Athletics and Football (extract)

ATHLETIC SPORTS IN ENGLAND I I time people of fashion took little part in them. Pageants, pro­ cessions, and masques were the amusements of Elizabeth's court, or bear-baitings or bull-baitings, and last, but not least, dramatic exhibitions. Nowhere in Robert Laneham's long account of the revels at Kenilworth, nor in Nichol's ac­ count of the ' Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,' are there, as far as we are aware, any allusions to pedestrian sports. In the succeeding reign the fashion turned again, as we shall pre­ sently see. Curiously enough, however, our best notion of the universal popularity amongst the lower classes of differ­ ent forms of athletic sport is gathered from the Puritan writers, whowere the bitter opponents of such pastimes. The Puri­ tans, however,at the first did not oppose the sports themselves so much as the occasions upon which they were practised. What these occasions were is abundantly clear. The ordinary times for running, leaping, football and such like pastimes were Sundays and Church festivals, and the usual arena the churchyard ; thegreater and more uproarious festivitiestook place on the last days of the country fairs. The fairs, as being the more important, perhaps deserve attention first. The greater part of the trading of the country in the Elizabethan age was conducted by means of the fairs ; horses,cattle, and all necessariesfor the season werebought at them. In Harri­ son's ' Description of England,' published at this time, a list is given of the ' more important' fairs, which mentions three or four hundred of these gatherings. It is scarcely to be wondered at, by those who know the peculiar facultyof the Englishman to combine business with sport, that when the businesswasover,or even before,sporting competitions should follow,the whole affairconcluding, as the Puritan writersassert (and probablywithsome truth), withgeneral orgies of intoxica­ tion and riot. Of the nature of the sports at these fairs, which, doubtless, continued in much the same form as long as the fairs themselveswere held, we shall have to give some further account afterwards, but running, jumping,and weight-putting seem to have been invariable features of the programme. The