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Cornish Wrestling - Ep11 - Archaic Wrestling
61 Plays10 months ago
The boys check in with the hardy history of the historic men of Cornwall and their notorious wrestling culture. From wrestling Celtic giants during the Roman conquest to the humble communities still keeping the tradition alive today...
Persistence of Difference: A history of Cornish Wrestling
Cornish Wrestling in California
Cornish Wrestling Championships (1928)
Music by Josh Kasen
Twitter: @ArchaicWrestle
ArchaicWrestling@gmail.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Recording Challenges
00:00:19
Speaker
What's up, folks? What's up, folks? This is Evan, and I'm joined, as always, by Sasha. How you doing, Sasha? Hello, everybody. I'm doing good. Wrestling season is finally over. And I forgot how long it was. It's definitely long. And listeners, there might be some fun audio stuff going on.
00:00:45
Speaker
with this episode for a couple reasons. A, I am in a different location. I've been relegated to our dining room to record today. I'm a little sick, so I might sound a bit nasally. And I'm hearing some weird stuff coming through my audio that I hope is not being replicated anywhere. So we'll see how that goes. Hopefully it's not too big of a deal.
Wrestling Season and Hypotheticals
00:01:08
Speaker
I wanted to check in real quick. Last time we
00:01:10
Speaker
Record an episode is right towards the beginning of the wrestling season. Is there anything you want to particularly talk about that has happened since then in the wrestling season? We're coming right up on conference championships here. Yeah, I guess it's really, it's been a while, huh? You know, I'm sure our haters, they were probably licking their chops. They thought it was going to be the downfall of the archaic wrestling podcast. They were saying, uh, it's going to be another podcast that two guys do five episodes of.
00:01:40
Speaker
and then never do again. Well, you know, to those people I'd like to say, guess what, buddy? It's gonna be a podcast of two guys that do 30 episodes and never do again, okay? So you better watch out. We're still pumping these things out. It's still an undetermined amount of time that this keeps going on. I've told you before, I think we got like close to a thousand episodes in us. I think that's where it'll be.
00:02:09
Speaker
But yeah, you know, you're right. We're back. It has been a little while. I don't know if there's too much to report on the college season right now. I think everyone knows what's up. All we can really say is is, you know, 125 is going to be wild. We're really curious to see where that goes. A lot of seating is going to come into play with that. But yeah, it's looking to be another fun year where Penn State wins and and and it's a battle for second place again.
00:02:37
Speaker
Could you imagine if Shane Van Ness did not get injured? They could have had, conceivably, within the realm of possibility, like what, seven or eight champs? Within, you know, in a more likely sense, they would have been maybe favored for what, like six? 41, 49, 57.
00:03:05
Speaker
65 is conceivable 74 Very possibly 84 97 285 if you take two of those out, you know, you're looking at favored to win like five Possibly it's it's insane. It's insanity. It's we got ourselves. It's like a Poway type situation here. It just gets crazier and crazier and
00:03:30
Speaker
Rich can't reach her. I mean, sure. I'm not going to get into Poway. I'm not going to talk about Poway today. You know what? I will get into Poway. You know what?
Evan's Memorable Varsity Wrestling Match
00:03:43
Speaker
We talked earlier just about how you didn't have a full spectrum of my wrestling experience in high school. Yes, I did not. So I'll tell you two stories. I still don't. I'm surprised somehow.
00:03:56
Speaker
I'll tell you two stories. So my very first match ever, the high school I was at was the same league as Poway. So we wrestled Poway in a duel every year. My very first varsity match ever. I had started wrestling as freshman in high school. I wrestled one JV tournament and I went like
00:04:16
Speaker
two and two or two or something like that. I got my face ripped off like, you know, it was like big shock. So, but, you know, after getting a little experience, I beat the guy that was who was had the varsity spot in the wrestle off. And so I got to wrestle in the duel that week and it was against Poway and the wrestler, the wrestler's name, the wrestler's name was Pat Payne.
00:04:41
Speaker
Uh, he went on to wrestle, he went on to wrestle for ASU and he at the time was ranked the, uh, fourth best wrestler, uh, at that weight cost the one 40s. Yeah. In the nation, in the nation, fourth best in the nation. Oh my God. That match didn't last long. I think it was a 32 second match before I got pinned.
00:05:01
Speaker
Um, but yeah, that was, uh, that was a fun experience for my very first varsity match, like my fourth or fifth match ever. So yeah, that was my experience. Uh, my first experience with Poway and the other story I was going to tell you about was, uh, in my junior year, I was wrestling, um, up in the Clovis area and.
