Abstract
This chapter is made up of three previously unpublished texts on processes of 'sportisation', mainly in eighteenth-century and ninenteenth-century England. The first draws upon various editions of Stonehenge's Manual of British Rural Sports to demonstrate the gradual transition from the dominance of 'field sports' like foxhunting to that of modern sports like football. The second fragment deals with the development of cricket and the impact of the specific figuration of social class on that process. The thrid piece sketches out ideas for a book on sports that Elias planned to write but never completed.
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Notes
- 1.
Stonehenge (pseud. of J. H. Walsh), Manual of British Rural Sports (London: Routledge, 1856), subsequently published in many revised editions.—eds.
- 2.
John Henry Walsh (1810–88) was born in Hackney, London, practiced for twenty years as a surgeon and was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Like [Henry] Mayhew [London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861–2] in another sphere, Walsh devoted part of his time to the study of aspects of English social life which had hardly been recorded. He travelled all over the country in order to observe and to study rural sports. It had been, as he said in the preface to the first edition of his Manual of British Rural Sports, the amusement of his leisure hours for the last twenty years to master the arcania of the several rural sports peculiar to Great Britain. He himself had been greatly retarded in his studies by the fact that in many cases he could not find any treatises giving minute instructions about the customs governing these sports and he tried to remedy this deficiency.
In 1853 he published a book on The Greyhound (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans), which became a standard book on that subject and went through many editions. He joined the staff of The Field and became its editor at the close of 1857. In 1861 he published The Horse in the Stable and the Field (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge). Although Walsh was genuinely interested in all the forms of sport he could discover—including popular sports—horse racing, shooting and greyhound racing were among his special interests. This itself is not uncharacteristic of the different emphasis in what was regarded as sport at this time. Although he was a surgeon and was very conscious of health problems, he never ceased to regard sport primarily as a diversion, or as he himself put it as an ‘amusement’. It was characteristic of the increase in the number and diversity of sports that developed their own organisations and regulations during the second part of the nineteenth century that, as he himself noted, although he had been well able to produce the first edition of the Manual largely on the basis of the knowledge he himself had acquired during the previous years, many chapters of later editions were written by members of the staff of The Field who were specialists in a particular branch of sport.
- 3.
Blain quite definitely regarded handball as the earlier game from which football was derived by a convention which allowed players to play with the feet as well as the hands: ‘Was it’, he wrote (p. 131), ‘that the ball might never be unengaged, and that its Protean qualities might never terminate, that it became to be propelled as well by the feet as the hands and then engaged attention as football?’ [It seems likely that Elias himself mixes up handball and rugby or other earlier forms of (folk) football here.—eds.].
- 4.
As noted above, Elias’s essay on foxhunting was published under the slightly confusing title of ‘An essay on sport and violence’, in Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, pp. 150–73.—eds.
- 5.
Blain, Encyclopaedia, p. 552.
- 6.
Stonehenge, Manual, 1856, p. 152.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 203.
- 8.
Elias wrote London, but apparently means Liverpool, where the National Coursing Club was formed. The Waterloo Cup coursing event was run at Great Altcar, some miles north of the city. Elias was generally aware of that, as the ‘Plan’ proves (see below), but might have mixed it up here with London as home of the Marylebone Cricket Club.—eds.
- 9.
Stonehenge, Manual, 1856.
- 10.
See Elias, The Court Society (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 2]).—eds.
- 11.
See Elias, Appendix, ‘The emergence of the modern natural sciences (c. 1925–6), in Early Writings (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 1]), pp. 111–23.—eds.
- 12.
No parts have been left out. The manuscript continues directly with this headline ‘Summing up and Conclusion’. Points A and B are not addressed here, but strongly resemble the first parts of ‘The genesis of sport as a sociological problem, part 1’ (Elias, in Quest, pp. 107–11).—eds.
- 13.
The so-called Book of Sports was a proclamation King James VI of Scotland and I of England issued nationally in 1618, and reissued by Charles I in 1633. It listed the sports and recreations that were permitted on Sundays and other holy days.—eds.
- 14.
Such a separate leaf could not be found in the archive.—eds.
- 15.
Nicholas Cox, The Gentleman’s Recreation, in four parts: (viz.) hunting , hawking, fowling, fishing/Collected from ancient and modern authors forrein and domestick, and rectified by the experience of the most skillful artists of these times (London: E. Flesher, 1674).—eds.
- 16.
Thomas Fairfax, The Compleat Sportsman: Or Country Gentleman’s Recreation (London: J. Cooke, 1758).—eds.
- 17.
Thomas Egerton, Earl of Wilton, On The Sports and Pursuits of the English: As bearing upon their National Character (London: Harrison, 1868).—eds.
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Elias, N. (2018). Fragments on Sportisation. In: Haut, J., Dolan, P., Reicher, D., Sánchez GarcÃa, R. (eds) Excitement Processes. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_5
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