ANTIQUES.(sports in England in the seventeenth century)(Brief Article)

Our pleasure likewise is, Our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, Such as dancing, either of men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmlesse, Recreation, nor from having of May Games, Whitson Ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles, and other sports.

King James I, Book of Sports, 1618

The Puritans who migrated to New England responded that the very recreations the king praised led away from God to sin and wickedness. They enforced their pious Sabbath and banned as corrupt and pagan the festivals and saints' days of the Catholic and Anglican calendars. Unlike the Puritans, the southern colonists did not think an extravagant life was incompatible with Christian behavior. Early Virginia was disproportionately settled by men, and a boom in tobacco growing gave the colony the raucous tone of a mining camp. Drinking, gambling, and the more brutal sports of old England flourished. Common pastimes were bearbaiting (banned in New England, as Thomas Babington Macaulay later hinted, "not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators"), cockfighting, and ratting (wagering on how long it would take a dog to kill a pit full of rats).

During the revolutionary era, the Continental Congress outlawed games, sports, and the theater as unfit for a virtuous people embarking on independence. In the nineteenth century Victorian capitalists and Evangelicals (often the same people) feared idleness, craved regularity, practiced self-control, and idealized usefulness. All leisure activities were thought to risk fostering drinking, gambling, swearing, and Sabbath breaking. As late as 1827 the editor of the American Farmer had to argue that ...