Mostly Cloudy 6 oC
March '10 Bulletin
If Sir Baptist Hicks left his mark on Campden by way of the buildings that still stand in tribute to his generosity, it was another local resident, a contemporary of Hicks, whose legacy also persists to this day. That man was Robert Dover, a lawyer who moved to the area in the early 1600s.
Around 1612 Rober Dover decided to consolidate a number of minor local festivities that took place around Whitsun to create a major annual event to be held on the Thursday and Friday of Whitsun week on an area of common land which at the time was called Kingcombe Plain, a part of which is now known as Dover's Hill.
The improvement that Robert Dover's intervention gave rise to was so great that the Games became a popular gathering, with people travelling up to 60 miles to see them. Amongst the events that took place were horseracing, hare coursing, wrestling, fencing and various other tests of athletic prowess. In addition there was much feasting and drinking, accompanied by music and dancing, and it is possibly with some justification that the Games were seen by some as a protest against the Puritanism that had been gaining a hold in the North Cotswolds for some years.
Much was written about the Games including a collection of poems by different authors, one of whom was Ben Jonson. The classical education of the time led the authors of these poems, published in 1636, to dub the Games "the Olimpick Games" thus predating the modern Olympic Games by over 250 years. A few years later the Games came to an end with the outbreak of the Civil War, but they were revived in 1660 with the Restoration of Charles II and continued without a break for almost 200 years.
The beginning of the end of the Games in their original form started in the early 1800s when the games started to attract larger and larger crowds from the industrial towns of the Midlands. The Games themselves had arguably become more brutal, with shin kicking, using metal tipped boots, having become an event in its own right and backsword fighting reaching such levels of ferocity that in one celebrated fight between one contestant from the nearby village of Mickleton and the other from Campden, one of them lost an eye and the other was mortally wounded.
Whether the tenor of the Games was responsible or not, the crowds gradually became more and more disorderly and violent until, in 1852, the owner of the land on which the Games were held was persuaded by the Rector of Weston-sub-Edge (in whose parish the Games were held) to obtain an Act of Enclosure, and this effectively put a stop to them.
In 1951 Robert Dover's Games were revived as part of the celebrations for the Festival of Britain, and they are now held as a regular annual event in early June, on the Friday immediately following the Spring Bank Holiday. The format is that there are various games and contests on and in the vicinity of Dover's Hill itself starting in the early evening, a bonfire and fireworks as darkness falls, followed by a torchlight procession from the Hill down to the Town Square where there is a display by a marching band and dancing until midnight.
On the Saturday following Dover's Games another old tradition is continued in the form of Scuttlebrook Wake. A procession of decorated floats carries the contestants for the title of Scuttlebrook Queen to the Town Square where the winner is crowned, the local Morris Men dance, and in the evening the area known as Leysbourne, at the northern end of the High Street, plays host to a selection of traditional fairground rides and sideshows.