From Broughton's Rules to legal sanctioning

Broughton's Rules, 1743

Bare-knuckle prizefighting was the original form of boxing, and it was ungoverned until the English champion Jack Broughton wrote the first formal code in 1743. Broughton's Rules introduced the concept that a downed fighter had thirty seconds to come to a mark at the centre of the ring, and banned hitting an opponent who was already down. They were written after a fighter died following a bout under Broughton's promotion — the sport's rules have been shaped by injury from the beginning.

The London Prize Ring Rules, 1838

The London Prize Ring Rules formalised the sport further, defining a roped square, prohibiting headbutting, biting and low blows, and retaining the round structure in which a round ended whenever a fighter went down. Fights therefore had no fixed length. They were revised in 1853 and governed prizefighting for the remainder of the bare-knuckle era.

Queensberry and the long exile, 1867–1889

The Marquess of Queensberry Rules, published in 1867, introduced gloves, three-minute rounds and the ten-second count. Over the following decades gloved boxing became the legally tolerated form of the sport, and bare-knuckle competition was pushed outside the law across the United States and much of Britain.

The last major sanctioned bare-knuckle prizefight of the old era came in 1889, when John L. Sullivan beat Jake Kilrain over seventy-five rounds under the London Prize Ring Rules. After that, the sport effectively disappeared from legal competition for well over a century.

Underground, 1889–2011

Bare-knuckle fighting never stopped; it simply stopped being legal. It survived in traveller communities in Britain and Ireland, in unlicensed venues, and in the American underground scene, where fighters like Bobby Gunn built reputations entirely outside any sanctioning framework. No records were kept in any verifiable sense, which is why bare-knuckle fighter histories before the modern era should be treated with scepticism.

The tribal route, 2011

The first crack in the legal wall came not from a state commission but from tribal sovereignty. In 2011 the Yavapai Nation sanctioned a bare-knuckle bout in Arizona, won by Bobby Gunn over Richard Stewart. The event was neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal under state law, and it demonstrated to promoter David Feldman that a genuine audience existed.

Wyoming and legalisation, 2018

After seven years of petitioning athletic commissions, Feldman found a jurisdiction willing to move. The Wyoming Combat Sports Commission published rules for professional bare-knuckle fighting in March 2018, having spent roughly a year developing them and having reviewed research suggesting bare-knuckle competition might carry lower concussion risk than gloved combat sports — the counter-intuitive argument that unlocked regulation.

On 2 June 2018, BKFC 1 took place in Cheyenne: the first legally sanctioned bare-knuckle card in the United States since 1889, and the first sanctioned women's bare-knuckle bout in modern American history. Mississippi followed as the second state, and by 2026 the sport is sanctioned in more than thirty US states.

The modern era

Legalisation created a professional sport with verifiable records for the first time in more than a century — but only from 2018 forward. That is the single most important fact for anyone building a database: bare-knuckle records are short, and anything claimed before 2018 is generally unverifiable. It is also why sample-size caution matters more here than in any other major combat sport.