ABSTRACT
If one fact above all others is evident from the foregoing review of English sport over four centuries it is that no sport can be insulated from the wider society in which it is played, and yet we have also seen that it has been common from the earliest times for gentlemen to use their recreations as badges of social and physical superiority over the lower order. 'What's a Gentleman but his pleasure?' rings as true in 1995 as it did in 1595, I but if we accept the conclusion of William FitzStephen in the twelfth century that all sport derives from a basic human inclination to playfulness then we must ask why the evolution of English sport has largely maintained the social and cultural differentials of so long ago.
