’s Gentleman’s Recreation (1686) insisted upon the worth of rural sports as gentlemanly pursuits, through connections between sports and courtly cultures (Deuchar 1988: 27), as it described techniques for hunting and fishing. In the late seventeenth century sporting pictures were generally regarded as a branch of landscape painting, and the importance of the genre in England initially enabled the development of sporting art. It emphasized a connection with representations of country estates, thus showcasing the complementarity of sport and country (Deuchar 1988: 75). But not every picture of the countryside can be regarded as sporting art, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, sporting art and literature had started to assert themselves as distinct genres:

FIGURE 8.1: Portrait of a Sportsman with his Son and Dogs, 1779, by Francis Wheatley. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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FIGURE 8.2: Whistlejacket, c. 1762, by George Stubbs. Photograph by Picturenow, courtesy of Getty Images.

“there is a clear basic difference in both outlook and purpose between pro-rural sentiment which includes a eulogy of sport . . . and semi-technical sporting literature which refers, in passing, to the general delights of the countryside” (Deuchar 1988: 38). James Wootton’s paintings of hounds, and above all his portraits of horses, Peter Tillemans’s representations of hunts or of races (such as The Round Course at Newmarket, Cambridgeshire, Preparing for the King’s Plate, c. 1725), and James Seymour’s depictions of hunts (A Kill at Ashdown Park, 1743; Huntsmen and their Hounds, 1750) or detailed portraits of horses all testify to the emergence of this art form. They also contributed to the definition of the sporting ideal, based on issues of healthy pursuit, moral and social worth, which, in paintings, reflected on the patrons. While there had been some arguments about the degree of faithfulness such paintings exhibited in their depictions of sports, the evolution of the representation of rural sports increasingly emphasized the actuality of the scene in the painting. Portraits of horses, for instance, might include the pedigree of the animal. In turn, the mention of the pedigree related to wider debates, in particular when concerned with Arabian horses (Landry 2008). This insistence on the reality of rural sports, in Seymour’s paintings for instance, was contrasted with pictures, such as Wootton’s, which focused more on the sporting ideal and its connections with the owner’s social standing. And yet, even in Wootton’s paintings, a degree of realism was important:

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However decorative they may be, Wootton’s paintings were also precise renderings of the ideal to be sought in equine flesh in the early eighteenth century, and that equine ideal was a decorative as well as an athletic and an intelligent one. —Landry 2008: 116 In the latter part of the eighteenth century, both traditions still coexisted, but they also addressed, in part, the criticism that could be directed at rural sports (Deuchar 1988: 93–4). The destruction of the natural world, condemned by James Thomson in his poem The Seasons (1730), the dubious morality and gross manners of the sportsman, were targets of anti-sport criticism, which lamented its effects on society. The reaction of the sporting world was to rally around certain representations that seemed to respond to the uncertainties over their favorite occupations. In Deuchar’s analysis, the works of George Stubbs could offer such comfort. The nobility of stag hunting, the orderly depiction of horse races, and his careful study of the anatomy of horses (Stubbs 1766) point to Stubbs’s understanding of his patrons’ aspirations and to the ways in which his pictures “conveyed to the outside world a sense of the social and moral responsibility of sportsmen and their world” (Deuchar 1988: 126). His precise attention to detail, the scientific approach to his subject transformed the depiction and perceptions of country life. His portraits of horses testified to his ambition for sporting art to be regarded as a form of high art. This is nowhere more apparent than in the anecdote told by Stubbs himself of his famous portrait of Whistlejacket (c. 1762): on accidentally coming across the portrait, the horse is said to have attacked the painting, for fear this might be a rival stallion. Such was the advertised realism of Stubbs’s art—reworking, of course, the celebrated anecdote of Zeuxis’ picture of grapes, told by Pliny. Sawrey Gilpin’s aspiration for sporting art is parallel to Stubbs’s. Renowned for his portraits of horses, he tried to escape the relative disregard with which sports painters were considered. His paintings based on the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels (Gulliver Addressing the Houyhnhnms Supposing Them to be Conjurors, 1768; Gulliver Taking his Final Leave of his Master, the Sorrel Nag, 1771; Gulliver Reprimanded and Silenced by his Master when Describing the Horrors of War, 1772) point to his ambition to link sports paintings with higher forms of art, while he portrayed the Houyhnhnms as Eastern blood horses, the “loftiest, most exalted image in the English horse painter’s repertoire” (Landry 2008: 142). The complexities of sporting art are linked to the nature of representation of rural sports that they aim to provide and to perceptions that may be derived from their contemplation. The evolution throughout the eighteenth century of modes of representation freed sporting art from the reliance on codes of landscape painting, inherited in part from the seventeenth century, and moved

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FIGURE 8.3: Gulliver Addressing the Houyhnhnms Supposing Them to be Conjurers, 1768, by Sawrey Gilpin. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

gradually towards a more precise, detailed focus on the nature of the sports, as well as on the animals. The connections with the social and political perceptions of rural sports were of course crucial, so that paintings of orderly proceedings at racecourses, for instance, cannot be seen as direct representations of the events, but rather as a form of defense of such practices. Sports artists progressively defined modes of expression and a specific pictorial language that came to define the genre. As argued, for instance, by Mitchell Merling à propos Gilpin: “While Gilpin does not ignore the visual traditions of high art, he increasingly uses sporting prints themselves rather than other art forms as his chief point of reference” (Merling 2013: 32). This may not have been enough to grant sporting paintings recognition on an equal footing with other genres such as history painting, but it helped constitute the category of sporting art under which falls a significant amount of the artistic production of the eighteenth century. It certainly emphasized the importance of equine culture for eighteenthcentury society, an obsession that Jonathan Swift satirized in book four of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The emergence of forms of expression intimately connected with the representation of sports is apparent in the emergence of writings about pugilism.

