Recalling his schoolboy days in Dornoch at the beginning of the 19th century, the Scottish minister Donald Sage wrote that cockfighting ‘took precedence over all…other amusements’ during the month of February. Students spent weeks preparing for the tournament, and on the appointed day the Highland town’s judicial courtroom became a battleground over the rights to a special throne:
Highest honours were awarded to the youth whose bird had gained the greatest victories; he was declared king, while he who came next to him, by the prowess of his feathered representative, was associated in the dignity under the title of queen. Any bird that would not fight when placed on the stage was called a “fugie,” and became the property of the master […] A day was appointed for the coronation, and the ladies in the town applied their elegant imaginations to devise […] crowns for the royal pair. When the coronation day arrived [and the king and queen of cocks crowned…] a procession then began at the door of the schoolhouse, where we were all ranged by the master in our several ranks, their majesties first, their life-guards next, and then the “Trojan throng,” two and two, and arm in arm. The town drummer and fifer marched before us and gave note of our advance, in strains which were intended to be both military and melodious. After the procession was ended, the proceedings were closed by a ball and supper in the evening.
According to the editor of Sage’s memoirs, such celebrations were pervasive in schools of eighteenth-century Scotland and usually happened on Fastern’s E’en (Shrove Tuesday), or Candlemas (2 February) in the Western Highlands.
All this calls into question a certain trope (both scholarly and popular), that pre-Lent Carnival was either absent or substantially weaker in premodern Britain, lacking the social inversion (i.e. the topsy-turvy), street pageantry and mock monarchs found elsewhere in Europe during that season. While I would argue against defining (premodern) Carnival in terms of inversion or particular customs in the first place (a little more on that here), such claims look downright spurious in light of Scotland’s extravagant cockfighting ceremonies.
Moreover, similar pre-Lent customs were widespread in Britain during the medieval and early modern periods. They featured two merry monarchs of February – the Candlemas King and Rex Gallorum (i.e. King of the Cocks/Roosters) – who have been rather overshadowed by other festive royals, like your Christmas Lords of Misrule or Queens of May.
In this post I’ll try to give these calendrical crowned-heads their due, reviewing their history, powers and prerogatives, and what it all can tell us about ‘social inversion’ – a concept often used to describe premodern festive customs, but one rarely explored beyond vague and potted gestures to ‘the world-turned-upside-down’.
Shrovetide Victors, Captains and Rex Gallorum
Shrove Tuesday cockfighting is attested in English schools as early as the 12th century, but evidence for the pageantry surrounding it first appears two centuries later. During the 14th and 15th centuries, Merton College, Oxford provided cocks for young students ad Carniprivium (during Shrovetide), with monetary reward going to ‘the victor’. As in Dornoch centuries later, it’s likely this champion was paraded around in a procession, like the below depiction from Flemish manuscript marginalia dating to c.1340. By the early Tudor period, these pageants were widespread enough for new school foundations in London and Manchester to specifically ban ‘Cock-fightinge [and] ridinge about of Victorye’.
Bodleian Library: MS 264, fo. 89r. Photo Credit: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
Our first Scottish evidence dates to 1415, when St Andrews University permitted grammar school cockfighting to continue, but reduced the proceedings from ‘three or four weeks’ to the last two or three days of Shrovetide. Moreover, it was decreed that ‘students should no longer have a victor during Lent who could pardon the punishments of students’. This hints at just how extended the Carnival season could be and provides the earliest evidence of the cockfighting champion’s powers.
Despite such attempts to prohibit or reform Shrovetide excesses, many early modern grammar schools (new and old) preserved the privileges, incorporating the ‘cockpenny’ directly into the schoolmaster’s dues so he could facilitate the cockfighting match each year. In the late 17th-century West Country, antiquarian John Aubrey could still observe the Shrovetide Victor going ‘thro ye streetes in triumph’ and saving ‘what Boy he pleases from Whipping’ during Lent. Such customs endured in older grammar schools of the north, midlands and southwest of England until the 19th century, when cockfighting was finally made illegal.
