The History (and Surprising Science) of Kicking in Devon Wrestling

February 22, 2026
February 22, 2026
18 min read
Deep dive
Self-defence Shin-kicking Sledgehammer

How a brutal Georgian spectacle became one of England’s most sophisticated martial arts techniques — and what modern practitioners can learn from it.

On a Monday afternoon in September 1827, at the Golden Eagle tavern on Mile End Road in London’s East End, some two hundred spectators who could find no seat or standing room climbed the poplar trees surrounding the wrestling green. Others packed themselves onto the tiled roofs of the surrounding boxes and sheds — until, with a tremendous crash, a large portion of the roofing gave way, depositing several hundred people onto the ground below. Once it was established that the fallen had nothing to bewail beyond dirty faces, crushed hats, and light bruises, the crowd’s attention returned to the two men standing in the ring: Abraham Cann, the Champion of Devonshire, and Gaffney, the self-styled Champion of Ireland (Exeter Flying Post, 1827).

What happened next remains one of the most vivid accounts of kicking in the entire archive of British folk wrestling. As the two men grappled for position in the close hold, Gaffney launched repeated kicks against Cann’s shins — but, the reporter noted, they ‘exhibited no signs of punishment, though the sound resounded through the ring’. Cann’s retorts were rather more effective. After only a few exchanges, Gaffney’s worsted stockings were ‘sopped with blood’, and his laced shoe ‘seemed saturated like that of a slaughterer from the shambles’. After four minutes and fifty seconds, Cann threw Gaffney to a fair back fall — described as ‘a beautiful throw, given in the best possible style’. The contest was eventually settled when, in addition to being thrown repeatedly, Gaffney suffered a dislocated shoulder and was forced to concede (Exeter Flying Post, 1827).

This was shin-kicking as it was once practised in Devonshire wrestling: calculated, devastating, and deeply embedded within a wider tactical system. It was also, as its critics were quick to point out, capable of inflicting appalling injuries. One contemporary observer lamented that he had ‘frequently seen men obliged to leave the ring, and abandon the chance of a prize, owing solely to the hurt they have received by kicks from the knee downwards’, adding pointedly that even Cann’s own brothers had been forced to withdraw from competition on the same account (Hone, Table Book, c. 1827). A journalist for the Western Times, writing as late as 1933, recalled having spoken to Farmer Ridd of Glebe Farm, Exeter, who told him that on one occasion ‘he had been so badly bruised about the legs that the last three miles to his home he crawled on his hands and knees’ (Western Times, 7 April 1933).

These stories are shocking. They were designed to be. And they are also only part of the picture. The history of shin-kicking in Devon wrestling is not merely a tale of brutality — it is a story about biomechanics, tactical intelligence, the evolution of rules, and the survival of an ancient martial tradition into the modern era. To understand it properly, one must understand the art it served.

The Shoe as Weapon: A Short History of Devonshire Kicking

When many people today think of kicking, they might think of Tae Kwon Do or Muay Thai. In Europe, they might also think of Savate or La Boxe Française. In Britain, a specific kicking martial art was found in Devon.

The distinguishing feature of the Devonshire style of wrestling, as distinct from the Cornish, was its emphasis upon what contemporaries called ‘out-play’ — the use of the legs to kick, trip, sweep, and reap an opponent to the ground, as opposed to the Cornish preference for ‘in-play’, the close-quarter hugging and heaving that relied primarily on shoulder and arm techniques (Parkyns, 1727, pp. 10–11; Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, pp. 42–47). The Devon wrestler entered the ring wearing specialised shoes; the Cornish wrestler entered barefoot or in stockings. It was this single difference in equipment — and the tactical system it implied — that defined the rivalry between the two counties for the better part of three centuries.

