Hi Larry T. Sherwood; Re recent brutality of Christian nations, as compared to Moslem. (I think this is skirting the line of off/on topic, but will hopefully be of enough interest to avoid FaultLine's whip.)
From a history of sports in Britain:
Meanwhile, London’s lower classes flocked to witness swordfights which were often inelegantly bloody affairs. In June of 1663, Pepys went to see the fencers at the Royal Theatre in Drury Lane and found “a woeful rabble” whose noise made “my head ake all this evening.” 62 In 1705, Thomas Brown graphically described an exhibition at the “Bear-garden”:
Seats fill’d and crowded by Two: Drums beat, Dogs yelp,
Butchers and Footsoldiers clatter their Sticks: At last the
two Heroes in their fine borrow’d Holland shirts, mount the
Stage about Three; Cut large Collops out of one another to
divert the Mob, and make Work for the Suregeons: Smoaking,
Swearing, Drinking, Thrusting, Justling, Elbowing, Sweating,
Kicking, Cuffing, Stinking, all the while the Company stays.63
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The German visitor Charles Louis von Poellnitz noted that spectators cheered when wounds were inflicted.69 The same custom was noticed by the French traveler Antoine Prévost, when, a few years later, he visited James Figg’s famous establishment, the boastfully named “Amphitheatre,” opened in 1743. Prévost and a crowd seated in banks that reached to the vaulted roof witnessed cudgeling, fistfighting, wrestling, and - finally - a combat with sabres. When the redoubtable Figg sliced off part of his opponent’s calf, the crowd shouted, “bravo, bravo, ancora, ancora.”70
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There is plenty of evidence that lower-class women were present at eighteenth century combat sports and that they were a hardy lot. Uffenbach reported that an “Englishman sitting behind us, who had probably drunk a considerable amount, was making a vast uproar and throwing down whole handfuls of shillings. His wife, who was sitting with him, was also rather vociferous.”73 In one of the finest of Rowlandson’s prints, The Prize Fight (1787), which probably portrays the 1786 bout between Richard Humphries and Samuel Martin, a few tubby females appear among the generally nondescript spectators.
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The vociferous wife whom Uffenbach met assured him “that two years ago she had fought another female in this place without stays and in nothing but a shift. They had both fought stoutly and drawn blood, which was apparently no new sight in England.”74 Apparently not. César de Saussure reported a bout between an Englishwoman and an Irishwoman, probably the one publicized in Mist’s Journal for November 20, 1725, and the Guide des Etrangers (1729) refers to “Amazones intrépides.”75 Saussure says that “il est rare de voir deux femmes faire les gladiateurs” and Prévost remarks that crowds were large because women’s matches were rare, but James Peller Malcolm’s Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London notes instances of female pugilists at Hockley in the Hole and what can only be referred to as “mixed doubles” at Figg’s Amphitheatre, where Robert Barker and Mary Webb fought James Stokes and Elizabeth Wilkinson .76 The most vivid account of female pugilism may well be from the memoirs of the late eighteenth century rake, William Hickey. At Wetherby’s near Drury Lane, he went slumming and found two women engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes not a creature interfered between them, or seemed to care a straw what mishap they might do each other, and the contest went on with unabated fury. Neither the men nor the women present, “promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables, and benches,” objected to the “unladylike” brawl. Hickey, who might be best characterized as a deviant middle-class rake, reveals considerable ambivalence about the thrillingly unsavory spectacle.77
As the variety of combats carried out at Hockley in the Hole and in Figg’s Amphitheatre proves, there was no clear demarcation from the days of cudgel and sword to the era of the fist. Figg the swordsman and stickfighter became Figg the pugilist who then reappeared with his trusty cudgel.
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-- Carl |
