Folk Wrestling in Topsham, Devon
or, Westcountry play: Folk Wrestling at the Salutation Inn, Topsham.
This article was an invited contribution to The Topsham Times, the official journal for members of The Topsham Museum.
Visitors to the Salutation Inn (affectionately known as ‘The Sally’) will know it today as one of Topsham’s finest dining establishments, diligently restored by the Williams-Hawkes family. Few, perhaps, will be aware that behind its celebrated façade there once lay a bowling green that served, for over half a century, as one of Devon’s premier folk wrestling arenas.
Ed Williams-Hawkes’s compiled history of the Salutation records that wrestling took place on the bowling green from at least 1821 until 1876, spanning over fifty-five years of Topsham’s sporting life. Showing me around, Ed explained how the bowling green itself was older still, in use from at least 1687. This inn was one of many venues across Devon where the county’s distinctive thousand year old martial art drew crowds who came to wager, to cheer, and to witness a tradition that was as much a part of the Westcountry’s cultural fabric as cider-making or ship-building.
Westcountry Play
Wrestling is somewhat of a loaded term. It evokes many things in the mind, such as modern WWE, or classic British pro-wrestling in the days of ‘Big Daddy’ or ‘Giant Haystacks’. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Devon’s folk wrestling was a martial art practised in rural communities for a thousand years. In fact, as we shall see, it was more like Jūdō than the wrestling seen on television.
The roots of the martial art, referred to colloquially as ‘Westcountry play’, run very deep indeed. Even the distinctive local term ‘wraxling’ preserves the ancient Anglo-Saxon wraexlian.
The earliest history is peppered with tantalising alignments. As early as 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded how Corineus, the legendary founder of Cornwall and expert wrestler, expelled the last of the Giants at Plymouth Hoe, and had “roused up his whole strength, and snatching him upon his shoulders, ran with him, as fast as the weight would allow him, …getting upon the top of a high rock, hurled down the savage monster into the sea”. By 1400, when an anonymous poet wanted to prove the worthy athleticism of Robin Hood, the poet situated the hero at a wrestling match where “there was all the best yeomen, Of all the West Country”. Henry VIII deployed Westcountry Wrestlers during sporting events to stack the odds in his favour. By the time the diarist John Evelyn recorded a wrestling contest in London before Charles II in 1667—Westcountrymen against Northerners, with the former victorious—the tradition was recognised nationally as a well established point of regional pride.
This wasn’t just a sport. This was very much a martial art, akin to those we now associate with the Far East. The oldest technical instructions by Sir Thomas Parkyns in 1713 described a system of self-defence that could be applied inside and outside sporting competition. Following Parkyns’ example, we must draw a line between the two.
Competition was a subset of the tradition, was the primary part documented, and thus the part most associated with the tradition today. The defining aspect of the sport was the rule-set. It dictated that play should be made in a canvas jacket: short, loose, made from strong linen, with sleeves reaching mid-way to the wrist. All holds (known as ‘hitches’) were taken upon this jacket. Three appointed ‘sticklers’ officiated, judging whether a throw constituted a fair ‘back fall’: both shoulders and one hip, or both hips and one shoulder, touching the ground simultaneously. It was a sport governed by precise rules, and its practitioners were schooled in a repertoire of named techniques such as the In-lock, the Fore-hip, the Back-lock, and the spectacular ‘Flying Mare’ (intentionally evoking an image of Pegasus), each with numerous variants depending on circumstance.
The distinction between Cornish and Devonshire Wrestling was one of emphasis rather than kind. The long-running rivalry was often palpable. The two traditions shared a common grammar: the jacket, the hitch, the ring, the sticklers. The Cornish style favoured close-quarter grappling (‘hugs and heaves’) relying on the power of the shoulders and arms. The Devonshire style was livelier, built around ‘kicks and trips’, with the legs as the primary instruments of attack. In Cornwall, wrestlers entered the ring in stockings or socks. In Devon, they wore shoes. It was this last detail, the shoe, that would come to define the sport in the public imagination, and ultimately to tarnish its reputation.
