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The research of the PhD student Des Newell from Oxford Brookes University shows that – far from being a mindless activity - fighting in the eighteenth century between ordinary people (including women) was carried out according to a code which ensured that fair play was adhered to.

At the Peacock Gym in Canning Town, East London, Des argues that in the years before the formation of the Metropolitan Police, East End communities would have been governed by these unwritten rules. Some of these ‘rules’ are alluded to in this letter home from a Monsieur Cesar de Saussure in 1727:

ÌýThe lower populace is of a brutal and insolent nature, and is very quarrelsome. Should two men of this class have a disagreement that they cannot settle amicably, they retire to some quiet place and strip to the waist. Everyone who see’s them preparing to fight surrounds them, not in order to separate them, but on the contrary to enjoy, for it is a great sport for lookers on and they judge the blows and also help to enforce certain rules in this mode of warfare… The insolence of the populace is so great that as soon as an honest man has any disagreement with one of their kind, then he is at once invited to strip and fight.

Street-fighting is part of Des’s work on ‘plebeian masculinity’ and he argues that the unwritten ‘rules’ in place for fisticuffs between individualsÌý were later codified and used in amateur and professional boxing.

Useful links

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To mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which was the first Gothic novel, the British Library is staging an exhibition later in the year which charts the rise and popularity of this genre.

Tom Holland spoke with one of the curators of the exhibition Tanya Kirk.

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Image: Watercolour of the Castle of Otranto. Horace Walpole's personal copy of The Castle of Otranto. Courtesy of the British Library.

Fiona Watson heads north on the road to Glencoe to try and find out why the district of Lochaber had such problems with bandits between the 15th and 18th centuries. She meets up with Professor Alan McInnes from the University of Strathclyde who explains that much of the problem is down to the lack of centralised government, the rule of clans and the importance of male rituals. Indeed, it isn’t until the 18th century that banditry is an expression of anti-English sentiment.

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Further Reading

Lochaber - The last bandit country, c.1600-c.1750. / MacInnes, A.

In: Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, Vol. LXIV, 2008, p. 1-21.

Making History is produced by Nick Patrick and is a Pier Production for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4.

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