Excerpts on The Gamecock Codex

On the Shamo's Posture

Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1996-01-01

From a 1996 monograph in the Senri Ethnological Studies series, the principal English-language academic treatment of the long-crowing and game fowl of Japan.

On Gameness

Thu, 01 Jan 1948 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1948-01-01

A remark recorded in Gamecock magazine in 1948, attributed to “an old breeder” of the Southern tradition. The passage distils the concept of gameness — the single quality most prized in the pit, and the one most carefully bred for — into a definition that has the force of a moral proposition.

On the Cockpit's End

Fri, 01 Jan 1886 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1886-01-01

A remark printed in The Field in 1886, the year after the comprehensive failure of cockfighting in England to recover from the 1835 Act. The speaker’s name is not recorded.

On the Modern Game

Thu, 01 Jan 1885 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1885-01-01

Lewis Wright’s Book of Poultry (1885) is the most widely cited Victorian poultry reference, and remains in print in facsimile editions. The description of the Modern Game captures the breed’s appearance — a bird bred, in the half-century since the Crystal Palace, into a creature of almost absurd verticality.

Harrison Weir on the Asil

Sat, 01 Jan 1853 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1853-01-01

Weir’s The Poultry Book — published in two lavish volumes between 1853 and 1854 — is the first major English-language monograph on the domestic fowl, and the source from which most Victorian and Edwardian breed standards ultimately derived. His chapter on the “Aseel” (his transliteration of Asil) is the earliest detailed Western description of the breed.

Tarleton on Sumter

Sat, 01 Jan 1780 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1780-01-01

The dispatch in which Tarleton — the British Legion’s most aggressive officer — recorded his failure to overrun the Patriot militia of Colonel Thomas Sumter at Blackstock’s Farm. The first half of the sentence became the origin of the Carolinian Gamecock tradition.

Gervase Markham on the Feeding of the Cock

Wed, 01 Jan 1614 00:00:00 +0000

date: 1614-01-01

Markham’s Cheap and Good Husbandry is one of the first English treatises to describe the management of gamefowl in any detail. His recommendations are remarkably similar to those still followed by exhibition breeders of Old English Game today — proof of how little the working practices of the cockpit changed in three centuries.

Plutarch on the Cock

Fri, 01 Jan 0100 00:00:00 +0000

date: 0100-01-01

Plutarch’s Moralia contains an early example of the cock as a moral exemplar — a creature whose courage and sense of duty make him a model for human behaviour. The passage became one of the most-quoted classical references to the domestic fowl.