… – the crowd that gathered to watch the boxing match – enabled the confusion of social classes, the middling-class mixing with the rank-and-file. Boxing as an art & a science The rules of prizefighting The growing popularity of boxing in the mid-eighteenth century coincided with a global movement to codify the practice and to turn it into a proper sport with its set of rules that could guarantee a fair opposition between the two contesters. Even though bare-knuckled boxing …