Sport and Religion in Modern England: An Overview
The development of modern sport in England may be roughly divided into four periods. In each of these phases Christians, and indeed Jews and more recently Muslims, have played a part—sometimes, as in the second phase, very conspicuously, and at other time less visibly. In either case, they have adapted to the opportunities and the threats which each period has presented.
In the first phase from about 1790 up to about 1860 an older sporting world continued, and sometimes, as with the field sports of the gentry, it flourished, but there were also important new developments. One was the publication of the first sporting newspapers. Another was the increasing number of professional events attended by large numbers of spectators. The dominance in England of competitive sports, with betting playing a major role, contrasted with the situation in many parts of continental Europe, where for much of the nineteenth century the most widely practised and most prestigious sport was gymnastics, closely associated with a patriotic agenda of forming disciplined and physically fit young men, able to defend the fatherland.
In the eighteenth century, the dominant section of the Church of England had been those known as High Church: Protestant, but strongly opposed to any kind of Calvinism; closely attached to the Anglican Prayer Book; concerned for decency, order, and tradition in church and society; committed to paternalist social relations, and to defence of the powers and privileges of the Established Church. In the 1830s the High Church began to move in a new direction with what has come to be known as the Oxford Movement, because many of its founders were academics or parish clergymen in the High Church stronghold of Oxford. At the time they were more often known as Tractarians or Puseyites. They were initially spurred to action by what they saw as the secularizing policies of the Whig governments of Grey and Melbourne, which, they feared, might culminate in a persecution like that during the French Revolution. Their answer was to go beyond the idea of the church as a branch of the state, to rediscover the identity of the Church of England as the English branch of the universal church, in continuity with the medieval and, above all, with the early church and the Church Fathers, whose authority they revered. The liking of some in the movement for more elaborate ritual, richly decorated church buildings, processions, and music led them to be dubbed ‘Ritualists’. The movement would have an enormous though increasingly diffuse influence on the Church of England in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, and it frequently developed in ways unintended by the founders.
But in the first half of the nineteenth century the growing religious force was the Evangelicals. They were growing both within the Established Church of England, and even more strongly in the Dissenting (or Nonconformist) churches. After increasing gradually from around the middle of the eighteenth century, these churches enjoyed explosive growth in the years from about 1790 to 1850. In the industrializing districts of northern England and the Midlands they attracted large sections of the lower-middle and working classes, as well as lesser numbers from higher in the social scale. These more affluent groups were especially attracted by the small but influential body of liberal Unitarians. But by far the largest section of Nonconformity were the Methodists, split into numerous branches including most notably the Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists. The Baptists and the Independents or Congregationalists were also growing fast. Until 1828 Dissenters were excluded from holding public office, but after the reform of local government in 1835 they quickly became a dominant force in the government of many towns and cities, though it took longer for them to achieve a significant representation in Parliament.
In the first half of the century Evangelicals, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, enjoyed considerable political influence and even greater social and cultural influence. Many of them had a very critical view either of sport in general or of the sports which were popular at the time, and as well as abstaining themselves, they often tried to prevent others from practising any sport which was considered cruel, brutal, dangerous, or immoral. In this period relations between the worlds of religion and of sport were at their lowest level.
My second period, between about 1860 and 1900, saw the great Victorian sporting boom, including an enormous increase in the numbers of those playing or watching sport, as well as the invention of new sports such as lawn tennis. The boom began in the 1860s with men of the upper-middle class, and these years saw the formation of many cricket, football, athletics, rowing, and gymnastic clubs by business and professional men. From the 1870s men of the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly involved, and by the 1880s a small but steadily growing number of middle-class women were going to gyms, playing tennis and golf and, by the 1890s, cycling. In this period the amateur ideal came to have a widespread prestige and influence, though it was frequently a source of conflict. In some sports it remained a powerful influence until the later twentieth century, though in a few, notably association football, its importance was short-lived. Connected with this ideal was a widespread condemnation of the betting which was seen as interfering with
the honest pursuit of victory without concern for the monetary gains resulting from victory—and sometimes from defeat. However, betting continued to be integral to one of the most widely popular sports, horse racing, and indeed it was greatly increasing from the 1880s.
