Winners never Quoit: The Decline of an Ancient Game
The development of modern sport is of great interest. Why have some sports made great strides towards global significance, and others fallen by the wayside? Why is Football (Soccer) played in just about every corner of every nation of the world, while certain folk sports seemingly never got out of the borough? Meticulously researched Over the past few weeks I've been reading Neil Tranter's meticulously researched book 'Sport, Economy and Society in Britain 1750-1914', and have spotted a curious trend. In the book there are regular descriptions of the changing nature of a host of pastimes. The general flow of the text suggests, as time goes by, a shift of body and movement cultures from play , through games , to sports . And alongside this shift it seems that a range of symbiotic activities attach themselves to these emergent sport forms: gambling, patronage, even commercial sponsorship. What surprises me however is that all of the sports mentioned in the book