By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
Many of you will have been watching the Winter Olympic Games these past couple of weeks and this Sunday (22 February) is the closing ceremony in Verona. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to find anything ‘sporty’ in the Cathedral Library so I was delighted to come across a particularly handsome second edition of Joseph Strutt’s Sports and pastimes of the people of England, printed by Thomas Bensley in 1810. (The first edition appeared in 1801.) The book was given to the Cathedral by former Canon Chancellor, Edward Charles Harington (1804-1895), as part of the Harington Collection.
Joseph Strutt (1749-1802), an artist and engraver, believed that to ‘form a just estimation of the character of any particular people, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most generally prevalent among them… when we follow them into their retirements, where no disguise is necessary, we are most likely to see them in their true state, and may best judge of their natural dispositions’.
This engraving is from a chapter on ‘tumbling and vaulting’. I’m not sure what’s going on in the activities at the top and bottom of this engraved plate (answers on a postcard) but the middle activity looks promising as a popular sport. In fact, Strutt says that leaping through hoops is ‘an exploit of long standing’. And I am glad to see safety measures are in place – while two boys hold the hoop, the third prepares to leap through but, first, he has sensibly placed his cloak on the ground to soften his fall.