In 1885 the Football Association (FA) legalized professionalism and in 1888 the Football League was formed. Very soon professional football was attracting large crowds, and the FA Cup, in particular, generated huge excitement. The other major spectator sports were cricket and rugby. Rugby underwent its ‘Great Split’ in 1895 when the Northern Union (NU), which recognized the need to provide ‘broken-time’ payments to the players, many of whom were miners and mill workers, broke away from the strictly amateur Rugby Football Union. Following various changes in the rules, the Northern form of the game became the separate sport of rugby league. Cricket already had in the nineteenth century and for long retained some unusual features. It was probably the only sport where elite players included both professionals and amateurs, and where both the elite and those playing on Saturday afternoons were drawn from a wide range of social backgrounds. The system of county cricket, which came to dominate the upper levels of the sport, was controlled by amateurs, many of them from the aristocracy and gentry. The same was true of the MCC, with its base at the Lord’s ground in London, which remained until the 1990s the dominant institution in English cricket. But the North and Midlands saw something akin to NU rugby, as clubs were formed based on a single town, and enjoying a fervent local following. Both county and league cricket attracted substantial crowds, as did the Test Matches against Australia and South Africa. In the late Victorian years, sports which had originated in England and Scotland spread across the Atlantic and into other parts of Europe where they began to challenge the dominance of gymnastics.
In this second phase, the later decades of the nineteenth century, a rapprochement between the worlds of religion and sport was underway. While the more conservative branches both of the Anglican and the Nonconformist churches were still powerful, there was a gradual process of liberalization. From around 1850 Anglicans began to speak of a third force beyond the two historic wings of the High Church and the Low Church or Evangelicals. This was the ‘Broad Church’, which was open to critical study of the Bible and questioned literalistic readings of the sacred text. By the 1870s similar trends were evident in Nonconformity. The other important development in the Church of England was the growth in numbers and influence of the AngloCatholics (as those in the High Church tradition were increasingly called).
Anglo-Catholics were extremely diverse in belief and practice, but the points most relevant to the relationship between religion and sport were their contribution to the growing anti-puritanism of the later nineteenth century and the prominence of Anglo-Catholic clergy among the so-called slum priests working in city parishes during that period, many of whom actively promoted sport.
This was the era of what contemporaries called muscular Christianity. Initially it was the more liberal wings of the various churches which led the way in bringing the worlds of religion and sport closer together, but soon other sections of the churches were joining in. The later nineteenth century saw a great expansion of British overseas missions, assisted by the extension of British rule over large areas of Africa and Asia. By the 1890s the affinities between Christianity and sport were so widely accepted that missionaries and teachers in Christian schools played an important role in the diffusion of British sports to other parts of the world. The same period also saw an increasing religious pluralism in English cities—though rural areas were little affected by the new developments. The relatively small Catholic and Jewish communities were reinforced by immigration respectively from Ireland, especially from the 1840s, and from the Russian empire especially from the 1880s. Liverpool and other parts of Lancashire, as well as some parts of London, became Catholic strongholds, and large Jewish communities were formed in London’s East End and on the north sides of Manchester and Leeds.
The third period, between about 1900 and 1960 saw a big growth of women’s sport. In England, the sporting enthusiasm of young women of the upper and middle classes continued to grow, causing consternation among some of their elders and becoming the subject of critical articles in the reviews. And by about 1900 young women of the lower-middle and working classes began to be involved too. Women’s sport then grew rapidly in the interwar years, with hockey, netball, tennis, swimming, and cycling being especially popular.
The other major development in this period was the internationalization of sport, including the diffusion of Western (principally British and American) sports to all parts of the world, the growth of international competition, including most notably the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, and the promotion of sport by governments and by newspapers and radio as a source of national identity and prestige. Internationally, the growth of women’s sport was reflected in their increasing participation in the Olympics from 1924 onwards, though until 1956 the proportion of women among the athletes never exceeded 10 per cent and only in the 1970s did participation by women increase more rapidly.
1930 saw the first football World Cup. The four ‘home’ nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), while continuing to compete among themselves, refused until 1950 to take part in the global event, though they also less frequently played against other countries. Cricket was slowly internationalizing in the interwar years, with New Zealand, the West Indies, and India being added to the Test Match nations. As boxing under the Queensberry Rules took the place of bare-knuckle contests in the later nineteenth century, most leading fighters were initially from Britain, the British colonies, and the United States, but the interwar years also saw world champions from France, Germany, and Italy. During this period attendance at sporting events reached unprecedented levels. In England, the years immediately after World War II saw the peak of attendances both in cricket and in football.
