The Rural Life of England

by William Howitt

But another circumstance which tended to fashion their amusements was that the feudal ages were also the ages of the Catholic church; a church which delighted to amuse the imaginations of the people with shows, pageants, miracle-plays, and mysteries. The church festivals were all scenes of holiday, feasting, and wonderment. Processions, and representations of the acts and persons of their religious faith, kept them fixed in admiration and insatiable delight. The churches were the first and only theatres. In them all scripture subjects, personages, doctrines, and even opinions were represented, and brought palpably before the wondering people, in mysteries, moralities, and miracle-plays. Things which now would justly be deemed the most revolting blasphemies and desecrations of holy things, were then gravely brought out by the church, for the entertainment and edification of the people. I have already shewn something of this in speaking of the religious festivals, as celebrated in Catholic countries, but we can only see these things in their full growth, by looking back into the middle ages. The theatrical exhibitions of London in the twelfth century were of this kind; representations of the miracles wrought by confessors, and the sufferings of holy martyrs. But these did not suffice. These ecclesiastical actors penetrated into the Holy of Holies, and dared to represent the sacred Trinity before the eyes of the mob. In the mystery called Corpus-Christi, or Coventry-Play, being played in a moveable theatre, by the mendicant friars of Coventry, the Deity himself is represented seated on his throne, delivering a speech commencing thus:

Ego sum de Alpha et Omega, principium et finis.
My name is knowyn God and Kynge,
My worke for to make now wyl I wende,
In myself now resteth my reyninge,
It hath no gynnyng, ne noe ende.

The angels then enter, singing from the church service, “To Thee all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein; to Thee the cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts.” Lucifer next makes his appearance, and desires to know if the hymn they sang was in honour of God or of himself? The good angels readily reply, in honour of God; the evil angels incline to worship Lucifer, and he presumes to seat himself on the throne of the Deity, who then banishes him into hell.

In the mysteries, the Devil and his angels seem to have been the principal comic actors; and by all kind of noises, strange gestures, and contortions, excited the laughter of the people. At many of these plays the kings and their courts, all the nobility and gentry of the time, as well as the people, would sit with the highest delight, nine hours a day, for six and eight days together. Nay, at the moralities, which were not representations of facts, but moral reasonings and dialogues, carried on by Virtues, Vices, Good Doctrine, Charity, Faith, Prudence, Discretion, Death, and the like, they would sit equally long. The Scotch were as persevering in these amusements as our own ancestors. They are represented as sitting “frae nine houris afoir none till six houris at evin,” at the representation of Sir David Lindsay’s “Satyr of the Three Estates,” and in 1535, in the reign of the accomplished James IV. Here, however, Sir David, the Chaucer of Scotland, had turned the weapons of the church against itself, and through its favourite medium, the drama, uttered the most caustic satire against it from the mouths of Rex Humanitas, Wantonness, Solace, Placebo, Sensualitie, Homeliness, Flattery, Falsehood, Deceit, Chastity, Divine Correction, etc. etc.

Besides the church too, during the feudal times, there were the festivities kept up in the castles and halls at Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and other great days, on which all kinds of pageants, mimings, masks, and frolics, were shewn to their followers and dependents, by the great feudal lords; and their minstrels, mimes, and jesters were made to exert their arts for their gratification. Wandering minstrels and jongleurs went from house to house, and from village to village, following their profession of entertainers of the people. All these things combined to fashion the popular taste, and the popular amusements, and all at the Reformation received their death-blow. It was not, indeed, an instant death, but it was a slow and certain one; for though the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth seemed to carry pageants and tourneys to their climax, the living principle of them was dying out. The Catholic church, the great mother of all festivals and mysteries, was overturned, and in the dispersion of its property the rise of new classes and a new state of things originated; and so far had these causes taken effect in the reign of James I., that he made public proclamation in 1618, that “Whereas, we did justly, in our progress through Lancashire, rebuke some Puritans and precise people, in prohibiting and unlawfully punishing of our good people for using their lawful recreations and honest exercises on Sundays and other holidays after the afternoon service, it is our will that, at the end of Divine service, our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged, from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either for men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other harmless recreation; nor for having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles, and other sports therewith used.”

