James VI and I: Football Fan or Foe?

Posted on June 19, 2026 by merryshrovetide

Today (19 June) marks the 460th birthday of James VI of Scotland and I of England, the first monarch to unite Great Britain under one crown. He’s had a big year: 2025 was the 400th anniversary of his death, and saw a parade of events and books reassessing his reign and legacy. But amidst all this hoopla, no one has been asking the really big questions: would our dear friend King Jimmy have favored Scotland at the men’s World Cup, or England? Was he even a football fan?

Most football histories would answer that second question with an obvious and emphatic ‘no’. The oft-quoted evidence comes from the king’s own treatise on how a monarch should govern and live, Basilikon Doron. First published in 1599 and addressed to James’s young son and heir Henry, it promotes certain sports and activities for princes and courtiers, like running, dancing, fencing and tennis. But it explicitly debarred from the court ‘all rough and violent exercises, as the football, meeter [better] for lameing than making able the users thereof.’ The hostility seems clear enough: football was a dangerous and uncouth sport that men of good breeding should avoid. Yet the king’s actions did not always match his words.

After acceding to the English throne (1603), James and his court enjoyed football games on multiple occasions. Two different times in August 1612, the royal household constructed special ‘standings’ at the Earl of Southampton’s Beaulieu Palace, Hampshire so James and his retinue could ‘see the play at footeball’. One year later, two more sets of stands were built, probably in Beaulieu again, for the king and queen to ‘see the Footeball playe’.¹ Notably, these are the earliest references in history (as far as I’m aware) to purpose-built football stands, however temporary they may have been. James would take in a game again in 1615, when the minister of Bishop’s Canning, Wiltshire presented a ‘football match of his own parishioners’ who could have ‘challenged all England’ in the sport.

Perhaps the King of Scots took all this English football as a challenge for the mastery of what he called in Latin pila Scotica quae pede propellitur [a Scottish ball propelled by the foot]. Ahead of the visit to his northern realm in 1617, James ordered the Earl of Mar to ensure that ‘the football and the rowbowles and sutche manlye exerceisses maye be practysed and exercised befor his Majesties cumming to Scotland, that theis pepill heir [i.e. the English] maye see the owld exerceisses of that cuntrye [Scotland]’.² Evidently, James’ attitude towards football was not entirely negative. Complicated might be a better word.

If James’ was not above watching football, he may still have wanted elites to avoid playing football themselves. The Wiltshire players were rustics. But we don’t know if the Beaulieu ones and those from the Scottish progress were non-elites or courtiers, though court spectacles usually centred the latter. Regardless, there’s no doubt football had become popular among the nobility and knightly classes by the Jacobean and Caroline periods. We find courtiers like Sir David Cunningham of Auchenharvie (Ayrshire) playing the game in London 1629, or lords like Emanuel Scope (later earl of Sunderland) and Lord Willoughby together in an even-sided match earlier in the century.³ Artist and poet Henry Peacham even claimed in his Art of Drawing (1606) that it was a natural and proper pursuit for a lord to ‘play at footeball with his men’.

Interestingly, in a later expanded edition (1612) Peacham replaced this positive reference to football with a possiblly less controversial line: ‘play at tennis with his page’. That same year, he also published the famed emblem book Minerva Britanna, which includes a depiction of football not as a lordly pastime, but as a game of ‘country swaines’, like those from Bishop’s Canning [see picture below]. Over the previous decade, Peacham had been in perennial pursuit of royal patronage. He produced several manuscript books of emblems, each dedicated either to King James or Prince Henry, and based on the king’s Basilikon Doron. Considering the views expressed in this advice book, Peacham’s shifting treatment of football may reflect an enduring unease about its value and suitability for elites. For some it was manly and martial, but for others it remained a rude and rustic ‘friendly kind of fight’ prone to ‘broken banis [bones]’. Certainly there was truth to the latter: after all, Cunningham and Scope were both badly injured while playing. Nonetheless, by this time there was an emerging view among the leisured classes, that at least in their refined hands (or feet), football could be a net positive.

These approving early modern sentiments represent a striking about-face to the contempt and indifference with which medieval elites regarded the sport. Football had been subject to repeated English and Scottish royal bans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during this period we have little to no evidence of the warrior classes participating in the sport. This all changed during the sixteenth century, with the royals leading the way. Henry VIII owned football boots (1525), the household of James IV (James VI’s great-grandfather) purchased footballs (1497), while an actual football was found at Stirling Castle from the 1530/40s [see 3D scan below]. Famously, James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots beheld a match while under house arrest at Carlisle Castle (1568), when ‘about twenty of her retinue played at football before her the space of two hours, very strongly, nimbly, and skillfully, the smallness of their ball occasioning their fair play’.⁴ Indeed, Scottish nobility and lairds seem to have been particularly taken with the beautiful game from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Even James himself had played the sport at a young age, receiving ‘a fute ball’ from his regent around his seventh birthday (1573).⁵

World’s oldest football by Emotions3D on Sketchfab

It’s not certain why this shift occurred, but I have a few theories. Firstly, medieval martial sports like the melee, tourney, and joust became less common and relevant as warfare changed. ‘Those who fought’ may have turned to bellicose football as an increasingly attractive proving ground for virility and valor. Secondly, the Renaissance brought new ideas of what a gentleman, courtier and prince should be: not just a warrior but a cultivated body and mind. As the warrior classes turned into the leisured classes, athletic exercises and pastimes like ball games became the ‘work’ of the day, so to speak. Thirdly (and most importantly, I think), the nobility and gentry increasingly favored school and university education for their children over private tutelage at home, as state bureaucracies and legal systems expanded and humanism spread.

