‘The wrestlings will commence’

Whitsuntide and the opening of the Westcountry Wrestling season

Introduction

Whitsuntide — the feast of Pentecost and its surrounding week, falling fifty days after Easter — occupied a distinctive and largely irreplaceable position in the traditional sporting calendar of Devon and Cornwall. For wrestlers, their backers, subscribers, and spectators across the two counties, it functioned as what we might now call a season-opener: the moment at which winter’s enforced idleness gave way to the summer calendar of matches, tournaments, and county rivalries. This was not merely custom in the sense of pleasant habit. It was a structuring principle, rooted in the convergence of religious observance, agricultural rhythm, and popular leisure, that organised the social life of wrestling communities from at least the mid-eighteenth century through to the latter half of the nineteenth. To mark the 24th of May — Whit Sunday in 2026 — this piece draws together the primary sources preserved in the archive to reconstruct what Whitsuntide meant to the wrestling world of the Westcountry: when it began, why it mattered, how it was celebrated, and what it tells us about the deeper place of wrestling in regional life.

The importance of Whitsuntide

The most succinct and authoritative account of Whitsuntide’s place in the Devon wrestling year comes from Sabine Baring-Gould, whose magisterial survey of Devonshire life provides the essential formulation:

Wrestling matches usually began at Whitsuntide, but were most in practice at the period between the hay and corn harvests, when the cereals were assuming a golden hue, and the orchards were bending under their burden of fruit. There was hardly a village in the West that did not offer a prize and enjoy the time-honoured spectacle of a game of wrestling. (Baring-Gould, 1908, p. 518)

Several features of this passage repay attention. First, the precision of the temporal claim: wrestling ‘began’ at Whitsuntide. This was not merely one occasion amongst many but the initiating moment of the season, a threshold that demarcated the sporting from the non-sporting period of the year. Second, the logic of the timing is implicitly agricultural. Whitsuntide falls in late May or early June, after the major pressures of spring planting had eased but before the intensity of the hay harvest made leisure impossible. The season that follows — between hay and corn harvest — represents that brief window of relative agricultural freedom in which men could travel, compete, and gather. Baring-Gould’s portrait of a landscape of near-universal participation, in which ‘hardly a village in the West’ lacked its prize, is consistent with the evidence of the newspaper record and points to the genuine depth of wrestling culture in the region.

William Howitt, writing rather earlier in his celebrated survey of rural England, confirms the geographical restriction of the practice and gives some sense of its cultural weight:

This exercise… is now, like many others, fallen into general disuse; and is confined almost entirely to Cornwall and Devon in the west, and the counties of Chester, Lancaster, Cumberland, and Westmorland in the north. These counties, indeed, have always been pre-eminent in the science of wrestling, and have possessed practices peculiar to themselves. (Howitt, 1838, p. 244)

Howitt’s observation that each tradition was ‘peculiar to itself’ is significant. The Westcountry did not merely participate in a national pastime; it maintained an entirely distinct corpus of technique, custom, and seasonal structure. Whitsuntide was the moment at which that distinctiveness was most publicly expressed.

Mike Tripp’s systematic analysis of Cornish wrestling from the eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth confirms and extends this picture. His analysis of Cornish wrestling in the eighteenth century establishes that ‘tournaments occurred when people were free to either participate or watch, which meant at major holiday times, especially Whitsuntide’ (Tripp, 2009., vol. 1, p. 104). The specific examples he marshals are precise and accumulate into a pattern: wrestling at Millbrook, near the county border, was advertised for ‘Monday and Tuesday of Whitsun week’ in early June 1783; a match was arranged for ‘Tuesday of Whitsun week’ at Redruth in 1786; and the Liskeard Riding — a civic custom of some antiquity — was held over three days ‘from Whitsun Monday to Wednesday’ as early as 1757 (Tripp, 2009, vol. 1, p. 104). The consistency of this pattern across a half-century of evidence is itself historically significant.

A Parish feast tradition

To understand why Whitsuntide carried such weight, it is necessary to appreciate the dual nature of the occasion. Whitsuntide was simultaneously a major feast of the Christian calendar and an occasion for popular festivity, the two elements reinforcing rather than contesting each other in the pre-industrial rural community. William Borlase, the eighteenth-century Cornish natural historian, provided a description of the parish feast structure that captures this integration exactly. Quoted by Tripp, he describes the feast as beginning with a religious service on the Sunday, followed by entertaining friends and relatives, whilst on the Monday and Tuesday ‘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’ (Borlase, 1758, cited in Tripp, 2009, vol. 1, p. 104). The rhythmic sequence — devotion followed by festivity, the sacred day giving way to the secular — was a pattern deeply embedded in the annual round of rural life across the Celtic west.