The shoes themselves were formidable instruments. Sir Thomas Parkyns, writing the earliest known English-language wrestling manual in 1727, advised that the wrestler should ‘choose rather to wrestle with narrow low-heeled shoes, than with broad heels; for in the first you’ll stand much faster’ and suggested putting ‘tacks into your heels to prevent your slipping and sliding’ (Parkyns, 1727). By the early nineteenth century, however, the Devon shoe had evolved into something rather more alarming. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, in Devonshire Characters and Strange Events, recorded that wrestlers wore shoes ‘soaked in bullock’s blood and baked at a fire, making them hard as iron’. Hone’s Table Book corroborated this, describing ‘heavy shoes and thick padding’. Abraham Cann himself was said to have entered the ring ‘with a monstrous pair of shoes whose toes had been baked into flints’ (Baring-Gould, n.d.; Hone, c. 1827; Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 66).

The damage such weapons could inflict was considerable. In the account of another celebrated match — Cann versus Polkinghorne at Tamar Green in October 1826 — the Devon champion’s kicking strategy was described in surgical detail. Cann ‘continued his kicking system for some time’, targeting Polkinghorne’s legs with such persistence that the Cornishman was described as ‘much distressed by the severe kicks which Cann inflicted with his right foot’ (Exeter Flying Post, 1826). A later retrospective put it more bluntly: Cann ‘left him knee-deep in a stream of gore’ (Baring-Gould, n.d.).

Yet the kicking was never, within the logic of the Devon system, an end in itself. It was a means — a method of softening an opponent’s structural base to create the conditions for a throw. The Exeter Flying Post described Cann’s kicking as having ‘the force of a sledge’ and, crucially, as ‘working with such regularity as a pendulum’ — an observation that, as we shall see, captures the essential biomechanical principle of the entire Devonshire game (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 223).

The Loose Leg: Why Kicking Is Harder Than It Looks

The most common misconception about shin-kicking in Devonshire wrestling is that it was merely an exercise in brute endurance — a test of who could absorb the most punishment. The historical evidence does not support this interpretation. When one examines the tactical framework within which kicking operated, a considerably more sophisticated picture emerges.

Parkyns identified the fundamental paradox of the out-play system in 1727. In kicking, he observed, ‘the player must of necessity have but one leg on the ground, and having an off-hitch might be thrown by a quick player with a trip or a lock’ (Parkyns, 1727, pp. 10–11). In other words, the very act of raising a leg to deliver a kick simultaneously removes one of the kicker’s two points of contact with the ground — transferring all of his weight onto a single standing leg, which is itself vulnerable to being swept, crook’d, or tripped. Every kick is therefore a calculated gamble: a moment of self-imposed instability, undertaken in the hope of inflicting sufficient damage or disruption upon the opponent before one’s own vulnerability can be exploited.

The Westcountry Wrestling Textbook (2024, pp. 220–228) formalises this insight through what it terms the ‘Pendulum Principle’. The model describes the wrestler’s body as an inverted pendulum — an A-frame with the Centre of Gravity (COG) suspended from the head, oscillating over the Base of Support (BOS) defined by the placement of the feet. When the wrestler is stable, the COG falls within the BOS. When the wrestler raises a leg to kick, the BOS narrows instantly to a single point of contact, and the COG must shift to remain within this dramatically reduced base. The moment at which the COG passes beyond the limits of the BOS — the Range of Stability (ROS) — is the moment at which the wrestler is maximally vulnerable to being thrown.

This is the ‘loose leg’. And it is why the Exeter Flying Post‘s description of Cann’s kicks as having the regularity of a pendulum was not merely poetic: it was a precise description of the biomechanical rhythm that every Devon wrestler had to master. The kick was not a standalone strike. It was one phase in a continuous oscillation — a rhythmic exchange of weight between the legs, in which the moment of maximum offensive power (the kick landing) was also the moment of maximum defensive vulnerability (the standing leg unsupported).

