No . 133 The Trusty Servant you to the first known description of our game written , naturally , in Latin hexameter verse .
The author of the work is Thomas Warton , younger brother of Dr Joseph Warton ( entered College 1735 ; 2M , 1755-66 ; HM , 1766-93 ). Thomas was educated at home but ‘ when he visited his brother at Winchester College he is said to have indulged in all manner of boyish pranks with undignified amiability , and , owing to his bulk , with ludicrous awkwardness ’ ( DNB 1885-1900 ).
This bulk , it seems , was also thrown with gusto into games of football on St Catharine ’ s hill , and Warton was a poetic heavyweight as well : he was elected Poet Laureate in 1785 . Mons Catharinae , his description of Winchester men at play , was published in 1760 .
The poem begins addressing the hill herself , which can , on holidays , see the Wiccamicam pubem ( Wykehamical youth ) engaged in a game Warton
describes as multiplici . The adjective multiplex , before it was coöpted by the cinema industry , literally meant ‘ with many folds ’, sharing a root with ‘ complex ’. Clearly the rules of Winkies were already baffling . A deeper dig into the Latin dictionary cites the meaning ‘ inconstant , changeable , fickle ’, clearly a sense derived by someone who had seen the rules of the game applied on Palmer Field .
Warton depicts the players trooping uphill in clothes already soiled , ready for battle . Indeed , he portrays the start of the match in highly martial language : military trains , battle arrays , phalanxes and formations abound . The crucial part of the formation , however , as in so many battles , is the wings , which here represent those charged with keeping the ball in play . As readers will know , before the pitch was flanked by canvas , ranks of Wykehamists were lined up to stop the ball rolling down the hill .
The pursuit of an errant flier is a highlight of the poem . Warton borrows from any number of pursuits in extant Latin verse where the trope is common : one warrior gives chase to another on the battlefield or a god chases a nymph through the mountain groves , their quarry ever at their fingertips but ever evading them . Here Wykehamists pursue a rapidus globus ( racing ball ) in its volubilis error ( tumbling jinks ). As someone whose chosen method of exhausting his dog is hurling a tennis ball from the top of St Cat ’ s , I can attest that the desperate energy of Warton ’ s lines is certainly true to life .
Warton , mercifully from this author ’ s standpoint , makes no effort to explain the ebb and flow of the game itself ; his concern is rather with the holiday spirit that permeates the scene . Almost cinematically , he uses the errant ball ’ s journey to the bottom of the slope to move the scene to the river , pater Ichinus . The epithet is self-consciously epic : Virgil uses it of the Apennines in Aeneid XII and here it evokes the sense of the Itchen of a protective local deity , a genius loci . We find Wykehamists leaping into the water , beating out rhythms on its surface , capering around , splashing each other and ‘ playing by washing ’. This would be chastening reading for any Latinists at Southern Water ’ s head offices !
The poem ends with a lament for the brevity of youthful innocence , the felix Puerorum aetas ( blessed age of boyhood ) and how the sweet laughter of adolescence is replaced by the tedium , cares and tears of adult life . Warton reflects on the good fortune of Wykehamists ‘ if such pleasures still remain for the boys on the Itchen ’ s pleasant bank ’.
I write this on the first half-rem of Cloister Time ; I think he would still find much to be envious of .
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