The Jaouen study of Celtic jacket wrestling elaborates the same point in a comparative frame, noting that matches ‘took place on the greens around their pubs or the churchyards’ and that ‘the date was generally at the time of wakes, the annual parish feast, generally on Monday and Tuesday’ (Jaouen, 2007, p. 19). As Jaouen remarks, this calendar logic was structurally identical in Brittany, where the ‘profane days after the Sunday feast’ — the days given over to sport and assembly — persisted into the modern era. The Westcountry pattern was thus part of a wider Atlantic-Celtic cultural continuum, not a local peculiarity.

The Cornish evidence is particularly rich. Tripp notes that wrestling took place at ‘major religious holidays, such as Whitsuntide as at Falmouth and Liskeard’, and that the Falmouth Whitsun Monday meeting of 1809 drew an attendance estimated at ten thousand spectators — a figure that testifies to the scale and civic importance of such occasions (Tripp, 2009, vol. 1, p. 116; Jaouen, 2007, p. 69).

Whitsuntide in practice, 1811–1857

To see how Whitsuntide surfaced in wrestling culture, we need to look at the way it was portrayed in the local papers of the period. The newspapers contained in our archive provide granular evidence of how Whitsuntide tournaments were organised and advertised across the region. The material is striking for both its consistency and the care with which promoters and committees structured the occasion.

The earliest detailed example is the Crediton advertisement of May 1811:

The Annual Prize of Twenty Guineas will be Wrestled For this year on the Wednesday and Thursday in Whitsun-Week: Ten Guineas of which will be played for and distributed on the Wednesday; and the remaining Ten Guineas on the Thursday. (Exeter Flying Post, 14 May 1811)

Several features of this announcement are characteristic of the genre. The prize is described as ‘Annual’, indicating that the match had already acquired the status of a recurring fixture embedded in the community’s expectation. The distribution of the purse across two days was standard practice, the first day’s ‘single play’ serving as a qualifying round for the second day’s decisive ‘double play’. The fact that it fell in Whitsun week was not incidental: it was the scheduling logic that made the event viable, ensuring that both competitors and spectators would be free from regular employment.

By 1816, the pattern had extended to the coastal town of Brixham:

Brixham Annual Diversions, in Whitsun-week, will be generally attractive, from the variety of amusements, and particularly so on Wednesday, the 5th June, to the admirers of Scientific Wrestling, from the expectation that a Purse of Five Guineas, which will be the winner’s prize, will bring together many competitors for fame, in this national and English exercise. (Exeter Flying Post, 22 May 1816)

The advertisement is instructive in its categorisation of wrestling as ‘this national and English exercise’, a piece of rhetoric that reflects the contemporary discourse of muscular nationalism surrounding prize athletics, whilst simultaneously presenting it as the centrepiece of a broader programme of ‘Annual Diversions’. Wrestling was not an isolated event: it was embedded in a festive complex that included music, racing, and communal eating.

The following year, 1817, brings the Dartmouth Whitsuntide Amusements, which extended across two consecutive days:

Dartmouth Whitsuntide Amusements. On Tuesday, the 27th of May, 1817, to be Wrestled For, on the South Ground, a Purse of Eight Guineas, and other Amusements. — And on Wednesday, the 28th of May, to be Wrestled For, a Purse of Three Guineas, Boat Racing, and a variety of other Amusements. (Exeter Flying Post, 1817)

The combination of wrestling with boat racing and unspecified further amusements illustrates the integrated nature of Whitsun festivity: wrestling was the premier athletic event, but it occupied its place within a richer programme of holiday entertainment that gave the occasion its distinctive social character.

By 1820, Paignton had adopted the same pattern:

To take Place on the 23d and 24th of May, 1820, being Tuesday and Wednesday in Whitsun-Week. On Tuesday there will be Lots of Fun, as usual. On Wednesday, Wrestling, for the following Prizes, to begin precisely by one o’clock. (Exeter Flying Post, 1820)

The phrase ‘Lots of Fun, as usual’ — casual and even jovial in tone — reveals the degree to which Whitsuntide had been thoroughly domesticated as a community occasion, its pleasures understood and expected without further specification.

