Board Games, Football and Medieval Pets
Leisure in medieval England ranged from the genuinely gentle to the outright dangerous, and the surviving records of board games, football and pet-keeping give a real, textured sense of how ordinary people actually spent their time off — when they got any.
Board games were more varied than the usual chess-and-draughts assumption suggests: Nine Men’s Morris boards, using holes rather than lines, survive carved into cathedral cloister seats at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich and Salisbury, and even into a church pillar in Chester — quite literally graffiti left by bored medieval clergy. Chess itself reached England from Spain by around the 12th century, evolving gradually into something close to the modern game by about 1475. Football, by contrast, was closer to organised chaos than sport in any modern sense: a Gloucester Cathedral carving from the early 14th century appears to show players using hands as well as feet, injuries (including a visibly broken arm in the same image) were common enough to be unremarkable, and London banned the game outright in 1314 with essentially no effect on actual play — a 1333 County Durham manor court record shows officials struggling for months just to get residents to name the players still defying an earlier ban.
Pet-keeping, meanwhile, was a genuinely widespread and cross-class habit: dogs, cats, red squirrels, rabbits and tame songbirds were common, with genuinely exotic choices for the wealthy — Edward I’s queen, Eleanor, kept a pair of parrots, and a 13th-century Bishop of Durham was noted for personally feeding his two pet monkeys peeled almonds. One 14th-century priest complained that many of his fellow clergy clearly cared more for their pets than for the actual souls in their care — a grumble that, however unfair to any individual priest, does at least confirm that plenty of medieval clergymen were keeping pets in the first place.
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