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At one level, treatises provided a picture of physical activities and fashioned for the period the perception and understanding of these practices, but they were not necessarily in accordance with the changing fortunes of specific sports. Pugilism saw a development of writings of various sorts at a time when interest in the sport was also on the rise. As analyzed by John Whale, the complexities of sports journalism, as it was emerging from the descriptions of pugilism in particular, lay in the illegal character of the sport and the ensuing sense of an embattled subculture (2018). Alongside the development of journalism, a number of treatises and manuals appeared from the middle of the eighteenth century. One of the most important was The Art of Boxing by Daniel Mendoza (1789), whose fights with Richard Humphries in particular had brought him such fame that he became a visual icon and his feats were told on the stage of theaters in London (Boddy 2008: 40; Whale 2008: 264). The Complete Art of Boxing (1788) for instance uses as a frontispiece “Humphreys and Mendoza Setting To.” In his own book Mendoza insists on the Englishness of the sport, and indeed the equation soon became a cliché—an 1800 song that described the possibility of a boxing match between “that ancient British boxer, John Bull, and the Elf, Bonaparte” ends with: “From Bonaparte and his host, no invasions ne’er fear / For John Bull will him box, and keep your coast clear” (A New Song 1800). Mendoza was also keen to defend pugilism against attacks on its morality: the “art” of the title suggests that the book offers to the reader a refined technique to be emulated. Similar elevation of a popular practice to the level of an art through the publication of manuals can be seen in the case of swimming. While the sport predates its first expression in the literature of the age, manuals devoted to swimming began to appear in the second half of the eighteenth century. These treatises purported to elevate the practice to the status of art (Mallinckrodt 2016). On the other hand, while tennis had been played until the second half of the eighteenth century only with reference to Forbet’s rules of 1599, there appeared, from 1767, a number of texts which described in turn the art of making rackets or of building courts, or the principles of the game, both in French and English (Tadié 2015b: 87). The paradox here lies in the fact that these treatises appeared as the game—no longer one of the favored pastimes— was disappearing in the form in which it had been played in past centuries. They effectively constituted obituaries of a game that had been replaced by other forms of entertainment. At the heart of the representation of sports lays a tension between the history of a practice and its acknowledgment in the public sphere, in the form of texts or images. At one level, the publicity given to specific sports—in the form of poems, treatises, paintings, or book illustrations—might reflect the growing interest of the public in these pastimes. Sometimes the popularity of a given practice predates its recognition in print, providing the authors of such works

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with the opportunity to make a statement or to claim a higher status for the sport—as is the case for swimming—or indeed for their art; this seemed to have been the case for a number of sport artists in the eighteenth century. At another level these images or publications can be seen as occasional responses to attacks, in order to claim for the sport a degree of nobility usually denied to it. The reputation of country hunters or the boisterous events at the races may have prompted certain artists to smooth over the rough character of such meetings. Pugilism was threatened with prohibition in the eighteenth century. Such attempts as Mendoza’s or even Egan’s were predominantly aimed at providing an acceptable representation of the sport. This meant in turn that they were at risk of altering the nature of pugilism, of canceling out its rough nature (Whale 2008: 265–6). It was noted that these pastimes and sporting practices gave rise to distinct genres of painting and of writing, such as the poetry of rural sports. But a further tension inhabits such representations, not only in the interpretation we might give of them, but in their very production. While they purported to be accurate representations of sport, and might have been considered as such at the time and sometimes later, some of these were deemed to be fictional, either idyllic or sentimental, requiring a more robust form of realism.

THE USES OF REPRESENTATIONS The literary and artistic activities surrounding sports in the eighteenth century, beyond their diversity, point to the meanings with which the culture of the age hoped to endow them, further emphasized by their circulation. Paintings were of course commissioned by patrons keen to promote their association with a particular activity, and sporting art contributed, like other forms of art, to the celebration of these patrons. Specifically, the display of sporting art in country houses implicitly reflected on their owners. Deuchar suggested that changes in the modes of presentation and hanging of sporting art in houses were consonant with changes in the perception of the genre. While in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such paintings hung predominantly in the entrance hall, in the eighteenth century there was on the one hand an insistence on a more formal visual first impression on entering the house, which relegated sporting pictures to the background, and on the other a tendency to hang such pictures in rooms directly associated with sports, such as hunting rooms or billiards rooms (Deuchar 1988: 90–1). For Deuchar this specialization of the viewing of works of art went hand in hand with the increasing focus of paintings on the sport itself rather than on its social relevance. From the middle of the eighteenth century, cricket was patronized by the nobility. Famous patrons included John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich; the 1744 cricket game at the Artillery Ground between Kent and All-England was watched by the Prince of Wales, his brother the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke

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of Richmond, and Admiral Vernon, all promoters of the new sport (Birley 1999: 26). Rivalries between patrons were of course rife, such as that between Sir Horace Mann and John Sackville, third Duke of Dorset, who was said to spend at least £1,000 a year on the sport (Birley 1999: 38–9). Paintings of cricketers in those years might involve lesser characters. The collection assembled by the Marylebone Cricket Club Museum in London includes, for instance, the Portrait of William Rice (1744) by Robert Scaddon; but very little is known of the man whose likeness shows him holding a cricket bat—with a cricket match being played in the distant background—and the curved cricket bat looking, perhaps to suggest a certain amount of continuity in representations, like a shooting gun. The Young Cricketer, Portrait of Lewis Cage (1768) by Francis Cotes seems to take its composition from the tradition of portraits of children, but the heroic pose is here conveyed through the holding of a bat. This is one of a number of portraits of children or youth with a cricket bat that were painted in the second half of the eighteenth century. The later Thomas Hope of Amsterdam Playing Cricket with His Friends (1792) by the French painter Jacques-Henri Sablet elaborates on the hackneyed theme of the Grand Tour painting: the portrait was commissioned while Hope was in Italy and he is shown playing in the Roman Campagna. These portraits use a familiar pictorial language, and, while conferring distinction both on the sitter and on the game, they presuppose continuities in pictorial traditions and integrate cricket as a marker of sociability, with the bat replacing the shooting gun in some paintings. The visual relationship between cricket and shooting, with the newer pastimes occasionally replacing the traditional rural sport, was certainly one that artists were aware of. John Collett’s Miss Wicket and Miss Trigger (1778) is a satirical depiction of two ladies, one resting on her bat, in the familiar position of batsmen, but a pose probably inappropriate for a lady, while the other is bringing to the first one the fruits of her hunt. Paintings of cricket were not limited to individuals posing with a bat in hand, but also depicted the whole proceedings. For instance, an early painting by Francis Hayman, Cricket in the Artillery Ground (1743), depicts a match as the batsman is about to strike the ball which has just been bowled. His Cricket Match at Mary-le-bone Fields (1748) gives a more distant view of the proceedings, placing them in nature, the background suggesting a connection with landscape painting. Both paintings were popular in the eighteenth century, the first one having been engraved to decorate one of the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens. This further indicates the dissemination of sports representations through engravings and other popular forms of reproduction. Indeed, not all sporting art remained in the specialized rooms of country houses. A number of paintings were reproduced in diverse publications, such as Gilpin’s Death of the Fox (1788), which was published in the Sporting Magazine (1793) and later became popular through the engraving produced in 1811 by John Scott. Scott specialized

