Events included horse-racing, coursing with hounds, running, jumping, dancing, sledgehammer throwing, fighting with swords and cudgels, quarterstaff, shin-kicking, and wrestling.

Booths and tents were erected in which games such as chess and cards were played for small stakes, and abundant food was supplied for everyone who attended.

Events have included the tug of war, gymkhana, shin-kicking, dwile flonking, motorcycle scrambling, judo, piano smashing, and morris dancing.

[3] Dover was admitted to Gray's Inn on 27 February 1636, and was probably called to the bar in 1611,[4] the same year he likely moved to Saintbury, near Chipping Campden, with his wife and children.

His biographer, Christopher Whitfield, claimed that Dover combined ancient countryside practices with "classical mythology and Renaissance culture, whilst linking them with the throne and the King's Protestant Church".

[12][b] Endymion Porter, a member of the court of King James, had an estate in the village of Aston-sub-Edge, close to Dover's home.

[18] Having been brought up in a Catholic family, Dover might well have been keen not to draw attention to religion, particularly if the games had taken over from an earlier church ale.

[19] The games took place in a natural amphitheatre on what is known today as Dover's Hill, then called Kingcombe Plain, above the town of Chipping Campden, in Gloucestershire.

Dover presided over the games on horseback, dressed ceremonially in a coat, hat, feather and ruff, donated by King James.

Horses and men were decorated with Dover's favours, yellow ribbons pinned to a hat or worn around the arm, leg, or neck.

Mounted cannons were fired to begin the events, which included horse-racing, coursing with hounds, running, jumping, dancing, sledgehammer throwing, fighting with swords and cudgels, quarterstaff, and wrestling.

[27] They frowned on festivities such as the games as being of pagan origin, promoting immorality and drunkenness,[9] and disapproved of any celebration on a church holiday such as Whitsun.

[28] A Puritan revolt over a 1627 "Bringing in the May" festival at Mount Wollaston in present-day Massachusetts resulted in the expulsion of its organiser from the colony.

He described starch as "[a] certain kind of liquid matter ... wherein the Devil hath learned them [non-Puritans] to wash and die their ruffs".

In it he wrote:[31] We find that under pretence of taking away abuses, there hath been a general forbidding, not only of ordinary meetings, but of the feast of the dedication of the churches, commonly called wakes ... Now our express will and pleasure is that these feasts, with others, shall be observed, and that our Justices of the Peace ... shall look to it, both that all disorders there may be prevented or punished, and that all neighbourhood and freedom, with man-like and lawful exercises be used.The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 brought the games to an end.

[33] Dover had died in 1652,[34] and bereft of his influence, the games became "just another drunken country festival", according to an account written by the poet William Somervile in 1740.

[35] Somervile's account of the 1740 games describes a general riot in which "chairs, and forms, and battered bowls are hurled/With fell intent; like bombs the bottles fly".

The rector of Weston-sub-Edge, the parish in which Dover's Hill is located, Reverend Geoffrey Drinkwater Bourne, claimed that up to 30,000 people were attending the games by then, and that the hillside was full of drunk and disorderly individuals.

Bourne also claimed that:[38] From 1846 onwards, the games, instead of being as they originally were intended to be decorously conducted, became the trysting place of all the lowest scum of the population which lived in the districts lying between Birmingham and Oxford.

[3] The first Shakespearean scholars to make a connection between Dover and Shakespeare were Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Thomas Warton, and Edmond Malone; historian Jean Wilson has commented that it required "quite imaginative leaps such as a hill referred to by Bolingbroke [King Henry IV of England] being the hill on which the games were held".

Events have included the tug of war, gymkhana, shin-kicking, dwile flonking, motorcycle scrambling, judo, piano smashing, morris dancing, and, in 1976, poetry.

[47] The 2019 games agenda included events such as a children's half mile Junior Circuit, a championship-of-the-hill race for adults and a tug of war competition.

[49][50] I cannot tell what planet ruled, when IFirst undertook this mirth, this jollity,Nor can I give account to you at all,How this conceit into my brain did fall.Or how I durst assemble, call togetherSuch multitudes of people as come hither.