00:05:21
Speaker
my team's football team, because I played football as well, we were in the playoffs. So wrestling season was overlapping a bit with football season. And wrestling was my main sport at that time, even though I enjoyed football. And so the Zinkin Classic was going on at the same time. And it just and so I was like, okay, normally you'd have to pick, hey, we are either gonna, you know, I'm either gonna go to this wrestling tournament or I'm gonna, you know, stick with football and do my the playoff game.
00:05:51
Speaker
But the playoff game was happening at the same school, Buchanan High School as the Zinking Classic was being held. So I went to the tournament all day Friday. And then I was like, I was like two and one at that during the tournament. So I was in consoles and the football game was starting. So I left my singlet on and I had all my football equipment with me and I ran over to the football stadium.
00:06:20
Speaker
Um, and I had missed warmups. I had, you know, I had, you know, the pre-walkthrough stuff I had completely missed, but hey, I was warm enough. Um, I put on all my football gear and I went out and I played the, in the first half. I wasn't a starter at the time, so I didn't have to play too much. And I, yeah, I played the first half of the football game. Um, and then at halftime, I ran back over to the gym and all my football gear. So I come running into the gym and football helmet full of pads.
00:06:47
Speaker
And I'm taking stuff off as I'm coming to the mat. I'm running over there and it's like Superman taking off of his clothes and I have my singlet on underneath. And so I run out, I wrestle my next match, I lose close. So I'm out of the tournament, but it's like, all right. And then I run back over to the football field and I still got my singlet on. I throw in all my football gear, go out, do the second half. And yeah, that was actually a really fun
00:07:17
Speaker
story to tell for college essays. Yeah. Because I got to be like, Oh, this is how dedicated I am. You know, it was a good one. That is insane. I don't know how. I mean, I've listened to a lot out of you coming to the mat and then having just played football. I mean, yeah, the football game wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was sprinting over to the gym from the
00:07:43
Speaker
from the field because they weren't close together necessarily. So I was all out of breath going each way. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to be a two-sport athlete, but two sports in the same day is a bit much. Ben Kutter could never. What did your coaches have to say about it? The football coaches, they weren't too concerned with it because I wasn't a starter. And they were like, hey, that was cool. You did that.
00:08:08
Speaker
And my wrestling coaches, I don't remember them commenting on it. I made it to all my matches. So you're walking to the mat with a football helmet still on, taking it off as you get to the table to reveal yourself. And they're just sitting there like, this is normal. This is fine.
00:08:26
Speaker
I mean, we knew I was going to be doing it. I think they just thought it was funny, you know, and I was brand new to the high school, too. So this was like my first, like, you know, really tough tournament. So I think they were just more concerned with, like, learning, you know, where my faults were and stuff and how I needed to improve. So it wasn't too big of a deal. Their introduction to you as a wrestler was coming off the football field. What position did you play? What weight were you when this happened, too?
Feedback on Mongolian Wrestling Episode
00:08:53
Speaker
Oh, um, so I in football, I would, I played linebacker mostly. So a little bit of outside, a little bit of inside, uh, you know, I was kind of small, um, cause I only weighed when I was wrestling. Uh, one 60, my junior year. Um, we had 45 that was better than me. Got 52 that was better than me. Um, and the beginning of the year, they had me wrestling up at one 70. In fact, that might be up at one 72, um, because I just hadn't wrestled off with anybody yet. And then they ended up getting the spot for one 60.
00:09:23
Speaker
Which was nice because I only weighed like 155 And I never had to cut weight that year Yeah, so you were one of the weights that it actually makes sense for someone to be be playing football Interesting. Yeah, I went down to 45 this my senior year after that and that was a little different experience But a better experience overall. So let's
00:09:44
Speaker
talk about wrestling history. And before we get into our topic today, we did get a little bit of feedback on our episode on Mongolian wrestling, the bulk wrestling, I was just, you know, on Reddit, and there were some, there was like, someone posted about Mongolian wrestling and you know, how
00:10:03
Speaker
uh, it was like on an MMA forum or something like that. And, uh, there was a guy commenting under, under there who seemed to like really be into Mongolian wrestling and, uh, you know, just seemed to be a fan of it. He wanted to share things about it with people. And I thought, Hey, you know, I'm going to share our episode with this guy. I just kind of commented on it. And before, and like, so all of his responses to people before that had been kind of like, you know, paragraph length, you know, he was going into details, really excited about things. And then he, he,
00:10:30
Speaker
after I shared that with him, he started responding to me and he responded to me a couple of times. But each response was like, like, small sentences, like his tone suddenly changed. His main things were he had gripes with us saying that our skepticism about the cave paintings, whether it actually depicted Mongolian wrestling. So that was just like, how dare you?
