Old English Game
British breed of chicken

The Old English Game is a British breed of domestic chicken. It was probably originally bred for cockfighting. Two different standards are recognised by the Poultry Club of Great Britain: the Carlisle Old English Game and the Oxford Old English Game. There is an Old English Game bantam.
Characteristics
The Old English Game has many colour variants. In Britain, thirteen colours are recognised for the Carlisle type, and thirty for the Oxford type, while the Entente Européenne d’Aviculture et de Cuniculture lists thirty-three. Twenty-eight are recognised by the American Poultry Association,
Use
Since the abolition of cock-fighting in 1849, the Old English Game has been kept primarily for show. Old English Game hens may lay about forty small tinted eggs in a year.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old English Game” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.