North of the border the Victor was even more widespread and entrenched. At ‘Fastrensevin’ 1664, for example, the Laird of Glenorchy paid for his boys to set ‘down their coaks in the school’ in Perth, with a payment following ‘to the trumpeter that went abowt the towne with them’. In 1746, expenses for the education of Lord Lovat’s son Archibald in Inverness included ‘a guinea to the Schoolmaster when King at the Cockfight’. So ingrained was this custom that Robert Blau, a schoolmaster from Edinburgh, concluded his 1696 book of Latin and English orations with one on the subject, complete with a grandiose song and Latin inauguration for the ‘Rex Gallorum’.
Unsurprisingly, details varied considerably across locales. In some places, students were divided into two camps, each headed by a ‘captain’. Whichever side fielded the victorious rooster, that captain led a grand parade back to their own house for a banquet. Elsewhere, in towns along the Anglo-Scottish border, the victorious captain might have to supply a football to their classmates. In others still, the schoolmaster provided the post-tournament football, feast, or punchbowl. This diversity was perhaps most pronounced in the Scottish Lowlands, where the Rex Gallorum of Fastern’s E’en shared jurisdiction with the separate but similar Candlemas King.
Candlemas Kings
The Statistical Account of St Andrews and its burgh school in 1795 gives some measure of this mock monarch:
The scholars, in general, pay at least 5 s. a-quarter, and a Candlemas gratuity, according to their rank and fortune, from 5 s. even as far as 5 guineas, when there is a keen competition for the Candlemas crown. The king, i. e. He who pays most, reigns for 6 weeks, during which period he is not only intitled to demand an afternoon’s play for the scholars once a-week, but he has also the royal privilege of remitting all punishments.
Similarities to the Rex Gallorum are obvious, and also extended to pageantry. In Jedburgh, for example, the teachers presented the king with a football which became ‘a source of amusement to the whole pupils for several weeks afterwards’, with students ‘marching in procession through the town with a gilded ball on the top of a pole’.
Our earliest known evidence of the custom dates to January 1634, when a young Alexander Campbell wrote from Dundee to his uncle, Laird of Glenorchy, asking for money ‘to make me king in the school at Candlemas’. Historians have tentatively traced such gratuities back to ‘bleeze [blaze] money’, a payment annually given to the school, on top of tuition, towards candle or fire provision. But at best we can say the King was a product of an idiosyncratic premodern education system where the teacher’s living was largely dependent on customary gifts, coupled with the unique Scottish quarter-days, of which Candlemas was one. There is no evidence of Candlemas Kings elsewhere in Britain, i.e. where Candlemas was not a quarter-day.
Given the similarities between the two, and the preponderance of cockfighting kings outside Lowland Scotland, it’s tempting to see the Candlemas King as a less controversial, and more lucrative adaptation of the Rex Gallorum. But evidence from the 17th century points to coexistence rather than outright replacement. Robert Blau’s publication, for example, contains an additional ‘Inaugural Oration of the Victor, at Candlemas’, alongside the aforementioned ‘Inauguratio Regis Gallorum’ at Shrove Tuesday. To avoid redundancy, perhaps the king was attached to one or the other occasion based on local custom. What we can say with more certainty is that the Candlemas King followed his Shrovetide co-ruler into oblivion over the course of the 19th century, gradually falling prey to educational reform.
Gallorum Rex Crown, from Dyke in Morayshire, Scotland (likely 19th century). Photo courtesy of Highland Folk Museum, High Life Highland.
Unpacking the Social Inversion of Festive Monarchs
Mock monarchs like the Victor or Candlemas King were common features of festive culture in medieval and early modern Europe and prime examples of social inversion – the temporary flattening or flipping of hierarchies in an otherwise very stratified society.
Scholars often use ‘social inversion’ to label a wide array of topsy-turvy motifs and practices which pervaded both everyday life and festive occasions in premodern Europe. But at best ‘social inversion’ is a theoretical grab-bag, stuffed with concepts that are not always clearly defined, distinguished, or contextualised (e.g. norm reversal, subversion, transgression, opposition, levelling, misrule, carnivalesque, licensed disorder, safety-valve, etc). Before it can be of much explanatory value, it needs unpacking. So what, specifically, was going on with this particular ‘inversion of norms’?