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah. And then he also, there was the moment where we, we commented on the guy's name, uh, from his name was Buriboka. Right. And we were a little skeptical that that was like even a real guy necessarily. Um, just cause it sounded too, too on the nose. Right.
00:11:18
Speaker
And his claim was like, no, that person was real and his descendants are still alive and all this stuff. And I just kind of responded to this stuff because I was like, oh, you know, because, you know, he did seem to be, you know, he did seem to be really into it. Maybe I don't know. Right. And I was like, oh, and I like went and rechecked stuff and tried to figure out if I could find more information about these specific things. And no, no new information that I could find. But I was like, you know, maybe he knows something. So I asked him.
00:11:47
Speaker
and he never responded. I was like, Do you have any sources on this? I want to learn more. Yeah, he never responded to any of that. So yeah, hey, you know what, maybe we're, you know, we were a little too skeptical about some stuff. And maybe there's some sources out there that are not. To be clear, Bori Boca was the guy who got his back broken and then instantly died. Right. That was correct. From the semi mythological
00:12:15
Speaker
story. Yeah, but his descendants are still around, apparently. Ah, okay. Well, I guess he had kids before the incident. I don't know, man. We'll have to, maybe we'll learn more down the line. We'll see. But yeah, that was a little bit of feedback. No closure to this, I guess. The debate goes on amongst our academic peers. If anyone out there has anything, DM us on Twitter or something, use our email address that we don't check.
00:12:45
Speaker
And, um, yeah, just get in touch
Introduction to Cornish Wrestling
00:12:48
Speaker
with us. Yeah. So today we're going to be going over Cornish wrestling. So Cornish wrestling, uh, hails from Cornwall. Cornwall is, uh, an area in the UK. It is the like lowest Southern most tip of the UK. And they have their own style of wrestling there. That is, uh, well, one, they're very proud of it. A lot of these sources. And we went through.
00:13:15
Speaker
uh, evinced a lot of praise for Cornish wrestling over the awful Devonshire wrestling, certainly better than that awful Bretton Gorin wrestling. And it is a style of wrestling that takes place between two guys on a field wearing jackets. So it's one of our, our classic jacketed wrestling styles that we've, we've seen a decent amount of so far. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned the, uh,
00:13:45
Speaker
some of those other local styles because from what we understand, you know, there's a lot of Celtic history, obviously, in this area. They, like pretty much everyone else, have their own sort of tradition of wrestling that is localized to like indigenous cultures, right? And it is nice that we're finally getting over here to the Northern European side of things. The folks of the Caucasian persuasion have been
00:14:13
Speaker
uh, relegated to the sidelines of this podcast for far too long. Um, so we're glad that we can give some attention, uh, to some of my brethren. Um, we, we are, uh, and so, so a lot of these like different styles, and you mentioned like Devonshire and like the Britann styles, right? A lot of these are like very like incestuous styles, right? They're all kind of like mixed together
00:14:37
Speaker
They're all kind of coming from this Celtic origins. Some of them have slightly different rules, like the Devonshire folks. Apparently, it looks a lot like Cornwall wrestling, but then you're allowed to kick people in the shins, right? They got some shins kicking over there. Yeah, yeah. So Cornwall, I think we're going to focus on just because it's a little bit more well known. We might get to some of these other styles later on, but
00:15:05
Speaker
just kind of understand to listener that this is a little bit of a broad range of styles that do exist within the British Isles. So this style definitely at least goes back hundreds of years. And I do want to point out really quickly, as we get into some of the information we'll be sharing, we relied heavily on a research paper for this entitled Persistence of Difference, A History of Cornish Wrestling by Michael Tripp. So
00:15:34
Speaker
Big shout out. We'll have a link in the description to that paper. But it had a ton of information that, you know, was really interesting. We can't cover all of it. It was over 500 pages. But there's really good information in there that was pretty cool. So really relying on that source for this. So they, they suspect that this style goes back hundreds of years. The earliest written evidence for it,
00:15:59
Speaker
is in the 1500s where there's writing saying that Henry VIII actually spectated some Cornish wrestling. And this was a style that traditionally would be for like special occasions, right? Like there would be, you know, a funeral or a holiday, you know, or like a harvest thing or weddings, right? This is when like local communities would have their wrestling matches as kind of a way to come together, which shouldn't sound
00:16:28
Speaker
too different from a lot of other folk styles that we've covered before. Yeah, it's very similar. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me a little bit of the Mongolian wrestling. I mean, even I mean, all of them, it seemed like they were using this as a way to things were boring back then. Yeah. So they were there was always looking for an occasion to be the partying to have some fun doing something.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah, and something Tripp talks a lot about in this research paper is how back then, there was a lot more opportunity for leisure, right? And that didn't mean like people weren't working hard back then, but they were beholden to like the cyclos of the earth, right? And morning and night and things like that a lot more than we are now. And especially before
00:17:12
Speaker
uh, like the, like industrialization, right? That the whole industrial revolution changed a lot of ways and how people work. And that's not to say that they weren't working hard and having to have side gigs because their main jobs wouldn't actually like pay for everything. They had to go hunting and all that stuff, right? But there was more opportunity for doing things like this as a community, right? And getting out there and not having to, you know, necessarily work a 40 hours a week, right?
