cock-throwing

To clarify, the pastime was known as "cock-throwing" (the bird often being a rooster rather than a goose) and, while indeed associated with Shrove Tuesday, may well have been played at other times of the year (The world's masterpieces: in detail, in your house, and with nobody's head in the way, 2 January, page 3).

Corrections and clarifications 2011

Bull and bear-baiting, cock-throwing and fighting, and such like barbarous pastimes, have long been on the wane, and will, it is to be hoped, soon become totally extinct.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 17, No. 475, February 5, 1831 Various

The apprentices of the London craftsmen followed the popular diversion of cock-throwing on Shrove Tuesday and tossing pancakes in the frying-pan -- the latter custom is still kept up at Westminster School.

A History of Nursery Rhymes Percy B. Green

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was not known in the days of bear-baiting and cock-throwing.

Old English Sports 1892

This was the barbarous game of cock-steling, or cock-throwing, or cock-squoiling -- a game as old as Chaucer's time, a universal pastime on Shrove Tuesday in

Customs and Fashions in Old New England Alice Morse Earle 1881

The seclusion in which they were compelled to live, produced a picturesqueness of manners which is pleasant to look back upon, now that it is a thing of the past; but it was also accompanied with a degree of grossness and brutality much less pleasant to regard, and of which the occasional popular amusements of bull-running, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, the saturnalia of Plough-Monday, and such like, were the fitting exponents.

The Life of Thomas Telford Smiles, Samuel, 1812-1904 1867