Being collectives of playful youths, educational institutions have been central (deliberately or inadvertently) to the history of football from the earliest records through to the modern codes. It therefore follows that elite interest in the sport would rise alongside elite rates of institutional education in Britain. Tellingly, football seems to have been quite popular among medieval clergymen and lawyers, those who were the main products of schools and universities before the early modern period. Scotland’s ‘educational revolution’ was particularly precocious, as the Education Act of 1496 required ‘all barons and freeholders who are wealthy [to] put their eldest sons and heirs into school’ and some degree of university. This early initiative may help explain why football was already so popular among Scottish lords and gentry (more so than in England) by the time James inherited the English throne.

James’s interest in regulating sport and recreation, however, extended well beyond his court and its courtiers. His most significant intervention into the recreational lives of common folk kicked off during his return journey from Scotland in 1617. As he progressed through Lancashire he became embroiled in a controversy between Puritan magistrates and defenders of traditional Sunday recreations. In the dispute over whether sports and games should be allowed on the sabbath, James sided with the traditionalists, producing what became known as the King’s Declaration (or Book) of Sports. Published in 1618, this document would prove an enduring flashpoint in the culture wars (and civil wars) of decades to come.

Yet it was not a blanket defense of all Sunday recreations: above all, divine service should be observed with no interference, and only certain recreations were approved for after service. Others, like bear-baiting or bowling, were explicitly banned on Sundays (and really any day) as unlawful games. Strikingly, football was absent from both lists. This seems a glaring omission considering it was one of the most common sports cited in contemporary sabbath-breach cases, and certainly in terms of team sports. Football had even been explicitly targeted in a 1614 Parliament act against Sabbath abuses, though the bill never became law. Technically, football remained an ‘unlawful game’ and as such was not allowed by the Declaration. Yet the king’s silence left some wiggle room for interpretation; it may suggest he held a soft spot for the ‘manly exercise’ of the ‘Scottish ball’.

Whether for courtiers or commoners, James remained ambivalent about football. Neither fully fan nor foe, he was a footy frienemy. That being said, James would have loved the World Cup. He had a penchant for spectacle and sport, and could be quite adept at harnessing these for statecraft. No doubt, he would have FIFA kissing his ring and awarding him Rex Pacificus prizes. Between his two teams in the running this year, James’s heart would be with Scotland, but he would relish England’s greater resources and odds of glory – just as he coveted the power of the English throne. Above all, though, he’d seize the opportunity to further his ultimate ambition: to unite his two kingdoms symbolically and practically. But if he thought his Book of Sports was controversial, it would be nothing compared to a Team GB scheme.

Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, 1558-1642, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson (Malone Society Collections VI; OUP, 1962), p. 109. ↩︎
National Records of Scotland: GD124/15/27/39. ↩︎
National Records of Scotland, GD237/25/1, Letter from Sir David Cunningham to the laird of Robertland, 1629 June 8. ↩︎
Letter from Sir Francis Knollys to Lord Burghley, 15 June 1568. Printed in John Daniel Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in Captivity: A Narrative of Events from January, 1569, to December, 1584, Whilst George Earl of Shrewsbury was Guardian to the Scottish Queen (London, 1880), no. 7.s ↩︎
Thanks to Alexander Courtney for sharing this reference. ↩︎

Easter Football 1598: Surprising Details from some Star Chamber Depositions

Posted on April 22, 2026 by merryshrovetide

The Records of Early Football series highlights types of evidence and sources central to the study of medieval and early modern football, as compiled in the REF database. This post spotlights court depositions (legal witness statements).

During Easter celebrations in 1598, the villagers of North Moreton, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) gathered to watch and play football in the close of William Leaver, a wealthy yeoman farmer and high constable of the hundred. Multiple matches were ‘made and played’ on the day, including a particularly consequential one ‘between six persons’. Simon Watts, a husbandman from nearby Sandford, Oxfordshire and servant to a local gentleman, was present that day as a player and spectator:

…he and some others went to play at football in a close…. and after [he] had there played awhile he left off and then a new match was made and played in the said close between William Field, John Field, Robert Field, Richard Gregory, John Leaver and a boy of one Sydbury’s and in that play the said Richard Gregory stroke the said John Field with his fist at two several times and at the last time John Field with his fist stroke Richard Gregory again (at which time one Brian Gunter, William Gunter and this defendant and John Gregory and diverse other persons were looking on the said play). John Field and Richard Gregory then buffeting one another, William Gunter went to them to part them and thereupon a quarrel began and blows were given between William Gunter and John and Richard Gregory. And then Brian Gunter seeing that affray drew his poniard [dagger] and coming to the Gregories did therewith strike and wound them both a little on the heads that the blood followed in some small measure...¹

While this ‘small measure’ of bloodshed ended the fight, both of the young Gregory brothers would die some weeks later, allegedly from the head wounds sustained. The incident sparked a long-running family feud between the Gunters and the Gregories, which crackled on through a rising conflagration of assaults, witchcraft accusations, litigation, and ultimately an intervention from King James I himself. Historian Jim Sharpe masterfully reconstructed this sordid tale in his microhistory The Bewitching of Ann Gunter, which I highly recommend.² But here I want to focus on the football match which started it all. The testimonies of Simon Watts and many other witnesses come from a 1601 case before the notorious Star Chamber Court in Whitehall.³ The evidence demonstrates how rich court depositions can be as a source for early football, challenging some preconceptions about the premodern game.

