Five... moments from London's ice skating history
'With a velocity equal to the flight of a bird or a bolt discharged from a crossbow'
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter…
This edition’s a handful of moments from London’s ice skating history, in honour of waking up this morning to a frostily beautiful -3℃.
Londoners have been strapping sharp edges onto their shoes and taking to the ice for centuries — the earliest detailed description of ice skating in the city I found was from the 1100s, though these would’ve been bone skates (the Museum of London have an example from the 12th century): shin-bones of an animal attached to the soles of your shoes. Where today’s metal skates cut into the ice, giving some grip and manoeuvrability, bone skates slid on top of the ice, the skater pushing themselves forward with poles.
By the time Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn were recording their impressions of the growing fashion for ‘scheets’ in the 1600s, the pasttime was evolving, at least among the aristocracy. Less bone, more metal. Less jousting, more figure-skating. Elegance and artistry in carving particular shapes on the ice became the sign of mastery, to the point that, by the 1770s, when Robert Jones published A Treatise on Skating, there was apparently significant market for books with chapters called things like ‘Of the outside circle’, ‘Of the flying Mercury’, and ‘To cut the figure of a heart on one leg…’
Jousting on ice
1183
Bear-fights, bull-fights and packs of hounds being set upon boars ‘soon-to-be-bacon’: there’s a Game of Thrones feel to the high-energy, high-brutality picture of Norman London that William FitzStephen paints in his 12th century account of midwinter in the city.
Love skating? Love jousting? Love mortal peril? Great news: there’s a sport for that:
‘…And when that vast lake, which waters the walls of the city towards the north, is hard frozen, the youth in great numbers go to sport upon the ice… they place certain bones, the leg bones of some animal, under the soles of their feet, by tying them around their ankles and then taking a pole shod with iron into their hands, they push themselves forward by striking it against the ice, and are carried along with a velocity equal to the flight of a bird or a bolt discharged from a cross bow…
Sometimes two of them, thus furnished… at a great distance; they meet, elevate their poles, and run one against another, as it were at tilt, with these stakes, when one or both of them fall, and not without some bodily hurt; and after their fall, they shall be carried a good distance one from another, by the rapidity of the motion, and whatever part of your head comes upon the ice, it is laid bare to the skull. Very often the leg or arm of the party that falls, if he chances to light upon them, is broken: but youth is an age ambitious of glory…’
— by William FitzStephen from A Description of the City of London from 1183, translated from the Latin by B. White, 1773
‘The strange, and wonderfull dexterity…’
1662
By the time Samuel Pepys was roaming the frozen city in the 1600s, skating on the frozen expanses of the Serpentine and St. James’s Park lake was becoming common.
‘…Thence I to my Lord Sandwich’s, to Mr. Moore, to talk a little about business; and then over the Parke (where I first in my life, it being a great frost, did see people sliding with their skeates, which is a very pretty art)…’
— from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, from 1st December 1662