[Download] "Robert Anderson, "the Cumberland Bard": An Overlooked Source for Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth Century England (Critical Essay)" by Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Robert Anderson, "the Cumberland Bard": An Overlooked Source for Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth Century England (Critical Essay)
- Author : Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 384 KB
Description
We still know very little about eighteenth-century British rural working-class sporting life at the micro-level, even though Emma Griffin has recently argued the need for historians "to move beyond analysis of carefully orchestrated civic ceremony" to uncover the "often more informal and unofficial plebeian events that existed alongside", and this surely applies to sport. (1) The recent issue of a historical encyclopaedia of rural sports edited by Collins et al. has done little to clarify a period during which, Griffin has also suggested, "the scarcity of detailed descriptions of popular custom ... has impeded the writing of histories". (2) The surviving evidence has been variously described as "fragmentary", "scattered", "often incidental" and "lacking the necessary range of empirical evidence" to confirm views, not least because the elite found the "experiences of the common people", not "worthy of notice". (3) The most recent survey of British leisure from 1500 to the present, by Peter Borsay, an authority on the eighteenth century, tentatively characterized the period as showing a quickening of industrial growth and a growing commercialization of leisure in urban areas, alongside some attacks on popular recreations and customs. (4) However, as he accepted, there was still substantial debate about the extent to which there was a growth or decline in sport and recreation, the regional chronology of change, and how far a commercial sporting culture existed in urban areas. (5) With much historiographic focus on urban life, there have been few attempts to extend the sporting archive to investigate rural sport. Few key works on leisure in this early modern period have focused upon sport. (6) Robert Malcolmson's Popular Leisure in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1971) provided an early useful foray into the field in the E.P. Thompson tradition, using a mixture of local and county records and histories of varying reliability, and very conscious that "the experiences of the common people were not usually worthy of notice". (7) Denis Brailsford was another figure early into the field, while Derek Birley provided a perceptive but limited overview based largely on secondary sources. (8) Two recent major works have extended a still limited historiography. Emma Griffin, in England's Revelry, A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes 1660-1830 (Oxford: OUP, 2005), focused largely on the key issue of the relationship between popular recreations and space, although also providing a cultural history of wakes, fairs, feasts and various athletic sports, most especially in the West Midlands, but also in South Yorkshire and Cambridge. She concentrated on the contested space for sports, such as bull baiting in market towns, industrial towns and townships, although one chapter examined rural villages, in which, she argued, there was some continuity in popular recreations despite rapid agricultural and social changes, and a degree of accommodation between the poor and landowners. However, given the focus on uses of space, much of her discussion here concentrated on enclosure and the village green, partly because of the scarcity of evidence for rural recreations.