But the day was gone by. A new spirit was arisen, and was destined soon to shew itself with overwhelming power. The days of Cromwell and the Puritans were coming, when all these things were to be denounced as popish and heathenish. The spirit and language at that time becoming universally such as that displayed by Thomas Hall, B.D., Pastor of King’s-Norton, in his Funebria Floræ, or the Downfall of May-games in 1660, in which he says, “The city of Rome, in the county of Babylon, has contrary to the peace of our lord, his crown and dignity, brought in a pack of practical fanatics, viz.: ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers, maid-marians, morris-dancers, maskes, mummers, May-pole stealers, health-drinkers, gamesters, lewd men, light women, contemners of magistrates, affronters of ministers, rebellious to masters, disobedient to parents, misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, etc.”

This republican Puritanism, in its genuine style, was now again about to cease, but the effects of it could never be obliterated by subsequent kings. Compare the popular amusements as enumerated by Burton in his “Anatomie of Melancholie,” a short time before the Commonwealth, with those which remained thirty years ago,—the period when they expired nearly altogether, and gave way to a new era. “Cards, dice, hawks, and hounds,” he says, “are the recreations of the gentry; ringing, bowling, shooting, playing with keel-pins, tronks, coits, foot-balls, balowns, running at the quintain, and the like, are the common recreations of country folk. Riding of great horses, running of rings, tilts and tournaments, horse-races and wild-goose chases, are desports of greater men. The country hath its recreations of May-games, feasts, fairs and wakes; both town and country, bull-baitings and bear-baitings, in which the countrymen and citizens greatly delight; dancing of ropes, jugglings, comedies, tragedies, artillery-gardens, and cock-fightings, Whitsun-ales, maskes, jesters, gladiators, and tumblers.”

Thirty years ago, tilts and tournaments had gone after their parent chivalry; archery had fallen before gunpowder; Whitsun-ales had followed many another ecclesiastical merriment; comedies and tragedies had set up their own secular houses apart from the church; and scarcely any of the other amusements were left but bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and similar barbarities. The public mind had become vulgarized and brutalized. The spirit of chivalry, with its pageants and knightly feats, had diffused some sense of grace and graceful emulation amongst the people; the church, amid all its ludicrous shows and absurdities, had conveyed some moral principles; the wandering minstrels had in their lays and ballads excited some feelings of honour, and many a feeling of true nature and homely poetry: but all these sources of inspiration, feeble and mingled with evil as they were, were dried up, and during the long wars of the Hanoverian dynasty the common people seem to have been neglected as rational and immortal beings, and cultivated and educated only as the instruments and the food of war. Accordingly, the minstrels had dwindled into ballad-singers, the jongleurs into jugglers and mountebanks; the Arcadian amusements of the country—May-games, dances on the green, wrestling and leaping, were nearly extinct; and there remained the very characteristic sports of bull-baiting, bear-baiting, badger-baiting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, and throwing at cocks on Shrove-Tuesday. Bear and bull baitings were games that our queens Elizabeth and Anne had both delighted in, but the more elegant pastimes of those queens and their subjects had fallen into disuetude, the savage and brutal alone remaining. This was natural enough. From the days of Marlborough to those of Wellington, the common people had been bred for the battle-field,—the food of the great European Moloch of war; and the bloody spirit which casts out all the fairer spirits of grace and gaiety, had been purposely and avowedly cherished, as the true English spirit. Who that remembers these times, does not recollect the famous speeches of Wyndham and his colleagues in favour of these brutal sports? Who forgets their prognostics that if this spirit was destroyed, there was an end of our martial ascendency? But the point of time had arrived beyond which this spirit could not endure. The brutal and vulgarized condition of the people flashed on the perception of the middle classes, which amid all the noise of war had been progressing in intelligence and refinement. Robert Raikes and Sunday-schools arose. A better spirit, a better sense of our duties and responsibilities towards the people awoke. It was seen that all over the country the more laudable sports of the village green, and the village wakes, as quoits, nine-pins, skittles, wrestling, leaping, cricket, and the other ball games; will-pegs, jumping in sacks, and other athletic amusements, had lost much of their relish, and were abandoned for the bloody spectacles of the bull-ring and the cock-pit. Attempts were made to counteract this spirit; Parliament was petitioned on the subject, and after the repulse given to these attempts by the senators I have alluded to, nothing was so common as to see the bulls led through the villages adorned with ribbons, and bearing on their necks large placards of—“Sanctioned by Wyndham and Parliament!”