The spectacle vs the substance
History has not been kind to Devonshire Wrestling. The feature that most captured public attention during the twentieth-century was the use of a hardened shoe. A key reference by Sabine Baring-Gould in 1908 tarnished its entire history for later generations: that soles had been soaked in bullock’s blood and baked at a fire until they were ‘hard as iron’. No proof of this as a widespread practice has so far been found. Nonetheless, the description stuck.
Safety was very important to the sport, despite Baring-Gould’s fanciful description. In most events ‘skillibegs’ (small custom-made shin guards similar to those now used in modern cricket) were used. And a movement made by John Stone of the Plymouth Inn in Crediton made the sport safer, stipulating when and what shoes were to be worn. Stone’s policy was known informally as ‘the Bow stipulation’, that ‘no man will be allowed to play but in shoes and padding provided by the committee’. Most publicans adopted such a policy, citing that lack of safety had ‘nothing to do with the sport of wrestling’. The popular sports that replaced Wrestling in the public mind (Football and Cricket) later adopted the shin-padding invented for Devon Wrestling.
As expected, when these precautions weren’t taken, the injuries inflicted could indeed be dreadful. Some accounts describe men leaving the ring with bloody (‘claret’) shins. One farmer recalled how he had been so badly bruised that he crawled the last three miles home on his hands and knees. In fact, the prevailing sentiment of many crowds was ‘opposed to the practice, formerly so universal among Devonshire wrestlers, of kicking their antagonists’. Regrettably, most modern coverage of the sport focuses on the negligent examples.
It is worth pausing, therefore, to highlight why such negligence might have happened. Such negligence was part of the theatre of Devonshire Wrestling, the outward spectacle that drew onlookers and filled newspaper columns. Such negligence fuelled the business of the sport. Put bums in seats. Yet, unlike Boxing where competitors sustain blows to the face, folk wrestling was far safer and more like a one-on-one game of Rugby. And for those who competed on the circuit, the art lay elsewhere: in the science. In the interplay of skill, balance and tactical intelligence; in the capacity to read an opponent’s intentions through the tension of the jacket; in the precise timing of a trip or a lock. A Devonshire Wrestler’s game, played well, was a thing of quick and subtle beauty.
One might think of it this way: a visitor to the Salutation’s bowling green in, say, 1840, would have seen the wrestling ring, the sticklers positioned to judge, and a crowd of Topsham’s working men—shipwrights, fishermen, dockworkers—pressed against the ropes, shouting encouragement and placing bets. Wrestlers themselves would have understood their contest. For them, the match was a test of embodied knowledge: an art acquired through years of practice, passed from father to son, and demonstrated in competition before a community of people who understood its fine points. The spectacle and the substance of the sport were two different things, but it is the spectacle that has dominated the historical record.
It was the substance that attracted the best wrestlers to compete at Topsham. Among the wrestlers who competed there was Abraham Cann of Colebrooke, near Crediton, widely regarded as the finest Devonshire wrestler of his generation and later acclaimed as champion of all England. Today, he’s recognised as the greatest of all time. Cann appeared with his brother at the Salutation Inn as early as 1822, four years before his legendary encounter with the Cornish champion James Polkinghorne would place him at the centre of one of the great sporting events of the nineteenth century.
Close-knit communities
The importance of Wrestling in pre-industrial and early industrial rural communities cannot be understated. Across the Westcountry, wrestling was not a discrete sporting activity separable from the rhythms of rural existence. It was, rather, woven into the very fabric of communal life.
