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No Pie, No Priest by Harry Pearson, review: a delightful

We’re lucky to live in a golden age of writing about folk Britain, from Amy Jeffs’s Storyland to Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain – and I must put in a word for Ethan Doyle White’s beautiful encyclopaedia, Pagans. 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. It is reported that during one Georgian game of hand-ba, between the Men of Suffolk and the Men of Norfolk, nine men died. Harry Pearson was born and brought up on the edge of Teesside and is the author of twelve works of non-fiction. 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.they kicked each other around the ankles till one fell to the ground – a dance one couple kept going for five minutes. 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. No Pie, No Priest combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.

No Pie, No Priest | Book by Harry Pearson | Official

This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use.It’s difficult to recommend this book highly enough…Harry Pearson is so effortlessly funny that I found myself snorting aloud while I read this on the Tube. Granny got fed up being left on her own every weekend so she accompanied him down to the club and entered the ladies cup, despite never having played before. Two competitors in front of me,” reports Pearson from a modern match, “each dressed in farmers’ smocks, had straw stuck up their trouser legs”.

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

I am subtracting a star however, because he re-uses passages and short pieces from other books of his which is a bit of shame - the passage about the names of flowers (originally from Hound Dog Days) is very funny, but less so the 2nd time around. In Tudor times, governments tried to ban sports like quoits and skittles, fearing their effect on the nation’s ‘martial spirit. First of the Summer Wine (2022), about three remarkable characters from the golden age of Yorkshire cricket, was shortlisted for the Cricket Society / MCC Book of the Year. His books include The Far Corner (shortlisted for the 1995 William Hill Sports Book of the Year); A Tall Man in a Low Land and Achtung Schweinehund!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. 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. But as Harry Pearson points out in No Pie, No Priest, his entertaining trawl through the folk sports of Britain, from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century, these were the sounds of sports in Britain. Among the idiosyncratic activities that Pearson explores are the arcane art of Cheese Rolling in Gloucester, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, Skittles in Somerset, Road Bowling in the aforementioned Armagh, and the terrifying violent arena of Shinty in the Scottish Highlands (as Pearson describes it, “not a place for the velvet-slippered aesthete”).