ABSTRACT
On Thursday 3 October 1751, the Whitehall Evening Post reported a ‘remarkable Trial of Manhood’ that had recently taken place in St James’s Park, ‘between two Cripples, who had but one Leg between them both’. One of them was a ‘black’, who finding himself ‘unable to sustain the violent strokes of his Antagonist’s Right Fist’, managed, ‘by the Assistance of the Bystanders’ to get rid of his ‘two tottering wooden supporters, and manfully fought on his stumps’. After an ‘obstinate and bloody’ contest that lasted ‘near a Quarter of an hour’, in which ‘they alternately received several severe Falls’, the fight was eventually settled ‘in favour of the African’. 1 Strikingly similar contests between black and white ‘cripple beggars’ were recorded again in London in April 1761 and Bristol in 1782 where, after ‘the African proving too strong for the European’, the combatants shook hands and a ‘congress was appointed at a neighbouring gin shop where all disputes were amicably settled’. 2
