No Pie, No Priest: A Journey through the Folk Sports of Britain

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In Tudor times, governments tried to ban sports like quoits and skittles, fearing their effect on the nation’s ‘martial spirit. as Pearson set out on his warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports, he discovered how and why many have survived and met the characters who keep them going. It might have been easy for “No Pie, No Priest” to descend into the realm of the self-conscious wackiness and zaniness, but Harry Pearson treats these sports – many of them ostensibly ridiculous – with a warm respect for their traditions.

No Pie, No Priest - David Higham Associates

Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. they kicked each other around the ankles till one fell to the ground – a dance one couple kept going for five minutes. The Roundheads proved no more approving of the sports, attempting to stamp out their ‘joyful, drunken barbarism,’ and the Victorians regarded the sports as untamed mob-ruled exhibitions of violence, gambling and ‘encouragers of grievous immorality. small, secret worlds, free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the Dorset flop, as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack toad and almost as endangered. No Pie, No Priest combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.

combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.

David Higham Associates Harry Pearson - David Higham Associates

A gentle stroll around some of Britain's less well-known traditional sports, written in Pearson's distinctive style. WSC regular Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going. An enticing and enlightening blend of sports reporting, travelogue and history, and featuring a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents, this is both a joy to read and a treasure trove of Britain’s hidden sporting legacy. His first book, The Far Corner - A Mazy Dribble through North-East Football, was shortlisted for the William Hill Prize and is still in print. Harry Pearson was born and brought up on the edge of Teesside and is the author of twelve works of non-fiction.Harry has written for When Saturday Comes for twenty years and for many years was a weekly columnist for the Guardian. Here they remain, small, secret worlds, free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the Dorset flop; as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack toad and almost as endangered. When Victorian public schoolmasters and Oxbridge-educated gentlemen were taming football, codifying cricket, bringing the values of muscular Christianity to the boxing ring and the athletics field, games that dated back to the pagan era clung on in isolated pockets of rural Britain, unmodified by contemporary tastes, shunned by the media and sport's ruling elites. After many years working in jobs that required overalls or paper hats, his life was altered for ever by reading an article about Alan Foggan in the football magazine When Saturday Comes.

No Pie, No Priest: A Journey through the Folk Sports of…

The match that Pearson witnessed was “hard to follow… A mass rolling maul that occasionally collapsed in a heap of limbs… That a bottle was down there somewhere seemed a matter of faith. He wrote a weekly sports column in the Guardian from 1996 to 2012, and has twice won the MCC/Cricket Society Prize for the Cricket Book of the Year. Harry’s biography of the West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, Connie, was longlisted for the 2017 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and won the 2018 Cricket Society / MCC Book of the Year. Attending a bout of shinty, a Scottish variant of hockey that allows the ball to be played in the air, he asked a local if the game ever results in injury. Whether that was because the contestants were evenly matched, timid or plastered,” the author could not say.Targeted by Victorian social reformers (read: boring prudes), however, they appeared to die out in the 1860s.