The lost playing places of Lincolnshire

Comparative Drama, Fall-Winter, 2003 by James Stokes

If bullrings tended to be placed in market areas near butcheries, cockpits were often part of inns and taverns, which might be situated anywhere within the town. In Gainsborough, a nineteenth-century valuation of properties describes Ship Inn and its properties in Silver Street, including "the Cock Pitt." A drawing with the valuation shows the cockpit as a circular structure at the extreme north end of the property, described as being "24 - 4 in Diameter" presumably meaning twenty-four feet and four inches. An entry in the Gainsborough Parish Register in 1660 refers to a second site in Gainsborough called "Cockpitt Hill," but as of the beginning of the nineteenth century its location was no longer familiar. In Barton-on-Humber, an inn known as the White Lion had a cockpit as late as 1774. The White Lion was located in the Market Place, which is near the site of the castle, at the spot where West Field Road, Barrow Lane, and Lincoln Gate meet. When King James visited Lincoln in 1617, he went to a cockfighting at the Sign of the George near the Guildhall on Wednesday, 2 April, "where he appointed fiue Cockes to bee put on the pitt to gether which made his Maiestie very merie." Also in Lincoln, an eighteenth-century agreement of sale describes a messuage "in the parish of Saint Michaell on the Mount ... Comonly Called or knowne by the Signe of the Hare & Hounds," which had "a Cockpitt thereto belonging." It was being sold by William Banks, esq., of Revesby to Clement Wood, gent., of Lincoln. In Sleaford, an eighteenth-century map identifies a cockpit "at the end of the George Inn, facing the church"; it was near the river and the school close. In Stamford, the Black Bull, built before 1488 at 16 St. Mary's Street, had two yards, "the eastern one containing a cockpit." Stamford also had a cockpit which, as of 1896 according to a local historian, was being "used as a store-room of the Mercury-office," cockfighting having been outlawed in 1834. Whether this cockpit dates from the medieval or early modern period is unclear. Cockfighting flourished in Stamford during the eighteenth century, a time when "Lord Exeter built the cockpit in the George Hotel in St Martin's, south of the river, to complement the fights which took place in the White Swan, the Red Lion Pit, the Half Moon, the Roebuck ... and elsewhere in the town: Horncastle had an inn known as "the Fighting Cocks" on Far Street near Blind Lane. (20) In Whaplode, a man was presented in 1637 "for fighting cockes vpon ye sabboath day in ye time of diuine seruice," but the location of the cockpit is not given in the citation. (21)

Nondedicated playing places fall into two categories--those in religious spaces (the cathedral, churches, church houses, churchyards, hospitals, monasteries) and those in public spaces or private dwellings (squares, streets, houses). Clerics certainly were already using Lincoln Cathedral as a playing place by the early thirteenth century. In 1236, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, chastized the cathedral chapter for turning the church into "a house of jesting, scurrility, and nonsense ... with devilish intentions" by enacting the Feast of Fools there, and he forbade celebration of that feast thereafter "in the church of Lincoln" on the Feast of the Circumcision. However, the practice must have continued because in 1390 the chapter offered its own condemnation and once again outlawed the practice. (22)