1835 · 1830s
The Cockpit Goes Legitimate
The Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822 is followed by the Humane Act of 1835, which makes cockfighting illegal in England and Wales. The sport persists in Ireland and Scotland until the late nineteenth century.
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sortableYear: 1835
The Humane Act of 1835 (5 & 6 William IV c. 59) made it a criminal offence to keep a cockpit, to set cocks to fight, or to be present at a cockfight in England and Wales. The act was a broader piece of animal welfare legislation, building on Richard Martin’s Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822 — the first successful prosecution under Martin’s Act had been against a cockfighter named Abraham Clarke.
The 1835 act did not end cockfighting overnight. Pits continued to operate in defiance of the law throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in rural northern England, and the practice persisted openly in Ireland and (more briefly) in Scotland into the 1880s. But the legal foundation of the British pit was destroyed, and the Old English Game began its long transition from a working fighting bird to the exhibition breed we know today.
The act’s passage was celebrated by animal-welfare reformers as one of the first great victories of the new humanitarianism — and lamented, in some quarters, as the end of an English tradition older than the Stuart kings.