NATURE

FUN AND GAMES AT THE SIGN OF THE RED COW

By Barry Brock

In July 1769 the Sherborne Mercury advertised a ‘cudgels competition’ to be held at the Red Cow in Sherborne. Cudgels? - what were cudgels? And where was the Red Cow?

Cudgels was a game played in inn yards, where competitors fought with wooden sticks, aiming to draw blood by a blow to an opponent’s head or neck. The onlookers would shout ‘a head’ when they saw blood drawn and there would be prizes for ‘breaking most heads’. ‘Sword and dagger’ was a similar game, played with even more dangerous weapons. And the Red Cow? There is no trace left of it now, but it stood at the bottom of Newland, close by the old Black Horse. William Dinning was landlord in 1719, and when he died without making a will in June that year, his widow, Frances, had to prepare an inventory of his goods for probate to be granted. Amongst these was a singular tavern sign: The Signe of the Red Cow. Prior to this, the earliest use of a tavern sign bearing this name and recorded by the English Place-Name Society had been in 1827, and that was not in Dorset. This Sherborne example shows that the name was in use much earlier in the town, probably even before the end of the seventeenth century. There was also evidence of less bloodthirsty inn games, such as a ‘Billard Chamber’ which contained a number of items, including a ‘billard frame’, so billiards was being played too. William Dinning was not only an innholder, he was a barber as well, and he is described as such in a 1691 deed held by the Dorset History Centre. This is reflected in the contents of the ‘Shopp’, which suggest that this Sherborne barber was acting as a dentist too:

‘A Chair, a broken looking Glass, a bason a Water pot, 6 old basons, 6 Rasors a pr Scisors, Instruments for drawing Teeth a old Surplice 6 Napkins, & 2 Capps’ Members of religious houses probably acted as the first dentists, but in 1215 the clergy were banned from shedding blood, and so various other trades came to take on this role. Blacksmiths, wigmakers, jewellers and apothecaries had all extracted teeth as a sideline, but in 1462 the first charter of the Barbers’ Company specifically mentioned ‘drawing teeth’. The Barbers’ Company merged with the surgeons in 1540 and both trades continued to carry out extractions before they separated again in 1745. Until then, a barber-surgeon would have been something like a modern general practitioner, tending wounds, setting broken limbs, letting blood and pulling teeth. The Red Cow ceased to be an inn or alehouse in about 1800 - owned for over a hundred years by the Dinning or Denning family. My thanks to George Tatham for the inventory and to Sue Detain for the inn-sign illustration.

Nature

Beautifully captured by local photographer Colin Lawrence, here is nature’s take on the kestrel and the cricket. Colin comments, ‘I came across a family of five kestrels comprising two adults and three juveniles. The parents were clearly teaching the youngsters how to hunt.’

Colin continues, ‘Surprisingly their prey wasn’t the usual voles or mice, they were hunting and devouring in the air great green bush-crickets!’ He explains, ‘I photographed a family of five diving into two-foot-high grass and scrub (totally disappearing) and then reappearing with their prey!’

Kestrels have exceptional eyesight, which is vital in helping them catch their prey. While the human eye has around 38,000 photoreceptors per millimetre, a kestrel has twice as many. As a result, a kestrel hovering at a height of 20 metres is able to see clearly a 2mm-long invertebrate on the ground.

Great green bush-crickets are relatively easy to identify because of their size. The males can grow up to 36 millimetres in length and females reach nearly 70 millimetres. They are normally completely green apart from a brown rust-coloured line on the top of their body.