I have before me now a curious specimen of the effect of such doctrines on the minds of those even who are, by national authority, the public teachers of the country, in a little volume published in 1819, by a clergyman of the name of Chafin—“An Account of Cranbourn Chase.” He says, “cockfighting also, in the last century was a favourite diversion, greatly delighted in by persons of all ranks; and there was a nobleman, Lord Albemarle Bertie, who was so fond of the amusement, that he attended cock-pits when he was totally blind. And there were but few gentlemen in the country, who did not keep and breed game cocks, and were very anxious and careful in the breeding of them. Frequent matches were made, and there were cock-pits in almost every village, the remains of which are still visible. To this amusement also Cranbourn Chase contributed, for the cocks bred in it were superior to others, both in shape and make, and, as the feeders name it, handled better when brought to their pens; insomuch that Lord Weymouth, of Longleat, an ancestor of the present Marquis of Bath, for many years had a cock at walk at every lodge in the chase, and the keepers were well rewarded for taking care of them; and when they were brought chickens from Longleat, annually, each game cock was accompanied with two dunghill hens, which became the perquisite of the keeper when the cock was taken away. But in our days of refinement, this amusement of cock-fighting hath been exploded, and, in a great measure, abandoned, being deemed to be barbarous and cruel; but in this respect the writer thinks differently, and believes it to be the least so of any diversions now in vogue, and nothing equal as to cruelty, to horse-racing, in which poor animals are involuntarily forced against their nature to performances against their strength, with whips and spurs, which, in jockey phrase, is styled cutting up. But in fighting of cocks the case is totally different; for, instead of a force against nature, it is an indulgence of natural propensities; for cocks at their walks, and at full liberty, will seek each other for battle as far as they can hear each other’s crowing; and the arming them with artificial weapons, when they are brought in the pit to fight, is the very reverse of cruelty, for the contest is sooner ended, and sufferings trifling, in comparison to what they would have been had they fought with their own natural weapons, by lacerating their bodies, and bruising each other in every tender part.”

Now, to feel the full force of the Rev. William Chafin’s notion of a game that is the least cruel of any diversions now in vogue, it is necessary to consider that these cocks are stimulated to contest by heating food and artificial contrivances, such as keeping them within the sight or crow of their rivals; that they are then clipped almost bare of feathers; the feathers are clipped off their stomachs; their heads cut clean of their wattles; their wings and tails cut short and square; that they are, in fact, metamorphosed from the most gallant-looking of birds into the most bare, comical, quaint, and strutting objects in nature, I was going to say; but they are put out of all nature, and are, lastly, armed with steel or silver spurs of an inch long, sharp as needles. With these they kick and pierce each other, “lacerating their bodies, and bruising each other in every tender part;” fighting till their heads are all one mass of gore; till they are often stark blind, and go staggering about like drunken men, till one has the luck to strike the other clean through the head with his artificial spur. This is a game which a clergyman, a teacher of Christianity, could by custom come to think “the least cruel of all the diversions now in vogue.” It is impossible to produce more striking evidence of the effect of a familiarity with cruelty. It is just by the same process that men come to approve of war and slavery. God be praised that all these bloody sports are gone for ever from the soil of England. That bull, bear, and badger baiting, have all, after many a hard contest, been eventually put down; that for some years, so much has the mind of the common people been raised and softened, there have scarcely been any cock-fighters, except noblemen and gentlemen, whose cock-pits have been the nuisances of their neighbourhoods, and their game-cock caravans, travelling from place to place with these cocks, have offended the public eye. It is a satisfaction to record that in the year 1835, even this brutal game was made illegal by Act of Parliament, and that through the exertions of Joseph Pease, the only member of Parliament who is a member of the Society of Friends.