This was the era of American domination of many international sports, including athletics, swimming, golf, tennis, and boxing, as well as those such as basketball which had been invented in the United States. After World War II the Americans faced increasing competition from Australia in tennis and swimming and from the countries of the Soviet bloc in athletics. The Soviet Union participated in the Olympics for the first time in 1952, and they together with other communist-ruled countries, provided formidable competition to the athletes and gymnasts of the West, and ensured that the political significance of the Games remained a primary concern.
In this third phase from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1960s, churchgoing, both Anglican and Nonconformist, was gradually falling, but it remained generally agreed, at least until the 1960s, that England was ‘a Christian country’. The characteristic religious tendency in this period was what the historian Jeffrey Cox has called ‘diffusive Christianity’.3 Cox applied it to the working class but it could be applied more widely at a time when regular church attendance was declining in all classes, I will suggest that the taken-for-granted position of the church in many areas of social life was reflected in their large role in recreational sport, as well as in the continuing use of Saturday as the main day for professional sport, and the rarity of professional sport on Sundays.
The fourth period from around 1960 to the early twenty-first century has seen the commercialization of sport reaching previously unimagined levels. According to Garry Whannel, who has described a ‘remaking of British sport’ between 1965 and 1985, the most important factor has been television and
3 Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford 1982), p. 93.
the possibilities opened up by the televising of sporting events.4 Some key developments took place in the 1960s, though this process has gone much further since then. One was the abolition of the maximum wage in football in 1961 and another was the beginnings of elite-level Sunday cricket in 1966. Professional sport on Sundays had been very rare before that. The first Football League game on a Sunday came in 1974. The decade saw a considerable increase in the sponsorship of sporting events. On the one hand, declining income from gate money meant that the authorities of the various sports were on the look-out for new sources of income. On the other, televised sporting events offered outstanding opportunities for advertisers. Cricket abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals, which had indeed become of very limited practical significance, in 1962. One by one, the sports where the distinction had greater practical significance followed suit. Tennis did so in 1967; in athletics amateurism was gradually eroded in the 1970s, but effectively came to an end in 1982; rugby union, where amateurism had been partly sustained by the long-running feud with rugby league, finally succumbed in 1995. The biggest changes came in the 1990s, and again television and sponsorship by businesses played key roles. The most important development was the establishment of football’s Premier League in 1992 in connection with BSkyB television. This led to an enormous increase in the money available to the leading football clubs and enabled them to attract outstanding players from all over the world. The dominant interest of television now meant that football could be played on every day of the year but one— Christmas Day still being sacrosanct. One product of this new era has been the ‘sports icon’, able to enjoy a lavish lifestyle not only through the direct rewards for their sporting achievements but more through associating their names with products ranging from running shoes to perfumes.
This period also saw the internationalization of sport go much further. After decades of domination by Americans and Australians, Wimbledon champions were now coming from a wide range of (European) countries. There is a similar pattern in golf, though Americans continue to be dominant. African and Asian countries began to be major players in the Olympics and in football’s World Cup, and in the early twenty-first century India had become the dominant force in cricket. Most of the major team sports established men’s and women’s world cups in the later twentieth century.
4 Garry Whannel, ‘The unholy alliance: Notes on television and the remaking of British sport 1965–85’, Leisure Studies, 5 (1986), pp. 129–45.
In this fourth phase, from the 1960s, we see four major religious trends. First there were accelerating processes of secularization, reflected not only in further drops in church attendance and the rising numbers of people with no kind of religious affiliation but also, so far as the relationship between religion and sport is concerned, by the increasing prevalence of Sunday sport. Second there was the emergence of the so-called multi-faith society. This was mainly the result of immigration by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists from the 1950s onwards—though some of the growth, especially of Buddhism, was through conversions. This had paradoxical effects on the place of religion in society. On the one hand it undermined claims of Christianity to privileged status. On the other hand, it also undermined those who wanted a privileged status for Secularism, not least because the various ethnic and religious minorities were key players in the politics of many cities. Third there was a resurgence of Evangelicalism, partly through immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, but more especially through the impact from the 1970s of the Charismatic Movement. And fourth there was the growth of what were called ‘alternative spiritualities’, which included the claim that each individual had the right to find their own ‘path’, drawing from a diverse range of sources.
The Historical Debate
Few historians have explored the relationship between religion and sport in nineteenth-century England, and even fewer have looked at the twentieth century. The historians who have written on this theme agree that religion is a part of the history of sport, but they are completely disagreed as to what that part is.
Four questions have provoked debate: How do we explain the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’? How significant was the role of religion in the sports boom, and was its significance brief or longer lasting? Was the role of the churches in the sports boom proactive or reactive? And behind many of these other questions is the big question of the relationship between the rise of sport and secularization.
