Shrovetide Sports: Sponsorship of Festive Culture in Post-Reformation Britain

On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, numerous festive customs which adorned the British ritual year were sponsored by civic bodies or co-opted as fundraising tools by parish authorities. Over the course of reformations of religion and manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many of these festive traditions were discontinued as “papist” holidays were condemned or official approval and financial support was withdrawn. However, through adaptation and evolution some customs survived these times of social change and religious upheaval, and did so with their official sponsorships intact. The shifting relationships between civic support and popular custom are the foci of this paper, with the sports of Shrovetide providing the case studies. Shrovetide, the series of days before Lent, was a time of revelry and excess in early modern Britain punctuated by popular bouts of mob football, cock fighting, and general carousing. In towns and cities throughout Britain, large-scale Shrovetide football matches were sponsored by civic corporations or craft guilds. As a resolutely populist holiday connected to the royally sanctioned observance of Lent, it survived the Reformation culling of feast days. However, the volatile and violent nature of the holiday’s popular traditions made it a target of social reformers from the latter half of the sixteenth century onwards. The responses of civic bodies to such religious and social pressures can be read in the nature of the continuation, elimination, or adaptation of Shrovetide sport sponsorship in various towns.

Discussing the social and economic utility of festive culture in early modern Britain through the lens of Shrovetide sports, the paper will analyze how trends in festive sponsorship from the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries were reflected (or not) within these particular contexts. What can this tell us about how past peoples utilized festive culture to respond to or prompt changes in society?