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FIGURE 8.4: Stag Hunting Scene in a Park, c. 1795, by Thomas Rowlandson. Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust, @ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

in the representation of animals, was long associated with the Sporting Magazine, illustrated William Barker Daniel’s British Rural Sports (1801), and published in the early nineteenth century collections of engravings of dogs and horses that brought him fame (O’Donoghue 2004). Sporting prints in general were extremely popular in the eighteenth century, mainly in Britain but elsewhere in Europe as well. They were acquired by members of all social classes (Cormack 2013: 3), and constituted an important source of inspiration for a number of artists. The influence of British sporting art on the French painter Théodore Géricault is, for instance, well documented. He painted copies of Stubbs’s Horse Attacked by Lion, gave his own view of English horse races (Course de chevaux, dite Le derby de 1821 à Epsom, 1821), and produced a number of engravings and lithographs of horses during the two years he spent in London between 1820 and 1821. While they sometimes reproduced paintings, British sporting prints also developed an aesthetic of their own, moving away from models of classical art, and becoming in turn a source of inspiration for a number of artists: As sporting printmakers shifted away from traditional models drawn from classical and Continental sources in depicting sport, their art became more

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sophisticated and had greater contemporary relevance. It was this very currency, not only as representations of modern life, but also as representations in a modern style, that brought the sporting print to the notice of nonsporting Continental artists who sought inspiration in the genre. —Merling 2013: 38 Not all sporting art and representations were concerned with the status of the patrons or the faithful depiction of the activities of sportsmen or animals. The codes of sporting art could be turned against the world of sports. This is the case for instance in works by Thomas Rowlandson. The artist painted a number of scenes of hunt, showing his command of the tradition of such representations. Stag Hunting Scene in a Park (c. 1795), a drawing with watercolor, depicts the pursuit of a stag near the gothic house of Lanhydrock, in Cornwall; another watercolor, A Stag Hunt in the West Country (n.d.), shows the pack of hounds closing in on the stag, with two horsemen in pursuit; Stag at Bay—Scene near Taplow, Berks (1795–1800) displays similar interest in the movement of the animals against the background of a forest. But in The Breakfast (1789) the artist caricatures rowdy huntsmen as they are about to depart for the hunt, gulping down large quantities of food and drink. While

FIGURE 8.5: The Breakfast, 1789, by Thomas Rowlandson. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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some are not nearly awake, a man on the left puts his boots on, in a pose which is inspired by the celebrated statue of Cincinnatus, and another man in the background blows the horn. The drawing Breakfast before the Hunt (1785–90) uses the same reference but focuses on a smaller group of hunters, while the hounds are already running outside. With indirect reference to the nature of the hunting room, satirical portrayals of huntsmen and the hunt were not uncommon in the late eighteenth century. Similarly the series London Sportsmen after paintings by Isaac Cruikshank mocked the London men out shooting in the country (Cormack et al. 2013: illustrations 33 and 34, 76), thus drawing, in a satirical mode, on the opposition between town and country. The amorous encounters between huntsmen and ladies were also the topic of frequent satirical depictions. Traditional sports could be used for other purposes, with satirists using traditional pastimes such as bullbaiting to reflect on British politics. In John Bull, Baited by the Dogs of Excise (1790), James Gillray addresses the efforts by William Pitt to impose new excise duties on tobacco, by having John Bull, blindfolded, chained, and muzzled, trying to fight off attacks by dogs with heads of members of parliament; Pitt appears as a dog attacking John Bull in a print by Richard Newton (The English Bull Baiting, 1797). These satirical representations are in turn articulated in the literary representations of sports, where the sporting activity is the object of literary

FIGURE 8.6: John Bull, Baited by the Dogs of Excise, 1790, by James Gillray. Courtesy of Alamy.

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irony. The 1744 game of cricket, which was played at the Artillery Ground in London, provides the background for James Love’s mock-heroic poem on cricket of the same year, subtitled “Illustrated with the Critical Observations of Scriblerus Maximus.” While the first book celebrates the manly virtues of the game and builds its identification with the land in almost organic terms, linking it with the values of nation and empire, it also provides an ironical undercurrent to such celebrations. The footnotes, which are deliberately reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s in The Dunciad, suggest for instance: There is great Reason however, to think, that it is an European Invention, and perhaps, as our Author ventures to affirm, a Sprout of Britain: For the Chinese, who claim Printing, Gunpowder, &c. so long before we had any Notion of them, to our great Satisfaction, lay not the least Claim to it. —Love 1744: 2 The second and third books are more directly focused on the game at the Artillery Ground, although some attention is paid by the poet to surrounding activities: But while the drooping Play’r invokes the Gods / The busy Better calculates his Odds, / Swift round the Plain, in buzzing Murmurs run, / I’ll hold you Ten to Four, Kent.—Done Sir.—Done. —Love 1744: 19 The fact that the game could provide material for satirical poetry may reflect on its cultural importance by the middle of the century and on its inscription in the English landscape at the same time as it evidently provokes ironical distance towards the passion that the game sometimes generates. The same is true of the Gymnasiad or the Boxing-Match (1744) by Paul Whitehead. It is a mock-heroic account of Jack Broughton’s victory over George Stephenson, with occasional pastiches of Virgil, a lofty style used to describe the appearance of the heroes (“First, to the Fight, advanc’d the Charioteer, / High Hopes of Glory on his Brow appear; / Terror vindictive flashes from his Eye”; Whitehead 1744: 20, ll. 1–3), leading to the poetic and boxing fall (“Down dropt the Hero, weltering in his Gore / And his stretch’d Limbs lay quiv’ring on the Floor”; Whitehead 1744: 32, ll. 73–4), and regular footnotes from the “editor” calling the attention of the reader to the composition or suggesting possible interpretations of the text. Written in imitation of the great classical poets, The Gymnasiad follows Swift and Pope in the use of the mock-heroic, at the same time as it is addressed to Jack Broughton, thereby suggesting that it must also be read as a celebration of the hero (Harrow 2015a). The circulation of representations of sports was emphasized by the design of trade cards, with an illustration that could sometimes be relatively elaborate. As

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their name indicates trade cards could describe all manners of trade, but in the world of sports they could advertise schools where one might learn a particular sport, fencing or boxing for instance, or shops where tools and implements could be acquired, such as fishing hooks. In the second half of the eighteenth century their size could be small, but they were usually the size of an A4 or A5 sheet. These cards were usually printed from etched or engraved copper plates or from letterpress. Part of the engraving, in particular the background, could be used for more than one trade card. The image was supplemented with information concerning the premises and the days when the school was open. The supposed trade card of the prizefighter James Figg advertised his amphitheater and the various activities one could find there (Figg n.d.), J. Mackree advertised his academy of fencing (Mackree n.d.), and Mr. Picasse had two sets of premises for fencing that appeared on his trade cards (Picasse n.d.). Such cards existed both in England and on the continent, although the design might have been different. The circulation of images of sports went through varied networks that ranged from paintings that hung in great halls of country houses to prints, reproductions, or trade cards which commanded a different kind of attention. At one level they can be said to display an image of sporting activities, but they were inscribed in complex networks of consumption and placed their owners, spectators, and users in varying positions vis-à-vis the sports. They endowed the sport with a form of distinction, and they sometimes related to a more commercial venture, while knowledge of a pictorial language, both in artists and viewers, enabled some artists and writers to indulge in humoristic or satirical depictions of sports.

