the_gneech | Happy Birthday, djarums!

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English!

shrumpsed
Beaten in games; Devonshire.
--James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855

The Cotswold Games
There lived at that time [early 1600s] at Burton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, one Robert Dover, an attorney, who entertained rather strong views of the menacing character of Puritanism. He deemed it a public enemy, and was eager to put it down. Seizing upon the idea of the Cotswold meeting, he resolved to enlarge and systematize it into a regular gathering of all with leaping and wrestling, as before for the men, and dancing for the maids, but with the addition of coursing and horse-racing for the upper classes.
--W.& R. Chambers's Book of Days, 1864

The games were originally held about this time during Whit week in 1612 but were suspended for nearly a century, between 1853 and 1951, in part due to the riotous crowds they attracted. Today an annual revival known as Robert Dover's Cotswold Olympick Games, featuring athletic contests, pageantry, music, and fireworks, is held in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, on the first Friday evening after England's spring bank holiday.

He was a man who knew what's what, was Robert Dover.

-The Gneech