Cannons roared out over the grassy Cotswold hillside. Athletes and other contestants took their places. A well-dressed man, wearing a hat with a feather in it and riding a white horse, sounded a bugle. The glory that was Greece’s Olympic Games had come to England’s green and pleasant land.

The year was 1612. The Stuart king James I was on the throne. The first English Olimpicks were under way. Local shepherds sang, danced and took part in sports contests while landowners, clergymen, poets and even the occasional visiting courtier looked on under the benevolent eye of Robert Dover, a local lawyer who initiated the games. He is pictured, with a wand of office (or riding stick), mounted on what is probably a white horse, an equine symbol of his authority.

The English Olimpicks became an annual fixture and their existence was celebrated with a book of poetry, Annalia Dubrensia, which is our main source of information about the games. This book was published in 1636 when the Olimpicks had been established for many years. Later documents have suggested dates from 1601 to 1612 for their first appearance.

Kingcombe Plain, as the area was then called, was and is a natural amphitheatre. Robert Dover’s choice of venue may have been influenced by its existing use for a much smaller Whitsun event. If so, Dover took it over and reorganised it. But these Olimpicks were quite different from the traditional fairs, festivals, wakes and church ales held in the British countryside.

King James had made clear his approval of country games in his popular book of advice to his son, Basilicon Doron. In order to promote good feeling among the common people towards their king, James wrote, “certain days in the year would be appointed, for delighting the people with public spectacles of all honest games, and exercise of arms”. Not surprisingly, therefore, King James gave his approval to the Cotswold Olimpicks.

Putting on some kind of country entertainment was common among gentry and there was also a convention whereby such entertainments might be set in an Ancient Greek landscape. Indeed, Dover’s friends made much of the comparison between Olympia and the Cotswolds.

But one only has to look at “Dover’s castle” — a portable wooden structure complete with blank-firing cannons and pennants — to see that Dover’s Games were characterised by, as he put it, their “jollity”, and were not rigidly formed on the Olympic pattern. Nonetheless, by letting his Games be called “Olimpick”, Dover secularised them. Olimpick Games were not, and could not be, church ales. Theirs was a pagan, not a church, model. Moreover, the classical term gentrified the sports.

The games of Olympia included foot racing (sometimes in full armour), wrestling, boxing, and horse and chariot races. The Ancient Greeks also invented the pentathlon, a five-part contest consisting of throwing the discus, throwing the javelin, jumping, running and wrestling.

We have the frontispiece and the poems of Annalia Dubrensia to tell us which sports were practised on Kingcombe Hill. One immediate difference between Dover’s Games and the originals is what the athletes were wearing. While the Ancient Greeks competed naked, there is no sign from this picture that Dover’s young men even took their doublets off.

The 17th-century sports were performed in a culture that was very different from that of Ancient Greece, where attendance at the gymnasium was part of an educated man’s lifestyle. In traditional Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, the body was innately inferior to the mind or the soul. The health of a man’s soul was of much more concern than the health of his body.

True, the idea of sport as part of a healthy lifestyle wasn’t completely foreign to the 17th century. In a society in which educated men read the classical authors, it couldn’t be. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, a rambling masterpiece on the topic of mental depression, Robert Burton explains: “Riches may not easily be had without labour and industry, nor learning without study, neither can our health be preserved without bodily exercise.”

But it was as a preparation for war, rather than as an aid to health, that sports were legitimised in 17th-century society. Sports, Burton argues, “hath in former times been enjoined by statute as a defensive exercise and an honour to our land, as well may witness our victories in France”. Warlike sports included anything from athletic exercises to bloodthirsty contests in which men could be seriously injured or even killed. The modern term for these would be martial arts.

Seventeenth-century fights, whether for sport or anger, often resulted in maiming or death. In a fight between Sir German Poole and a Mr Hutchinson, of Gray’s Inn, Robert Dover’s old law school, Poole cut off three of Hutchinson’s fingers before he had even drawn his sword. In revenge Hutchinson sliced off Poole’s nose, picked it up, pocketed it and went off with it so that it could not be sewn on again. It was the mean attitude in taking away the slice of nose, not the fact that it was cut off in the first place, which made this particular contest the subject of gossip.