ABSTRACT
For over 700 years, or so was claimed by local custom, the men of Stamford in Lincolnshire would assemble every 13 November to chase a bull through the streets of the town.2 Shops in the market town were shut, streets were closed and business ground to a halt. It was if, a commentator in 1829 recorded, the town’s populace had ‘licence to cast off all appearance of decency and order, and plunge into every excess of riot, without shame or restraint’.3 But in the new capitalist society where time was money and money was time, this could not be tolerated. The first attempt to ban the bull run was made in 1788 and met with stiff popular resistance. The battle raged for the next fifty years, even after the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act outlawed it. It was only in 1839, due to the presence of a regiment of dragoons and hundreds of special constables that had been sent to Stamford to ensure its suppression, that the bull run finally ended, demonstrating both the depth of popular support for traditional recreation and the lengths to which the authorities would now go to stop them. The Stamford bull run was one of hundreds of traditional recreations that were
often portrayed as part of the bucolic paradise of ‘Merrie England’ in which feudal England was seen as rural idyll of deferential social harmony – allegedly the field from which the bull run began was originally provided to the town by the Fifth Earl of Surrey.4 These traditional games included animal-baiting of various kinds, stick and ball games (with the partial exception of golf) and football. They were rarely played for commercial gain despite their undoubted popularity, had little in the way of rules – still less governing bodies – and were staged usually during festivals or holidays.5