First, it’s worth looking at how the mock ruler came to power. Festive inversion is often associated with freedom and egalitarianism, with mock monarchs ostensibly elected through popular vote, lottery, or merit. For instance, you could say the cockfighting Victor got his crown through both merit and lottery: breeding and selecting gamecocks was a skill, while the match would have an element of chance. Yet, inevitably, a wealthy student would have better access to gamecocks than his poorer classmates. Such inequalities were also at play when students popularly elected their own ‘captain’, for this was invariably based on the ‘known ability of his father to furnish…a feast if required’. Bribes for the Candlemas crown, of course, did away with all egalitarian pretences.
Candlemas gratuities also point a big finger towards the motivations of authorities. Historians often discuss official attitudes to festive inversions in terms of ‘licensed disorder’, with authorities supposedly allowing them as a ‘safety-valve’ to ensure social control in the long run. But there’s little evidence that schoolmasters needed such a rationale for a custom that benefitted them financially and materially. Those justifications which do survive speak more to broader pedagogical and societal goals than to strategies for maintaining classroom order.
Robert Blau, for instance, surmised that Shrovetide cockfights ‘beget, in young Students, great Spirits; and drive them…on a vigorous prosecution of Learning, or to military Bravery’. Likewise, his oration for the ‘King, or Victor in the School’ extolled the ‘antiquity, usefulness and excellency’ of monarchy, claiming that the position would be a lesson in good and just rule. Such training in paternalism was, of course, intended specifically for ‘well disposed young Gentlemen’ via the ‘generous bounty of [their] Parents’. Alexander Campbell spoke directly to these underlying issues of status and hierarchy in 1634, when he told his uncle that £20 should suffice to make him king, ‘seing ther is no mor gentill men sonnes in ye school’.
For those in power, these Carnival privileges did not merely establish some vague control over lower orders through temporary festive release, but pointedly promoted genteel paternalism, militaristic bravado, and leadership skills – particularly in the wealthy classes – all the while desensitizing future leaders to acts of cruelty. All this seems especially significant in the context of burgeoning empire from the 17th to 19th centuries.
But what of the other side of the coin? Did students gain any real power for themselves through this festive inversion of norms? Unlike some of the more well-known mock rulers of premodern Europe (e.g. Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason), our School Kings were children, rather than adults. This did not necessarily cap their capacity for transgression – the related festive custom of ‘barring out’, for example, could see an armed and bloody takeover of the school during the Carnival season. But being children did limit the societal reach of their transgressive or subversive acts, more than those of adults or youths appointed to preside over festivities in some communities or households. The subversive potential of the latter festive lords sprang from their rowdy and sometimes violent antics, or their ability to speak truth to power through satire and comedy. Adolescent school kings obviously lacked that kind of reach, but in some ways their powers were far more potent to the parties involved.
For young boys, the king’s ability to command free-time, or the ‘liberty of playing’ would be no small matter. Nor should we ever underestimate the fact that kings could ‘rescue Delinquents from punishment’. To adults, corporal punishment was a largely accepted part of education in premodern Europe, but we should not assume children ‘accepted’ or were complicit in the physical and emotional abuse to which they were subjected. These high stakes come through vividly and poignantly in a letter from George Murray to his father, written in Perth, March 1710:
When I was in the School this forenoon there was a Grandsone of Ledy Rollo’s who was whipt, and I, by the privaledge I received at Candlemis, went to protect him, but the School M[aster] would not allow me, & when I asked him why I might not doe it as well as formour Kings, he answered that it was he gave the privaledg & he could take it away again, & I told him that it woud be an afront : he answered that he would not alow me to doe it, & ordred me to sit down […] After he had don me the afront I resined al the privaledges I had.
So anguished was young George by this ‘afront’, that he begged his father to ‘let me stay no longer at School’. His rather moving stand against perceived injustice (and dishonour) speaks not only to the limits of the School King’s powers, but also how meaningful these powers could be to students.
Historians have tended to measure the radical or conservative nature of festive inversion in terms of systemic change or even revolution. Not only is this an unrealistic expectation to place on any cultural phenomenon in isolation, but it can also obscure more subtle power dynamics. It’s unlikely that George Murray harboured any revolutionary designs, but I doubt that mattered much to his beleaguered classmate, who in other circumstances might have been spared the pain of corporal punishment by his Carnival King.