Wrestling tournaments occurred when people were free to either participate or watch, which meant at major holiday times, especially Whitsuntide, and were ‘especially associated with parish feasts’. On the Monday and Tuesday following the Sunday service of a typical annual parish feast, ‘all business is suspended, and the young men assemble and hurl or wrestle, or both, in some part of their parish of the most public resort’. The cessation of commerce signals that wrestling held priority that could temporarily displace the economic imperatives of rural working life, a point reinforced by the fact that matches were occasionally delayed, rather than abandoned, to accommodate competing demands. The sport thus existed in a negotiated relationship with agrarian labour, bent around, but never wholly subordinated to, the demands of the working year.
Nowhere was the social weight of wrestling more viscerally apparent than in the status it conferred upon its champions. A contemporary journalist, recalling the era at its height, described the local wrestler of renown in terms that evoked genuine reverence: “with what admiration and adoration was he of the top hat regarded when he strutted through his village on a Sunday in indication that he had won honours in the ring”. This description sums up how sporting prowess served as cultural capital. A wrestler was afforded “…the opportunity to gain the prestige of becoming a ‘champion’ of the community or district”. In some cases, it also provided immunity from the conscription of the Press-Gang. On a Sunday, there was the practice of ‘churching’, to display your winnings in the church after the Saturday matches. Continuing, the correspondent professed that “no village revel or fair was worthy of the name if it did not include in its programme a wrestling contest”.
Thus wrestling was embedded in rural life as a social keystone. It drew communities together in a shared spectacle during feast days, fairs, when communal bonds were most actively reaffirmed.
Wrestling in Topsham
Amongst all the active venues for the sport, Topsham was one of the most celebrated on the annual Devonshire Wrestling circuit. It’s relationship to the sport was intimate, deeply rooted in the culture of its principal coaching inn. The town’s Annual Grand Wrestling Matches were featured in many newspapers of the period, and provide rich detail. An 1825 advertisement, for instance, offered twenty-five sovereigns in prizes under conditions of ‘Fair Back Falls’ and promised that “the Champions of the neighbouring Counties are earnestly requested to poke-in their horns”, with an extra ten shillings offered to any out-of-county wrestler who made ‘standard’ (a term used to qualify). Such an invitation reveals both the competitive ambition and the swagger of the Topsham organisers.
What made Topsham distinctive was the quality of the ground itself and the atmosphere it generated. The Exeter Flying Post‘s correspondent, reporting on the 1827 Grand match, describing the Salutation’s bowling green, that there was “no place better adapted for an exhibition of this sort”, and went on to narrate a day of extraordinary drama in which the crowd’s mood swung from the disappointment of a slack opening (“many navigators were on the ground, but the number of real wrestlers were very few; all appeared to be out of condition”), to exhilaration when elite competitors arrived on the second morning, (“tumbling in of some prime ones, who soon diffused a proper spirit into every part of the proceedings”).
The same report gave a glimpse of the sensory intensity of the ring. When the renowned Simon Webber and Charles Cleve stepped forward to wrestle, “every eye glistened with delight, and the most profound silence succeeded to the general shout with which their entrance was greeted — it was one of the finest displays of science ever witnessed”; and when Robert Westlake and John Lidwell locked together for a gruelling twenty-minute bout in which “every inch was disputed”, the resolution of the contest “put the ring completely in spirits, the disorder of the preceding day disappeared as if by enchantment, and repeated cheering testified the satisfaction of all”.
These major sporting occasions attracted the leading wrestlers of the county. In 1822 the great Abraham Cann, champion of England, and his brother James took the first two prizes. At the 1825 match, Robert Underdown and John Flower, men whose ‘muscular powers it must be admitted are of extraordinary description’, produced such evenly matched play that ‘these fine men held each other out’ and had to be separated by the triers, whilst Cann himself entered the ring and dispatched a young man of Kenton in two minutes, with the day’s play running from one o’clock until eleven at night. By 1869, the Topsham Grand matches had grown to a forty-guinea purse advertised as ‘Open to All England’, with a Grand Stand erected for subscribers and competitors drawn from Plymouth, Moreton, and Simonsbath, featuring the well-known Milton, Oliver, and Hutchings. As the Topsham matches reached their greatest scale, the broader forces that would extinguish Devonshire wrestling were already taking their toll.
