The Agreeable Recreation Of Fighting

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Carolyn Conley

University of Alabama at Birmingham

I know not however whether it was fair to expect them to give up at once the agreeable recreation of fighting. It's not easy to abolish old customs, particularly diversions; and everyone knows that this is the national amusement of the finest peasantry on the face of the earth. To be sure skulls and bones are broken, and lives lost; but they are lost in pleasant fighting - they are the consequences of the sport, the beauty of which consists in breaking as many heads and necks as you can. William Carleton(1)

Studies of the history of violence, especially homicide, have focused on a number of explanations: economic, political, demographic and cultural. An overabundance of young men, a culture of honor and the absence of other means of achieving status have been among the factors demonstrated to influence violence in a society.2 However, a study of violent crimes in nineteenth century Ireland suggests another factor - that of violence as recreation.

This study is based primarily on the records of 1,932 homicides reported by the Irish police between 1866 to 1892. The government compiled a Return of Outrages which included a brief description of homicides reported by police outside metropolitan Dublin. The figures in this paper are based on these returns, supplemented when possible by newspaper and court records. A fire at the Irish Public Record Office destroyed a large portion of nineteenth century criminal records. However some criminal records survive for seventeen counties. The British Library has extensive holdings of Irish provincial newspapers.(3)

The recreational aspect of Irish violence does not mean that other causes are not involved. However, the Irish evidence includes cases in which other explanations do not suffice. The thesis here is that while violence at times serves as a substitute for something else or as a reaction to negative stimulus, it is also sometimes deliberately chosen as a pastime. Anthropologists have used the term "agonistic" to refer to violence which is "playful, symbolic or ritualistic."(4) While the symbolic and ritualistic elements have often been the subject of scholarly analysis, relatively little work has been done on the playful aspects. More often the recreational aspects of violence are overlooked in the search for deeper meanings. Perhaps the idea that humans find pleasure in violence is simply unpalatable, though, as Gwynn Nettler has pointed out, "It is not at all clear that human beings prefer lives without some violence."(5) In his classic study, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argued that fighting "is the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive. Young dogs and small boys fight 'for fun;' with rules limiting the degree of violence nevertheless the limits of licit violence do not necessarily stop at the spilling of blood or even killing."(6)

The Irish evidence is particularly colorful and in some ways distinctive, though recreational violence is not unique to nineteenth century Ireland. Much of the violence of late nineteenth century Ireland resembles the patterns Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning characterized as typical of pre-industrial societies. Dunning describes the distinction between instrumental violence which is rational and goal oriented and expressive violence which is emotional and "more closely associated with the arousal of pleasurable feelings."(7) The idea of pleasurable violence may be jarring to modern sensibilities. However in addition to evidence for pre-industrial Europe, similar actions have also been documented in the American West and South, Australia, the Mediterranean and parts of Central and South America.(8)

Further while the amount of recreational violence has declined in the past century, I would argue that it still exists in milder forms. Recreational violence is distinguished by clearly defined rules, willing participants, a sense of pleasure in the activity and an absence of any malicious intent. Under these conditions fighting can be seen as the far end of a spectrum of play or sport.(9) Though seldom acknowledged, violence is an integral part of most team sports. As Don Atyeo point outs: "The thing about sports is it legitimizes violence, thereby laundering it acceptably clean. Incidents routinely occur in the name of sport which if they were perpetrated under any other banner short of open warfare would be roundly condemned as crimes. . . . The pain inflicted in sport is somehow not really pain at all; it is Tom and Jerry pain, cartoon agony which doesn't hurt."(10) Anyone who has played pick-up basketball or touch football or has childhood memories of sharing the backseat with a sibling on a long car trip probably has had some first-hand experience of a mild form of recreational violence.(11) Obviously the consequences in these recent examples are far less severe, but the basic concept of physical conflict as a form of pleasant entertainment is the same.

Many scholars have suggested that violence provides a means of attaining status for those who are barred from economic or political achievement. For example, Kenneth Polk has suggested that physical violence is the means of competition for status only among groups where economic or political avenues to dominance are denied.(12) However, recreational violence in late nineteenth century Ireland was not simply a response to political oppression or dire poverty. Post-famine Ireland had actually reached new levels of political and economic sophistication. By the 1860s the Irish economy had largely recovered from the devastation of the famine and the structure of rural society was changing. The "strong" farmers who leased substantial holdings represented a growing force in the rural community. Even the smaller tenant farmers had become more vocal and politically aware. The agricultural laboring class, which had been hardest hit by the famine, was also more prosperous after the drastic decline in population had made more land and work available. Furthermore, literacy was increasing among all classes and a lively provincial press enhanced political awareness.(13)