00:17:36
Speaker
So they they had more opportunity to do things like this and like you said there wasn't a whole lot else to do necessarily So fun times was wrestling time and we approve. Yeah, and then something I found was that uh Most of the days that they would have the competitions it seemed to be Sundays So like church going days is when they would do this Most of the other days apparently back then or at least, you know in Cornwall Saturday was always a day you were working
00:18:06
Speaker
You were always working on Saturday. Sunday was a church day, and that's when they would traditionally do most of their competitions. I mean, like we said back then, it was the whole schedule was very different. I mean, it wasn't like a consistent 52 weeks of the year working five days a week type thing. Yeah. And, and.
00:18:28
Speaker
I also mentioned like, you know, earliest written evidence. What I meant to say specifically was it was the earliest written evidence of actual competition. There was earlier references to the Cornish wrestling in the sense that the Cornish were wrestling people. So there's a very strong
00:18:49
Speaker
cultural significance of wrestling within Cornwell throughout this, you know, the last, you know, thousands of years or so, right? Like there's general references to wrestling in the Celtic areas going all the way back to like the Roman times, right? Even possibly further back. But in the Roman times, they even had like a myth where the Romans were coming into the area and there's a myth of a Celtic giant called
00:19:17
Speaker
Gog Magog. And we know this is definitely a myth, because giants. That's a real guy, Evan. Yeah, right. And the whole idea was like, oh, the Roman general, whoever wrestled the giant. So there's like, there's definitely this idea of the Celts wrestling being a big part of it, right?
00:19:41
Speaker
There's also references as early as 1415, which is the Battle of Agincourt, which is part of that famous Shakespearean Henry V monologue, the St. Crispin's Day thing, where the Cornish Banner, the Cornish fighters, the bannermen of Cornwell,
00:20:04
Speaker
actually had wrestlers on their banner. So there's like a lot of connection with wrestling and Cornwell. And I pulled a quote actually from the 1600s. And this is from Thomas Fuller, who was a cleric. And he had this to say, Cornish are masters of the art of wrestling. And to give a Cornish hug is proverbial.
00:20:33
Speaker
Um, and they also suggest that if the Olympic games were now fashioned, they would come away with victory. So there's even at this time before the modern Olympics had come back, they were like, Oh, the, the Cornwell people will win the, would win at wrestling if the Olympics still existed. Yeah. There's a lot of, uh, clearly like in the sources, a lot of pride, um, about Cornish wrestling, about
00:20:59
Speaker
you know, the Cornish people themselves being wrestling people. Like you said, like with the myth of Gog Magog. So Jeffrey of Monmouth, who was, I don't know, born like 1139, something like that, sometime around there, who was like, I guess, I don't know if he wrote it, or if he was the originator of it, or if like his version was the, just became the most popular version,
00:21:29
Speaker
Um, but he was the one who popularized the myth of like King Arthur, like the Arthurian tales and Merlin. Um, his work, the Historia Regum Britannia was, you know, huge in that. So in that there's a story of the founder of Cornwall, Coronius, uh, wrestling the giant Gog Magog and like throwing him off a cliff. Uh, I went and I looked at the passage.
00:21:57
Speaker
And unfortunately there was nothing about any specific moves. I mean, basically he fireman's carries. He does the only real move he does. He challenges him to a wrestling match. He does a fireman's carry on Gog Magog and throws him off a cliff.
Rules and History of Cornish Wrestling
00:22:11
Speaker
Not a bad way to go. The earliest we can find about the actual rules seems to be closer to like 1550, at least what I can see. 1550, you're like 1600s.
00:22:26
Speaker
But clearly, wrestling was a huge part of their identity and culture before that. And Tripp makes a point in his article about the idea of pre-modern sports. So wrestling definitely falls into this kind of idea of pre-modern sports. And modern sports are going to be things like football or things like tennis, where we're starting to use these tools. And there's this interesting differentiation between, and I'll talk about it in a little bit,
00:22:56
Speaker
about the idea of like, at certain points of history, like especially like the 1700s, if you can imagine how people are starting to consider things like wrestling to be, oh, that's a low man sport, right? It's a, yeah, it's a sport for the non wealthy, right? They can't afford a ball, right? They can't afford these nets and courts and things like that. Therefore, you know, they can't afford a horse to go fox hunting, right? Yeah, that's more of a low person sport.
00:23:26
Speaker
Um, and, and like, it's, it's true, like the Cornwall, uh, or Cornish wrestling, like didn't get its first governing body until 1923. Like it took that long for a governing body to be established. Which is crazy to think about, especially considering, uh, from looking at these sources, how much they were doing it. Like how much people were spectating, um, it, and like with like the fervor they respected, there's like some funny stories, which are, you know,
00:23:56
Speaker
some of them like we'll go over them later, maybe are apocryphal. But it does seem like it was extremely popular. Yeah, really popular. But this also isn't like, like, unique to wrestling, a lot of sports didn't go through real, like getting gaining governing bodies or having, like unified rules and things like that until like,
00:24:20
Speaker
It's kind of a 20th century thing as sports become more commercialized and things like that, where the idea of having local rules is more of a no-no. You want to avoid that because it's harder to sell a football game between Yale and Harvard that way. You need to ask them to unify your rules. So it doesn't surprise me too much to see that it took that long.
00:24:48
Speaker
You want to talk a little bit about like, what does this sport just look like when you're watching corners wrestling? What are you seeing? Yeah. So you got two guys wearing like shorts and they have this jacket on top. So it's got, you know, full sleeves. Um, it's like a white canvas. Um, and it's fairly loose. It's not, uh, not like a tight jacket or anything like that. And when they're wrestling, I would say like,
00:25:15
Speaker
It looks a lot like judo. It's really similar to judo. Yeah. So the, you know, moves in it or the way you score is by getting what they call backs. Or was it what were the points called when you get? No, you got it. Yeah. Like a hit or it's a hitch. Yeah. So back is essentially what we would call a pin or a fall. Right. And the way you get a back is by having what they call
00:25:45
Speaker
pins. So in order to get a back, you need to have three pins down, three pins hitting the ground at the same time. And pins are your shoulders and your hips. So this is confusing. So yeah, as you're wrestling someone, you're trying to get their hips and shoulders to the ground. If you can get the hips and shoulders to the ground, you win automatically, like you would with a pin, right? But they are calling that a back.
00:26:12
Speaker
if you were to only get one or two pins on the ground, then you would get a point for each pin that goes down, right? So the way you win a match is, you know, they have a generalized time limit. You either win within that time limit by getting a back or you score a certain amount of pins as in the points. And you can win by points as well. You, there's also what's called marks, which are essentially penalties.
00:26:41
Speaker
If you get three marks, you that would result in like your opponent getting a point. You're, you know, you're not allowed to and so like an example of a mark would be supporting yourself on the ground with with a hand like so you don't touch the ground or a knee. I guess we should also mention, you know, it starts off with shaking of hands, right, similar to us. And it's also two concentric circles, just like ours are. In fact, a lot of people think of American folk style as
00:27:10
Speaker
you know, catch as catch can wrestling that's being it's like primary originator. But there's actually quite a bit of Cornish wrestling culture that's kind of integrated into American wrestling as well. There's like a bunch of stuff that I found out that I'll say for maybe another episode. But yeah, like Cornish wrestling like made its way over here and definitely affected our American folk style and some of the ways that they did stuff.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, part of the reason we even came over and started getting into Europe is if you look at the history of folk style, it was primarily where folk style comes from was primarily the UK. So I'm sure there are things in Cornish wrestling that are the style that we call American folk style originated from. And yeah, I think what's interesting about it is counting the hips too.
