Sport and Society

You’d have thought - wouldn’t you? - that the latest sports coaching books acquired by the British Library would be cutting edge modern titles replete with the latest research by sports physiologists and psychologists.  Not a bit of it: a couple of years ago we proudly took possession of a book on swimming published in 1595. This was an English edition, from a Latin original called De arte natandi which was written by Everard Digby and published in 1587.

As Professor Nicholas Orme wrote in his note to accompany a talk on the book at the BL in October 2008, Digby was a ‘rumbustious Tudor scholar, thrown out of Cambridge for offences ranging from crypto-Catholicism to fishing (when he should have been in chapel) and blowing a horn and shouting round the college’. Unusually, he seems to have been pretty nippy in the River Cam, with a love of synchronised swimming moves such as ‘to caper with both his legges at once above the water’ and ‘to swimme with one legge right up’. Woodcuts showed how this was done, should anyone wish to try it.

It’s such a wonderful book that one half expects it to be revealed as a daring hoax, like the Hitler diaries, but anyhow we rate it as authentic – so far…