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This was the barbarous game of cock-steling, or cock-throwing, or cock-squoiling a game as old as Chaucer's time, a universal pastime on Shrove Tuesday in England, where scholars also had cock-fights in the school-rooms.
It was a happy thing for us when the conscience of the nation was aroused, and the law stepped in to put an end to such disgraceful scenes which were witnessed in the Paris Garden at Southwark, or in the rude bull-run of a Yorkshire village. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was not known in the days of bear-baiting and cock-throwing.
The seclusion in which they were compelled to live, produced a picturesqueness of manners which is pleasant to look back upon, now that it is a thing of the past; but it was also accompanied with a degree of grossness and brutality much less pleasant to regard, and of which the occasional popular amusements of bull-running, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, the saturnalia of Plough-Monday, and such like, were the fitting exponents.
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