The Years of Endurance by Arthur Bryant Page A

his morning ride in Windsor Park. And the common people were tougher, if it were possible, than their betters. At Shirley village in Bedfordshire the penny barber told a traveller that he never used a brush since his customers, complaining of the tickling, preferred to be shaved dry.
    They were fighters to a man: a race as game as the cocks they
     
    1 " The laying out of the ground in a natural way is carried to greater perfection in England than in any part of Europe. In foreign countries . . . the taste of gardening is forced and unnatural. . . . They constrain and counteract nature ; we endeavour to humour and assist her."—Lord Kinnoul to Thos. Graham, Lynedoch 5.
     
    backed in the crowded, stinking pits of Jewin Street and Hockcliffe. When challenged they fought to the death. " Look, you, sir," cried old General Sherbrooke to a fellow-officer who had offended him, " my hands are now behind my back, and I advise you to leave the room before they are brought forward, for if they once are, I will break every bone in your body." " Why, my little man," asked one of the East India Directors of twelve-year-old John Malcolm at his interview for a commission, " what would you do if you met Hyder Ali? " " Cut off his heid," came the instant reply.
     
    Boxing was the favourite pastime of the nation: all seemed ready at a moment's notice to roll up their sleeves for a mill as they had done on the sward under the billyard at Harrow or behind the church wall in the village at home. The last years of the eighteenth century saw the classic age of the Fancy: of John Gully and Robert Gregson, the Lancashire g iant, Cribb and Belcher and Gentl eman Jackson: the ringside under the open sky with its packed, democratic crowd lying, squatting and kneeling around it and the top-hatted seconds shadowing the combatants in their shirt-sleeves. The young lordlings of the day were never so proud as when they forgathered with their favourite champions at Zimmer's Hotel or took their lessons in the manly pastime in Gentleman Jackson 's rooms in Bond Street. When the Jew Mendoza on April 17th, 1787, beat Martin in the presence of the Prince of Wales he was brought back to London with lighted torches and to the strains of Handel ' s " See the Conquering Hero Comes."
    Yet in all this brutal bruising—and in those days of gloveless,
timeless contests a dead man someti mes lay on the sward before the sport was done—there was curiously little bullying. " In Eng-
land," wrote Southey's visiting Spaniard, " a boxing match settles
all disputes among the lower classes, and when it is over they shake hands and are friends. Another e qually beneficial effect is the security to the weaker by the laws of honour which for bid all undue advantages; the man who should aim a blow below the waist, who
should kick his antagonist, strike him when he is down or attempt
to injure him after he had yielded, would be sure to experience the
resentment of the mob who on such occasions always assemble to
see what they call fair play which they enforce as rigidly as the
Knights of the Round Table and the laws of Chivalry." 1 It was not
     
    1 Espriella III, 311.
     
    unfitting that this intensely individualistic, quarrelsome and stubborn race should have this rough and equalitarian sport to even harsh tempers and teach the sobering lessons of defeat.
     
    At the heart of the English character lay a fund of kindliness. Though in the mass rough and often cruel, and passionately addicted to barbarous sports like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, they led the world in humanitarian endeavour. It was an Englishman who in the 'seventies and 'eighties, at extreme risk and personal inconvenience, travelled 50,000 miles visiting the putrid, typhus-ridden jails of Europe; and it was Englishmen who at the close of the century first instituted organised opposition to cruelty to children and animals. But nothing so well illustrates the slow but persistent national impulse to mitigate