Bull Market
In a recent feature, I included an early 19th-Century Staffordshire pottery bull-baiting group that was sold at auction and carried an estimate of £50-80. There was no attribution, but the market obviously thought it was from the hand of Obadiah Sherratt, whose examples are the “Holy Grail.” After a bidding war, it finally sold for £4,500.
The Sherratt group is on a base with two plaques, one reading “Bull Beating” and the other “Now Captain Lad” (possibly the man’s encouraging words to either the dog or the bull for putting up a fight). Little is known about the man who created this group other than he is recorded as working from 1815 to 1846, and this was the first Staffordshire pottery figure to own Sherratt attribution.
There are no records of when or who produced the first bull-baiting group, and there are many variations — with or without a man, one dog or two, base on which the group stands, color variations, with or without plaques with legends — as this selection shows. Quality also varied, from the pearlware example modelled with a fawn dog at the bull’s nose, the bull held by a heavy rope attached to a ring by its one hind leg, to the brightly decorated group with a spotted Bulldog and a tree stump attached to the bull to prevent the group from collapsing in the kiln.
All the groups are thought to have been made in the first quarter of the 19th Century, and all would have been made in the Staffordshire Potteries in middle England, where, in its heyday in the 19th Century, there would have been up to 4,000 bottle kilns (bottle shaped and used for firing the pottery wares).
While today we admire and treasure pieces that came from the Staffordshire Potteries — and elsewhere, for that matter — the life of the Staffordshire pottery worker was not easy. Children as young as seven or eight were employed in many branches of the trade, sometimes working a 12-hour day, and in some cases carrying weights that the average man today would consider heavy. Often adults working in the potteries employed children rather than the factory owner. The factory act of 1833 limited the time children up to the age of 13 could work to a maximum of 48 hours a week and eight hours in any one day.
Not only were the hours long, conditions bad and life expectancy low, but the potters were also exposed to industrial diseases, especially lead poisoning from the glaze mix and lung disease from the flint dust.
Bull-baiting was introduced into England by the Normans following their conquest in 1066 and is often credited to William de Warenne, first Earl Warren. When they conquered the country, their street entertainers accompanied them. The Norman jugglers brought with them their bulls and bears and a primitive kind of Mastiff. The dogs were allowed to torment the tethered bulls and bears as a crude sideshow. These pastimes became more and more popular, and by King Henry II’s accession to the throne in 1154, they were widespread and remained popular until the very end of the 18th Century, when people’s attitudes toward the treatment of animals began to change.
The early travelling entertainments were not as brutal as later displays. These animals were too valuable to be killed and had to perform time and again. As the years passed, however, the baiting of bulls grew more savage, and torturing them to death became routine. It was believed that meat from a bull that had been baited had a superior flavor, and bull-baiting as a legal requirement prior to slaughter remained on the Statute book throughout the 18th Century, although the law was only periodically enforced.
By the 16th Century, bull-baiting had risen from primarily a peasant pastime to a royal entertainment, and Queen Elizabeth l frequently offered it as a spectacle for visiting ambassadors. It was at this point that serious attempts were made to improve the quality of the dogs that were used. Their mode of attack was to leap at the bull’s head and cling on to its nose, ears or tongue with their powerful jaws. Once they were clamped on tightly, they had to keep hold firmly, as the enraged bull tried to shake them loose. To achieve this feat, the dogs had to have large jaws and had to be able to continue breathing freely. This required a change in the anatomy of the dog’s skull. Also the Mastiff’s body had to be reduced in size to enable the dogs to approach the bull in a crouched position without falling easy prey to the bull’s horns.
The result was a specialized bull-baiting dog that was eventually to become the purebred “English” Bulldog. This refined Bulldog was perfected by the 1600s and continued its popular bloody sport for the next two centuries. There is a record that on St. Stephen’s Day in 1789, a riot followed a bull-bait; soldiers were called and fired on the crowd, killing four people.
An act was brought in in 1835 banning all cruel animal sports, and at this point the Bulldog was out of work and looked set to vanish. With the introduction of dog shows in the middle years of the 19th Century, the fortunes of the Bulldog changed; it became a popular show dog and the points that defined the original Bulldog were enhanced to the extent that the breed would now stand little chance against a lively bull.
It was the usual practice to tether the bull to a metal ring secured into the ground; hence, so many towns and villages still have an area known as The Bull Ring. In a very few instances the ring remains, albeit raised every time the road or square is resurfaced.
References: Desmond Morris, “Dogs: The Ultimate Dictionary of Over 1,000 Dog Breeds”; and Myrna Schkolne.