To start with the first question: muscular Christianity began in 1857 as a joke by a reviewer of Kingsley’s novel, Two Years Ago. Kingsley disliked the term, but it soon won general acceptance, and it has remained in use right up to the present day. Most historians would agree that a mix of factors was involved, but there is a basic division between those who see muscular Christianity principally as a religious movement and those who see other
factors as more significant. The first view has been advanced notably by Norman Vance, as well as by Dominic Erdozain, who has especially highlighted the influence of these ideas on the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and by Malcolm Tozer whose main concern has been their influence on the public schools.5 The second view has been presented most fully by the contributors to Donald Hall’s collective volume.6
Vance, like Kingsley himself, dismisses ‘muscular Christianity’ as a trivializing epithet. He prefers the term ‘Christian manliness’, which places more emphasis on the social vision and liberal theological message of these writers, as well as their insistence that muscularity is in itself of little value unless combined with moral purpose. As Hughes would write in the 1870s, ‘a great athlete may be a brute or a coward, while a truly manly man can be neither.’7 Kingsley and Hughes belonged to the liberal wing of the Church of England, and Kingsley in particular was repelled by anything he regarded as ‘manichean’. This included asceticism, contempt for the body, and any attempt to separate the spiritual from the secular. Their polemics were directed against two of the most influential movements within the Anglican Church, the Evangelicals and the Tractarians. They accused the former of puritanism and the latter of a sacerdotalism which served to separate the clergy from the people. Instead, they wished to celebrate the goodness of the body and of the natural world, as God-given, and the obligation to work for a better world. Their promotion of sport and physical recreation of many kinds was a product of their own love of the open air and of sporting contest, but also it was part of their agenda for a different kind of Christianity and a different kind of society.
In questioning Vance’s term ‘Christian manliness’, intended to highlight the Christianity, Hall prefers ‘muscular Christianity’ because it highlights the physical. He sees this movement as a response to the ‘intensification’ of ‘the gender power struggle’ as well as the challenge to ‘ruling class male’ power. He sees the body as a metaphor for these various forms of power. Beginning with Thomas Hughes’ novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, he suggests that the subject of the novel is the white, upper-class, heterosexual male body in a patriarchal society, which denigrates or excludes all other groups and is often contrasted
5 Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge 1985); Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge 2010); Malcolm Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham (Truro 2015).
6 Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge 1994).
7 Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London 1874), p. 26.
with ‘the caricatured bodies of lower-class, Irish and non-European men’.8 The principal themes, he suggests, are masculinity, sexuality, and gender relations. The authors also highlight the social origins of Hughes and Kingsley as members of the gentry, with tendencies to be critical of the business class and sympathetic towards, but also distanced from, the working class, and their fervent patriotism (also discussed by Vance). As one of the contributors, C. J. W.-L. Wee notes, there is a strong national and imperial dimension to Kingsley’s work, which presents the idea of a united English nation, underpinned by Protestantism and a vigorous masculinity.9 The contributors to Hall’s volume do not so much refute, as ignore, Vance’s emphasis on the specifically liberal Christian inspiration of muscular Christianity, so it is not entirely clear how far the intention is to argue that Vance’s argument is wrong or irrelevant, or whether it is to show that there is a wider context and other perspectives are also needed.
As regards the second question, the contribution of religion to the sports boom, both in the short term and in the longer term, an influential view is that of Peter Bailey. In his history of the ‘rational recreation’ movement, he argues that religion had an important role in the early stages of the sports boom but that this was a temporary phase. From the 1850s clergymen, mainly Anglican, were providing leisure facilities of various kinds intended both to ameliorate the lives of working-class people and to divert them from harmful recreations, focused especially on drinking and betting. They wanted to encourage other kinds of leisure, beneficial to mind or body, such as attendance at concerts and lectures, walking in parks, and participation in healthy sports. Facilities for these things were often very limited and most workingclass people lacked the money to pay for them. The churches often had the resources to pay for free or low-cost facilities, and at least until the 1870s these were gratefully received. Bailey suggests that working-class membership of church clubs was ‘instrumental’ ‘calculated to obtain certain benefits often unobtainable from the resources of working-class life’.10 However there were always possible tensions. Some of the football teams started by clergymen broke away from church control. Similarly, working men’s clubs, initially established by clergymen or pious laymen, eventually declared independence,
8 Donald E. Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity, p. 6.
9 C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Christian manliness and national identity’, in Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity, pp. 66–88.