SPORTS AS REPRESENTATION Then as now, these representations of sports suggest the necessity of a public beyond the immediate participants in the activity. Patrons wanting to display themselves hunting, cricket players keen to remind the viewer of the polite character of their favorite pastime, writers arguing over the appropriate mode of representation of boxing were all in search of a public and hoping to extend the immediate confines of the various sporting arenas. A number of representations of traditional pastimes emphasized the participation of the public. Images of bearbaiting often showed not only the bear being attacked by dogs but could also involve other participants, waiting to take their turn, or even the public watching the proceedings. The emphasis by some artists on the social and indeed spatial organization of sports corresponds both to a desire to situate these pastimes in their contexts but also to construct space and society, through the sports, into the visual representation. Emma Griffin’s work on the popular pastimes of England has established the importance of spaces for an understanding of sports, showing

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that the pressure on space was different in rural areas, market towns, or larger cities, thereby suggesting different patterns of recreation. Ancient pastimes such as bullbaiting existed throughout the country, but would find a suitable location in the market square, making it an urban activity (Griffin 2005: 43). While some games of cricket were played in specific locations and were watched by a sizeable public, the sport also took place on commons, where the locals and the laboring poor could participate (Griffin 2005: 49–50). The village green was also an important place where such activities took place and where they became representations for the whole village. Like the market square in towns, the green was a place for feasts, fairs, and celebrations, as well as for sports (Griffin 2005: 198). The cockpit was one of the most important such arenas. Since the fifteenth century the word had been in use to describe the place where cockfighting took place, watched in particular by gamblers. William Hogarth’s engraving of 1759 takes place at the Royal Cockpit in Birdcage Walk, St. James’s Park (The Cockpit, 1759). It alludes ironically to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, showing the effects of gambling and debt on society, the disorders of the public seemingly greater than the actual scene of the cocks fighting, while the scene is being presided over by the blind Lord Albemarle Bertie, whose money is being stolen. While they were constructed for cockfighting, these places sometimes evolved or welcomed other activities. The Royal Cockpit situated behind the palace of Whitehall also included a tennis court and a bowling alley. By extension the expression could be used to refer to government offices located nearby. A theater in London in the seventeenth century was called the Cockpit because it was converted in 1616 from a cockfighting arena built in 1609 (Hibbert et al. 2008: 199). In the late twentieth century a theater built in London on the design of a theater-in-the-round was renamed the Cockpit. And we know the fortune of the word was to refer to a specific part of ships, planes, Formula One cars, or road bicycles. Beyond the metaphor, the connections between cockpit and theater point both to the round designs of such buildings and to the continuities between sports and dramatic performance. More than the attendance of the public at both types of events, the spatial organization of the relationship of the public to the performance was crucial in the definition of such continuities. The circle of spectators around the area where cocks were fighting suggests that the connections between sports and spectacle have a material, concrete basis in the familiar metaphorical usages. The stage was likened to a cockpit in Shakespeare’s Henry V and to a tennis court in Lust’s Dominion, a play generally ascribed to Thomas Dekker (“Me thinks this stage shews like a Tennis Court”; Rhodes 1968: 21); but when theaters reopened at the Restoration actors were in need of playhouses, so they came to use tennis courts because their dimensions— about 75 by 30 feet—were convenient for such purposes.

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This in turn suggests the intricate links between sports and representation, then and now. Participation in sports and pastimes took many forms, ranging from popular endeavors watched by thousands of spectators to more local contests and pastimes. Some traditional recreational practices such as bull- or bearbaiting survived into the early nineteenth century; as sports such as tennis were dying out in the eighteenth century, others acquired a more important presence, through patronage for instance, but in a number of areas, in particular rural areas, “deeply rooted traditions of custom and paternalism served to ensure the survival of older patterns of sports and pastimes” (Griffin 2005: 222). Writers and painters turned to these activities, not merely to document them but because they found in the investigation of games and sports entries into the world of nature, into social interactions, or they could explore and transform artistic techniques and traditions. In turn, these representations could generate new meanings, making of sports, for instance, the markers of new forms of sociability. Representations of early modern sports are not confined to the fine arts or to a specific place in the hierarchy of painting: works of sporting art are better understood in conjunction with their circulation through prints, the growth of pugilism is inseparable from debates over modes of writing about the sport, the writing of instruction manuals would hope to confer on certain physical activities the dignity of an art, and certain traditional forms of recreation could be denounced for their cruelty through representation, while the gradual disappearance of certain sports encouraged writers to record what was in danger of becoming an antiquarian pastime. Financial dealings around games had an impact on the spectators as well as on the regulation of sports. While local interests meant that recreational activities diverged between regions, or between towns and rural areas, the gradual codification of sports in the early modern period (treatises were partly or entirely devoted to cockfighting, the laws of cricket were first drafted in 1744, the first rules of golf were produced in the same year, Broughton’s rules for pugilism were published in 1743, etc.) led to an increasing standardization of practices. Spaces available for sports were driven by patronage, by local practice, access to public land, and by the building of specific venues where spectators could gather, but which, in turn, could be reappropriated for other forms of representation, such as cockpits or tennis courts which became theaters. But whether they celebrate or satirize, whether they aspire to fictionalize or uphold new conceptions of realism, representations of early modern sports contributed to their centrality as cultural practices and to their enduring power to fascinate.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Wolfgang Behringer is professor of history at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. His Kulturgeschichte des Sports. Vom antiken Olympia bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (C. H. Beck, 2012) has been translated into Hungarian (2014), Chinese (2015), and Japanese (2019). It is in use as a textbook at various universities in China and was the subject of a conference at Nanjing University of Sports in 2019. His English-language publications include Witches and Witch Hunts. A Global History (2004), A Cultural History of the Climate (2010), and Tambora and the Year without a Summer. How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis (2019), all published by Polity Press, Cambridge. He is currently working on a Global History of the Early Modern Period. Elisabeth Belmas is professor emeritus of modern history at Sorbonne Paris Nord University, member of the IRIS laboratory (UMR8156-U997), and coordinator of the theme “Construction and dissemination of medical knowledge” in the “Health, society” axis at MSH Paris-Nord. She is also secretary general of GIS “Jeu et Sociétés.” Her research focuses on the history of play in modern French society (“Les échanges ludiques entre la France et l’Espagne, XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” 2018; “Tricheurs et tricheries au jeu au XVIIIe siècle. La figure du chevalier d’industrie,” 2017), and the history of health and illness (with Coste Joël, Les soldats du Roi à l’Hôtel des Invalides: Etude d’épidémiologie historique, 1670–1791, CNRS Editions, 2018; with Nonnis-Vigilante Serenella (eds), L’orchestration de la mort. Les funérailles des temps modernes à l’époque contemporaine, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2017). Dave Day is professor of sports history at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include the biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth227

