I was just watching QI, a British comedy/quiz TV show that I highly recommend to anyone who loves trivia and believes that most commonly held “facts” are actually quite false indeed. Anyway, in this episode, they mentioned that cock-fighting was England’s national sport for over two thousand years, and that every town/village had its own fighting pit.
So much was this “sport” part of the national psyche that it gave us some elements of language which still survive today, such as:
“cockpit”: where the fights actually took place
“show a clean pair of heels”: some fights had weapons attached to the birds’ heels
“game” (as in ‘I’m game for that’): related to game in the sense of birds in general, I assume
“to pit someone against someone else”: again, the name of the ring being used
There are others which I’ve found during my brief searches online, including “crestfallen” (from the visual image of the crest on the bird’s head after the fight), and “cocky/cocksure” in general for the opposite.
The transcript of that episode of QI is online, and there’s a little more information about cock-fighting’s cultural impact on medieval England here.
As the title of the programme says, it’s all quite interesting.