00:28:03
Speaker
that, you know, you could feasible, you could be pinned in American folk style, right? Both shoulders on the mat and still not be not score. Uh, you wouldn't end the match in Cornish wrestling, like say, if someone had a really good bridge. Yeah. I think the interesting thing is like those faults. So, you know, I watched some of it. I don't know. It's probably today looks fairly different than it did back then. You know, right now, if you're doing it, it's going to look just a lot like judo. It's going to look like a lot like judo.
00:28:34
Speaker
A lot of hip tosses is a lot of you know trips. What's interesting is that in Cornish wrestling there is no Grant you can't grab the legs right but um at least from what I could find it does seem like you could Twine the legs like you could do an outside or an inside trip, but you couldn't grab the legs with your hands Yeah, and there's a lot of
00:28:57
Speaker
like grape finding of the legs, right? Yeah. Like as someone goes to lift and you kind of hook your leg around their leg to keep them from lifting. There's a lot of that where they, they hook their legs in together and twine them are kind of like trying to off balance each other. Right. Oh, and another way I forgot to mention that a win can happen is if there's no score at the end of the match and no one has been able to get a back, then the referees who are called sticklers,
00:29:27
Speaker
can literally just award the one wrestler the win, which is actually something not entirely foreign to freestyle wrestling, right? Yeah. They used to have that. And sticklers, by the way, they're called referees and they're called sticklers because they got these sticks. And there's some theories about why they have sticks. Some people say it's more ceremonial, if anything, these days. But some people claim, oh, they used to be able to use the stick to check to see if there was
00:29:57
Speaker
space between the shoulder and the ground, right? Or something like that. Yeah. Or to beat back unruly, you know, spectators. But this is also where the phrase, a stickler for the rules comes from, right? So a stickler for the rules we think of as a person that is, you know, very focused on getting the rules right and things like that. So they are a stickler. So we've talked a little bit about how it originated, right? And as it's kind of going through the centuries,
00:30:25
Speaker
There is kind of like this golden era or like kind of heyday of Cornish wrestling. And that's going to be kind of through the 1700s, but especially in the early 1800s, where they were having up to like 50 events a year. And then like, you know, they'd have 150 wrestlers in a bracket at the most, right?
00:30:45
Speaker
Um, these are a lot of like single elimination tournaments, um, or even prize matches, right? Along with, you know, your little local kind of get together wrestling, right? So it was starting to become a little bit more of a thing. It was attracting crowds, uh, crowds as much as 10,000 people. Um, and they would give away prizes, um, uh, to the main wrestlers later on closer to the, uh, 1900s, they start giving away, um, uh, like prize money.
00:31:12
Speaker
However, at this time, there was a lot of giving prizes that were either like clothing items or things like cups, right? Like we have something like the Stanley Cup, where it's literally like a big silver dish, right? And you'll see that in a lot of like styles of giving things away, right? For a winner, that things are fashioned in a cup or a dish, right? It's a gold cup or it's a silver cup, right?
00:31:42
Speaker
And that comes from a time and place where you would give a winner something that was a precious metal, right, to something that they could sell easily if they wanted to, or even use. It was like, you know, a way for them to just kind of have a thing to either show off or it has actual value. And then things like they would give them a hat that had, you know, gold trim on it, right? Yeah, a lot of hats.
00:32:09
Speaker
a lot of hats. But that's not that weird, right? Like you watch the Doc B and all the winners get cowboy hats, right? Or the fact that we give out belts that are gilded, right? Like this is all pretty, you know, not that weird sounding. It sounds weird when you read about it, because it's like, oh, they got a jacket with silver trim. And it's like,
00:32:29
Speaker
That's cute, you know, but that's not that weird. It's kind of what we still do. Yeah. And it looked like it was also, you know, there were gradations of it too, right? The gold hat was for the winner. The silver hat was for the guy who came in second. And there are whole tables in this thesis specifically about like what, you know, what prizes were for which people and like half of them were hats.
00:32:58
Speaker
Well, and at this time, the sport is still kind of like the low man sport. Like it's a working class sport. There's a mention of this guy, Thomas Gundry, who was kind of like one of the best ever to do it, right? He worked as a minor, right? So this is just something he would do on the side. And he took first place in like 24 different competitions over a 15 year period. And it's funny because everyone would talk about like, oh, he was so small because he was 5'8", 93 kg.
00:33:27
Speaker
Um, which it doesn't sound that small to me. Oh, it sounds pretty large. Short King get after it in wrestling. That's, that's how it goes. But then there's also like a lot of accusations of, uh, max match fixing back then. Right. There's a lot of, uh, um, I'm sure it actually happened. Uh, like no question. Um, but also like, there's like accusations even when it wasn't true. Right. Yeah. Uh, especially if it was like, uh, there wasn't necessarily very strict weight classes. So if you had a huge guy up against like a small guy.
