May 14.]

COTESWOLD GAMES.

The vicinity of Chipping Campden was the theatre of the Coteswold Games, which, in the reign of James I. and his unfortunate successor, were celebrated in this part of England. They were instituted by a public-spirited attorney of Burton-on-the-Heath, in Warwickshire, named Robert Dover, and like the Olympic games of the ancients, consisted of most kinds of manly exercises. The victors were rewarded by prizes, distributed by the institutor, who, arrayed in a discarded habit of James’, superintended the games in person for many years. The meetings were annually held on Whitsun Thursday, and were frequently attended by an immense number of people.

Ben Jonson, Drayton, and other poets[61] of that age, wrote verses on this festivity, which, in 1636, were collected into one volume, and published under the title of Annalia Dubrensia.

These diversities were at length terminated by the breaking out of the civil wars, but were revived at the Restoration; and the memory of their founder is still preserved in the name Dover’s Hill, applied to an eminence of the Cotswold range, about a mile from the village of Campden.—Britton and Brayley, Beauties of England and Wales, 1803, vol. v. p. 655; see Book of Days, vol. i. 712.