Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850

Professor Malcolmson provides a full account of the sports, pastimes and festive celebrations of the English labouring people in the eighteenth century.

Robert W. Malcolmson (Author)

9780521295956, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 September 1979

212 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.328 kg

'Malcolmson tells this story with wit, grace and the precision which comes from wide reading.' Journal of Social History

Despite the challenge of seventeenth-century puritanism, many aspects of popular leisure continued to flourish in the century which followed: bull-baiting and cock-fighting; football, wrestling, cudgelling and cricket; and such holiday festivities as parish feasts, Michaelmas fairs, May Day rituals and Whitsun ales. In this book, Professor Malcolmson provides a full account of the sports, pastimes and festive celebrations of the English labouring people in the eighteenth century and examines their gradual decline up to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He describes how widespread social and cultural changes in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the enclosure movement, the rapid growth of cities, the rise of evangelicalism, the increasingly rigorous approaches to labour discipline, the decline of paternalistic values - undermined many of these recreations: while others were vigorously suppressed by 'respectable society'. Throughout, full attention is given not only to the actual conduct of popular recreations, but also to their social contexts, their relevance to the culture of genteel society and their involvement in those broader patterns of change which we have come to associate with the 'modernization' of traditional society.

List of plates
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. Popular recreations before the eighteenth century
2. The holiday calendar
3. Sports and pastimes
4. Social contexts
5. Some social functions
6. The undermining of popular recreations
7. Popular recreations under attack
8. Social change
Appendix: the reform movement against cruelty to animals
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]