A Prize Playing was a test of martial skill popular in Renaissance England with the London-based Corporation of Masters of the Noble Science of Defence. It involved several dozen bouts against continually refreshing opponents, with little or no rest in between.
This practice was revived after a fashion in the late 17th century in the form of "Prize Fights", whence the term prizefighting for modern professional boxing.
Read more about Prize Playing: Renaissance Prize Playings, Prize Fights, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words prize and/or playing:
“I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do, it is morally wrong for him to do. The fallacious doctrine of male and female virtues has well nigh ruined all that is morally great and lovely in his character: he has been quite as deep a sufferer by it as woman, though mostly in different respects and by other processes.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)