Cockfighting: A National Pastime

For centuries, cockfighting, like cock-throwing, which had become largely the preserve of schoolboys, retained close links with religious practices by taking place during the calendar festivals. Fairs, numbered in their thousands, where people gathered in hamlets large and small primarily to buy and sell goods, were also times for socialising, amusement and entertainment, with cockfighting a staple pastime. Although spread across the year, the dates of over 600 fairs in England and Wales depended on the Church’s moveable feasts with concentrations around Christmas, the Lenten period, Easter, and Whitsuntide. This period of the year up until Midsummer, was for many centuries, the ‘season’ for cockfighting, until it became more commercialised and more closely linked to the racing calendar. In some rural communities cockfighting continued to be part of religious festivities as a symbolic expression of carnal excess prior to the period of abstinence during Lent. In the parish of Hemingborough, Yorkshire, in 1661, the sanctity of the church was desecrated; ‘Upon fastene day last [when] they came with their cocks to the church, and faught them in the church – namely Thos. Middleton, of Cliff, John Coats, Ed. Widhouse, and John Batley’. The fact that these individuals are named suggests they were censured or punished for their actions. A more convivial arrangement existed at the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire where, ‘since ancient times’, the serving rector enjoyed the rents and profits of land given to him for his own use on condition he provided ‘two Hare-pies, a quantity of Ale, and two dozen of penny Loaves, to be scrambled for on Easter Monday annually, after divine service and a sermon preached. The afternoon [being] spent in festivity, singing of bells, fighting of cocks, quoits, and such like exercises, by Hallaton and the neighbouring youth’.