Ready to disport with you: Homosocial culture amongst the wool merchants of fifteenth-century Calais

In late summer 1478, a dozen married merchants challenged their bachelor brothers to an archery match. The surviving invitation, found amongst the papers of the wool merchant Cely family, provides rare evidence for mercantile socialising outside of formal feasts, and is particularly notable for its use of a sporting event as a corporate activity. As Raewyn Connell argues in her seminal book Masculinities, the ‘institutional organization of sport embeds definite social relations: competition and hierarchy among men, exclusion or domination of women…. The performance is symbolic and kinetic, social and bodily, at one and the same time’. Synthesising and expanding on the work of other prominent sociologists, she claims that organised sports play a key role in male identity formation – not just in allowing men to demonstrate individual physical prowess, but more significantly in establishing collective masculine experiences that form a keystone of hegemonic male culture.