Controlling
Recreation and Maintaining the Class Divide
Richard J. Hayton
BA Medieval
and Early Modern History
While the seventeenth-century puritanical laws against
entertainments are infamous in English history, it is rather little-known that
several Acts had already infringed on the recreational freedom of the working
class in the centuries prior. The most complex and intrusive of these arrived
during the reign of Henry VIII in 1541; this was the ‘Acte for the Mayntenance
of Artyllarie, and debarringe of unlawful Games’, or the Unlawful Games Act.
Essentially, it forbade the lower classes from playing most recreational games,
such as cards and dice games, but also the likes of tennis and bowling, whilst
reserving the privilege for the wealthy and highborn. The ‘middling sort’ –
those beneath the gentry – could be met with hefty fines for hosting or playing
games, except for at Christmas. The other part of the Act is more notorious, as
it was the last in a series of medieval and early-modern laws which required
Englishmen to regularly practice longbow archery. Mandatory archery practice
and the prohibition of games might seem like an unusual pairing, but as the
preamble of the Act explains, the popularity of newly-devised games was seen as
the “reason where of archery is sore decayed and daily [was] like to be more
and more minished.”[1]
Yet, this explanation surely seems terribly inadequate, to believe that the
competition of other games was as detrimental to archery as to necessitate a
large-scale ban for the lower classes. What else might have inspired such an
Act? Was the intention to protect the realm from civil disorder arising from
games, or was the Crown inspired by an ever-growing moralism which condemned
“noxious, inordinate and unhonest games”?[2]
This article assesses potential rationales for the Unlawful Games Act 1541 and,
considering it within a sequence of oppressive medieval and early modern laws,
exposes a longstanding precedent of conditioning social order, controlling
which activities and behaviours were appropriate for different classes. The
Unlawful Games Act took advantage of a moralist society in order to reserve
recreational games as privileges of the peerage, while maintaining the
obligation of the ‘middling sort’ to work in accord with other legislation.
