The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (57 page)

Unsurprisingly, gentlemen do not play football. It is purely for working folk. Shakespeare refers to a ‘base football-player’ in
King Lear
. But not everyone is as negative about the game as Elyot and Stubbes. In his book
Positions
(1581) the educationalist Richard Mulcaster declares that football would not ‘have grown to the greatness that it now is at … if it had not had great helps, both to health and strength’. He goes on to say that it should be played with ‘a training master, a smaller number of players sorted into sides and standings, not meeting with their bodies so boisterously to try their strength’. If the ‘sides’ are even and the ‘training master’ is the referee, and considering the ball is inflated and encased in leather, with goals at either end of the pitch, Mulcaster’s vision of the game is not so far off the modern sport as all that.
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Today we associate hurling almost exclusively with Ireland but in the sixteenth century it is among the most popular sports played in Cornwall. There are two varieties: ‘hurling to goals’ (played in east
Cornwall) and ‘hurling to the country’ (played in the west). The key difference between hurling and football is that the ball is always thrown, not kicked. Also, hurling to goals already has a set of rules. On each side there are fifteen, twenty or thirty players, ‘stripped to their slightest apparel’ and playing on a pitch that is 160 or 200 yards in length, with a goal at each end. The players all pair off and mark each other, holding on to one another. When the referee puts the ball into the air, every man tries to jump for it, catch it and carry it through his opponent’s goal. ‘But therein lies one of the labours of Hercules,’ writes Richard Carew, ‘for he that is once possessed of the ball has his contrary mate waiting at inches and [trying] to lay hold on him. The other thrusteth him in the breast with his closed fist to keep him off, which they call butting …’ Note that his opponent may only butt him in the breast, not below the waist. If he is caught and held, he must pass the ball by throwing it to one of his teammates. He may not throw the ball forward to any of his teammates who are nearer to the opponents’ goal than himself, only backwards – an early offside rule. Hurling to goals, you might like to know, is commonly played at weddings.

Hurling to the country, the west-Cornwall version, is almost entirely without rules. It is usually organised on holy days by two gentlemen who enlist teams of their tenants and set the goals as each gentleman’s house. Hence ‘the hurlers take their way over hills, dales, hedges, ditches, yea, and through bushes, briars, mires, splashes and rivers whatsoever, so as you shall sometimes see twenty or thirty lying tugging together in the water, scrabbling and scratching for the ball’. The gentlemen do not generally take part, but provide the silver ball used and watch as their respective workers attempt to muscle it from one place to another. The gentleman whose team finally carries the ball to his house is given the ball as a ‘trophee’ to keep – and everyone gets to drink his house dry of beer.
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You may wonder about that other great team game, cricket. If you attend some schools – such as Guildford Grammar School in Surrey – you will see boys playing a game with a bat, and they do indeed call it ‘crecket’; but as yet you will find it only sparingly mentioned and rarely played. As for golf, that game comes to England in the next reign. It is played in Scotland – it is banned as an unlawful game by the Scottish kings in 1457, 1471 and 1491, in favour of archery – but not yet in England. Mary, queen of Scots, hits a round or two
in her youth, but it is one of the things she gives up when she comes south across the border..

Baiting Games

Baiting games reveal one of the most striking differences between sixteenth-century people and ourselves. Elizabethans are extraordinarily cruel to animals. It is not just the lower classes who take delight in seeing an animal in agony: almost everyone loves the sight of animal blood – except the Puritans, that is. Why is this? You might point to a deep-seated psychological connection between blood and food, so that animal blood is indicative of God’s goodness in providing things to eat. Or you might think it is a respect for the nobility of the creatures to be killed, as with the modern Spanish bullfight. However, that second reason hardly applies to a cockfight: it is not the nobility of the chickens that engages the onlookers. Rather it is the huge bets that change hands. Life and death, money and chance – these are what captivate the audience.