10 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London 1978), p. 178.
the main issue often being the provision of alcoholic drinks on the premises.11 However, Jack Williams has shown in a series of studies of the interwar years that the major involvement of churches and chapels in amateur sport continued long after the 1880s.12 I shall also argue that a nuanced view of relationships between churches and working class is needed, which highlights their complexity and the diversity within both the working class and the religious world.
The third question is whether churches had a proactive role in the sports boom or whether they were jumping on a bandwagon which was already well on its way. Most historians, whatever their overall perspective, have noted that sport was seen by many churches as an effective means of recruiting new members, and the formation of a football team or the provision of a gym on church premises was thus a recognition of the fact that sport was already a part of life for many people, especially teenage boys and young men. Some historians have argued therefore that the adoption of sport by the churches was reactive and essentially opportunist, rather than driven by any real enthusiasm. This is the view of the historian of leisure, Hugh Cunningham, who argues that by the 1870s, ‘the churches were accommodating to society rather than changing it’: ‘Leisure called the tune and the churches danced to it.’13 Similarly, the historian of religion, Callum Brown, suggests that ‘from the evangelical standpoint, muscular Christianity was no more than an experiment and not a fundamental change to a dominant negative discourse on male religiosity.’ The purpose of church-based sport was ‘to contain, capture, restrain and discipline masculinity’.14
The opposite view has been argued by the historian of leisure in Birmingham, Douglas Reid, who suggests that the role of the churches in the rise of sport, at least up to the 1880s was often proactive, with churches and chapels frequently acting as pioneers.15 He recognizes considerable differences both between denominations and within denominations in attitudes to recreation and specifically to sport, with much of the opposition coming from Evangelicals, whether Anglican or Dissenting. He notes some examples of clergy who promoted leisure for fear of losing their congregation, rather than seeing it as anything good in itself. However, Reid, as well as rejecting the idea
11 Bailey, Leisure and Class, pp. 106–19.
12 See, for example, Jack Williams, ‘Churches, sport and identities in the North, 1900–1939’, in Jeff Hill and Jack Williams (eds), Sport and Identity in the North of England (Keele 1996), pp. 113–36.
13 Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (New York 1980), pp. 181–2.
14 Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (2nd edn. London 2009), pp. 97–8, 107–8.
15 Douglas Adam Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics in Birmingham, ca. 1800–1875’ (University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 1985).
that there is any necessary conflict between the church and secular amusements, goes on to argue that some influential clergy were ‘moulding’ rather than ‘reacting to’ public opinion.16 Seeing the 1850s as a turning-point, he highlights the role of two prominent clergymen, the Anglican J. C. Miller at the historic parish church, St Martin’s, and the liberal Dissenter George Dawson at the non-denominational Church of the Saviour. Reid notes that church sports club were often started by the young men of the congregation, rather than being directly established by the clergy, but he also mentions the examples of clergymen who were themselves sports enthusiasts, and who took the leading role.17
Also relevant here is the work of historians of the public schools such as J. A. Mangan and Malcolm Tozer.18 From the later 1850s onwards these schools were building gymnasia and including in their curriculum increasingly large amounts of sport, especially cricket and the various codes of football. Most of the headmasters and many of the assistant masters in these schools were clergymen and though the motives for their promotion of sport varied, many of them were inspired by some form of muscular Christianity.
The big question behind many of the debates is the relationship between the rise of sport and secularization. We can see three basic positions. John Lowerson has claimed that there was a direct connection, and that by the last part of the nineteenth century sport was taking the place of religion in many people’s lives.19 A second view is that of Jack Williams, who argues for the continuing importance of the links between religion and sport at least up to the 1920s and 1930s. Williams’s book on cricket in the interwar period includes a chapter on religion, and he sees the prominence of church teams as evidence that the extent of secularization in the early twentieth century has been exaggerated, though he also comments that a decline in the number of church cricket and football teams in the 1930s may have been a cause of secularization, in so far as these teams had been a route into the churches.20 His work parallels that of historians such as Callum Brown, who minimizes the extent of secularization before the 1960s,21 and Michael Snape who, without
16 Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics’, pp. 132–5.
17 Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics’, pp. 102–7, 115–18, 136–9, 163 note 267.
18 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Lewes 1986); Tozer, Manliness
19 John Lowerson, ‘Sport and the Victorian Sunday: The beginnings of middle-class apostasy’, in J. A. Mangan (ed.), A Sport-Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play (London 2006), pp. 179–97.