The practical implication is profound. Kicking in the Devon system was not a crude bludgeoning contest. It was a timing art — a discipline in which the successful practitioner had to perceive and exploit the opponent’s pendulum rhythm whilst simultaneously concealing the vulnerabilities within his own. As the Westcountry Wrestling Textbook observes, ‘most of the skill in wrestling can be reduced to good timing. When the opponent puts their weight onto a certain foot, or begins to take that weight away, these are the perfect moments to take advantage’ (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 220).

The Cornish counter to the Devon kick was itself instructive. As one nineteenth-century observer noted, ‘the Cornish player did not seem to fear the kick, the stop to which is the knee. The kick, supposing the toe-play to be played without the savage kicking which was discountenanced for good-fellowship sake, is directed against the inside of the knee just under the joint. The stop is bending the knee to meet the kick, stopping the toe by receiving the shin against the knee, a most effective and punishing stop’ (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, pp. 42–43). This single passage reveals the depth of the tactical exchange: the kick targeted a specific anatomical vulnerability (the inner knee joint), and the defence exploited a specific counter-vulnerability in the kicker (the exposed shin meeting the hard bone of the bent knee). Neither element was random or unskilled.

‘The Sledgehammer’ and ‘The Scraper’: A Technical Vocabulary

Our DWS collected archive materials make it possible to reconstruct a surprisingly detailed technical vocabulary of Devon kicking. The Westcountry Wrestling Textbook (2024, pp. 195–207) identifies six principal kick techniques, each employing a different part of the foot against a different target on the opponent’s lower leg:

The front kick — a direct kick to the shin using the toe or ball of the foot. When delivered repetitively and at full force, this was known historically as ‘the Sledgehammer’, a term adopted from newspaper descriptions of Abraham Cann’s signature technique. The Exeter Flying Post recorded instances of opponents passing out from the pain this created, suggesting it was Cann’s most feared skill (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 195).

The inside kick — using the inside edge of the foot to sweep the opponent’s legs from under them. This could be delivered either as a damaging strike to the ankle or as a hooking sweep whilst connected to the opponent’s ankle.

The outside kick — using the outside edge of the foot to kick the shin, which could readily be converted into a crook (a leg-wrap technique) for a fore-crook or back-crook throw.

The hook (also known as ‘hamming’, after Walker, 1840, p. 19) — applying the heel to the back of the opponent’s knee joint, either as a strike or as a means of controlling the joint by forcing it to bend.

The back heel kick — applying the heel behind the opponent’s heel, disrupting the standing base.

The stomp — a downward stamp using the base of the foot, targeting the shin with the heel or bridge.

In addition, one historical source describes a technique for which no codified name has been recovered: sliding the edge of the foot down the opponent’s shin to remove the skin. The Devonshire Wrestling Society has designated this ‘the scraper’ (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 48). All these techniques were delivered exclusively below the knee — to the area known in Devon dialect as the gammerell (the calf or lower leg). Kicking above the knee was a foul; kicking to the groin (‘kicking the codds’) was explicitly condemned, although, as our textbook notes drily, ‘it didn’t seem to stop some opportunistic wrestlers’ (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 47).

The Man Who Stopped the Kicking: John Stone and the Crediton Reforms

If shin-kicking was so tactically sophisticated, why did it nearly kill the sport?

The answer lies in the escalation problem. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the competitive logic of the Devon ring progressively rewarded more extreme forms of footwear. Clogs gave way to hardened leather boots; hardened leather boots were soaked in bullock’s blood and baked; baked boots were supplemented with nails and metal-tipped soles. The Cotswold Olimpicks — held at Dover’s Hill near Chipping Campden since 1612, and still the site of the World Shin-Kicking Championships to this day — saw a parallel escalation. During the early nineteenth century, the Cotswold wrestling competitions had degenerated to the point where one contestant was fatally injured (Wikipedia, ‘Cotswold Olimpick Games’, 2026; Guinness World Records, ‘Longest Running Shin-Kicking Contest’). Competitors in that era wore ‘heavily nailed boots, sometimes with pointed tips’ (Wikipedia, ‘Cotswold Olimpick Games’, 2026).

