Sports and recreations of Kentish genetlemen 1700-1900

Fairley, Michael, 1937-2023

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Summary

Living, working and leisure life in Kent during the 1700s and 1800s was very different to that of the 20th and 21st century. Previous books in the 'Kent's Untold History' series have looked at the county's history of crime and punishment, at stagecoach travel and the growth of coaching inns, and at music hall and theatre over the past one, two or three hundred years.This book explores the sporting and leisure activities of the county's noblemen, the nouveaux riche landed gentry, the farmers, agricultural workers and country folk, and the new generations of tradesmen and businessmen in the county's towns and villages. Although there were still extremes of poverty and wealth, this was an age when (old and new) sports, leisure, recreation and all kinds of public spectacles and indoor amusements were coming to the fore.Even from the middle 1700s onwards there were major public gatherings, with large crowds attending big bank holiday horse racing meetings on Barham Downs and Cox Heath; rather smaller crowds would be found at town and village cricket matches, while attendances in the many hundreds might be found at public house cock fights, at pigeon shoots, hare coursing on the Kent marshes and later, at football and tennis. Big bare-knuckle boxing matches, watched by thousands of excited (gambling) fans, were most commonly held in large London venues where entrance fees could pay for prize money of up to one or two thousand pounds.