20 Jack Williams, Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Inter-War Years (London 1999); Williams, ‘Identities’, p. 127.
21 Brown, Death, pp. 9–10 and passim
entering the debates over the sixties, has highlighted the influence of ‘diffusive Christianity’ both at home and at the front during the two world wars.22
A third view, which overlaps with the first, but approaches the question from a different angle, is that of Dominic Erdozain. Drawing especially on the example of the YMCA, which he sees as representing wider trends in British Christianity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues that the churches underwent an inner secularization. This was partly because of the increasing time devoted to sport which, he suggests, diverted Christians from more important tasks. But he sees more subtle processes at work even in those churches which still gave primacy to preaching and worship. The mistake, he suggests, was to present sport not as a relatively unimportant extra, but as integral to the church’s mission.
The literature on the relationship between religion and sport is far more extensive in the United States than in England. The main reason for this has been the prominence of Evangelicals in American sport since the 1970s, which has prompted a succession of books and articles both on the current relationship between religion and sport and on its longer history. The writers have included journalists, sporting professionals, ministers of religion, and academics in many disciplines.23 Much of the writing has been by sporting Evangelicals addressing other sporting Evangelicals. But there has also been a more critical literature, written both by Evangelicals and by others, who have voiced concerns about what one critic called ‘sportianity’.24 On the other hand, William J. Baker in his history of ‘Religion and Modern Sport’, takes a more distanced view of contemporary concerns and controversies. He ranges very widely, going back (briefly) to the early Christians and beyond, before concentrating on the modern United States. He includes Catholics and Muslims, as well as many kinds of Protestant. His theme is that intimate relationships between religion and sport have been the norm and that periods of conflict have been the exception. He goes further, arguing for a close interconnection between religion, sport, and patriotism in the United States. My emphasis here, however, is on the fluctuating nature of the relationship between religion and sport in England, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes more distanced. The ‘ “fit” of faith and sport’,
22 Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier (London 2005), p. 58.
23 For example, Shirl Hoffman (ed.), Sport and Religion (Champaign IL 1992); Tony Ladd and James A. Mathieson, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids, MI 1999); Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II (eds), The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture (Louisville, KY 2002).
24 Frank Deford, ‘Religion in sport’, ‘The Word according to Tom’, and ‘Reaching for the stars’, Sports Illustrated, 19 April, 26 April, 3 May 1976.
to use Baker’s terminology,25 has never been quite as tight in England as in the United States—though it came closest to that in the later part of the nineteenth century.
I shall return to all of the debated questions, while also opening up other issues, so far unexplored. In doing this I will draw mainly on four kinds of primary source. I have used Anglican and Nonconformist local church records, mainly from London and the Midlands and mainly from urban areas. I have found church magazines a particularly rich source. I have used the central archives of the YMCA, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and Sunday School Union. I have made extensive use of local and sporting papers in the British Newspaper Archive, especially for the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, though after about 1950 the numbers of newspapers accessible through the archive falls fast. And, for the most recent period, I have drawn especially on the national press and on the websites of religious organizations and of sports associations and clubs.
25 William J. Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge 2007).
‘’E Mun Be Baited, It’s a Rule’
Old and New Sporting Worlds
The Old Sporting World
In spite of new trends which pointed to the future, an older sporting world was still alive in England, and in some respects flourishing around 1800. This had both an elite and a plebeian branch. The elite branch, belonging to the aristocracy and gentry, together with some of the larger farmers, was devoted principally to hunting. This meant above all fox hunting, though hares and, in some regions, stags and otters were also hunted. In the more plebeian branch the highlights were linked with holiday seasons, such as a wakes week in the summer or autumn, Shrove Tuesday, or Whit Monday—thus the name ‘calendar sports’. But there were also sports practised in a less organized way on Sundays or on summer evenings. In this older sporting world, the clergy patronized the recreations of their social inferiors and participated in those of their social equals. The historic connections between popular recreations and the church and with its calendar continued, but only in attenuated form. Robert Malcolmson contrasts this with Catholic Europe where ‘the Church’s participation in these festivities remained vigorous and of fundamental importance.’1 Many of the sports practised by working men and youths on Sundays or on summer evenings had no religious significance at all.
The role of the clergy in calendar sports was limited to that of a patron. This was most conspicuous in the wakes week, the main occasion for sporting contests in many parishes, both rural and industrial. This traditionally began on the Sunday following the feast-day of the patron saint of the parish. Malcolmson has shown that there was a strong seasonal dimension to the scheduling of wakes, as they took place at times of the year when agricultural work was less intensive. So although the date was often chosen because of the patronal festival, there must have been many instances where the saint’s day
1 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700 to 1850 (Cambridge 1973), p. 74.
occurred at an inconvenient time in the year, and a completely different date was chosen.2 The festival began with a church service that was said to be unusually well attended—partly because of family members now living elsewhere who returned for the wakes.3 A Newcastle clergyman and antiquarian, Henry Bourne, provided in 1725 a good summary of the main features of the celebrations:
The Inhabitants deck themselves out in their gaudiest Clothes, and have open Doors and splendid Entertainments for the Reception and Treating of their Relatives and Friends, who visit them on that occasion from each neighbouring Town. The Morning is spent for the most Part at Church. . . . The remaining part of the Day is spent in Eating and Drinking; and so is also a day or two Afterwards, together with all Sorts of Rural pastimes and Exercises, such as Dancing on the Green, Wrestling, Cudgelling, &c.4
While the patronal festival provided the occasion for the celebrations, and the service in the parish church was the essential starting-point, Bourne was concerned that the original Christian significance of the day had become largely obscured. After the religious observances in the morning, the church was reduced to a small supporting role. For example, in the very popular Stamford bull-running, patronized by many of the town’s elite but finally suppressed in 1840, the bells of St Mary’s church tolled as the bull entered the town.5
Major occasions for calendar sports included Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, associated especially with street football; Easter Monday and Tuesday, also a common time for football, and Whit Monday and Tuesday, which were times for races, wrestling, morris dancing, and the holding of fairs.6 Other favoured days may have been more localized. For example, in Wokingham in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the annual marketplace bull-baiting, for which the parish overseers provided the bull, took place on St Thomas’s Day (December 21).7
The street football involved a game with unlimited numbers of participants on either side with each of the teams representing a different village or a different district of a town, and each side aiming to carry the ball to the opposite end. A typical example was Derby where the sides represented, respectively,
2 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 18. 3 Malcolmson, Recreations, p. 19.
4 M. F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge 2003), p. 28.
5 Malcolmson, Recreations, pp. 47–8. 6 Malcolmson, Recreations, pp. 31–3, 83–4.
7 Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry (Oxford 2005), pp. 64–5.
St Peter’s, the main parish on the south of the town, and All Saints’, the leading parish on the north side, though each was reinforced by players from other parishes or from surrounding villages. Play was robust with injuries being common and considerable damage being done to town-centre shops. Keith Snell has highlighted the way in which football and cricket matches between neighbouring villages or pugilistic encounters between the champions of those villages could become a focus for local rivalries and antagonisms.8 The other side of this coin, as Michael Snape argues, is that football in eighteenthcentury Lancashire reinforced a strong sense of identity with the parish and sometimes with the parish church. He cites the case of King Charles the Martyr Day at Downham, which began with a sermon and distribution of alms, followed by a football match against a neighbouring parish. He gives the example of one clergyman in the mid-eighteenth century who was ‘custodian of the town’s football’, and another in the later part of the century who would produce a football at the end of the afternoon service and kick it into the neighbouring field.9 In the case of Derby the contest reflected and reinforced parish identities within a growing industrial centre. The many attempts to close the game down finally succeeded in 1846. At the time there were bitter feelings between those on either side of the argument.10 In later years the football came to be seen as part of the town’s ‘heritage’ and in 1884 a local paper published the reminiscences of a well-known player, William Williamson, nicknamed Tunchy Shelton, who was then living in an alms house. He said his ribs had never fitted properly since he broke them in the football. He was a Peterite and his father had also played for St Peter’s before him:
You know it was a sort of what is called caste. There’s many a hundred dying for their caste as there is religion and I would have gladly died rather than give up St Peter’s and so would many another, and some have died for it. All the lads and lassies were either St Peter’s or All Saints, and the women were worst of all. . . . Nearly every one was the same high and low. The little children in St Peter’s parish would sing in the streets ‘Roast Beef and Potatoes | For the Bells of St Peter’s | Pig muck and carrots | For the Bells of All Hallows.’
8 K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700–1950 (Cambridge 2006), pp. 55–6.
9 Snape, Church of England, pp. 31–2.
10 Anthony Delves, ‘Popular recreation and social conflict in Derby, 1800–1850’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Brighton 1981), pp. 89–127.