In 1827, the pattern remained vigorous across multiple Devon venues. The Broadclyst tournament — a village meeting rather than a major town event — was advertised for ‘Whit-Monday and Tuesday, the 4th and 5th June next, a Purse of 20 Sovereigns’ (Exeter Flying Post, 17 May 1827). The prize fund of twenty sovereigns was substantial, indicating that even relatively small communities could mobilise significant financial support for Whitsun wrestling when the occasion demanded.

Whitsuntide in the Capital

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Whitsuntide’s structural importance to wrestling culture is its replication in London, where the Cornish and Devonshire diaspora reproduced the seasonal calendar of the Westcountry in metropolitan settings. Pierce Egan, whose Book of Sports of 1836 remains one of the most valuable primary sources for the London wrestling scene of the 1820s and 1830s, and whose editorial role at Bell’s Life in London gave him unmatched access to the sporting world of the period, provides a vivid account of the Whitsuntide excitement that wrestlinggenerated in the capital.

The archive preserves two passages from the period around 1827 that are of particular significance. The first records the anticipation surrounding the prospect of the two great champions — James Polkinghorne of Cornwall and Abraham Cann of Devon — meeting in London:

Polkinghorne and Cann are both expected in London at Whitsuntide, when in all probability a match will be made between them for 500l. a-side. (Bell’s Life in London, c. 1827)

The sum is extraordinary: five hundred pounds a side was a level of wagering that placed this anticipated encounter among the highest-stakes athletic contests of the age, comparable to the great prize-fights of the period. The fact that Whitsuntide was specified as the moment for such a match — rather than, say, Good Friday, or midsummer — suggests that the season-opening character of the festival carried with it a prestige and a concentration of attention that made it the natural occasion for the most ambitious contests.

The second passage is still more evocative of the atmosphere:

The Whitsuntide wrestling excites great interest. The Devon men meet at the Eagle, in the City-road; and the Cornish, at the Wellington, at Chelsea. (Bell’s Life in London, c. 1827)

The image of the two communities — Cornish and Devonian — gathered at their respective metropolitan heartlands, the public houses that served as their social and organisational bases, before descending on the wrestling ground, speaks to the depth of county identity that wrestling expressed. Whitsuntide was not merely a sporting occasion; it was a moment of collective self-assertion for communities of migrants who carried their sporting traditions with them from the Westcountry to the metropolis.

By June 1847, Tripp notes, the London Whitsuntide programme had been elaborated to the point where the two styles were given separate days: ‘wrestling in the Devonshire style was organised on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Whit week and the Cornish style was on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday’ (Tripp, 2009, vol. 1, p. 139). This allocation of an entire week to wrestling, with the different county styles given their own sequence of days, is perhaps the clearest possible indication of how central Whitsuntide had become to the wrestling calendar on both sides of the Tamar.

The Cornwall and Devonshire Wrestling Society’s notice published in Bell’s Life in London in May 1857 exemplifies the mature form that London Whitsuntide wrestling had taken by the mid-century:

The Committee of the Cornwall and Devonshire Wrestling Society beg to announce that they will celebrate their usual Annual Sport in the Pleasure Garden attached to Mr Baum’s, the White Lion, Victoria Park Station, Hackney Wick, on Whit-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when a number of handsome money prizes will be given to be wrestled for by men of three classes, viz, Men of any Weight, and Men under-list, and for Amateurs that have not wrestled for a prize. (Bell’s Life in London, 17 May 1857)

The notice is remarkable for what it reveals about the organisation and self-understanding of the London wrestling community. The event is the ‘Annual Sport’, firmly institutionalised. Three weight or experience categories have been established, reflecting a degree of administrative sophistication. And the occasion extends across three days — Whit-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday — confirming the multi-day character that distinguished the major metropolitan fixtures. The ground ‘will be illuminated upon this occasion’ and conclude ‘with a grand display of fireworks each evening’, details which give a vivid impression of the festive ambition that surrounded the event.

The Brecknock Arms, Camden Town — which served as the principal London venue for Cornish and Devonshire wrestling across much of the 1840s — also structured its season around the Whitsuntide climax. One notice in the archive announces simply: ‘At Whitsuntide the Annual Subscription Match for £100 will be played for at the Brecknock Arms’ (Royal Cornwall Gazette, c. 1845). A prize fund of one hundred pounds represented, by any measure, an exceptional commitment of financial resources, and the casual confidence of the announcement — no date given, no further detail required — suggests that the readership would know exactly what was meant and when.

