Women as Athletes in Early Modern Britain
- Women as Athletes in Early Modern Britain
Voltaire reports that on his arrival in England in 1726, he attended a sporting festival by the River Thames, at Greenwich in Kent. Two racecourses had been marked out and two poles erected; on the top of one a large hat was hung, and a woman’s chemise floated from the other. He fancied that he had been transported to the Olympic Games. There were to be horse races and footraces for men, but, he writes,
I was agreeably surprised when I heard that there was to be a race for the girls as well, and that, besides the purse, which was to be the winner’s prize, the chemise was to be given to the best runner among the girls and the hat to the best runner among the men.1
Others might not have been so surprised. Young women had run in competitive footraces each year in Kent, probably starting as early as 1639. Elsewhere in Britain, after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, there are accounts of women engaging in footracing, pitching the bar, playing football, cricket, and fighting on a public stage, not merely for their own pleasure, but in public competitions for wagers, challenges, or prizes, including money.
Sir Dudley Digges, who died in Kent in 1638, made a series of unusual charitable provisions in a codicil to his will, that included footraces for the local poor to celebrate his birthday every May 19: [End Page 42]
a young man and a young maiden of good conversation between the ages of 16 and 24 and these two young men and the two young Maidens on the 19th shall run a Tye at Chilham and the young man and also the young Maid that shall prevail shall each have £10.2
The decision about which young men and women would run was made by a panel of local worthies, who established separate qualifying races on May 1 at Chilham, and at Sheldwich Lees, about 8.5 miles (13.6 km) apart. The deciding races on May 19 were held at Old Wives Lees, in the parish of Chilham. Digges clearly did not believe that the young women deserved any less than young men, so he awarded the winners the same prize-money, £10, equal in purchasing power to £1,382 in 2014.3
Some twenty years later, on June 11, 1661, the Edinburgh newspaper Mercurius Caledonius announced the following:
six brewster wives, great with childe, are to run from the Thicket Burn to the top of Arthur Seat, for a groaning cheese of one hundred pounds weight, and a budgell of Dunkel aquavitæ, and a rumpkine of Brumsweek mum for the second, set down by a Dutch midwife. The next day after, sixteen fish-wives are to trot from Muslburgh to the Cannon-cross, for twelve pair of lambs harrigals.4
On April 14 1667, in London, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:
by and by away home, and there took out my wife, and the two Mercers, and two of our mayds, Barker and Jane, and over the water to the Jamaica House, where I never was before, and there the girls did [End Page 43] run for wagers over the bowling-green; and there, with much pleasure, spent little, and so home, and they home.5
And in 1681, the Rev. Oliver Heywood reported on a “strange unheard of race” for a “holland shift” on Karsey [Kersal] Moor, near Manchester, Lancashire, “run by 3 or 4 women stark naked only their privitys covered with a rag, amongst many thousands of people, oh unparaleld impudence!”6 The idea of this being “a strange unheard of race” is echoed about the same date in an anonymous Yorkshire ballad: “Sure such a race was never seen.”7 The ballad tells of a race run on Temple Newsham Green [Temple Newsam] in the West Riding of Yorkshire, run by “Four Virgins that supposed were.” In July 1696, as part of a horse-race meeting, men ran for a tumbler near Ormskirk in Lancashire, and women ran for a “Smock of one Guinea value, and a Guinea in...