Cockfighting, or cocking, is a regular Sunday occupation, with special celebratory fights taking place on Shrove Tuesday. Men spend considerable amounts – £5 or more – on purchasing a fighting bird and having it trained. Henry VIII builds a cockpit next to the Palace of Whitehall, alongside Birdcage Walk, but in Elizabeth’s reign the most popular cockpits are in Jewin Street, Shoe Lane and at St Giles in the Fields; the last of these will become the Drury Lane theatre in the next reign. Thomas Platter describes the Shoe Lane cockpit in 1599:

In the centre of the floor stands a circular table covered with straw and with ledges round it, where the cocks are teased and incited to fly at one another, while those with wagers as to which cock will win sit around the circular disk. The spectators who are merely present on their entrance penny sit around higher up, watching with eager pleasure the fierce and angry fight between the cocks, as these wound each other to death with spurs and beaks.
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Entertainments can go on for four or five hours, with fight after fight leaving the straw all bloody. In the Shoe Lane establishment, strong
spirits such
brandewijn
are given to the birds beforehand to enhance their viciousness in fighting. Hundreds of pounds can be bet on each fight. Lord North loses £13 on a cockfight in 1578.
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More exotic than Cockfighting are the bear-baiting contests. In London these take place most days, including every Sunday, at Paris Garden in Southwark. In 1570 a second theatre is constructed so that there is one for bears (the eastern one) and one for bulls (the western).
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To watch the bear baiting you will need to pay 1d for the stalls or 2d for the gallery. The bear is brought in on a leash or chain and tied to the stake in the middle of the theatre. Great English mastiffs are then set upon the bear:

Now the excellence and fine temper of such mastiffs is shown for although they have been much struck and mauled by the bear, they do not give in but have to be pulled off by sheer force and their muzzles forced open with long sticks to which a broad iron piece is attached at the top. The bears’ teeth are not sharp – they have them broken short so they cannot injure the dogs. When the first mastiffs grow tired, fresh ones are brought in to bait the bear. When the first bear is weary, another is supplied, and fresh dogs to bait him, first one at a time, then more and more as it lasts, till they have overpowered the bear.
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Thomas Platter is entertained by the display although his nose recoils at the smell of the 120 mastiffs and thirteen bears in their cages and kennels beside the ring. The high value of the bears means that normally they are not allowed to be killed by the dogs, although many dogs are killed by a bear lashing out with its claws or grabbing a dog and ‘pinching’ (crushing) it to death. Some bears become celebrities. ‘Sackerson’ is the most famous – so famous that he is mentioned in Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
‘I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times and have taken him by the chain.’ Nevertheless you may be distressed at the sight of the bear enraged, its mouth frothing with saliva and its pelt red with its own blood and the blood of the dogs it has killed. Robert Laneham writes of a bear baiting that,

if the dog would pluck the bear by the throat, the bear would claw him again by the scalp … thus with plucking and tugging, scratching and biting, by plain tooth and nail on one side and the other, such expense of blood and leather was there between them as a month’s licking will not recover … It was a sport very pleasant of these beasts: to see the bear with his pink eyes leering after his enemy’s approach, the nimbleness and watch of the dog to take his advantage, and the force and experience of the bear again to avoid the assaults. If he were bitten in one place how he would pinch in another to get free; that if he were taken once, then what shift with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling he would work to wind himself from them; and when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and saliva about his face was a matter of goodly relief.
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Blind bears are whipped into a fury to entertain the crowds; they lash out and seize the whips, and cuff anyone who comes within range. However, some learn how to loosen their tethers and run amok about the crowd; Sackerson is by no means the only one to escape. In October 1565 at the abandoned church of the Austin Friars in Oxford, a twenty-four-year-old man is set upon by a runaway bear and killed. At Birling, Kent, in August 1563 a widow is mauled in Lord Bergavenny’s house by his bear, it ‘biting and tearing her head, body and legs’. In 1570, near Hereford, a bear breaks loose, enters a house and kills a woman in her bed.
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Bear baiting is enjoyed in every part of the country and by all classes of people, men and women, young and old. In Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
, Sir Andrew Aguecheek states that he regrets spending so much time fencing, dancing and bear baiting. In April 1559 the queen entertains the French ambassador with bear-baiting displays – and he is so taken with them that the very next day he goes to Paris Garden to see more animals tormented. Throughout her reign many visiting dignitaries are treated to a display of bear baiting: it seems to be one of the queen’s personal delights. Robert Dudley provides displays for the queen at Kenilworth in 1575, and in 1599 she even attends the Paris Garden to watch the bloodshed.
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(You may be surprised to learn that although she never goes to Southwark to visit the Globe Theatre, she does go to see the bear baiting.) Only the Puritans refuse to accept that it is suitable family entertainment, although most of them despise the baiting because it takes place on a Sunday, not because they feel sorry for the animal. A lone voice speaking against the cruelty is that of Philip Stubbes, who asks, ‘what Christian heart can take pleasure
to see one poor beast rend, tear and kill another, and all for his foolish pleasure?’

There is also great enthusiasm for baiting bulls. Several mastiffs are released into the ring to challenge and bite a tethered animal. The bull lashes out with its horns and sends the dogs flying. Men with sticks break the dogs’ fall so that they can continue to fight. Eventually the large number of dogs set upon the bull will wear him down, but the fight continues until the surviving dogs have killed the bull or he is so badly injured that he is taken away to be slaughtered. What might surprise you is that it is actually against the law
not
to bait a bull. Every town has its ‘bull-ring’ where the baiting takes place. Anyone slaughtering a bull without baiting it first is liable to be fined: the statutory penalty for selling meat from an animal killed without baiting it first is 3s 4d per bull.
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The most distressing spectacle of this sort regularly to be seen in England is often the finale of a day of bull baiting. A monkey is placed in the saddle of an old horse and led into the ring. Half a dozen young dogs are then sent into the ring to attack the horse. In the words of Alessandro Magno, ‘it is a fine sight to see the horse run, kicking and biting, and the monkey grip the saddle tightly and scream, many times being bitten, in which baiting the horse is often left dead and removed by the attendants …’
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Music and Dancing

Although no one has yet conclusively proved that music is the food of love, there is little doubt that Shakespeare himself thinks it is. More than 170 passages in his plays allude to music or musicians, airs or madrigals, and nearly all do so in a positive way. The words for many songs are reproduced verbatim in the plays.
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Nor is Shakespeare alone in his passion for music: most Elizabethans are expected to play an instrument or at least to be able to sing. Barbers sometimes have a cittern or lute in their shops, which the customer is welcome to strum as he waits for his shave. The vast majority of taverns will have music played within, although the most commonly played instrument among working drinkers is still the bagpipes. In 1587 Stephen Gosson notes that ‘London is so full of unprofitable pipers and fiddlers that a man can no sooner enter a
tavern than two or three cast of them hang at his heels to give him a dance ere he depart.’
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There is just as great an aptitude for music at the top end of the social spectrum. Ever since the Middle Ages noblemen have maintained their own musicians to entertain them during meals and to perform at feasts. The royal family leads the way: Henry VIII maintained as many as fifty-eight musicians, and Elizabeth has about thirty on the payroll of the royal household. The nobility themselves play music: all the members of the Willoughby family of Wollaton, for example, are trained to play the virginals.
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The well-to-do ladies in Claudius Hollyband’s dialogue book declare, ‘our dancing master cometh at 9, our singing master and he that teacheth us to play on the virginals at 10, lute and viol de gamba at 4’. The queen too plays the virginals, the lute and the orpharion (a large cittern). The only difference between the aristocratic love of music and that of the common people is that noblemen and ladies are expected
never
to play in public, only in private. Elizabeth explains that she is fond of playing the virginals because it calms her down.