The Cotswold Games re-revisited

Résumé En

The Cotswold Games are poetical jousts, the heroes of which are the contributors to Annalia Dubrensia, who borrowed from classical Greece its literary style, which was associated with the royal policy aiming at persuading the élites to go back to their demesnes to control the masses. Social control rested as much on the internalization of obedience as on physical coercion, and the Games depict a pre-Puritan, socially and economically harmonious England. Therefore, Dover might have staged sports because of Puritan opposition to seasonal feasts of which his Games were an outgrowth, or because Puritanism questioned the common religion underlying the so-called Merry England. The secular derived its legitimacy and cohesion from the sacred as illustrated by the Corpus Christi cycle that represented society as body, and linked one's psychosomatic self to the social body, whose wholeness was therefore to be protected, to the body of Christ. Indeed, it is to save the social body that Dover set up his Games. Indeed, sport provides a means of both solving inner conflicts and reinforcing the social body. Adapting Hendricks: '(the Cotswold Games) provided a thoroughly secular ethic for a society grown suspicious of religious authority and the divine right of kings. "