Blood Sport and Ritual

Beyond hunting, the peoples of early modern Europe also practised various kinds of ritualised animal abuse, often invoked for purposes of religious observance, social condemnation or simple entertainment.

The range of such acts defies full accounting, but to take one species as an example, cats were tormented in different places and in different ways for all the above reasons. In Catholic nations like France they were often tortured to death - thrown into bonfires or crushed on the ground or torn to pieces or buried alive - to mark the passage of church festivals like Mardi Gras and St John's Eve, or to ensure various kinds of spiritual protection. In Protestant countries like England, they were sometimes burned or otherwise abused as a parody of these Catholic practices, while in the popular shaming processions called charivaris or Katzenmusik, wherein crowds would mock unpopular neighbours by shouting and banging on basins, the participants would sometimes ‘pass... around a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl'. Elsewhere, cats were brutalised for no reason other than to gratify the inherent sadism of the human species; as Richard Braithwaite (1615) cheerfully inquires, ‘Set out a Pageant, whoo'l not thither runne, / As twere to whip the cat at Abington?' - this pastime apparently being popular enough to serve as an injoke for Braithwaite's audience.^{^[843]}

But cats were not the only domestic species singled out for abuse. Dogs were bred for fighting from classical times onwards. Cockfighting, already popular in ancient Greece, remained widespread throughout early modern Europe, and was justified not only as delightful but also as morally instructive, combining sweetness and usefulness in the approved Horatian manner. Thus George Wilson exhorts readers to ‘call to mind the inuincible courage of these unreasonable creatures' lest we ‘which are men, indued with wisedom and understanding...

shew more cowardise and faint hearted timorousnesse, then these silly fowles of the aire haue done'.^{^[844]} Less edifying and more plebeian in character was the English sport of cock throwing, wherein the bird was tied to a stake or buried neck-deep in the ground while gamesters threw brickbats at it until it was dead. Keith Thomas declares that on Shrove Tuesday this practice proved ‘almost universal', but it was in decline by the mid 1700s, when William Hogarth illustrated it in the first engraving of his series The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Also associated with Shrove Tuesday, the sport of goose pulling was practised in Britain but proved more lasting among the Dutch, Flemish and Germans. In this nauseating exercise a live goose was dangled upside down from a high horizontal rope or branch, and ‘[a]s he sw[ung] in the air, a set of young people [would] ride one after another, full speed, under the rope, and rising in the stirrups, catch at the animal's head, which [was] close clipped and well soaped, in order to elude the grasp'.^{^[845]} The victor carried off the bird's head in his hand.

Wild species were subject to similar attentions. The princes of the Holy Roman Empire, for instance, favoured Kampfjagden - large-scale animal baitings inspired by the staged beast battles of ancient Rome and pitting bears, stags, wolves and other species against one another. King Frederick I of Prussia (r. 1701-13) so delighted in these events that ‘he had a medal struck with his image on one side and the arena used for his Kampfjagden on the other'. Equally popular was the pastime of fox tossing, in which

two persons standing about 20 or 25 ft apart [held] the ends of slings made of webbing or cord [whose] centre lay slack on the ground. As the terrified animals were driven across the arena, the tossers [tossers indeed] pulled the ends jerking the animals high into the air. The ground was covered with sawdust or sand so as not to kill the wretched beasts too quickly.

One such event, staged in Dresden by Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony (r. 1694-1733), annihilated 687 foxes, 533 hares, 54 badgers and 12 wildcats; another, hosted in Vienna in 1672 by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r. 1658-1705), ended with the emperor himself joining ‘the court dwarves and small boys in delivering the coup de grace to the tossed foxes by clubbing them to death'.^{^[846]}

For the most part, these practices did not travel abroad, remaining bound instead to their places of origin. However, there were exceptions. The charivari migrated to colonial North America, albeit mostly without animal abuse. The Dutch carried goose pulling to New Amsterdam, where the director general, Pieter Stuyvesant, condemned it in 1656 as ‘unprofitable, heathenish, and pernicious'. Yet despite such censure, the sport relocated to the southern United States, where it continued well into the nineteenth century.^{^[847]} And in the case of cockfighting, influence ran backwards, from the colonies to the colonial homelands. Practised independently for centuries in Asia, the sport had there developed distinctive forms, including the use of curved slashing

spurs affixed to the cock's legs, where they could inflict bloodier, less immediately deadly injuries than those dealt by the pointed spurs traditional in Europe. Thus, thanks to the growing reticulum of colonial commerce, by the early 1700s fashion-conscious Londoners could enjoy the novelty of cockfights ‘fought with Sickles, after the East India manner'.^{^[848]}

Among European blood sports, however, the two most iconic, and most successfully exported, were bullfighting and bear-baiting. These activities having already spawned a substantial literature,^{^[849]} we may limit ourselves here to some brief comparisons. Both sports seem to have developed from a combination of indigenous customs and the ancient Roman beast combats known as venationes, although other practices such as the bull slaying associated with Mithraism may also have exerted influence.

