ABSTRACT
The 1820s and 1830s saw the decline of the eighteenth-century model of sport. It no longer commanded the same intense interest from its aristocratic patrons. The Fancy ebbed away, the conspicuously extravagant wagers of the cricketing nobility dried up and the boxing halls were emptied of their titled spectators. Later commentators and some historians have ascribed the decline in the fortunes of sport to increasing corruption in sport. But there is no evidence that corruption was significantly worse in the post-Napoleonic era than it had been before it.2
Horse racing was never free of sharp practice in the late eighteenth century – in 1791 Sam Chiffney, the Prince of Wales’s jockey had been barred from Newmarket under suspicion of fixing races. Jack Broughton’s original boxing amphitheatre had closed following accusations that he had thrown a fight in which his patron, the Duke of Cumberland, had lost £10,000. Cricketers regularly bet on themselves and against each other, leaving room for considerable doubt about the transparency of the contest, especially in single-wicket matches. ‘Cheating, in every kind of “sport”, is as completely in the common order of things in England amongst the highest classes as the lowest,’ wrote a German visitor to England in the 1820s.3