The Star Chamber case was launched against Brian Gunter and his men by various well-heeled yeomen of North Moreton, including the owner of the close where the football had taken place. The Gunters exerted considerable influence in the village, being the only gentry family. But the senior Brian was clearly an unpopular figure. The bill against him and his household alleged much lawbreaking and violence (not just the football incident). Simon Watts was one of Gunter’s servants and fellow defendants. His testimony was hardly impartial, but a wide array of witnesses corroborate the basic details of the event. Taken together, we can reconstruct a day of play in an Elizabethan village, gaining some insight into the two main questions of football history: how was the sport organized and played; how was it viewed and valued within society?

To take game play and organization first (see slide above), the North Moreton matches do not conform to the typical popular and scholarly image of premodern football as a mob game: ‘played by variable, formally unrestricted numbers of people sometimes in excess of 1000’, with ‘no equalisation of numbers’, ranging ‘over open countryside and through streets of towns’, exhibiting a ‘loose distinction between players and spectators…and an unusually high level of violence’.⁴ Mass games like this were certainly played during the Tudor period. For example, in March 1576 some 100 people assembled to play football in the rural parish of Ruislip, Middlesex, a game which eventually gave rise to ‘a great affray’. And mass games are also the main form of traditional football that survives today, in festive fixtures like the Easter Tuesday ‘ba game’ at Workington, Cumbria (pictured below).

Yet North Moreton’s Easter football in 1598 did not look like this.⁵ At least one of the games featured very small sides: just three matched against three. There was an element of formality in delineating these teams, seen in the distinction between ‘making a match’ and the playing of it. There were far more spectators than players and the lines between these two were quite clear. Simon Watts had played in a match earlier in the day, but stood ‘looking on’ for the second one. When the spectators closed in, it was not to participate in an ad hoc way, but to break up a fight. The game was not played across country or through streets, but within the relatively defined space of a local close – by definition a smaller piece of land often enclosed or fenced. Within this close, the game must have been fairly spaced out, considering the small numbers involved. But the players also must have regularly come together for close contact, since Richard Gregory struck John Field twice before the fight even began. Gameplay may have looked something like the contemporary woodcut pictured below, showing six ‘country swains’ at football.

Over the last few decades, football historians have increasingly recognized that games of small and even sides existed alongside mass games, long before the codifications of the nineteenth century.⁶ London schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster advocated for this type of football play as early as 1581, while schools and colleges in Aberdeen were putting it into practice in the early 1600s. Significantly, the North Moreton evidence shows that this type of football also existed outside elite and educated circles, among rural farmers. It is also of note that, though the Fields, Gregories and Leavers were not necessarily highly educated or of gentle status, they did come from the most powerful families in the village. Looking at the background of the players and spectators can tell us something about football’s place in this agrarian society.

Football was technically an ‘unlawful game’ in Tudor England – the Ruislip players of 1576, for example, were indicted for the offense. Despite this, the local oligarchy of North Moreton clearly embraced the sport. Play took place in the close of a high constable; this was a significant legal office (usually held by lower gentry or prosperous yeomen) with criminal and administrative jurisdiction over a subdivision of the county called the hundred. Moreover, the list of spectators included a veritable who’s who of the parish – wealthy and elder yeomen and husbandmen who periodically held local offices (see slide below). Our list of those present on the day is undoubtedly biased towards the upper crust of village men: they would have been favoured as witnesses in the Star Chamber case. But those of more humble status were probably there too, to judge from the attendance of poorer husbandmen and servants like Simon Watts and John Taylor. It may be significant that Simon played a separate match to the one between the higher status yeomanry. Perhaps these matches were a reflection (and reinforcement) of local social hierarchies.

Such interest across the social ranks shows how deeply embedded football was within village life. Moreover, it suggests a respectability to this sport, rather at odds with the view of contemporary intelligentsia. Most of them saw football as a brutal and dangerous pretext for settling scores, and engendering bad blood. In 1583, Puritan writer Phillip Stubbes derided it as ‘more a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime’. The North Moreton football would seem a case in point, until we look a bit closer.

There’s little evidence that the three-a-side match was an outlet for any pre-existing factionalism or enmity among the players and wider community. Or that such factionalism led to the fight. In fact, the depositions show the Field, Gregory, Leaver, and Sydbury families making common cause against the Gunters’ various indiscretions over the following years. Rough football play certainly led to the fisticuffs between John Field and Richard Gregory, but a multitude of witnesses saw William Gunter and others trying to break up or part the ‘buffeting’ players, rather than escalate things. According to John Taylor, the fighting was actually successfully quelled. But John Gregory objected to how William Gunter had handled his brother Richard, so they ‘fell to words and then to blows’. It’s this secondary fight that carried fatal consequences.

Rather than craving bloodshed, the players and spectators were seemingly trying to avoid it, trying to get the game back on track. Premodern football was obviously a violent sport: it was a close contact struggle to possess and advance a ball, prone to serious injury, flared tempers, pride and passion. But the same could be said for modern football codes. Bruising contact remains central in American and rugby football, while factional fighting has notoriously devolved to the hooligans and ultras in association football. The narrative that premodern football exhibited an ‘unusually high level of violence’ which the leisured classes then needed to reform during the 1800s to make our modern ‘civilized’ codes is a tidy story. Perhaps it is a comforting tale of progress to some. But using the past as a foil for the present does not make for good history.