228

CONTRIBUTORS

century coaches and the historical and cultural development of coaching and training practices. He has published extensively on these topics, including Professionals, Amateurs and Performance: Sports Coaching in England, 1789– 1914 (Peter Lang, 2012) and A History of Sports Coaching in Britain (Routledge, 2016). He is currently exploring the transcultural transmission of coaching traditions and depictions of sport and exercise in Victorian children’s periodicals. He is also overseeing a project combining diverse biographical methods to illuminate the life courses of women engaged as swimming professionals during the long Victorian period. Mike Huggins is emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cumbria. His most recent monograph, Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century, was published by Boydell in 2018. He specializes in the history of British leisure and sport from 1660 to the recent past and is on the board of academic journals in the Americas, Britain, and Europe. He is president of the European Committee of Sports Historians, and has edited a companion volume in this series: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry. Rebekka von Mallinckrodt is professor of early modern history at the University of Bremen. She has worked in the fields of religious studies, the history of the body, postcolonial and slavery studies. From 2015 to 2021, she is leading the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and its Slaves.” With regard to sports and physical exercise she has published Bewegtes Leben—Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit/Life on the Move—Body Techniques in the Early Modern Period (Harrassowitz, 2008), Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture (with Angela Schattner, Routledge, 2016), and numerous articles on the cultural and social history of running, swimming, and diving. Angela Schattner specializes in the social and cultural history of early modern Britain and Germany, the history of the body, disability, sports, exercise and leisure. She was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute London (2010–16) and the University of Bremen (2016). She is now an independent historian, researching the history of early modern sports in her spare time while working on recycling the nonrecyclable at TerraCycle in her day job. She is the author of Zwischen Familie, Heiler und Fürsorge (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012) and has edited Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2016) together with Rebekka von Mallinckrodt. Alexis Tadié is a professor of English literature at Sorbonne Université, Paris, and an honorary senior research fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France.

CONTRIBUTORS

229

His books include monographs on Bacon, Locke, and Sterne. He has edited volumes on quarrels in the early modern period, including Ancients and Moderns in Europe (with Paddy Bullard, Voltaire Foundation, 2016) and Querelles et création en Europe à l’époque moderne (with Jeanne-Marie Hostiou, Classiques Garnier, 2019), as well as books on sports, such as Sporting Cultures 1650– 1850 (with Daniel O’Quinn, University of Toronto Press, 2018). He was the editor of the journal Etudes anglaises between 2015 and 2019. Laurent Turcot is professor at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada, research chair in the history of leisure and entertainment, and author of Sports et loisirs, une histoire des origines à nos jours (Gallimard, 2016). Using a range of different sources, such as engravings, paintings, travel guides, books, police reports, architectural plans, and municipal decisions, he is trying to shed light on how leisure and entertainment shape citizens’ identities and define group and individual behavior.

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INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. access, 52, 137–8 accidents, 123 advertising, 93, 109 agricultural working rhythm, 57–8 Alken, Henry, 177 America, 31, 35, 37, 143–4, 153 associativity, 38 gambling, 41 negative views, 44 social class, 154–5 time, 55–6 American War of Independence, 56 Andry de Boisregard, Nicolas, 165–6, 171–2 Angelo, Domenico, 12, 81, 113–4 angling, 31, 40, 97 animal protection, 109–10 animal training, 86 anti-sport criticism, 184 archery, 35, 85, 126–7, 127, 141–2, 142 aristocracy free time, 51 gambling, 41 motivation, 33–4 Aristotle, 117 associativity, 1, 22–5, 25, 38–40, 40, 47–8, 78, 82–4 Astley, Philip, 87

Aumont, Arnulphe, 162 Austria, 54, 57 ball games, 6–7, 10, 15, 56, 62, 103–5, 119–20 Ballexserd, Jacques, 172 ballrooms, 68, 70–1 Barbeyrac, Jean, 144 Bardi, Giovanni de’, 100 Barlow, Francis, 177 baseball, 7 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 127, 172, 173 Bath, 97 bearbaiting, 109, 193 Bedford, 61 Bee, John, 140 Behringer, Wolfgang, 20, 77–8 Beldham, William, 91–2 betting, 4, 19, 41, 42, 92, 105 billiards, 6, 88 Birley, Derek, 180 Black Act, 1723, 45 Blome, Richard, 177, 182 blood circulation, 163, 164 blood sports, 2, 33, 85–7, 86, 88, 120 popularity, 2 rules, 109–10 sporting facilities, 85

231

232

boat racing, 63 body, the, instrumental rationalization of, 93–4 body culture, 95 Bonin, Louis, 139 Borassatti, Giustiniano, 106 boredom, 31 Borsay, Peter, 55, 66 Bouchier, Richard, 88 Bourg, Jean-François, 77 bowling, 73, 88 boxing, 11–2, 36, 64, 76, 85, 89, 129, 154, 160 ban, 131 professionalization, 89–90 and race, 147–50, 148, 149, 151 representation, 185–6, 187, 192, 193 rules, 108–9, 130–1, 195 training, 95–6 women pugilists, 31, 98, 140, 145 Boyle, Robert, 152 Brailsford, Dennis, 3, 56, 61 Brazil, 152 Brookes, Christopher, 33–4 Broughton, John (Jack), 36, 108, 108–9, 116, 130–1, 130, 192, 195 Brown, Thomas, 85 brutality, 120 Bucer, Martin, 54 Buchan, William, 14–5, 166–7 bull festivals, 8 bullbaiting, 48–9, 86, 86, 191, 191 bullfighting, 2, 8, 11, 110, 124–6, 125 Campan, Mrs, 169 camping closes, 64 Camus, Antoine Le, 165, 167 Canning, George, 49 Capponi, Orazio, 100 carnivalistic enjoyment, 43 categorical distinctions, 7–8, 12–6 celebrities, 43 Charles II, King, 37–8, 41, 59, 87, 106 Cheyne, George, 14, 15 childbirth, 138 children, 34, 111, 169–70, 172, 174 church holidays, 53–4 churchyards, 62–4, 75 civilizing process, 90, 120, 121–2, 132, 135, 136

