Bottle-kicking: A charming, violent tradition only a pandemic could stop

It might not mean much to most of us that a British bottle-kicking match has been called off due to the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s a harsh blow to the two small villages of Hallaton and Medbourne, which have held the event for more than 200 years.

The Hallaton Hare Pie Scrambling & Bottle Kicking is an all-day celebration traditionally held on Easter Monday. At first glance, it’s a family-friendly occasion. There’s a parade, live bands, and bouncy houses for the kids. But if you’re imagining the bottle-kicking match as some polite British custom masked as a sport, think again.

You see, bottle-kicking has nothing to do with kicking a bottle. This charming English tradition is actually a violent, bloody battle over fields and ditches to get a small barrel of beer over the village’s two streams.

In other words, it is extremely sports.

The first rule of bottle-kicking is there are no rules. OK, that’s a lie — there are some rules, but they’re more like general life lessons to avoid going to prison, not typical guidelines one would imagine in sports.

Rule 1: No eye gouging.
Rule 2: No strangulation.
Rule 3: No use of weapons.
Rule 4: There is no rule four.

Even better than these scant list of illegalities are the origins of the sport itself, a rumored combination of public drunkenness, rabbit pie and watching the poor maul each other for food and drink. Dating back to pagan lore, the sport is purported to have started as a religious festival that turned dangerous over time. Essentially, the Hallaton town vicar would provide a hare pie, 12 loaves of bread, and bottles of beer to the people of the village who fought over the food and drink until it was gone.

All was well until a foreign enemy invaded the Easter games. Scourges from the neighboring town of Medbourne crashed the celebration, stole the beer and started an inter-village rivalry. Now the two sides meet to recreate the fight by trying to kick a wooden cask between the village’s two rivers in what can only be described as a total melee — and to the victor goes a cask of ale.

The winning team has to get the beer barrel across two streams a mile apart on a best-of-three basis. Aside from the physical demands and general risk involved when beating up your neighbors for beer, there are several hazards on the bottle-kicking pitch, namely hedges and barbed wire. Emergency services are on standby, though the most severe injuries are typically broken bones (a remarkable feat for a sport that is basically a reenactment of Walmart on Black Friday).

Bottle-kicking matches can last for minutes or hours, sometimes leaving competitors so exhausted they collapse at the end of a game. But once the battle is over and a winner is declared, everyone retreats to a local pub for food and drink (and probably some significant wound-dressing).

Weird sports are sports too.