As the rich incidental and contextual detail in this Star Chamber case hopefully makes clear, legal depositions can be an ideal source for premodern football history – something of a gold standard. Newspapers and antiquarian accounts may surpass them in detail, but those sources are invariably written from an outside perspective, usually elite and/or educated. And of course, newsprint only survives in numbers from the eighteenth century onward. What makes depositions particularly special is how they open windows onto the perspectives and experiences of ordinary people. We don’t have to simply take the hostile word of Stubbes or an indictment for granted: deponents can tell us (directly or indirectly) how and why they played football.

But just like any source, depositions have their own problems and limitations. For one, depositional references to football are exceedingly rare, though they can be found across the medieval and early modern periods. More problematic is the issue of reliability. Like today, legal witnesses such as Simon Watts were rarely impartial or infallible: they often had skin in the game and certainly had malleable memories. Testimonies could often contradict one another, and they were all mediated by convention, the legal process, and scribal language. How do we know the words on the manuscript reflect reality?

One approach is to compare and corroborate evidence across other sources, and the depositions of other plaintiffs, defendants and more impartial witnesses. You can then pair this with a degree of reasonable inference: Simon Watts would likely try to downplay any violence and injury, and portray himself, William Gunter, and others in his party as being concerned with keeping the peace, rather than causing a ruckus. But even witnesses who were no friend to the Gunters largely backed up Watts’ account. Moreover, he had far less reason to lie about the general organization of the football play, our main topic of interest. Beyond these techniques, we can use depositions as records of the plausible if not the definitively true. As Laura Gowing, historian of early modern gender and work, eloquently explains:

Fictions woven for court cases tend to reveal fantasies that had real power over people’s minds, and the power of the plausible means that fictionalised, exaggerated versions can be as useful to historians as strict truths. Alongside the key contested events, most testimonies include significant extraneous detail that reveals who was doing what, where and when. From the answers witnesses gave to leading questions, a landscape of daily life can be reconstituted alongside an attention to the fantasies and fictions people wove around their daily lives.⁷

Depositions from this Star Chamber case thus show early modern football as not merely a ‘bloody, murdering practice’, but a sport deeply inscribed into the ‘landscape of daily life’ in an Elizabethan village.

The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/L30/23, Deposition of Simon Watts. ↩︎
James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A horrible and true story of deception,
witchcraft, murder, and the King of England, (New York, 1999), chapter 2. ↩︎
TNA, STAC 5/L3/19, L30/23, L31/124, L35/5. ↩︎
John Goulstone, ‘Football’s Secret History – chapters 2 and 3’, Soccer & Society (2017), p. 2 quoting and critiquing E. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton, The Sports Process; A Comparative and Developmental Approach (1993). ↩︎
Sharpe dates the football play to May 1598, based on the death of the Gregories in May and a note in the burial register saying the injuries were sustained a fortnight prior. However, this register note was added later at an unknown date. The Star Chamber material consistently dates the football to ‘at/in or about the feast of Easter’ (16 April that year). Such dating could be vague and approximate but May Day would have been a more typical marker for something which occurred in early May. Regardless, this small-sided type of football was plausible enough as an Eastertide occurence not to raise any objections from deponents. ↩︎
Goulstone’s Football’s Secret History (2001) was a pioneering work in this regard. ↩︎
Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2021), p. 6. ↩︎

The Magiconomy of Early Modern England

Posted on October 30, 2025 by merryshrovetide

This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This post first appeared on the Forms of Labour Project website in 2020.

On the night of 8 April 1693, a burglar broke into Thomas Masterman’s house in Stokesley, making off with the hefty sum of £2 10s. To identify the thief and reclaim his money, Masterman trekked south through the north Yorkshire moors to Byland Abbey. There he met with William Bowes, described by Masterman as ‘a man who pretends to discover stolen goods by casting of figures or otherwise’. Bowes proceeded to do just that, and ‘in a glass did show…the likeness & physiognomy of Richard Lyth’, a tailor to whom Masterman had recently repaid a small debt. Bowes advised to look no further than Lyth for the thief, adding that, ‘he could not have power to dispose of the money, but within a few days it would be brought again & thrown in a corner near [Masterman’s] house’. For this information and service, Bowes received one shilling in payment.[1]

Masterman’s story, captured in a court deposition from the North Riding of Yorkshire, is not altogether unusual for the time. We know that many premodern English men and women similarly consulted and contracted local magical practitioners (variously called wisemen, cunning folk, or soothsayers) to cure ailments, find lost or stolen property, or fix other problems. While reading through court depositions from quarter sessions of the peace for counties of northern England, I’ve come across a number of references to such ‘practical magic’, as well as more classic examples of malicious witchcraft. And since it’s Hallowtide, it seems the perfect time to survey these magical findings and discuss their relevance to the project: what they suggest about the relationship between work and magic during this period, and the ways in which some magical activities could constitute ‘forms of labour’ in their own right.[2]

In the northern quarter sessions at least, I’ve found that depositional evidence of magic usually derives from just a few types of criminal cases.

Most obvious are those of witchcraft, where the very crime concerned was the use of black magic to harm people or property.

While witchcraft was legally a felony and should have been tried at higher courts like the Assizes, cases could initially be examined at the county quarter sessions.[3] And so we sometimes get depositions like those against widow Dorothy Bentum of Coppull, Lancashire, who in 1676 allegedly ‘did harm by her tongue’, bewitching one women into madness and another to death.[4]

Evidence of magic also crops up in defamation cases, when plaintiffs brought suits against those who slanderously accused them of witchcraft and thereby harmed their public reputation.

