Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Beginning of Boxing in Britain, 1300–1700

2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21558450.48.2.12

2155-8450

Mike Huggins,

Doping in Sports

Books about boxing, a form of competition based on blows with the fist, have been published regularly over the past two hundred years. The British Library, for example, currently lists over 1,400 works held there, including solid academic works by writers such as Kasia Boddy, Dennis Brailsford, Elliott Gorn, and Jeffrey Sammons. Boxing aficionados also have the International Boxing Research Organization, founded in 1982 with the hope of establishing a more accurate history of boxing by application of the rules of scholarly research. The vast bulk of this research focuses on “modern” boxing, the history of “pugilism/prizefighting,” or fist fighting in the ancient world. Articles and book reviews referring to boxing in the Journal of Sport History have followed a similar pattern.Arly Allen's book, however, tackles a very different and very challenging topic. He sets out to explore the beginnings of boxing in Britain over the period between 1300 and 1700 CE, although with some references forward and backward in time. Allen's background is in scholarly publishing, but, since retirement, he has turned to the study of boxing history, writing a 2017 book on heavyweight champion Jess Willard and several articles.Adopting this longue durée approach is challenging. Very little has been written on this topic in this way. Sources in print are fewer in number and need very careful handling. Conclusions and hypotheses can often only be tentative, given the limited previous research and the expertise in medieval life and textual criticism required. As Henning Eichberg and others have argued, sports such as boxing are all particular to a specific society and time, and so many apparent similarities are only superficial. Many activities are likely to have been in practice and in principle very different in their cultural meanings.Despite such caveats, there is much that is useful in the book. It employs a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including material from medieval manuscripts. Allen has clearly read widely, including material in the leading sports history journals. His notes are detailed, and the bibliography includes around 400 items. In defining “sport,” he draws partially on Norbert Elias, but more generally conceptualizes it as “play with rules” (43) and understands that the word meant different things in different times. He understands the limitations of his evidence. For example, he accepts that, in his discussions of how boxing might have emerged from activities such as wrestling, fencing, or disordered brawls, he can only offer hypotheses, although, as he points out, “until about 1550 boxing was viewed as a variant of wrestling” (10). His use of phrases such as “I believe,” “we have indications,” or “possible antecedents” help readers here. For example, he “suspects” that boxers were training for bouts as early as the 1300s (107). He is good on early boxing language and the meanings of terms such as “box,” “cuff,” “pommel,” and “buffet,” which were being used more commonly by the end of the sixteenth century. The term “buffet” was initially an early form of fist combat, where fighters stood toe to toe, each hitting the other savagely with the fist in ordered turn.Allen is also good on the cultural meanings of early boxing's rituals and rules: the issues of challenges, establishing a location, the making of a ring, the formal parade to the ring, stripping before the fight, why the fighters shake hands, the establishment of rounds, and why a boxing match became called a “prize fight.”The book contains nine relatively short, very readable chapters. Overall, the first four chapters, which focus on the links with wrestling, the beginnings of boxing, early boxers, and early rules, are the strongest. Boxing began in a range of ways, initially closely tied to wrestling, sometimes linked to criminal activity or undertaken by peasants as fighting and assaults began to shift away from the use of weapons. Only later did it become a sport supported by the kings and aristocracy. He stresses the important connections between wagering and boxing, and, in Chapter 9, he explores the legal standing of prize-fighting.Some chapters seem less convincing than others. Chapter 5, on possible links between working-class boxing, judicial duels, and the duel of honor is speculative, lacking clear evidence. He suggests that boxing and fair play helped Englishmen avoid the revolutions common to France, Italy, and Germany during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and made England one of the safest countries in the world. Such claims were often made by boxing's supporters, but academic experts on the period offer far more complex, nuanced explanations. The claim that Britain was one of the safest countries in the world at that time also lacks substantiation. He suggests too that modern boxing began in England as an outgrowth of the native English sense of fair play. But, “fair play” then had very different meanings, was closely tied to betting, and any rule weaknesses were sometimes deliberately ruthlessly exploited.Nonetheless, given the lack of material currently on early modern boxing, Allen's book offers a useful launching point for more detailed study.