INDEX

Clark, Peter, 4, 16–7, 17, 18, 20, 24, 26, 73 clubs and associations, 22–5, 25, 38–40, 40, 82–4, 99–100 coaching, 93 cockfighting, 33, 34, 41, 86–7, 95, 109, 194 Cockinne, Andrew, 94 The Cockpit (after William Hogarth), 33 commercial provision, 84–5 commercialization, 1, 8–9, 16–7, 20, 24–5, 25–6, 42–3, 52, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 113, 115 commodification, 78–81 common property, privatization of, 52, 64 competition, 16, 24, 25–6, 33 The Compleat Angler (Walton), 178, 181 Condorcet, Jean de, 174 conflict, 117–36 duels, 132–6, 135 regulation of, 123–9 sportification of, 129–36 sports as expression of, 118–23 conspicuous consumption, 156 cost of living, 18 Cotton, Charles, 104, 113 Cox, Nicholas, 32, 36, 177, 178 Cribb, Tom, 151 cricket, 33–4, 38, 39, 41, 41–2, 56, 58, 61, 76, 83, 83–4, 91, 129–30, 155 patronage, 187–8 professionalization, 90–2 representation, 180, 187–8 rules, 104, 131 women participants, 131, 144 Cronin, Mike, 77 cultural historians, 30 Cumberland, 38 dance, 9, 13–4, 102, 110, 114, 139 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 117 Dawson, Kevin, 153 De Bruyn, Frans, 178 Denmark, 128–9, 173 Descartes, René, 93–4, 163 Desch-Obi, T. J., 150 Desessartz, Jean-Charles, 166 Deuchar, Stephen, 183, 184, 187 Dibden, Charles, 46–7 Diderot, Denis, Encyclopédie, 162–3

INDEX

Digby, Everard, 111–2, 114 disorder, 64, 65, 68 dogfights, 86 dogs, 45, 48, 85, 86, 109, 183 Downing, Karen, 90 Dresden, 2 duels, 132–6, 135 Dunning, Eric, 90 Edinburgh Skating Club, 112 education, 12, 13–4, 168, 174 effemination, 147–8 Egan, Pierce, 147 Egypt, 9, 187 Elias, Norbert, 90, 118, 120 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 162–3 Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen (Vieth), 4, 5–14, 16, 59, 106–7 categorical distinctions, 7–8, 12–4 on commercialization, 8–9 coverage, 5–7 and current historiography, 16–25 historical introduction, 5 national comparisons, 9–11 transfers between the nations, 11–2 engagement, 33 England, development of sports in, 16–25 English advantages, 10 Enlightenment thinking, 25 entertainment complexes, 73–4, 74 entrepreneurs, 8–9, 19, 88 exclusion, women, 145–7 exercise, 12–6, 25, 34, 79, 106, 113, 158–9, 161, 162–3, 165–8, 168–9, 171–4 fair play, 101–2 falconry, 85–6, 177 fencing, 10, 12, 17, 24, 81, 93, 100–1, 107, 132–5, 135, 155, 193 Ferdinand, Christine, 93 festival culture, 52, 118–9 Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones, 176–7 Figg, James, 17, 95, 108, 130, 193 fitness, 34 fives, 63–4, 68, 88 Florence, 100–1, 115 Florentine football, 7 foot racing, 26, 80–1, 105, 157, 160 football, 36, 43, 65, 121 rules, 100–1, 103–4, 115

233

Fort Michilimackinac, fall of, 35 fox hunting, 45 fox-tossing, 2 France, 7, 9–10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 54, 56, 70, 103–4, 110–1, 112, 115–6, 131–2, 146–7 associativity, 38 conflict regulation, 118 duels, 132–6, 135 guilds of archers, 126–7 representation, 177, 179 free time, 53–62, 78 freedom, 165 French Revolution, 135, 157, 174 Fuller, Francis, 14, 113, 114 Galen, 13, 16, 34, 163 gambling, 4, 19, 38, 40–2, 49 gamecocks, 95 games, 12, 111, 123–4, 170 Gardiner, John Smallman, 46 Garsault, François de, 21 Gascoigne, George, 177 Geertz, Clifford, 120 gender, 6, 138 construction of, 36 and exercise, 168–9 and participation, 138–47, 159 gender roles, 97 Geneva, 74 Genlis, Mrs. de, 168–9 gentlemanliness, 36 Gentleman’s Magazine, 57, 115 Géricault, Théodore, 189 Germany, 3, 35, 38, 56, 70, 101 Gillray, James, 191, 191 Gilpin, Sawrey, 184, 185, 185 Glorious Revolution, 1688, 4 Glover, Thomas, 153 Goldwin, William, 180 golf, 104–5, 195 golf clubs, 39 Gorn, Eliott, 36 Gouguet, Jean-Jacques, 77 Gravelot, Hubert-François, 180 greyhounds, 85 Griesebner, Andrea, 138 Griffin, Emma, 32, 44, 48, 55, 66, 156, 193–5 Grisone, Federico, 114

234

Gumpelzhaimer, Georg, 106 GutsMuths, Johann Christian Friedrich, 34, 106, 128, 128, 173–4 Guttmann, Allen, 4, 26, 33, 78, 140 gymnastics, 13, 16, 34, 36, 106–7, 127–9, 128, 162–3, 171, 172–3 Haller, Albrecht von, 163 Hambledon Club, 39, 41–2, 91, 92, 104 Harvey, William, 163 health, 12–6, 34, 79, 106–7, 113 Hehenberger, Susanne, 138 heuristic function, 12 Higginson, Thomas, 68, 81, 93, 155 Hoffman, Friedrich, 172 Hogarth, William, 194 Holland, 8, 10–1, 35 Holy Roman Empire, 6–7, 24, 25, 45, 54, 71 Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, 104 Hope, William, 109 horse racing, 35, 37–8, 37, 41, 42, 56, 58, 61–2, 67, 76, 83, 87, 105–6, 154 horsemanship, 22, 45–9 horses, 35, 45, 87, 87, 94 representation, 181–2, 183, 183–4, 183, 185 training, 94–5 Houghton, John F.R.S., 86 Huggins, Mike, 92 Huizinga, Johan, 31, 52–3 human perfectibility, 21, 170–4 humoral theory, 34, 94, 138, 161, 165, 174 hunt clubs, 39–40 hunting, 31–2, 34, 36, 37–8, 46, 137, 155–6, 187 associativity, 47–8 pleasures of, 46–7 representation, 176–8, 183, 189, 190–1 social status, 45 sporting purpose, 45–8 women, 47–8, 142–3, 143 hygienist movement, 170–4 ice-skating, 6, 10–1, 11, 58–9, 58, 112–3 identity, 37 national, 89 illness, 164