Like witchcraft, defamation was usually handled by other courts in England, namely those of the church.[5] Nonetheless, similar cases could be brought up at the quarter sessions, like when Anne Harrison, a widow of Burland, Cheshire deposed in 1662 that her daughter-in-law had uttered the following defamatory words against her: ‘God blesse me against all witches and wizards and thou art one’.[6]

In such cases of defamation or witchcraft, magic was either integral to the crime or the crime itself. Yet magic could also be more incidental or tangential to a case. Accusations of witchcraft, for example, sometimes prompted retaliatory breaches of the peace. In a 1690 physical assault case from Idle, Yorkshire, Martha Thornton attacked James Booth and ‘dasht his head against a cupboard’ because the latter man claimed Martha had ‘destroyed’ his daughter ‘by witchcraft’ and also ‘did ride on witching every night’.[7]

But as Thomas Masterman’s story implies, not all depositional references to magic were negative. Theft cases – the vast majority of business handled by the quarter sessions – sometimes yield references to practical, helpful magic, as plaintiffs sought to track down their missing goods. In a case that I’ve already covered in detail for a previous blog post, Henry Lucas of Hoghton, Lancashire travelled across the county border in 1626 to consult with a ‘wiseman or witch’ in Yorkshire about his mother’s stolen cow. The wiseman provided a vision ‘of those persons that took the said heifer’ and told his clients where the cow might be found.

Similarly, in 1612, when a servant-boy named Thomas Aston went missing in Over, Cheshire, his master and mistress went to ‘blynd Burnie, to know whether he were quicke or dead’. Blind Burnie obliged, and ‘told them he [Aston] was alyve and lustie and was in Torpley parish and that at Michaelmas he would come home again to fetch his cloathes and the rest of his hire’.[8] Blind Burnie’s foresight proved myopically off target – not altogether shocking considering the wizard’s name!

It is these references to soothsaying and consultation that most clearly qualify as ‘magical work activities’ for the purposes of our project. They were transactional in nature, and although technically illegal, the magical acts themselves weren’t usually under criminal investigation. While rare, they hint at a much wider service industry of magic – what we might call a ‘magiconomy’. Like much else in early modern society, it was underpinned by reputation. As Alan MacFarlane demonstrated in his classic study of witchcraft in early modern Essex, people would travel long distances to consult specific cunning folk because of their famed skill, and not necessarily those practitioners nearest to them.[9] The same seems to have been the case in the north: Thomas Masterman and Henry Lucas each travelled over twenty miles to remote locations for their respective magical consultations.

Cunning folk also had a complex relationship with remuneration. Although many were poor characters living on the periphery of society, some refused payment for their services, claiming that compensation disrupted their abilities.[10] Interestingly, this represents something of an antithesis to work by commission or piece-rate, challenging the assumption that the quantity/quality of labour or service necessarily increased with the incentives offered. It also reinforces an argument that our project champions: that unpaid work was still work.

All that being said, many practitioners of ‘good’ magic did indeed charge for their services. William Bowes of Byland Abbey certainly received one shilling for his prognostication. We don’t know if Blind Burnie or the Wiseman from Yorkshire also had going rates, but one large and complex case, from our sample of quarter sessions depositions in eastern England, suggests the potential complexity and variance of magical service transactions.

In 1590, the Hertfordshire quarter sessions heard a case against Thomas Harden of Ikelford, who was ‘rumoured to be a wiseman and skilful in many matters’. The depositions include a veritable laundry list of magical work activities and corresponding prices: 6d (with more promised) to cure a ‘changeling’ child who could neither speak nor walk; 5s worth of money, bacon and pigeons to find a stolen parcel of clothes; 12d (with 20s more promised) to discover two lost horses; 40s (with an extraordinary £20 more promised) to divine who had burned down a house.[11]

There was clearly a pattern of paying a smaller sum upfront, with more promised upon the (presumably) successful completion of service. It was this last criterion that seems to have landed Harden in hot water, essentially for fraud. The problem was not so much that he illegally practiced magic or witchcraft (the deponents gladly and openly consulted him) but that he provided faulty prognostications and cures and then refused to refund customers. Thomas Masterman may represent a similarly dissatisfied client, since his deposition at the beginning of this post was actually levelled against William Bowes and pointedly stated that Bowes merely pretended to discover lost goods.

In Thomas Harden’s case, he eventually confessed to the charges of fraud. He admitted ‘that he could do nothing’, but added that ‘there was a time when he could do much’, before a ‘nobleman of the realm’ tricked him out of his ‘familiar spirit’ and a ‘great many books’. Such cases of fraud imply, as many scholars have been at pains to point out, that practical magic was a craft like any other: it required skill, tools of the trade, and a reputation for effectiveness, with avenues in place for quality control.[12]

And just like many other early modern forms of labour, magic was gendered, with discovering lost property generally coded male, and charms, incantations, and curses usually coded female.[13] This division of labour, and the types of quarter sessions cases most likely to contain evidence of magic (i.e. witchcraft, theft, fraud), help explain the overrepresentation in our depositional references of men as positive practitioners and women as negative ones.

Much more could be said about these magical work activities. For example, as our research proceeds apace on samples of court depositions from northern and eastern England, there may be scope in the future for comparisons between regions or types of courts. But regardless, practical magic demonstrates the diverse forms which early modern labour could take, and the incredible richness of early modern depositional material for a wide range of research topics.

[1] North Yorkshire Record Office (NYRO): QSB/1693/230.

[2] The literature on magic and witchcraft in premodern England is obviously vast, but on popular or cunning magic in particular see Tom Johnson, ‘Soothsayers, Legal Culture, and the Politics of Truth in Late-Medieval England’, Cultural and Social History, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2020.1812906; Catherine Rider, ‘Common Magic’, in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 303–31; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London, 2008); Alan MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (Abingdon, 1970), ch. 8; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London, 1971).