In Devon, the decisive figure in arresting this arms race was John Stone of Crediton. Stone was the proprietor of the Plymouth Inn, which had served as the principal venue for Devonshire wrestling tournaments for over sixteen years. The Western Times reported in 1926 that Stone had organised ‘many a great tourney and brought together old leviathans whose stour tussles were a pleasure to watch’. Crucially, the paper credited Stone as ‘one of the first to cut out of the Devonshire game that inhuman kicking business which often maimed opponents and certainly made good men from Cornwall and other parts of the country reluctant to join issue’ (Western Times, 23 July 1926).

Stone’s reform was pragmatic rather than puritanical. He recognised that the escalation of kicking severity was driving competitors away from the Devon ring — particularly Cornishmen, whose willingness to enter cross-county contests was essential to the commercial viability of the tournaments. By eliminating the most extreme forms of shin assault, Stone preserved the Devon leg-play tradition whilst making it compatible with broader competition. As the Western Times observed, ‘with this element eliminated there is not much difference between the Devonshire and Cornish styles’ (Western Times, 23 July 1926).

The reform came too late to save the Victorian Devonshire game as a mass spectator sport — that decline was driven by broader changes in rural entertainment, the enclosure of common land, and the rise of Association Football. By 1926, as the same Western Times article noted, wrestling survived in Cornwall but was ‘extinct’ in Devon, and the journalist was reduced to calling for a revival. It would take until 2014, when the Devonshire Wrestling Society was established in Exeter, for that revival to materialise.

Shin-Kicking beyond Devon

It would be a mistake to regard shin-kicking as a uniquely Devonshire eccentricity. The evidence suggests it was a widespread feature of jacket-based wrestling traditions across the British Isles and beyond.

The most visible surviving example is the Cotswold Olimpicks itself, where the World Shin-Kicking Championships have been held annually at Dover’s Hill, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, since the games were revived in 1951 — and intermittently since their foundation in 1612 (Guinness World Records; Olimpick Games, 2024). The Westcountry Wrestling Textbook identifies Gloucestershire as one of the six historic shires of Westcountry martial arts practice, and notes that the Cotswold Olimpicks’ shin-kicking ‘perhaps the last surviving legacy of the Devonshire style of wrestling’ (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 30). Today’s competitors at the Olimpicks wear white coats (representing shepherds’ smocks), hold each other by the shoulders, and attempt to kick each other’s shins whilst grappling their opponent to the ground — a simplified but recognisable descendant of the Devon system. Straw padding is now permitted; baked shoes and metal tips are not.

In Lancashire, a cognate practice known as ‘clog fighting’ or ‘purring’ persisted into the 1930s, particularly in the mill towns where heavy wooden clogs were everyday workwear. The Lancashire version was more closely associated with settling personal disputes than with organised sporting competition, and its association with gambling led to its eventual criminalisation (Wikipedia, ‘Shin-kicking’, 2025). Irish Collar-and-Elbow wrestling incorporated its own leg-striking tradition, referred to by MacFadden (2021) as ‘footsparring’. The Devon textbook notes that the practice of ‘purring’ was also exported to the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia by Westcountry emigrants, though in these colonial contexts it tended to degenerate into tests of endurance rather than the skill-based tactical system it had been in its Devon homeland (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, p. 48).

The broader parallel is with striking-grappling hybrid systems worldwide. Senegalese Laamb wrestling permits striking before the grappling engagement. Burmese Lethwei includes headbutts and kicks alongside clinch fighting. Muay Thai, though now primarily a striking art, retains a deep clinch-wrestling vocabulary. In each case, the same biomechanical trade-off identified by Parkyns in 1727 — that striking with the legs compromises the striker’s base — governs the tactical interaction between the two modes of combat. The Devon wrestlers of the early nineteenth century were not merely engaging in rural thuggery. They were navigating, within the constraints of their particular tradition, the same fundamental problem of human biomechanics that governs every modern mixed martial arts bout.