INDEX

Industrial Revolution, the, 77, 78 industrialization, 52, 60, 78, 78–81, 82–3, 96, 98 information, spread of, 3 innkeepers, 42, 72–3, 84–5 institutionalization, 77–8 instruction manuals, 21, 92 Italy, 7, 11, 15, 54, 70–1, 100, 102–3, 134 Jacob, Giles, 32 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 35–6 jeu de paume, 68, 69, 70–1, 104, 115–6, 121–3, 180 Jewish communities, 148 Jockey Club, 39, 40, 83 Johnston, Thomas, 87 Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 54 Kemp, William, 93 knightly exercises, 6 knowledge, rationalization, 162–3 kolf, 6, 8, 11, 73, 105 Kreussler family, 103 Krüger, Arnd, 77 Krünitz, Johann Georg, 26, 158 lacrosse, 35 l’Aisné, Forbet, 179 Landry, Donna, 183–4 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 173 lawn bowls, 80 Le Livre de chasse (Phébus), 177 leisure culture, 52 leisure industry, 74 liberalism, 22 literacy, 3 Litherland, Benjamin, 147 Locke, John, 13–4, 34 London, 18, 39, 63, 66, 68, 73–4, 80, 81, 109, 158 Lord, Thomas, 42 Love, James, 192 Luther, Martin, 54 McClelland, John, 34, 77, 92 Machrie, William, 109 Magnus, Olaus, 5 manliness, 36, 47, 89, 124, 140, 147, 160 Marie Antoinette, 143, 143 Markham, Gervase, 94, 104, 105–6, 110

INDEX

Marylebone Cricket Club, 39, 42, 84, 91, 104, 131, 188 masculinity, 124 Mauss, Marcel, 122 Mead, Richard, 14 media, 20–2 medical approach, 161–2, 162 mechanical, 163–4, 171–2 pedagogy, 164–8 to the social body, 170–4 medicine, 13 Mendoza, Daniel, 22, 89, 109, 116, 131, 149, 149–50, 186, 187 Mercurialis, Hieronymus, 13, 16, 34, 106, 111, 113, 164 Merling, Mitchell, 185, 189–90 methodological exercises, 167–8 Middleton, Christopher, 111 military training, 12, 34–6, 85, 126–7, 174 Milton, John, 44 modern sports, 4, 10, 25, 77–8 Molineaux, Tom, 149, 149, 150, 151 moral prescriptions and morality, 82, 163 motivation, 33–4, 101-2, 116 Nachtegall, Franck, 128–9 names, rationalization, 162–3 national comparisons, 9–11 national identity, 89 negative views, 44 Netherlands, 3, 20, 25, 105, 112, 134 New England, 55–6 newspapers, 3, 4, 20, 30, 93, 99 noble savage, the, 150–1 Offray de La Mettrie, Julien, 163 organization, 24–5, 99 Ottoman Turkey, 7 overexertion, 14, 15 Palla a bracciale, 15 pallone, 15, 16 Paris, 18, 64–5, 66, 71, 156 parks, 64–5 Parkyns, Thomas, 108 participation, 53, 115, 137–60 and class, 153–8, 159 and gender, 138–47, 159 and race, 147–53, 159–60

235

women, 25, 36, 75, 97–8, 131, 138–47, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 159 Paschen, Johann Georg, 22 patronage, 19, 38, 81–2, 84, 180, 187–8, 193, 195 pearl divers, 152 pedagogic institutions, 102–3 pedagogy, 161, 164–8 pedestrianism, 80–1, 96, 105 Pepys, Samuel, 80, 85 periodicals, 3 Persia, 7, 9 Peter the Great, 11 Pfalz, Lieselotte von der, 142–3 Phébus, Gaston, Le Livre de chasse, 177 Philippines, the, 109 physical aesthetic, 165 physical education, 128–9, 145, 169–70, 174 Pius VI, Pope, 54 Plato, 13 play, 31, 52–3 Playford, John, 110, 114 Pluvinel, Antoine de, 102 politeness, 89–90, 92 political allegiances, 37–8 political gatherings, 57 popular culture, 29 population, urban, 1–2, 18 Powell, Foster, 105 power relationships, 45–9 premodern society, 1 premodernity, understanding, 26–7 print industry, 42–3, 92–3, 114–5 printmakers, 188–90, 189 prize committees, 113 prizefighting. see boxing prizes, 38 professionalization, 1, 9, 18, 19–20, 51, 88, 113–4, 129 boxing, 89–90 cricket, 90–2 and rules, 102–3 promoters, 79, 84 prostitution, connotations of, 140 provision, commercial, 84–5 Prussia, 35–6 public health, 170–4 Puritan Revolution, the, 24 Puritans, 55, 55–6, 113

236

race, 138 and boxing, 147–50, 148, 149, 151 and participation, 147–53, 159–60 and swimming, 150–3 race week, 62 Racing Calendar, 3, 20, 106, 115 Radford, Peter, 145 real tennis, 70–1, 88 recreational battles, 118–9 referees, 113 Reformation, the, 53–4 relaxation, 31 religion, 52 representation, 175–95 dissemination, 188–9 early modern period, 176–81 genres and traditions, 181–7, 182, 183, 185 satirical, 190–2, 190, 191 sports as, 193–5 uses of, 187–93, 189 Ribaillier, Ambroise, 168–9 Richardson, Samuel, 179 Richmond, Bill, 149, 150 riding, 87, 87, 93 medical approach, 167 women, 30–1, 143–4 Ripon, 30–1 Roger, Nicolas, 22 role, 31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 34, 156, 164, 168–9, 172, 173 rowing, 56, 62, 88, 112, 158 Rowlandson, Thomas, 189, 190, 190 rules, 78, 83–4, 85, 90, 99–116, 123, 129, 195 aristocratic sports, 110–1 ball games, 103–5 blood sports, 109–10 boxing, 108–9, 130–1, 195 cricket, 104, 131 fencing, 107 football, 100–1, 103–4, 115 motivation, 101–2, 116 origins, 100–2 and professionalization, 102–3 publication, 99, 100–1 racing, 105–6 transmission, 101–2 trends, 113–6

