Recreation in the Renaissance

86 Recreation in the Renaissance
should ‘avoid both exposing themselves to laughter, and damaging
other people’. 31
Duelling and hunting are two other customs which we found briefly
assessed in Trotti’s De ludo. Duelling could hardly be defined as a sport
(or rather, as just a sport), given its role in the culture of the European
nobility, where it belonged to a highly codified set of behavioural
rules governing status and public recognition. However, the frequency
of its practice and its family relationship with fencing may suggest its
mention in passing here, particularly if we consider that it was practised
outside the aristocrats’ ‘office hours’ (that is, their actual engagement
in warfare). In Burton, we have found a passing critique of its excessive
diffusion (‘our modern Frenchmen, that had rather lose a pound of
blood in a single combat’). The Church traditionally condemned it,
in terms that resemble its battle against violent sports and spectacles
(like the aforementioned tournaments). 32
Status games were possibly even more at play in the legislation about
hunting. Obviously, this was not originally an activity reserved to a specific
social group; but during the Middle Ages European aristocracy had
made sure that rights to specific practices became their own monopoly.
This process had its climax during the fifteenth and sixteenth century,
and the subsequent monopoly remained substantially unchallenged
until the French Revolution. Generally speaking, princes and nobility
became the only social figures allowed to hunt; and, although the crossing
of farmland and devastation of crops could be discouraged and regulated
by law, at the end of the day it was perceived (by the hunting
lobby) as an inevitable side-effect. However, peasants’ protest and
poachers’ defiance of privileges and prohibitions are established facts of
social history throughout the period: well-known protesters include the
peasants of the German revolt of 1524–25 and the compilers of some
of the 1789 cahiers de doléances; among the poachers, we find the Blacks
studied by Edward Thompson. 33
The French case offers a particularly complex situation, since, on one
hand, the country was split along a north–south divide, with Germanic
law governing on one side, Roman law on the other. According to the
latter, game was nobody’s property and what really mattered were rights
of property: therefore, although solely in theory, nobody was allowed
to trespass property borders during a chase. On the other hand, further
complication derived to French jurisdiction from feudal law, under
which more than one person could claim rights of hunting over the
same land. With the social extension of hunting rights varying from
time to time (were landowners of plebeian origin going to be included