As a rather less strenuous form of exercise than eighteenth-century cricket many men kept themselves fit by walking. Wordsworth points out that “in 1799 Daniel Wilson writes to his father, that very few days passed when he did not walk for about an hour.” This exceedingly gentle form of pedestrianism was only an end of century hobby. Earlier on men seem to have been made of sterner stuff. The Greek Professor at Aberdeen, Dr Thomas Blackwell, wrote to Warburton at Oxford in 1736 to beg him to accompany Middleton and their common friend, Mr Gale, in a tour in Scotland for two months in the summer during the long vacation. “In 1742 Tho. Townson started for a three years’ tour in France, Italy, Germany, and Holland, with Dawkins, Drake, and Holdsworth. On his return from the continent,” the quotation is from Christopher Wordsworth, “he resumed in College (Magdalen) the arduous and respectable employment of tuition, in which he had been engaged before he went abroad. William Wordsworth took walking tours in France 1790-91 (at a time no less awfully interesting than that which the country has now been passing through) before and after taking his degree.” In the first instance he was accompanied by his college friend Robert Jones, with about twenty pounds apiece in their pockets. “Our coats which we had made light on purpose for that journey are of the same piece,” he wrote, “and our manner of carrying our bundles which is upon our heads, with each an oak stick in our hands, contributes not a little to the general curiosity which we seem to excite.”
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A Duck Hunt.
Had they but carried more money and travelled in luxury they would not have been unlike the present-day Rhodes men, whose custom it is during vacation to scour the ends of the earth.
Inter-college and inter-’varsity athletic meetings were undreamed of in the eighteenth century. Because Georgian Oxford men could not boast representative colours, however, is no proof that they were not sportsmen. It would be impossible to find a set of men in any century more ready for deeds of daring do. They rode straight and ate hearty. They broke rules and defied statutes with a zest that suggests anarchism. In spite of wigs and ruffles they sped like hares down back alleys and scaled the high college walls like monkeys to avoid a conversation with the Proctors and their bulldogs. They sallied forth in trencher and gown, the insignia of their allegiance to Alma mater, and in sheer high spirits set themselves to bring about a fight with the jeering townees. Back to back they fought against all odds, recking little of bleeding noses and broken pates. If they drank too freely and encouraged the toasts, the blame was not entirely theirs. They did but follow the fashion of the times. Their password was thoroughness. Whatever they did, they did with all their might. If they rang bells, they made the air hideous until they fell exhausted. If they collected knockers they stripped a whole street before their energy waned. If they slacked they slacked superbly. Without any of the advantages brought about by modern ideas and inventions, our predecessors were sportsmen to the core and just as we to-day employ every moment of our four years to the fullest advantage so did the men who trod Oxford streets in wigs and laces when she was two centuries younger.
CHAPTER VIII
CLUBS AND SOCIETIES