Decline
The sport that called Topsham home for several generations eventually fell into obscurity. Several forces combined to extinguish Devonshire Wrestling by the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than a perception of brutality, it was internal corruption in the form of match-fixing (in which wrestlers agreed results in advance to profit from the betting that surrounded every contest) that caused the sport to degrade. Fights amongst spectators also damaged the sport’s standing. As the economic historian J.H. Porter argued in his modern study of the Devonshire style’s decline, the combination of changing tastes, gambling and disorder placed wrestling on the wrong side of an evolving sports culture. By the second half of the century, Victorian ideals of ‘rational recreation’ favoured codified team sports governed by middle-class associations, whilst older, rustic working-class pastimes rooted in local custom were increasingly marginalised.
In Topsham, the last recorded wrestling match at the Salutation appears to have taken place around 1876. The bowling green itself survived until 1917, but the wrestling ring had long since fallen silent. Baring-Gould, writing in 1908, declared that in Devon the sport ‘is now a thing of the past’. In Cornwall, wrestling was successfully reformed (formalised through founding the Cornish Wrestling Association in 1923), sustained perhaps by a deeper association with Cornish national identity that endures today. In Devon, a professional body wasn’t formed, the tradition was not reformed and seemed irrecoverably lost.
Embodying history
In 2014, a group of enthusiasts gathered in a field outside Honiton, pulled on traditional canvas jackets, and wrestled in the Devonshire style for the first time in a hundred years. I know because I was one of them. Since then, we have built an archive of thousands of primary sources drawn from local museums, archives and private collections, and have reconstructed a practical curriculum of techniques recovered from historical descriptions and from the living tradition of Cornish wrestling, with which the Devonshire style was always closely intertwined.
It is this revival that prompts a thought worth offering to the readers of this journal. Topsham Museum’s members are, by and large, folk who care deeply about the past and who understand that historical knowledge is built through the careful reading of documents, the study of material culture, and the disciplined exercise of imagination. These are indispensable skills, and the present article has relied upon them throughout.
But a cultural practice like wrestling offers something that documentary history cannot. It is one thing to read contemporary accounts of Abraham Cann at Tamar Green, to study a lithograph of two champions facing one another, to note the gate receipts, match results, county rivalries and the elaborate wagering. It is quite another to grip a canvas jacket, feel the weight and intention of an opponent through the cloth, and attempt a Back-crook or a Flying Mare against someone who is trying to throw you first. When the adrenaline flows, the jacket is gripped, and you compete to win, the gap between the eighteenth-century wrestler and the present day closes in a way that no amount of archival study can achieve. The gap formed by time is closed by experience. In those moments, practice becomes not merely a reminder of a cultural pastime long past, but a genuine retrieval of it. Symbolic in its meaning, but entirely real in its experience.
So next time you pass The Salutation Inn, it’s worth pausing to consider what once took place behind it. To reflect that, although the original bowling green is gone, the tradition it hosted is not entirely lost. Somewhere in Exeter, not far from where Abraham Cann once kept his Champions Arms, we are pulling on canvas jackets, embodying the practice and experience of our ancestors. Westcountry Wrestling is a long and noble martial tradition, a Science, and we work hard every session to be worthy of it.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the Topsham Museum for inviting contribution to the Topsham Times; the Devonshire Wrestling Society for its comprehensive archive; the Crediton Area History and Museum Society; the Exeter Civic Society; Ed Williams-Hawkes for his invaluable compiled history of the Salutation Inn, and generous time to show me around and share his passion for ‘the Sally’; and the Cornish Wrestling Association for passing on their skills to us, and their ongoing role in preserving the living tradition of Westcountry Wrestling.