Prize Playing

In English martial arts, a "Prize Playing" usually means an event equivalent to a grading, performed by means of bouts during which the candidate for promotion has to demonstrate that they can fight at the level required of someone of the higher grade. Sir William Hope seems not to have used grades in his school, for which I am grateful as I don't like them and can thus cite precedent for not using them, but he did advocate the playing of a prize.

Hope's rules for the prize can be seen here. We don't follow these exactly, but we follow the general idea. That is, that the prize playing is a yearly contest between all the students during which the winner will take away some sort of trophy or token. This varies, depending on what I've managed to purchase that may be appropriate. As we're not based at Linacre College any more I don't tend to buy bottles of Linacre sherry, which is probably a great relief to winners as it was of rather poor quality.