Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

4 With Amusement for Allphy. Over time, the lines between moral instruction and escapist fantasywere sometimes thin. 7Still, before the 1680s, escapism of any kind from duties and onerouswork was for the most part limited for most people in the English colonies.In the Chesapeake and Southern regions, the widely dispersed populationdiscouraged the replication of Old World amusements. Play overlapped labor,and displays of prowess typically were rooted in arduous yet often irregularwork tasks. In the Chesapeake Bay area, for instance, the brutalconditions of the emerging tobacco economy allowed little time for recreation.“So soon as it is day,” said an indentured servant in a ballad, “towork I must away.” 8By the end of the seventeenth century, however, popular diversions beganto take a more regular shape, one that bore the imprint of distinct socialclasses. For an emerging group of “gentlemen”—propertied men withstatus—activities such as billiards, lawn bowling, and horse racing werepopular. Thoroughbred horse racing also served to remind propertyless observersof the aristocrats’ wealth and status. In 1674, a county court inVirginia emphasized that horse racing was “a sport for gentlemen only.”The races allowed the gentry to display their authority and valuable possessions,including slaves, who sometimes rode as jockeys for their masters inhigh-stakes races. Moreover, according to the historian Nancy Struna:“This generation of provincial gentlemen had begun to construct a specificnotion of leisure as a distinctive time and set of experiences.” From the participants’perspective, such experiences were separate from labor but not inopposition to it; horse racing, for instance, had a number of practical purposes,including separating out the best horses for breeding. 9While horse racing probably added to the amount of social deferencethat the gentry enjoyed, the lower classes found alternative spheres of recreationin fields, streets, and taverns. In many respects, as Struna has written,“taverns offered the ‘only game in town.’” Proprietors often sponsored“inn games” or various entertainments, including cards, dice, bowling,shooting contests, and cockfighting. The popular cockfights had a levelingtendency because both poor and rich could enter their fighting birds in thecontests. By the 1730s, elites increasingly complained that taverns were becomingthe haunts of “loose, idle, and disorderly” individuals of “the poorersort”—“the very dregs of people,” according to a Virginia minister.Georgia’s ruling council fretted that “the common people” were using tavernsto “debauch themselves.” Lower-class rowdiness was also evident infist fighting and cock shailing, whereby observers hurled rocks and sticks ata chicken that a man led down the street, sometimes hitting passersby anddamaging property as well. Elites complained about such behavior but had,in fact, done much to identify recreation as enjoyable on its own terms,quite separate from work, churchgoing, or community service. 10