00:33:57
Speaker
And that small guy doesn't look like he's resisting very much, probably out of preservation. People could say like, oh, he's throwing the match. Yeah. Well, this seemed to also, uh, were some of the stickler stuff is also claimed to be from, uh, part of that claim is also that like they, the sticks became sticks and that before that, before that they were swords and that they had the swords so that if somebody got rowdy in the crowd and was like, Oh, like that was bullshit or,
00:34:25
Speaker
that call was bad and that's why I just lost money on that or this match was thrown that the referee had a sword to protect themself and to calm them down. And that I guess the claim is that later it turned into a stick. Yeah, probably less blood to clean up when you're just using the sticks. So yeah, there was kind of like this golden era of Cornish wrestling. And, you know, that was really cool for the Cornish people.
Decline of Cornish Wrestling
00:34:50
Speaker
They took a lot of pride in that, right?
00:34:52
Speaker
Um, but there was an eventual decline and that kind of starts in the late 1800s. And there's a lot of like rise and fall, um, of its popularity, but yeah, late 1800s and into the 1900s, you start to see this kind of slipping, um, of its popularity. And there's, you know, a couple of reasons that are given for like, for this, a big part of it is it kind of follows the trend of, uh, Cornwell's economy, right? When the economy is good, there's a lot more wrestling going on when the economy was poor.
00:35:22
Speaker
You have young men like leaving Cornwell, going to find work elsewhere. And you know, those are the people that are competing in the sport. So you have people like leaving the area. You have this idea, especially of Christian nationalism going on, where the Christians are viewing Cornish wrestling as a pagan sport, right? So as Christianity grows in the area,
00:35:50
Speaker
Um, there's a little bit more of like, we should be leaving these old world, uh, traditions behind and the pagan traditions behind, right? Um, you know, the match fixing didn't help the sports popularity. And with the industrial revolution, there's a lot less leisure time. And now you have far fewer people, uh, in local communities participating because they don't have the time to do so.
00:36:13
Speaker
Um, the sport at this time is still not very well regulated, so it's hard for people to watch and really understand what's going on. And then, uh, another big thing is just other sports are popping up and other sports are getting popular. Other sports are being integrated into school systems, right? So you got rugby or, or football slash soccer, right? Like these are kind of the, the sports that are getting more popular. And then we come back to the idea of like, it's a proletarian sport, right? It's, uh, it's out of vogue. It's not gentlemanly.
00:36:41
Speaker
So you definitely see this slipping away. And a lot of I heard a lot of folks, you know, I didn't see a lot of real good articles or, you know, scholarly sources that were going to back this up. But I did like hear some interviews from different folks who are currently involved in Cornish wrestling. And they also felt like the World Wars were a big part of it. You know, you had a lot of your young men going off to war, many not coming back. And when they do come back, a lot of them are just like,
00:37:11
Speaker
I don't know. I don't really want to wrestle people anymore. And, you know, the world's trying to leave old things behind during that time. They're trying to move forward and be progressive and look in a different direction. And tradition just was less of a thing that they really wanted to concern themselves with. So they're just kind of like this
00:37:29
Speaker
big cultural shift and demographic shift going on due to the world wars that a lot of Cornish people feel like affected their wrestling. Something that was interesting too was this idea of like the Cornish diaspora that you see that basically starting in like 1900s people were leaving Cornwall in droves like because of the economy. I think partly what's interesting in that
00:38:01
Speaker
idea was that there's like also this claim and we'll probably get to that when we finally do a judo episode but there's a claim that the style of judo that them having the jackets actually originates from Cornish or you know some kind of English wrestling which you know I didn't spend too much time checking into but it does seem interesting I guess that at that time the you know the originator of judo
00:38:28
Speaker
was looking at various traditions from around the world trying to figure out what he wanted to put in. But again, also it's one of those interesting claims where it's like, oh, you know, our thing is the, we started it.
