A champion is a winner now – but the word began with the champion who fought your battles for you, sword in hand
The Champion holds twenty-two hundred and eighty-four reviews and a 4.5 – a strong score on a large sample – and it is named after one of the most triumphant words in the language: the champion, the winner, the best – a word whose origins lie, surprisingly, not in victory but in fighting on someone else’s behalf.
The winner
Today, “champion” means a winner – the best, the title-holder, the one who has triumphed over all comers. The boxing champion, the champion team, the champion of the world. It is a word of pure victory and excellence, and as a pub name it is bracing and celebratory – a place for winners, or at least for those who would like to feel like winners for an evening. In the north of England, “champion” is also a lovely dialect word simply meaning “excellent” or “great” – “that’s champion, that is.”
But the origins of the word are more interesting, and more martial, than its triumphant modern meaning suggests.
The one who fights for you
“Champion” comes, through Old French, from the Latin “campio” – a fighter, a combatant, one who fights in the “campus,” the field (of battle). And the original, specific meaning was crucial: a champion was someone who fought a battle or a duel on behalf of another person. In the age of trial by combat, when disputes could be settled by a fight, a person who could not fight for themselves – the old, the weak, a woman, a churchman, a monarch – could appoint a champion to fight in their place, their strength and skill standing in for the person they represented.
The champion, then, was originally a proxy warrior – one who took up the fight for another, whose victory or defeat decided the other person’s cause. To be someone’s champion was to fight their battles, literally, with sword or lance. This is the root of the modern figurative sense we still use – to “champion” a cause is to fight for it on its behalf, to be its advocate and defender. The old warrior-proxy survives in the phrase.
The King’s Champion
There is a genuine and wonderful survival of this ancient role in England: the office of the King’s (or Queen’s) Champion. For centuries, at the coronation of an English monarch, the hereditary King’s Champion would ride, in full armour, on horseback, into the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, and throw down a gauntlet, challenging anyone who denied the new monarch’s right to the throne to fight him in single combat. It was a genuine ceremonial survival of trial by combat – the champion who would fight, literally, for the king’s right to rule.
The role still exists, held hereditarily by a particular family (the Dymokes), though the armoured challenge in Westminster Hall was discontinued in the nineteenth century. The champion now bears the royal standard at the coronation instead – but the office remains, a living fossil of the age when a king had a champion to fight his battles for him.
The pub
A popular, well-regarded pub doing a strong 4.5 across a large and real sample, named after the champion – the winner, the best, and, originally, the warrior who fought your battles for you.
Verdict
Popular, strongly rated, and named after the champion – a word of pure victory now, but born from the proxy warrior who fought other people’s battles with sword in hand.
Have a pint, feel like a champion for an evening, and remember the King’s Champion, who once rode in armour into the coronation feast to fight anyone who denied the crown.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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