Cotswold Olimpick Games

A day of contests

The programme has altered a great deal over four hundred years. In the earliest records the sports include running and jumping, wrestling, shin-kicking, throwing a sledgehammer, quarterstaff play, and fighting with swords or cudgels. Horse races were run, and hounds were used for coursing. Booths and tents went up where people played chess, cards and a board game called Irish for small stakes, and plenty of food was provided for those who came. A hunting horn called the competitors to the hillside, and cannon were fired to open the competitions. Silver trophies were among the prizes.

Robert Dover and 1612

The event takes its name from Robert Dover, a lawyer who most likely moved to Saintbury, close to Chipping Campden, in about 1611. He is thought to have been born in Norfolk between 1575 and 1582, a son of John Dover. The first meeting is usually dated to 1612, though some accounts put it as early as 1601. Dover is said to have had King James I's approval for the scheme. Whether he invented the games or took over an older gathering, perhaps a church ale, cannot be settled from the evidence.

Puritan objections

Plenty of people disliked the games. Many Puritans of the 17th century thought that even small pleasures could draw a person towards sin, and they were uneasy about merrymaking on church holidays. The coat, feather and ruff that Dover wore, sent to him by the king, looked to them like a challenge; one Puritan writer even condemned the starch used to stiffen linen. Wealthy landowners of Puritan outlook barred their servants from going. Quarrels of this kind hardened into the English Civil War in 1642, and the games lapsed. They returned after the Restoration of 1660.

Revivals and today

Without Dover, who died in 1652, the gathering was said by critics to have turned into little more than a drunken country fair, and for a time it was known as Dover's Meeting. It came to an end in 1852, when the common land used for the sports was divided among landowners and farmers and then enclosed. A third beginning came in 1963. Since 1966 the games have taken place on the Friday following the Spring Bank Holiday. Recent programmes have featured shin-kicking, tug of war, morris dancing, judo and motorcycle scrambling. According to the British Olympic Association, they are among the earliest forerunners of the British Olympic movement.

How Cotswold Olimpick Games is kept

A single day, in late May or early June. Crowds climb Dover's Hill above Chipping Campden. A horn call and a cannon shot have opened the sports in the past; the day then moves through athletics and wrestling, shin-kicking, sword and cudgel play, and in recent times tug of war, judo and motorcycle scrambling. Officials called sticklers keep the fighters apart, and the phrase 'a stickler for the rules' is traced to them. Local people and visitors take part, a committee runs the event, and fireworks close it.

When and where

The modern games fall on the Friday following the Spring Bank Holiday, so they land in late May or early June, and this has been the pattern since 1966. In their early centuries they were kept over two days in Whitsun week, a movable church season that also shifted between mid-May and mid-June.

Dover's Hill, above Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, in the Cotswold hills of England. The sports are staged in a natural hollow in the hillside that used to be called Kingcombe Plain. In the 17th century spectators travelled in from Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, and Prince Rupert was among those who came to watch.

What Cotswold Olimpick Games means

Dover believed that physical training mattered for the defence of the kingdom, so the games had a practical as well as a festive purpose. He also seems to have wanted rich and poor to share the same occasion, and verse written about the games in 1636 presents them as a scene of social harmony and common enjoyment. Calling them 'Olimpicks' linked the sports to ancient Greece and gave them a classical gloss.

Questions people ask about Cotswold Olimpick Games

See also

Chelsea Flower ShowA five-day May horticultural festival held in London by the Royal Horticultural SocietyTrooping the ColourThe annual British military parade marking the official birthday of the monarch.Saint David's DayThe national feast day of Wales, marked with parades, poetry contests and daffodilsWaitangi DayNew Zealand's national day remembering the 1840 founding agreement.

Good reading and sources

• BBC NEWS | UK | England | GloucestershireBBC, Article
• BBC NEWS | UK | England | GloucestershireBBC, Article

• Cotswold Olimpick Games on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data

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