[3] On early modern legal jurisdiction over magic and witchcraft see MacFarlane, ch. 3.

[4] Lancashire Archives (LA): QSB/1/1676/ Information of Richard Fisher, Examination of William Millner.

[5] For some examples from the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishop of York: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/causepapers/results.jsp?keyword=witchcraft&limit=50

[6] Cheshire Archives and Local Services (CALS): QJF/90/1/100.

[7] West Yorkshire Archives Service (WYAS): QS1/29/9/ Examinations of John Thornton, James Booth, Lawrence Slater.

[8] CALS: QJF/41/4/71-73.

[9] MacFarlane, pp. 120-1.

[10] Johnson, p. 6; Rider, p. 321; MacFarlane, pp. 126-7.

[11] Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies: HAT/SR/2/100.

[12] Johnson, p. 10; Thomas, pp. 212-52; Davies, ch. 4.

[13] On the gender of magical practitioners, see Johnson, p. 5; Davies, ch. 3; MacFarlane, pp.127-8. And for cutting-edge work on the gender dynamics of practical magic, as a craft and service industry in premodern England, see the research of Tabitha Stanmore, particularly Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023) and Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024).

Common Wealth Games: Civic Shrove Tuesday Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

Posted on February 21, 2023 by merryshrovetide

An adapted version of this post was published as Pancakes and football: a brief history of Shrove Tuesday in the UK for The Conversation.

For nearly a millennium, Brits have celebrated Shrove Tuesday with food and sport. Today, pancakes have become the chief focus of what was once a more elaborate pre-Lent festival called Shrovetide. But during the medieval and early modern periods, a spirit of communal play and competition pervaded almost every aspect of Britain’s Carnival. Shrovetide games ranged from cruel animal blood-sports like cock-fighting, to tug-o-wars and skipping. Yet no Shrovetide sport was more widespread and long standing than football.

According to players from the Scottish Borders town of Duns in 1686, it was ‘an ancient custom throughout all this kingdom to play at football upon Fastens Eve [i.e. Shrove Tuesday]’. And indeed, Shrovetide ball games are documented from the 12^th century onwards, in scores of communities throughout Britain and northern France, with several surviving today in England and Scotland. Despite legal bans on football in pre-modern Britain, many Shrove Tuesday matches benefited from the support of those in charge, like the bailiff and elders of Duns. Why did some civic institutions and leaders embrace this game in the face of prohibition, and what can this tell us about the social value of football, sport and festivity in the past?

Shrove Tuesday football in Ashbourne, Derbyshire on 9 February 2016. Two games are played every year. One on Shrove Tuesday and the other on Ash Wednesday. Evidence for the tradition may date back as early as 1683. Photo Credit: Taylor Aucoin

‘Football’ in this pre-modern sense refers to a loose family of games where players contested a ball with hand and/or foot, usually towards a goal. As ancestors to our modern football codes (association, rugby, American, etc.), ‘folk football’ matches varied considerably in manner of play. Shrovetide games were often the marquee match-ups of the day, mass games with scores or even hundreds of participants. Whether town versus country, or married against bachelors, teams battled to move the ball through streets and countryside, towards goals like mills, streams, or even the kirk.

Due to its destructive potential, football oft fell afoul of authority. Medieval royal prohibitions called it ‘vain, unthrifty and idle’, while Puritans deemed it ‘a bloody and murdering practise’. But others in power obviously saw its appeal, to judge from its festive sponsorship in many cities and towns. Tudor Chester provides a detailed and prototypical example. Every Shrove Tuesday in the early 16^th century, the Merchant Drapers’ Company received a football from the Shoemakers’ Company, a wooden ball from the Saddlers’ Company, and a small silk ball from each city freeman married within the last year. Under the mayor’s supervision, the Drapers tossed up the balls (which doubled as prizes) for the craftsmen and crowd to play from the common field to the city’s Common Hall.

The particulars of Chester’s Shrovetide sponsorship were mirrored throughout the British Isles. Craftsmen and guilds played key roles as participants and providers of the ball. On Shrove Tuesday 1373, skinners and tailors played in the streets of London, while butchers did the same in Jedburgh 1704. The Skinners’ and Shoemakers’ companies paraded the ball to the match between married and bachelor freemen in late 18^th-century Alnwick. Indeed, leather-workers like shoemakers were especially important, crafting Shrovetide footballs in 15^th-century London, 16^th-century Glasgow and 17^th-century Carlisle.

Newlyweds also fronted the ball in many communities. As in Chester, recently married freemen of Dublin had to present a ball to city magistrates every Shrove Tuesday during the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Newlywed members of trade guilds in Perth and Corfe Castle (Dorset) also paid a Shrovetide ‘football due’, while a similar custom seems to have existed in medieval London. These were part of a broader folk tradition, where new married couples owed a ‘bride ball’ or ‘ball money’ to their community. Since weddings were customary during Shrovetide (and prohibited in Lent), it was an ideal time to collect.

Behind all this, civic governments might collect the ‘wedding ball’ dues, hire drummers and pipers to pump up the crowds, or pay for equipment. Gradually, authorities in most major cities did withdraw their support from Shrovetide football. Some cities like St Andrews simply banned it; in 1537 the burgh provost and university dean cancelled the annual match because of its ‘many ills’ and ‘disorder’. Others ‘reformed’ the games into less dangerous entertainments, like foot and horse races in 1540 Chester, or a public display of the city fire-engine’s capabilities in 1725 Carlisle. By the middle of the 18^th century, officially sanctioned Shrovetide ball games were mostly confined to smaller market towns and villages. But why did official support for an ‘unlawful game’ linger as long as it did?

