‘With all the keenness, accompanied by shouts, with
which their forefathers had wielded claymores’: Early-Modern Shinty in the
Moray Firth.
When researching the history of golf, it is clear that
it was not the only sport played out on the links in the Moray Firth region.
Shinty, a traditional Gaelic sport, was played throughout the Highlands and
Islands and also around the Moray Firth. The sport went by multiple names such
as chew and knotty. All were played with a curved wooden stick and a ball, the
objective of the game was to drive the ball into the other team’s goal. The
game could last for hours and could be played over vast areas. A match in the
mid-eighteenth century was apparently played over ten miles near Dingwall. Two
village teams gathered their men and met in the middle. By the end, only one
player remained, the rest were too exhausted or injured to continue. So, being
left alone to do his duty, he whacked the ball the remaining miles to the
opposing village to secure the victory.
After the Reformation the Kirk tightened controls on
Sunday sport in attempts to ensure complete observation of the Sabbath. People
profaning the Sabbath, by heading out to the links for sport instead of
attending sermon, was a continual thorn in the side of ministers during the
early modern period. However, despite the best efforts of ministers and session
elders Sunday sports continued. In the eighteenth century, the Kirk adopted a
more lenient approach and fewer sportsmen were officially charged.
The first references of playing at the ‘chew’, a
variation of shinty played with a cork float rather than a wooden ball, appear
in Elgin in the early seventeenth century. While the game play resembled shinty, the name ‘the chew’
was likely derived from the French game ‘la soule’, a popular ball and stick
game played from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. It is possible that
this variation of the game came to the region from trading connections with
Europe, especially because the first instance of chew being played was by two
sons of Edward Auldcorn, known as ‘Dutchman’. Between 1599 and 1618 no fewer
than seven cases of playing chew, instead of attending sermon, were heard
before the Elgin Kirk Session. By the summer of 1601, the elders were at wits
end with chew players and other sportsmen. Therefore, they made an example out
of the troublesome Thomas Makean. He was forced to pay 10s. to the kirk, stay
in the steeple for 48 hours and then repent publicly at the joggis. The joggis
was a form of public humiliation where an iron collar and chain leash, fixed to
a post or wall at the market, was placed around the perpetrator’s neck.
Although Makean would have felt the full shame of his deeds, it did not stop
other sportsmen from playing chew on Sundays in Moray.
Elsewhere,
ministers tried inventive ways to stop Sunday shinty matches. Daniel Bethune, the minister of Rosskeen in
Easter-Ross from 1717 to 1754, ingeniously halted the customary Sunday shinty
match. In the early years of his tenure, he approached the leader of the AR
dross men, who was famed for his strength and ability at the sport. After
serious persuasion he convinced the team captain to become a session elder. Little
did the captain know that his first duty as a new elder was to stop the Sunday
games! The following week the session elder walked to the playing-grounds with
his caman in-hand. He announced to his former compatriots that if they
continued at their Sunday games they would feel the full weight of his cudgel.
Afterwards, ‘the players thereupon quietly retired, and never afterwards met
again on the Sunday for a like purpose.’
Shinty, and sport in general, when played on
non-religious days, however, was accepted by the kirk. For example, New Year’s
Day was a popular day for celebrations and sport. In Dornoch shinty was played
annually on New Years’ day. Men and boys from the working classes took to the
links at 11AM and would play until dark. Donald Sage wrote, they played ‘with
all the keenness, accompanied by shouts, with which their forefathers had
wielded claymores.’ With their blood up and tempers flared the match resembled
more of a battle rather than a game. Injuries were common and one unfortunate
soul, Andrew Colin, died from being struck in the head by the ball.
Bystanders were also at risk of being injured during
shinty matches. In 1770, George Gunn, a customs officer from Thurso wrote a
letter to the local magistrate demanding an inquiry into the actions of James
Mackie, the officer of excise in the burgh. Gunn reported that he was on his
usual stroll along the beach after work when he was attacked by Mackie, who
abandon his match specifically to chase Gunn down and beat him to the ground
with his knotty stick. Subsequently, Mackie shouted abuses at Gunn and followed
him home yelling at him the entire way. The records unfortunately do not tell
us how the issue was resolved.
These colourful anecdotes tell us much about shinty
and when it was played during the early modern period. The Kirk was keen to
stop Sunday matches and used fines, confinement and public humiliation to deter
sportsmen from profaning the Sabbath. They also hatched clever, and
manipulative, plans to turn former players against their fellows. However, when
shinty did not interfere with the Sabbath, ministers left it alone. It remained
a popular festive game and was played frequently throughout the year. Golfers,
then, were hardly alone out on the links. It is likely that across the Moray
Firth many occasionally set down their slender jointed clubs and picked up
their caman, joining their neighbours for a lively bit of fun.
If you want to
know more about the early material culture of shinty in Sutherland, follow this
link:
Sources:
William Cramond (ed.), Extracts of the Elgin Kirk Session 1584-1779
(Elgin, 1897).
Roger
Hutchinson, Camanachd! The Story of
Shinty 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 2004).
Hugh Dan MacLennan, Not an Orchid (Inverness, 1995).
Tony Money, Manly & Muscular Diversions: Public
Schools and the Nineteenth-Century Sporting Revival (London, 2001).
Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica; or, Parish Life in
the North of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1889).
‘Papers of the
Sinclair family of Freswick, Caithness 1523-1891’ National Records of Scotland, GD136.
No comments:
Post a Comment