INDEX

water sports, 111–2 winter sports, 112–3 wrestling, 108 running, 26, 80–1, 105, 157, 160 Russia, 7, 8–9, 11 Sandwich Islands, 7 Santa Clara, Abraham a, 57 Scaino, Antonio, 100, 122, 179 Schattner, Angela, 144, 146 science, 21–2, 21, 26 scientific revolution, 78 Scotland, 39 Scott, John, 188–9 seasons, 57–9, 58 self-control, 120 sensibility, culture of, 89–90 shipwreck recovery, 152 Shoemaker, Robert B., 90 shooting, 6, 35 competitions, 24, 71–2, 126 fraternities, 24, 36, 126–7 Shrove Tuesday, 43 slaves and the slave trade, 11–2, 150, 153, 154, 159 Smith, Jackie, 96 smock races, 30, 145 Smollett, Tobias, 179 social class, 81, 138 and participation, 153–8, 159 social cohesion, 117 social permeability, 18 social standards, 168 social status, 37, 45, 51, 81–2 Sorel, Charles, 111 sources, 30, 175 space, 52, 62–9, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70–5, 70, 72, 74, 78, 82 camping closes, 64 churchyards, 62–4, 75 entertainment complexes, 73–4, 74 inns, 72–3, 72, 75 parks, 64–5 permanent facilities, 66–7, 75–6 purpose-built facilities, 67–8, 67, 69, 70–1 representation, 193–5 Spain, 2, 8, 11, 19, 54, 112, 120, 124–6 specialist knowledge, transmission, 22

INDEX

spectators, 2–3, 53, 66–7, 76 spirituality, 44 sport, definition, 12, 26, 31–2 sportification, 113 of conflict, 129–36 sporting art, 175, 177, 181–7 genres and traditions, 181–7, 182, 183, 185 sporting culture, 1 sporting facilities, 52, 79, 81 blood sports, 85 commercial provision, 84–5 entertainment complexes, 73–4, 74 inns, 72–3, 72, 84–5 permanent, 66–7, 75–6 purpose-built, 67–8, 67, 69, 70–1 Sporting Magazine, 3, 20, 96, 99, 106, 115, 188 sporting purpose, 29–49 bullbaiting, 48–9 carnivalistic enjoyment, 43 commercial, 42–3 gambling, 40–2 health and fitness, 34 hidden, 32–3 hunting, 45–8 and identity, 37 influences, 30 and manliness, 36 military training, 34–6 negative views, 44 relaxation, 31 and social status, 37–9 understanding, 29–33 sporting spirit, 81–2 sports architecture, 75 sports journalism, 181 sports literature, 20–2, 21, 23 sports schools, 102–3 Stahl, Georg-Ernest, 171–2 standardization, 77 Stokes, Elizabeth, 98, 145 Strasbourg, 19 strolling, 165–7, 168 Strutt, Joseph, 112 Stubbs, George, 182, 184 Stukeley, William, 55 Sturm, Leonhard Christoph, 70 Sunday observance, 44, 54–7, 62 Sweden, 128, 173

237

swimming, 21, 23, 34, 61, 62, 71, 111–2, 146–7, 150–3, 156, 186, 187 Switzerland, 7, 74 Sydenham, Thomas, 113 Szymanski, Stefan, 78, 82–3 Tahiti, 7 Talleyrand-Périgord, Maurice de, 174 Tanzer, Gerhard, 59 Tattersall, Richard, 42, 83 Taubert, Gottfried, 139 tennis, 21, 22, 63, 68, 81, 104, 155, 179–80, 186 terminology, 26 Thévenot, Melchisédech, 112, 151, 156 Thiers, Jean-Baptiste, 144 Thirty Years’ War, 24, 26 time, 51–2, 53–62 agricultural working rhythm, 57–8 seasons, 57–9 Sunday observance, 44, 54–7, 62 urban regime, 59–60 working times, 53–4, 60, 78 time keeping, 59 Tissot, Clément-Joseph, 171–2 Tissot, Samuel, 170–1 Tom Jones (Fielding), 176–7 Tomlinson, Alan, 77–8 tournaments, 122–3 trade cards, 93, 192–3 trainers, 94–6 transnational transfers, 11–2 Tranter, Neil, 29, 84 Tronchin, Théodore, 164–5, 167 trotting races, 8, 11 Tübingen, 102 Turquin, Barthélémy, 71 Underdown, David, 38 Ungar, Ruti, 89, 147, 149, 150 universalistic culture, 29 unrest, 123 urban population, 1–2, 18 urbanization, 4, 17–9, 42, 77, 78, 79 Vamplew, Wray, 78, 79, 96 Vandermonde, Charles Augustin, 171 Vassort, Patrick, 121 vaulting, 6 Venice, 144–5, 146, 179

238

Verdier, Jean, 167–8 Vesalius, Andreas, 163 Vienna, 19, 20, 64–5, 66, 70, 73 Hatztheater, 2, 3, 9 Vieth, Gerhard Ulrich Anton, 4–5, 16, 25. see also Encyklopädie der Leibesübungen, 4, 5–14, 16, 16–25, 59, 106–7 Vigarello, Georges, 117, 121, 129 violence, 131 regulation of, 117–23 wages, 18–9 Walton, Isaac, The Compleat Angler, 178, 181 water jousting, 19 Watts, Isaac, 44 Waymark, Thomas, 91 wealth, 18 Whale, John, 186 Whitehead, Paul, 108, 192 winter sports, 112–3 women, 82, 97 cricket participation, 131, 144

INDEX

exclusion, 145–7 and exercise, 168–9 hunting, 47–8, 142–3, 143 ideal motion, 139 invisibility, 30–1 noble, 140–2, 141–3, 143 participation, 25, 36, 75, 97–8, 138–47, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 159 pugilists, 31, 98, 140, 145 restrictions, 137–8 riding, 30–1, 143–4 weakness, 140–1 Wooton, James, 183, 183–4 Wordsworth, William, 180 working patterns, 53–4, 60, 78–9 working times, 53–4, 60–1 wrestling, 81, 108 Wynmann, Nikolaus, 112 York, 58 Young, Christopher, 77–8 Zocchi, Giuseppe, 70–1, 70

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