Carlisle chamberlain account expenses on ‘Shrovetewsday for the plaies’ in 1663, including 12 pence for a football. CRO: CA/4/3, 1 Mar. 1662-3. Credit: Image reproduced with kind permission from Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle.

Partially, sponsorship let officials (somewhat) contain a rowdy game that might happen with or without their consent. Certainly, outright bans were rarely effective, to judge from repeated mayoral ordinances ‘against football play at Shrovetide’ in the streets of Elizabethan London. Yet, the appeal of patronage went beyond social control. The often exclusive participation of guild or burgh members (known as ‘freemen’) in Shrovetide ball games reaffirmed corporate status, with its privileges and obligations. These obligations could include football itself. In January 1590, the shoemaker John Neil was made a ‘burgess’ or freeman of Glasgow in exchange for supplying ‘six good and sufficient footballs’ every Shrove Tuesday during his lifetime.

Failure to participate in or furnish football, via payments of the ‘wedding ball’ for example, could result in imprisonment, heavy fines, or the forced closing of a craftsman’s shop. The goods of maltman Robert Dykes of Rutherglen were distrained in 1626 because he failed to join the rest the burgesses on the town green for the annual Shrovetide match. These harsh consequences reflect the worth of Shrove Tuesday football to these pre-modern communities. To them it was not a ‘vain and idle’ game, but an ‘ancient and laudable custom’ of ‘goodly feats and exercise’. Rather than ‘unthrifty’, its value equated to the ‘benefit of the Company’, and the ‘common wealth of the city’, ideals which civic officials deemed well worth preserving.

May-Dew’s Medicinal Uses: An Early Modern Top Ten List

Posted on May 2, 2019 by merryshrovetide

I suppose that he who would gather the best May-Deaw, for Medicine, should gather it from the Hills.

Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1626)

Yesterday, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh at daybreak to gather May-Dew – an old tradition that from what I could see has mostly fallen into abeyance. For those not in the know, May-Dew is the moisture that collects around dawn during the month of May, but especially on May Day. According to folklore, the dew can convey (variously) luck, beauty and health for the coming year, usually through direct contact with the skin.

These last two ideas about beauty and health first show up on record in the late medieval and early modern period, when, as Francis Bacon’s quote suggests, the medicinal properties of May-Dew were taken quite seriously. To give this old tradition a proper 21st century treatment, here’s a Top Ten List of the Medicinal Uses for May-Dew, pulled from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources.

20190501_062123 — May Day morn atop Arthur’s Seat

Before beginning, we need to know the proper way to gather and prepare May-Dew so that it works effectively. Fortunately, the German surgeon, botanist and alchemist Hieronymous Brunschwig lays this all out in detail in his Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, published in 1500 and translated into English in 1527 as The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes.

According to Brunschwig, one must rise before the dawn on a night in the ‘myddest of maye’ when the moon is almost full and it has not rained. You should find a pasture or field ‘where as growe many flowres’. It should be far from ‘watery places’, but the nearer to ‘the montaynes the better’. Once there, ‘drawe a great linyn clothe’ over the field, wringing the dew out into a glass until you have enough for your purposes. Then, ‘strayne the dew thrughe a fayre lynyn clowte [cloth]’ before distilling it in a glass and setting it out for 30 days in the sun. Now it’s ready to cure what ails you.

TOP TEN MEDICINAL USES FOR MAY-DEW

1. Acne

May-Dew’s curative properties are most often associated with the face and head, and this is evident from the earliest references. Brunschwig explains that May-Dew is useful ‘whan a body hath an unclene hede & spottes in the face’. Wash the face with distilled May-Dew at morning and night, let air dry, and ‘than it wyll go awaye’.

2. Rosacea

According to Brunschwig, the same May-Dew treatment could also cure ‘Guttam roseam’ – a skin condition involving red discoloration of the face, which seems to describe the modern rosacea. He explains that the condition could come from overheating, but also ‘frome hote blode and frome the lyuer’. Since it was sometimes associated with the onset of leprosy, it was not something to write off.

3. Wrinkles

The final use Brunschwig suggests for May-Dew is more cosmetic than strictly medicinal – ridding the face of wrinkles. Washing with the distilled liquid at morning and night should ’causeth a fayre & clene face’.

Page on 'Water of the Maye dewe' in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 — ‘Water of the Maye dewe’ in Hieronymous Brunschwig, *The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes*, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 (Early English Books Online).

4. Small Pox Scars and Redness

Similar to the cures above, Simon Kellwaye wrote in A Short treatise of the small pockes (1593), that May-Dew could help with the ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’.

5. Sore Eyes

Hugh Plat’s Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, printed in 1602, recommends May-Dew for a variety of cosmetic and medicinal treatments. In a section on ‘How to gather and clarifie May-dewe’, which broadly repeats Brunschwig’s advice, he adds:

‘Some commend May-dew gathered from Fennell and Celandine, to be most excellent for sore-eyes’.

Plat_Hugh_Sir-Delightes_for_ladies_to_adorne-STC-19978-1733_06-p93 (4) — ‘How to Gather and Clarifie May-dewe’ in Hugh Plat, *Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters*, 1602 (Early English Books Online)

6. Lesions

Printed in 1659, The Queens closet purportedly contains ‘incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying &c. which were presented unto the queen’, including a method ‘To take away Freckles or Morphew’. A morphew was a skin lesion, but it was nothing that a little May-Dew and tartar couldn’t fix!

