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Cornish pastimes

The Survey of Cornwall, by Richard Carew. Printed in London by Simon Stafford for John Jaggard, 1602. Lower Library, B.16.15

A few lines from 'The Survey of Cornwall' describing the game of hurling.

Richard Carew (1555–1620) was an antiquary, translator, and government official, who inherited in childhood the Antony House estate near Torpoint in Cornwall.1 He published the Survey of Cornwall (1602) as his contribution to the genre of chorography (literally ‘place writing’), given new prominence by William Camden’s massive Britannia (1586).

Carew’s biographer well characterises the Survey as ‘a representation of Cornwall as its author saw it, in terms of the landscape and climate, and of the occupations of men and women whose lives these shaped’.2 But while Carew is interested in both sexes’ work, his book only discusses men’s recreations. These include the distinctive Cornish sports of wrestling (in which all holds must be taken on players’ jackets) and the two ball games called hurling.

In ‘hurling to goals’, played in the east of the duchy, two teams each try to carry a ball to their opponents’ goal at the end of a 200-foot field. Teams must be equal in number; contact is hard (the player in possession may ‘butt’ with his fist) but closely restricted; the ball may only be ‘dealt’ backwards.3 On Carew’s evidence, it has been cited latterly as ‘the most striking example’ of a rule-governed popular sport in pre-industrial England.4

In ‘hurling to the country’, played in the west, gentlemen call the men of whole parishes (‘two, three, or more’) to play against those of another group, and several miles of countryside stand between the goals to which a silver ball must be carried.5 The rule for victory seems to be the only one, and although the unlimited field enables stealthy passages as well as contest, the men return ‘as from a pitched battle, with bloody pates, bones broken and out of joint, and such bruises as serve to shorten their days’.6

Sporting discipline << Cornish pastimes >> The field of play

  1. S. Mendyk, , in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–2024), online.
  2. Mendyk, ‘Carew’, online.
  3. Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London: John Jaggard, 1602), 74r.
  4. Jonathan Duke-Evans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 179.
  5. Carew, Survey, 74v.
  6. Carew, Survey, 75v.

Gallery

The title page in a 17th-century printed book, with a woodcut printer's device and a handwritten signature.
The front of leaf 1 in a 17th-century printed book, with a decorated head-piece and initial letter.
The front of leaf 73 in a 17th-century printed book.
The back of a leaf in a 17th-century printed book.
The front of leaf 75 in a 17th-century printed book.
The back of a leaf in a 17th-century printed book.
The cover of a book in a small quarto format, bound in brown leather and blue and orange marbled paper.