Husbandmen and laborers amused themselves in a more humble manner, by murdering birds of various sizes in social rituals of high complexity. One favorite bloodsport of farmers in Virginia was called ganderpulling. By an irony of the Christian calendar, this savage event was commonly staged on Easter Monday—a day of riotous celebration in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. An old male goose was suspended upside-down by his feet from the branch of a tree, and the neck of the bird was lathered with grease. The contestants mounted their horses and galloped past the goose, endeavoring to tear off the bird’s head by brute force as they rode by. The game was dangerous to the galloper as well as the goose. More than one contestant was pulled backward off his speeding horse and succeeded only in snapping his own neck while the goose cackled in trumph. Others lost fingers or thumbs in the gander’s angry beak. But as the contest continued, the bird’s neck was slowly stretched and torn by one contestant after another, until some rural champion finally succeeded in ripping off the head, claiming the body as his prize. In early Virginia, one man remembered that a good ganderpull was “anticipated with rapture.” The scene was a lively one—shouting crowds, a swirl of violence, the goose twisting in agony, dismounted riders rolling in the dust, and finally the climax when the carotid artery gave way and the winner rode in triumph through a shower of crimson gore.
Apprentices enjoyed still another sort of bloodsport called cockshailing, which they played at Shrovetide. A cock or chicken was tethered to a stake, and crowd of youths tried to torture and kill it by throwing dangerous objects. The Puritans detested this barbarous amusement, and did all in their power to suppress it in New England—without entirely succeeding in doing so. But it flourished in Virginia, as it had done in the south and west of England, where one countryman wrote to another in 1668, “I cannot but give some touch of public affairs—what with the throwing at shrovetide and fighting this Lent time there’s a great mortality of Cocks.”
Smaller boys amused themselves in yet a different way by the juvenile bloodsport of annihilating songbirds. In Devon, one of these diversions was called “muzzling the sparrow.” A local historian described it thus: “A boy had his hands tied together behind him, and the tip of one wing of a sparrow or other small bird was placed in his mouth. He then tried by the action of his teeth and lips gradually to draw the wing of the bird into his mouth and bite off its head, the bird in the meantime pecking at his cheeks and eyes and endeavoring to escape.”