He once had a fight with a man who said he turned his coat: ‘I would not have turned my coat to save my life and I would not now.’11
There were also calendar sports involving animals. Throwing at cocks traditionally took place on Shrove Tuesday, and usually took place in churchyards: the participants threw missiles at a tethered cock, and the man who succeeded in killing the bird was able to take it home. In many places, Easter Monday was as closely associated with bull-baiting as Shrove Tuesday was with football or throwing at cocks. Thus the sense of bitter grievance encountered by those who tried to stop such events. ‘’E mun be baited—it’s a rule,’ was the response of aggrieved inhabitants of Ellesmere in 1813 when agents of the Earl of Bridgewater tried to suppress the annual baiting. As Bob Bushaway argues, the defence of ‘custom’ was one aspect of a ‘contractual framework’ whereby landlords and clergy ‘accepted certain duties and responsibilities’ and ‘in return received due recognition . . . and compliance’.12 In the early nineteenth century, bull-baitings would become a frequent occasion for conflict between a reforming clergyman, driven to challenge traditions which he saw as ‘shameful’ and ‘wicked’, and parishioners tenacious in defence of timehonoured custom.
Many popular sports were localized. For example, in Lancashire a running game called prison bars was popular. Stoolball was especially associated with Sussex, though Emma Griffin cites an example from Yorkshire.13 Cricket and football were played in all parts of the country. Football was a mainly plebeian game, sometimes patronized but seldom practised by elites—though Adrian Harvey notes some exceptions.14 As well as the annual set-piece matches, informal games or sometimes matches between the youth of neighbouring communities took place throughout the year. All of Sunday, but most often the afternoon, potentially provided times for sport, though a vicar’s son from the Yorkshire Dales writing in the 1860s recalled that the young men of the parish would gather for football after service on Sunday evenings.15 It should be noted that although Sabbatarian restrictions increased with the growing strength of Evangelicalism in the early and mid-nineteenth century, there were also many clergymen, especially those of High Church, or later Broad
11 ‘Tunchy Williamson Interviewed’, Cutting from Derby Express, Derby Local Studies Library (BA 796.33 MSS).
12 Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London 1982), pp. 1–4, 22.
13 Griffin, Revelry, pp. 48–51.
14 Adrian Harvey, Football: The First Hundred Years, the Untold Story (Abingdon 2005), pp. 53–4, 72.
15 Griffin, Revelry, pp. 45–51.
Church, leanings, who did not object to Sunday sport as long as it was in addition to, rather than instead of, attending church.
Cricket was already in the eighteenth century unusual in that it was played by men from all sections of society, and less frequently by women too.16 It was played by gentlemen, including clergymen, and newspapers sometimes reported their matches. It was also played by farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, and labourers. The gentry patronized teams made up mainly of poorer men and took bets on their matches. Sometimes they participated themselves. David Underdown’s account of the famous Hambledon club, based on a Hampshire village, but also drawing more widely, shows that the players typically came from the middle ranks of village society, including farmers, pub landlords, and builders, but also sometimes those from higher up the scale, such as the son of a Winchester clergymen. Underdown emphasizes their respectability and integration into local society, marked for example by the fact that several sang or played an instrument in the church choir. The patrons included aristocrats and several clergymen, including most notably the Rev Charles Powlett, who was both. He was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Bolton and also curate of a nearby parish. As well as being a key figure in the Hambledon club and sufficiently respected in the cricket world to have been a member of the committee which revised the Laws of the game in 1774, he seems to have been a striking example of what came to be called the ‘unreformed’ Church of England: he was a pluralist, drawing income from several parishes, he gambled heavily on Hambledon matches, and was also interested in hunting, horse racing, and cock-fighting.17
Among the sports of the aristocracy and gentry, fox hunting was growing in popularity from about 1730 onwards and had reached a high point by the early nineteenth century. Indeed, for many of the gentry it was the most important thing in their life, and some of them went out several times a week during the season, or even every day but Sunday. William Howitt, writing in 1838, admitted the cruelty of the sport, but went on to declare that ‘foxhunting is now the chief amusement of the true British sportsman and a noble one it is—the artifices and dexterity employed by this lively, crafty animal to avoid the dogs are worthy of our admiration, as he exhibits more devices for self-preservation than any other beast of the chase.’18 The thrill of a protracted chase with many obstacles on the way, the companionship and the eating and
16 Griffin, Revelry, pp. 47–8, 215–16; David Underdown, Start of Play: Cricket and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London 2000).
17 Underdown, Start of Play, pp. 66–7, 114–16, 133–4.
18 William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (2 vols, London 1838), I, pp. 44–5.