The Modern Game: Safe Practice and Self-Defence

It is important to state plainly what the modern Devonshire Wrestling Society teaches, and what it does not.

The DWS does not use, endorse, or train the brutal kicking methods of the historical game in competitive wrestling. There are no baked shoes, no metal-tipped soles, no blood-soaked leather. The modern uniform mandates trainers with non-marking soles, and the Society’s practice incorporates modern football-style shin pads — skillibegs, in the Devon dialect — worn beneath tall socks (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, pp. 62–63, 67–68). Controlled kicking techniques — sweeps, trips, hooks, and reaps delivered with precision rather than brute force — remain central to the Devon curriculum, because they are what distinguishes Devon play from the Cornish style and gives the art its distinctive tactical character. But the emphasis is upon timing, angle, and the manipulation of the opponent’s balance, not upon inflicting damage to the shin.

What the DWS does preserve is the full technical vocabulary. The front kick, the inside kick, the outside kick, the hook, the back heel, and the stomp are all taught as part of a comprehensive system of 20 core techniques — encompassing hips, heaves, crooks, trips, and rope techniques — within a structured curriculum of ten principles, four orientations, four hitches, and graded progression from novice to master (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, pp. 57, 121–123). The ‘Raising or Throwing the Toes’ drill — a solo kicking routine adapted from a seventeenth-century single-stick exercise described by Zachary Wylde (1711) — trains the rhythmic chaining of all six kick types in sequence, developing the pendulum rhythm that was Cann’s signature (Westcountry Wrestling Textbook, 2024, pp. 205–207).

There is, however, a further dimension to the teaching. The DWS recognises that the techniques it preserves were developed within a culture of practical self-reliance — by men who expected to use their bodies to defend themselves, their families, and their communities. The more forceful applications of the Devon kicking repertoire — the full-power front kick (‘the Sledgehammer’), the ankle-damaging inside kick, the stomp — are therefore taught and understood within a self-defence context. Practitioners learn what these techniques can do when delivered without restraint, precisely so that they understand the responsibility that comes with the knowledge, and so that the art retains its integrity as a genuine martial tradition rather than a purely sporting or ceremonial exercise. In this respect, Devonshire wrestling follows the same principle as any serious martial art: the full curriculum is preserved, studied, and respected, whilst the rules of competitive play define the boundaries within which the art is safely enjoyed.

The result is a modern martial art that is both accessible and authentic. A newcomer to the DWS can begin training the core curriculum in hours, enjoy competitive play with full safety equipment, and progressively develop the timing, balance, and tactical intelligence that the Devon system demands. They can also, should they wish, study the deeper self-defence applications — understanding, as Parkyns understood in 1727, that ‘whoever understands wrestling, will never call the out-play a safe and secure play; besides the in-play will sooner secure a man’s person, when playing at sharps’ (Parkyns, 1727, pp. 10–11).

Conclusion: From Shambles to Science

The history of shin-kicking in Devonshire wrestling is, in miniature, the history of all martial arts: a trajectory from unregulated violence, through codification and reform, to a modern practice that balances competitive safety with the preservation of genuine fighting knowledge. The spectators who climbed the poplars at the Golden Eagle in 1827 came to see blood. What they actually witnessed — had they possessed the vocabulary to describe it — was an applied lesson in biomechanics, timing, and the management of risk under pressure.

Cann’s ‘Sledgehammer’ was not merely hard. It was rhythmic — working, as the Exeter Flying Post observed, ‘with such regularity as a pendulum’. Stone’s reforms were not merely humanitarian. They were commercially rational — preserving the Devon leg-play tradition by making it sustainable. And the modern DWS curriculum is not merely sporting. It is a living martial art, rooted in three centuries of documented practice, preserving the full technical and tactical depth of the Devon system within a framework of responsible, safe, and inclusive training.

The blood has long been cleaned from the shins. The science remains.