The first recorded boxing match in Europe took place on 6 January 1681.
Yesterday a match of boxing was performed before his Grace, the Duke of Albemarle, between the Duke’s footman and a butcher,” wrote The London Protestant Mercury. “The latter won the prize, as he hath done many others before, being account, though but a small man, the best at that exercise in England.
They wore no gloves. While the man who is known to history only as ‘A butcher” was believed to be the best in the land, it took a generation to recognize the best bareknuckle boxer in England.
James Figg was the English champion from 1719 until his retirement in 1730. The early bouts were Vale Tudo, with kicks and chokes and takedowns. Figg was succeeded as champion by one of his students, Jack Broughton.
In 1741 Broughton fought George Stevenson in a match that hugely influenced the development of the sport.
“BROUGHTON got such a Lock upon him as no Mathematician could have devised a better,” wrote Captain John Godfrey, several years later. “There he held him by this artificial Lock, depriving him of all Power of Rising or Falling, till resting his Head for about three or four Minutes on his Back, he found himself recovering. Then loosed the Hold, and on setting to again, he hit the Coachman as hard a Blow as any he had given him in the whole Battle; that he could no longer stand, and his brave contending Heart, though with Reluctance, was forced to yield.”
Stevenson died days later of injuries sustained in the bout. Upset that he had killed a man, Broughton brought out the first set of rules for boxing.
Broughton’s Rule number 1 was “That a square of a yard be chalked in the middle of the stage, and on every fresh set-to after a fall, or being parted form the rails, each Second is to bring his Man to the side of the square, and place him opposite to the other.”
That rule lives in til today in the expression “up to scratch.” If you couldn’t make it to that line scratched on the stage, it was over.
The final rule, #7, barred ground fighting and hitting the groin. So this move in UFC 4, yah, out.
In 1838, Broughton’s Rules were developed into the London Prize Ring Rules. Then, finally, in 1867, the Marquess of Queensberry rules were finalized, and gloves were mandated. With some tweaks, those rules are in effect today.
In 1882 in England, the case R v. Coney in 1882 determined that a bare-knuckle contest was an assault occasioning bodily harm, despite irrespective of consent. This brought to a close widespread public bare-knuckle matches in England.
However, pockets of the practice remain to this day in England.
Here Billy ‘Bang Bang’ Hawthorn and Nathen J Dogg mix it up without gloves and prove how quick a bareknuckle fight can end, for either fighter. Or both.