Take four spoonfuls of May dew, and one spoonfull of the Oyl of Tartar, mingle them together, and wash the places where the freckles be, and let it dry of it self, it will clear the skin, and take away all foul spots.

7. Gout

In his Natural History of Wiltshire, published in 1691, antiquarian John Aubrey extolled the virtues of May-Dew for relief of gout, something corroborated in contemporary medical treatises.

Maydewe is a very great dissolvent of many things with the sunne that will not be dissolved any other way: which putts me in mind of the rationality of the method used by Wm. Gore, of Clapton, Esq., for his gout, which was to walke in the dewe with his shoes pounced; he found benefit by it.

Aubrey sought further confirmation by telling this story to a surgeon in Shoe Lane, London, who replied that it was indeed ‘the very method and way of curing’ used on Oliver Cromwell for the same ailment.

8. Tooth Ache

May-Dew was also an essential ingredient in Robert Boyle’s remedy ‘for the tooth ach’. Printed in his Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies (1693), it involved sprinkling the dew over a mixture of herbs before putting a few drops of the solution into the afflicted’s ear whilst they chewed some bread.

Boyle_Robert-Medicinal_experiments_or_A_collection-Wing-B3990-1479_14-p154 — ‘For the Tooth-ach’ in Robert Boyle, *Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies for the most part simple and easily prepared, useful in families, and very serviceable to country people*, 1693 (Early English Books Online).

9. Weak Back

Although there aren’t known records of this for the early modern period, by the nineteenth century some believed May Dew could strengthen weak backs, particularly those of sickly children. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published 1808, put it this way:

Great virtue is ascribed to May-dew. Some, who have tender children, particularly on Rude-day [3 May], spread out a cloth to catch the dew, and wet them in it.

10. Pretty Much Anything

Beyond specific ailments, May-Dew was a key ingredient in many recipes, both medicinal and alchemical. For example, the Thesaurus & armamentarium medico-chymicum – written by Adrian von Mynsicht in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in 1682 – called for ‘water made of May-dew gathered from the standing Wheat’ to facilitate his recipe for ‘Pearls Trochiscated’. Apparently, this powerful concoction could cure just about any problem, psychological or physical:

It is a most excellent Comfortative in all affects of the Heart, as Pain, Sorrow, Trembling, Pulsation, Palpitation, defects of the Mind, &c. Also in pains of the Head, Vertigo, Epilepsie, Apoplexy, Palsie, Contractures, resolution of the Nerves, Convulsion, Phrensie, Melancholy, Madness, Gout, and Gouty pains in the Joynts, Consumption, Blasting, the numbness and decay by Age, Stone, Dropsie, Scurvy, French Pox, and Feavers, &c. It purifies the Blood; it comforts all the Senses, Brain, Memory, and Heart, and preserves the whole body sound….

Etc., etc., etc.

And there you have it. If you’ve got a problem, May-Dew’s probably got you covered.

MAY-DEW AND MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Early moderns clearly respected this liquid’s efficacy, and the power the festive year could give them to influence their own lives. It wasn’t just a superstitious practice of the ‘folk’, either. Hieronymous Brunschwig, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle – these were leading thinkers and experts of their respective days. Even the Royal Society commissioned Some observations and experiments upon May-dew in the 1660s. While the division between folklore and learned knowledge certainly increased in the eighteenth century, such a divide was not necessarily so pronounced before this: folk practices could often be grounded – at least in part – in the prevailing learned theories of the day.

Francis Bacon’s own theory about May-Dew, quoted at the top, connected the substance to contemporary discussions on ‘manna’, the Biblical food which nourished the Israelites during their forty years in the desert. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Pope Blount compiled some of these theories, including Bacon’s, into a section called ‘Observations concerning manna’ in his Natural History (1693). Since manna was described in the Bible as arriving with the dew in the night, it was often called the ‘Dew of Heaven’. According to Blount, the substance still collected and congealed on plants and trees. It could be (and was) harvested and used for ‘physick’. Though more plentiful in hotter climes – where dew collected thick throughout the year – it could be found in England too: ‘In those hot Countries it Coagulates, with us it is liquid’.

Blount was building on the ideas of Bacon, who argued that the best manna could be found in Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s boot. Based on the harvesting practices there, where manna was gathered from trees in the mountains but not the valleys, Bacon thought that, in its descent from heaven, manna collected first in the highland areas, and dissipated before it could reach the plants of the valley. He drew the conclusion that it would ‘not be amiss to observe a little better the Dews that fall upon Trees, or Herbs, growing on Mountains’.

Echoing Brunschwig’s advice about collecting ‘nearer…the montaynes’, Bacon suggested the best May-Dew for medicinal purposes would come from the hills, presumably because it mingled with manna from heaven, or was perhaps manna itself. This may also explain the importance of May in this equation, at least in the minds of these thinkers. Since May is the month in northern climes when weather turns warm and dews increase (but do not evaporate too quickly), it would be the best opportunity to soak up powerful manna.

Theorizing aside, I can now say from experience that it was not easy to find and gather May-Dew at the top of Arthur’s Seat (there’s far more of it on the lowland Meadows). But perhaps this is really the point: the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, the more powerful the May-Dew.

Happy Maytide!

Corner Craftsman

Historian Taylor Aucoin

Category Archives: Britain

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The Magiconomy of Early Modern England

Common Wealth Games: Civic Shrove Tuesday Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

May-Dew’s Medicinal Uses: An Early Modern Top Ten List