Both sports emerged as distinct activities during the Middle Ages, the earliest recorded bullfights appearing at royal weddings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, while the Domesday Book notes that during the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66) the city of Norwich ‘furnished annually one Bear to the King, and six dogs for the baiting of it'.^{^[850]} During the sixteenth century both sports grew in popularity and came to be viewed as expressions of distinctive national cultures, respectively Iberian and British. Royal bullfights remained ‘rare' until ‘the age of Charles V and Philip II', at which time ‘they became a standard part of every type of [Spanish] royal celebration', while, across the English Channel, ‘not only Henry VIII and James I, but Elizabeth I, too, [were] particularly fond of bear-baiting'. From their emergence, too, both sports have existed in ambiguous relation to a series of cognate pastimes: the classic corrida de toros merges with such activities as non-lethal toreos comicos and local encierros like the running of the bulls at Pamplona, while bear-baiting shares a family resemblance not only with the baiting of other animals, especially bulls and badgers, but also with the practice of whipping blind bears for postperformance entertainment in the early modern English theatre.^{^[851]}

The sports differ in some ways too, of course. Whereas bear-baiting has always maintained the same general form - with the bear tied to a stake and worried by five or six large dogs - the rules of bullfighting underwent a major transformation in the 1700s, as the old form of the contest - in which the bull confronted a lance-wielding nobleman mounted on horseback - yielded to the now familiar spectacle of a pedestrian matador dispatching the beast with cape and sword. The emergence in the mid 1700s of the modern bullfighting spectacle - associated with the career of Francisco Romero (1700-63) - marked a plebeianisation of the sport, a turn away from its aristocratic origins.^{^[852]}

Likewise, bear-baiting differs from bullfighting as to the history of its legal suppression.

Opposition to bear-baiting in England first emerged in the 1500s as a feature of the Puritan social agenda, and over the coming centuries it gained ground until, in 1835, Parliament finally prohibited the pastime.^{^[853]} Bullfighting, by contrast, has continued mostly unsuppressed in Spain and Portugal, a fact sometimes cited to the disparagement of Catholicism. In fact, however, the Catholic Church's policy on bullfighting proved inconsistent in everything save its self-interest. On one hand, prelates like Archbishop Tomas de Villanueva (1488-1555) denounced the sport, and Pope Pius V prohibited it in his 1567 bull De salutis gregis domini - albeit ‘not for its abuse of other animals', but because of its alleged ‘reduction of human male behaviour to animal behaviour'. On the other hand, when Pius's bull reached Spain, churchmen there defended the sport in print, and Villaneuva's 1685 canonisation festival included bullfights. In truth, ‘the connection between the corrida and Catholicism is an old one', providing religious houses with ‘an integral and lucrative part of [their] finances',^{^[854]} so when conflict arose between sacred principle and worldly income, the latter of course prevailed. Pius's prohibition was gradually abandoned.

The export of these pastimes was principally to the Spanish and English colonies of the New World. By the 1700s bullfighting was established in Spanish America, with Mexico City emerging as the sport's New World capital. Mexico's first permanent bullring opened there in 1788, and two years later the Spanish accession of Carlos IV occasioned corridas in more than a dozen Mexican cities and towns. At roughly the same time, bearbaiting took hold in British North America. One British visitor to New York, for instance, recorded the following encounter with a chained bear at Ranelagh Garden in 1767:

I took the liberty of taking Bruin by the ears, which he instantaneously resented by making a snatch and bite at my right leg: but I luckily sprung clear of him, and thought myself exceedingly well off with a good silk stocking torn, the calf of my leg much scarified... But Bruin did not reign long, for a few days after he made a more successful snatch at a black Boy, who he killed on the spot, and was the next minute shot through the head.²

Over the centuries that followed bear-baiting would be increasingly restricted in North America (although it continued until recent years in parts of South Carolina). Likewise, restrictions on bullfighting have grown widespread on both sides of the Atlantic in the past fifty years.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

Blood Sport and Ritual

More on the topic Blood Sport and Ritual: