Page 33 - Sport Culture and the Media

14 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

firm hold, then ‘escaped from the cage’. What were these formative forces and
conditions out of which sport was created in Britain, and especially that part of
it that ‘is forever England’? An Anglo imprint so strong that the German writer
Agnes Bain Stiven stated that ‘England was the cradle and the loving “mother”
of sport’, while an aristocratic compatriot remarked that in Germany the
English word ‘“Sport” is as untranslatable as “gentleman”’ (Prince Puechlser-
Muskau, quoted in Elias 1986a: 127).
First, there is the longstanding practice of physical or ‘rough’ play and of
periodic competition. Elias and Dunning (1986a) describe the ‘folk football’
events when the inhabitants (especially the young men) of small settle-
ments engaged in playful activities like the attempted conveyance of inflated
pigs’ bladders from one village to the other, and a corresponding obstruction
of this passage – both tasks to be achieved by any means possible! Not
only did such events take many hours (even days), but they also sometimes
resulted in serious injury and even death. The more organized game con-
tests such as boxing, wrestling, football, horseracing and cock fighting took
place principally on market, feast, harvest and holy days well into the
nineteenth century (Clarke and Critcher 1985: 53). They often incurred the
wrath or moral concern of dominant political and religious forces who
abhorred the wasteful and dissolute behaviour – drunkenness, wagering,
violence and sexual promiscuity – that often accompanied these ‘proto-sports’
tournaments. Ruling elite anxiety concerning the leisure pursuits of the
general populace is a feature of all social history. Elias and Dunning (1986b:
176), for example, describe an order by ‘King Edward III in 1365 to the Sherriffs
of the City of London’ that ‘able bodied men’ who were at ‘leisure’ on feast
days should engage only in militarily useful ‘sports’ using bows, arrows and
other approved weapons. Those who engaged in ‘vain games of no value’ like
stone throwing, handball and football did so ‘under pain of imprisonment’.
Not all authorities have taken quite such a draconian stance, but they have
recognized the highly political nature of permitting, prescribing and pro-
scribing popular pastimes. Weber (1930: 167), for example, notes that it was
even necessary for Kings James I and Charles I to make the Book of Sports
(sport used here in the most general sense of pleasurable diversions) into
law to permit ‘certain popular amusements on Sunday outside of Church
hours’, legislation that was inspired by a struggle for power with the Puritans,
for whom:

Sport was accepted if it served a rational purpose, that of recreation
necessary for physical efficiency. But as means for the spontaneous
expression of undisciplined impulses, it was under suspicion; and in so far
as it became purely a means of enjoyment, or awakened pride, raw