Porter, The Decline of the Devonshire Wrestling Style (Dec 1989)
This article constitutes the first modern scholarly account of the rise and decline of the Devonshire wrestling style during the nineteenth century. Writing from the Department of Economic History at the University of Exeter, Porter situates the sport within the broader historiographical expansion of sport history during the 1980s, noting that whilst cricket, football, prizefighting, and various other recreations had attracted sustained academic attention — particularly around questions of social control and public order (Bailey, 1978; Walvin, 1986; Elias & Dunning, 1985) — the south-west counties of England had been substantially neglected as a region of special study, despite Devon possessing a distinctive wrestling tradition of its own.
Porter opens by establishing the technical distinctiveness of the Devonshire style. Unlike Cornish, Cumberland, or Lancashire wrestling, the Devonshire form was characterised by the wearing of a hard shoe with which a wrestler could legally kick his opponent below the knee. Bouts were adjudicated by three ‘sticklers’ who determined ‘fair falls’ — a three-point fall requiring both shoulders and one hip, or both hips and one shoulder, to touch the ground simultaneously. The match format progressed through single, double, and treble play, with participants earning ‘standards’ by achieving two consecutive fair falls. The rules and character of the sport are drawn principally from Charles Vancouver’s 1808 agricultural survey of Devon and from Sabine Baring-Gould’s later, more romanticised accounts (Vancouver, 1808; Baring-Gould, 1908).
The article’s central narrative traces the sport through several phases. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Porter documents a flourishing culture of wrestling across Devon, drawing extensively upon the Exeter Flying Post — the primary newspaper source for his study and one which he cross-referenced systematically against an index held in the West Country Studies Library, Exeter. The sport was patronised by committees of ‘gentlemen’ who subscribed purse money ranging from five to twenty-five sovereigns, and matches were held in towns and villages spanning the county, from Ashburton and Dartmouth to Tiverton and Winkleigh. The great matches attracted crowds in the thousands — 6,000 to 7,000 at Okehampton in 1824 and an estimated 10,000 at St Thomas, Exeter in 1826 — and produced celebrated champions, most notably Abraham Cann of Colebrooke, styled ‘Champion of all England’, whose career forms an important narrative thread through the article. Cann’s inter-county match against the Cornish champion Polkinghorne at Tamar Green in 1826, described in vivid primary source detail, epitomises the sport at its most compelling and its most contentious; the Cornish objected strenuously to the Devonshire kick, and partisans from both sides stormed the ring.
Porter identifies the 1830s as a turning point. Reports in the Flying Post begin to adopt a tone of nostalgic regret: prize money diminished, famous names disappeared from the ring, attendance fell, and two-day events were increasingly seen as unacceptable interruptions to the agricultural working calendar. At the 1830 St Thomas games, the reporter condemned ‘a worst kept ring was never seen’, and by 1832, the paper declared the sport ‘degraded’.
The article’s most significant analytical contribution lies in Porter’s identification of the twin causes of decline. The first was the spread of what contemporaries called ‘understandings’ or ‘accommodations’ — collusive arrangements between wrestlers to predetermine outcomes. Porter documents these with considerable specificity: suspected fixed bouts at the Blue Ball Inn, Heavitree in 1830; the notorious activities of Gundry and Chapple in the 1840s, with Gundry buying off Chapple for £5 and Chapple being openly accused of having ‘sold his back’ at Tiverton in 1845; and the pre-emptive exclusion of named individuals from advertised matches at St Thomas and Topsham in the mid-1840s. Porter is careful to correct R. S. Lambert’s earlier assertion that the sport was corrupted by its audiences rather than its performers (Lambert, 1939), demonstrating from the newspaper evidence that it was the wrestlers themselves who were primarily responsible. Committees attempted reforms — matching contenders by weight rather than allowing open entry, providing standardised shoes and padding, and employing ‘honest’ triers — but these proved insufficient.
The second cause was a gradual shift in attitudes towards the violence of kicking. Porter draws upon Thomas Shapter’s medical observation that the practice was ‘very prolific of obstinate ulcerated legs in after years’ (Shapter, c.1835), the diary of John Griffith Hancorne of Gower who dismissed it as ‘Nasty, Brutish work’ in 1840, and a Flying Post editorial of 1845 which called for the abolition of kicking as ‘wanton punishment’ having ‘nothing to do with the sport of wrestling’. Porter situates this attitudinal shift within a broader cultural reorientation against violent popular sports — a parallel he had himself explored in relation to cockfighting (Porter, 1986). The Cornish had always objected to the kick, and its persistence constituted a barrier to productive inter-county competition.
By the death of Abraham Cann in 1864, the sport had, in Porter’s assessment, ‘all but disappeared’ — or at least from the press, which he acknowledges at minimum indicates it had lost favour amongst the readership of the Tory Flying Post. Sporadic revival attempts in the 1860s and 1870s produced only brief, sparsely reported matches at Tiverton, Exeter, Topsham, and Moretonhampstead. By the time Baring-Gould published his memoirs, he wrote that ‘wrestling is now no more’, and in 1917, Percy Longhurst recorded that the Devonshire style had been absorbed into the Cornish style (Baring-Gould, 1925; Longhurst, 1917).
Porter’s Contribution to the Field
Porter’s article holds a foundational position in the historiography of Devonshire wrestling and, more broadly, of regional folk sports in south-west England. This piece was published in December, after an earlier piece, ‘Devonshire wrestling in the nineteenth century’, in the British Society of Sports History Bulletin (No. 9, May 1989, pp. 19–37), and together these two articles represent the first sustained academic treatment of the subject. Prior to Porter, the sport received only passing mention in general studies of popular recreation (Malcolmson, 1973) and local histories of Exeter (Newton, 1968, 1984).
Porter’s methodological approach — a close, chronological reading of the Exeter Flying Post over some six decades, cross-referenced against antiquarian and agricultural sources — established the primary source base upon which all subsequent scholars have depended. Michael Tripp’s doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter, The Persistence of Difference: A History of Cornish Wrestling (2009), draws directly upon Porter’s arguments regarding corruption and attitudinal change as comparative evidence for the parallel decline of Cornish wrestling (Tripp, 2009, citing Porter, 1989, p. 206). Tripp and Porter’s work is further cited in international comparative scholarship, notably in studies of the ‘sportification’ of Celtic wrestling traditions across Britain and Brittany (Jaouen, in The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2014), and in Tripp’s subsequent journal article on the Cornish–Devonshire wrestling relationship (Sport in History, 2022). Our own modern revival project of the Devonshire Wrestling Society, established in 2014, explicitly draws upon Porter’s research as a foundational text for reconstructing the historical practice of the sport.
Porter’s argument was that Devonshire wrestling collapsed not through magisterial suppression or statutory prohibition, but through an internal crisis of integrity compounded by shifting cultural attitudes to violence. Porter offers a distinctive contribution to the wider debate on the decline of pre-modern popular recreations in England, and stands as an important counterpoint to narratives centred on legislative intervention and social control.
References and Further Reading
Porter, J. H. (1989). The decline of the Devonshire wrestling style. Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, 121, 195–208. [Earlier volumes of the Transactions are available via the Internet Archive: https://archive.org; the Devonshire Association index of published papers is at https://devonassoc.org.uk/publications/transactions/. Volume 121 (1989) is not currently digitised online.]
A physical copy of the Journal is in the collection of The Devonshire Wrestling Society.