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The Whole Volume of Statutes at Large. Printed in London for Christopher Barker, 1587. Lower Library, H.14.37

Our picture of medieval and early modern sport has to be assembled from disparate fragments.¹ The participants in elite sports such as tournament in the earlier period, riding and shooting in the later, or hunting and hawking throughout, might leave records in their letters, account books, and later diaries. Even these haphazard sources do not exist for popular sports, few of whose players could read or write. As Peter Burke remarks of the later period’s popular culture in general, ‘we are forced to see [its performances] through the eyes of literate outsiders.’²

These might be sympathetic reporters, such as Thomas Becket’s clerk William fitz Stephen for medieval London, or the gentleman Richard Carew for Elizabethan Cornwall; they might be poets or, later, dramatists, turning to popular as to elite sports for colour or metaphor. Most often they were officials: court and statute rolls are two important sources for medieval and early modern sport. Here we find the written shadow of popular custom in efforts to suppress it.

Thus a statute of 1388 banned ‘servants and labourers’ from the games of tennis, football, quoits, dice, casting the stone (target bowling), and kailes (a kind of skittles): instead they were to practice archery on Sundays and holidays.³ Another statute of 1477 banned all subjects from a new list of games – including ‘new imagined’ ones like closh, in which a ball was knocked through hoops as in croquet, and halfbowl, another kind of skittles played with a half-ball – again in favour of archery, ‘because the defence of this land was much by archers’.⁴ The Caian historian Mark Bailey considers that ‘a determination to discipline the workforce’, by barring its distractions from labour, ‘must have been another unstated aim’.⁵

We present here the two statutes as printed in Statutes at Large, part of the early initiative to publish English law.⁶

Struggle in stone << Sporting discipline >> Cornish pastimes

1. Angela Gleason, , in The Oxford Handbook of Sports History, eds. Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 101. Mike Huggins, , in The Oxford Handbook, 113.
2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 104.
3. The Whole Volume of Statutes at Large (London: Christopher Barker, 1587), 185.
4. Statutes at Large, 388–389.
5. Mark Bailey, ‘Rural Society’, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163–164.
6. Richard J. Ross, , University of Pennsylvania Law Review 146, no. 2 (1998): 324.