The beastly truth behind the Bull Ring

The stark truth is that from mediaeval times until the early 1840s, this centrepiece of St John's was the regular scene of appalling barbarism.

The area between St John's Church and what is now the New Road roundabout was then far more level than now and formed a natural piazza or open arena for bull baiting.

Bulls were tied to stakes or to a metal ring in the ground, and dog owners paid for the privilege of setting their pets on to the tethered beasts. In the gory encounters, dogs were tossed into the air or impaled on the bulls' horns, while the bulls suffered terrible injuries as they were savaged by the dog packs.

Local butchers of the time claimed the barbaric practice was all to the good as it helped ensure the meat was more tender when the bulls were slaughtered.

In fact, it became the recognised duty of successive mayors of Worcester to ensure a sufficient supply of bulls for the sport by ruling that it was a punishable offence for butchers to kill unbaited beasts.

However, it seems that in the final decades of bull baiting, the sport was made a little less barbaric. Crowquill, in his Berrow's Worcester Journal comment column, said this exactly 100 years ago: "It is hardly likely that there are any old people in Worcester who remember bull bating in the Bull Ring at St John's.

"The sport was brutalising in times past but towards the end, the dogs were no longer required to worry the bull, only to pull down a rosette affixed between its horns. Further, the horns were blunted and the bull strove only to toss the dogs, not to gore them.

"It may be superfluous to explain that the ring was not a fenced off piece of land, like a prize ring, but a large metal ring fixed permanently in the ground."

Bull baiting continued on the Bull Ring and at Pitchcroft until the 1840s. It only came to an end when a long campaign by protesters culminated in threats to publish in the Press the names of butchers who were organising the sport.