Wrestling, ballad, and collective memory

The cultural resonance of Whitsuntide as a wrestling occasion found its way into the ballad tradition of Cornwall, embedding the festival in popular memory in a way that transcended the merely administrative. Tripp quotes a ballad commemorating the Truro Fair, which took place at Whitsuntide, that captures the spirit of the occasion with considerable vividness:

Four friends were bent on a holiday,
A holiday,
A holiday,
So to Truro town they made their way
One early Whit-sun morning.
(Anon., in Baring-Gould (ed.), 1974)

The ballad proceeds through the traditional diversions of the fair before arriving at the wrestling booth, where the amateur ambitions of the visitors are summarily dispatched:

A wrestling booth did draw them in,
Did draw them in,
Did draw them in:
Here was sum’mat, surely, they stood to win
So early in the morning.
But each of them had a terrible bout,
A dreadful rout,
A sick’ning clout:
For the wrastler threw the whole lot of them out
So early in the morning.

The tone is comic and unsentimental, but the structural point is clear: wrestling at Whitsuntide was a given, an expected element of the fair that the visitors seek out as naturally as they seek food and entertainment. The booth is there; they ‘are drawn in’. Wrestling at Whitsun was simply what happened.

The season as a whole

It would be misleading to present Whitsuntide as the only significant moment in the wrestling year. As Baring-Gould makes clear, the season extended through the summer months, with the period between hay and corn harvests representing the peak of activity. Parish feasts, midsummer celebrations, civic ridings such as the Bodmin and Liskeard events, and the great autumn fairs all sustained wrestling activity well into September and October. The ‘Western Times’ columns of the early twentieth century, preserved in the archive, confirm that even into the late Victorian and Edwardian period, wrestling occupied a broad summer arc.

But within that arc, Whitsuntide retained its privileged position as the opening moment — the occasion that signalled the resumption of the season after the enforced pause of winter and early spring. The Paignton report of June 1827 in the Exeter Flying Post captures this sense of renewed collective purpose with particular force:

As evidence of the satisfaction afforded to all classes at this grand holiday, the announcement of its repetition in the next Whitsun week, was received with universal welcome, and arrangements for that purpose immediately entered on. (Exeter Flying Post, 14 June 1827)

The phrase ‘universal welcome’ is one that a journalist might deploy loosely, but the specificity of ‘the next Whitsun week’ — the immediate commitment to the following year’s festival, made at the moment of this year’s close — speaks to a genuine and deeply held attachment to the Whitsuntide occasion as the anchor of the sporting year.

Conclusion

The evidence assembled here, drawn from a range of primary sources spanning more than a century, presents a consistent and coherent picture. Whitsuntide was not incidentally associated with wrestling in the Westcountry: it was constitutively so. The festival provided the structural logic — religious, agricultural, and social — that made organised wrestling possible. It was the moment when communities suspended their ordinary work, gathered their resources, assembled their athletes, and invited the world to see what Devon and Cornwall could do. From the village green at Crediton in 1811 to the illuminated pleasure grounds at Hackney Wick in 1857, from the Liskeard Riding of 1757 to the streets and public houses of Chelsea and the City Road, the pattern held: when Whitsun came, the wrestling began.

That tradition deserves to be remembered, celebrated, and (where possible) revived.

References

Anon. (1974). The wrestling match. In S. Baring-Gould (Ed.), Folk songs of the West Country. David and Charles. (Original ballad, undated)

Anon. (1811, May 14). Crediton wrestling [Advertisement]. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (1816, May 22). Brixham annual diversions [Advertisement]. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (1817). Dartmouth Whitsuntide amusements [Advertisement]. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (1820). Paignton annual wrestling [Advertisement]. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (1827, May 17). Wrestling to be wrestled for at Broadclist [Advertisement]. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (1827, June 14). The Paignton match. Exeter Flying Post.

Anon. (c. 1827). [Wrestling intelligence]. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle.

Anon. (c. 1845). At Whitsuntide the annual subscription match. Royal Cornwall Gazette.

Anon. (1857, May 17). Cornwall and Devonshire Wrestling Society [Advertisement]. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle.

Baring-Gould, S. (1908). Devonshire characters and strange events. John Lane.

Baring-Gould, S. (Ed.). (1974). Folk songs of the West Country. David and Charles.

Borlase, W. (1758). The natural history of Cornwall. W. Jackson.

Egan, P. (1836). Pierce Egan’s book of sports and mirror of life. T. Tegg.

Howitt, W. (1838). The rural life of England. Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans.

Jaouen, G. (2007). Celtic jacket wrestling: Cornish, Devon wrestling and Gouren [Reduced ed.]. Author.

Tripp, M. (2009). Persistence of difference: A history of Cornish wrestling [Doctoral thesis, University of Exeter].