er public-houses on the Market Hill.

Wrestling was emphatically the most generally practised recreation, and
the charming sketches in the _Spectator_ of young men wrestling on the
village green was no mere picture from the realms of fancy. Such
scenes have been frequently witnessed on Royston Heath where the active
swain threw his opponent for a bever hat, or coloured {24} waistcoat
offered by the Squire, and for the smiles of his lady-love. Wrestling
matches were very common events between the villages of Bassingbourn (a
good wrestling centre), the Mordens, Whaddon, Melbourn and Meldreth,
but when these events came off there was generally something else
looked for besides the prize-winning. Sports in 1780 to 1800 were not
so refined and civil as those of to-day, and it was pretty well
understood that every match would end in a general fight between the
two contending villages; indeed, without this the spectators would have
come home greatly disappointed, and feeling that they had been "sold."

A favourite spot for such meetings was in a Bassingbourn field known as
the Red Marsh, on the left of the Old North Road beyond Kneesworth,
nearly opposite the footpath to Whaddon, where the Bassingbourn
men--who, when a bona fide contest did come off, could furnish some of
the most expert wrestlers in the district--frequently met those of the
Mordens and other villages, and many a stubborn set-to has been
witnessed there by hundreds of spectators from the surrounding
districts.

During the whole of the last half of the 18th century, bowling greens
did for the past what lawn tennis does for the present, always
excepting that the ladies were not thought of as they are now in regard
to physical recreation. There was an excellent bowling green at the
"Green Man," smooth and level as a billiard table. Earlier in the
century another bowling green was situate in Royston, Cambs., for which
Daniel Docwra was rated. The gentry had private bowling greens on
their lawns.

As to other kinds of out-door sport of a more individual kind, shooting
parties were not quite so select as at the present day, and the farmers
had good reason to complain of the young sportsmen from Cambridge.
Foulmire Mere, as it was sometimes called during the last century, was
a favourite spot for this kind of thing.

It seems that about this time the undergraduates were in the habit of
freely indulging in sport to the prejudice of the farmers, for in 1787