00:38:42
Speaker
I do I do want to look very a little bit closer at that. Like I saw that as well. And it's a very interesting thing. I'm going to hold off on that. We'll do that. I think Japan is a little bit closer to Mongolia and they did kind of have a jacket too. So we'll see. I mean, yeah, exactly. I don't I don't see a reason for me to think like, oh, that just because a guy visited, like, I don't know. Well, we'll look into it. But yes. But you mentioned the diaspora and there's like apparently Cornish diaspora like
00:39:13
Speaker
much more dispersed than I even realized, like they're all over the place. And but in a fun, you know, thing to reveal about that is the largest competition of Cornish wrestling outside of Cornwall was held in Grass Valley, California. And that was, you know, through that kind of period where there were, you know, the the popularity was about to start dwindling or was already starting to dwindle. But the Aspera kind of brought it together a little bit, right?
00:39:41
Speaker
And so that was like kind of the late 1800s, early 1900s that this was going on. And there's been other ones, there's been some in Pennsylvania. There was a lot of like Cornish people in Wisconsin area, right? So it's kind of cool like that this is popped up here and there. But the real consequence of this is Cornish wrestling is definitely diminished into
00:40:10
Speaker
much more of a local cultural celebration. Um, and it's just not quite what it, what it was before. So there's so many like accounts, um, in, in newspapers, especially in like the 1800s, you see a ton of enthusiasm for corners wrestling. There's so many accounts of huge tournaments. Um, I guess what was also kind of interesting is women just didn't, did not watch it. Um,
00:40:39
Speaker
Which it probably has more to do with, you know, what they were expected to do. You know, what, whatever they were doing, you know, was, you know, probably not leisurely. They were probably, you know, sort of forced to be watching children or, you know, doing housework, whatever it was. And then the men are just, you know, they're fucking off. They're having fun watching the wrestling. But there's so many accounts of like these huge crowds for these wrestling matches. Everyone taking trains to them.
00:41:08
Speaker
Uh, there's one really funny story that, you know, maybe apocryphal or maybe not, but that was, uh, a woman came to a Cornish wrestling tournament and it was her wedding
Anecdotes and Cultural Impact
00:41:17
Speaker
day. And she found her groom at the tournament and he was just watching the wrestling and she tried to get him to come to the wedding and he tried to run across the, you know, run across the ring. And, uh, and everybody closed ranks and they wouldn't let him and she chased him around for a while until she grabbed him. And then he had to go.
00:41:38
Speaker
You know, do the wedding, which is. That's funny. It's a very, very funny story. No, no, I have to watch that. Be like me at NCAA is just like, no, it's the finals, the finals happening. I have to watch Kegan O'Toole. Yeah. Nowadays, I think people are just better at scheduling. Yeah, you'd think you'd be able. Well, I guess, you know, probably back then it was a little bit different. You schedule your wedding, you know, months in advance, all of a sudden.
00:42:08
Speaker
You know, a tournament pops up. You don't know if there's going to be a tournament. Or maybe the tournament just lasted a few days longer than you thought it would, you know? I'm not scheduling it on Google Calendar. You don't know what's going on. All right. I think we've covered about everything that I picked up through here. I know that there, you know, obviously it continues to be a celebration of heritage. They were actually finally recognized, like the governing body was finally recognized by the British Association.
00:42:35
Speaker
Uh, but that took until like the early 2000s for them to do that. Um, and you know, kind of a call to action here for any Cornwell listeners or Corners listeners. Um,
00:42:47
Speaker
you know, it's kind of, there's a lack of funding. Like apparently they couldn't put on a tournament or like a little local tournament because they couldn't raise like $500, like a few years ago. So hey, if you're Cornish, if you wanna like keep some of your local tradition going on, some local indigenous activity happening, you know, chip in, find your local Cornish Wrestling Association and help them out. I mean, it is really interesting too,
00:43:17
Speaker
how much of at least like some of the European stuff, I don't know, so much of like, we go over some of these old styles and some of them appear to be so popular. And then they just like, some, something happens where it's, I mean, it looks like for this, it was really like the 1900s, like 1920. It was so popular until then. And then it's like 1920. And obviously there's like World War I, there's like Cornish diaspora, there's all these economic problems.
00:43:46
Speaker
And then just falls off a map and it's just never, it's never seen again. It's just not popular anymore. Uh, it's just kind of interesting how that can happen. I mean, it goes from being, you know, clearly the most popular sporting event that they have to just nothing. Nobody cares anymore. But it's also interesting to contrast that with like Mongolia, where we looked at it and it was always the most popular sport that, you know, like a thousand, 2000, probably, or even more than that.
00:44:15
Speaker
years ago, and then it's still the most popular sport. I mean, we really shouldn't be that surprised to learn that Mongolian people have better taste than British people, though. I can't just...
00:45:09
Speaker
right next to where I record.