THE BEGINNING OF FOOTBALL | INCLUDING FOLK FOOTBALL

                                          (FOOTBALL 2)

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

                                              folk football

Then strip lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather, And if, by mischance, you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a rumble on heather, And life is itself but a game at football. —Sir Walter Scott, 18151

The high social status of the men who formed the FA in 1863 would have come as a surprise to most of those who had played the game in previous centuries. Before the industrial revolution football was largely seen as plebeian entertainment, a folk practice that was played regularly on religious holidays and rural festivals.

 The first written reference to it in Britain appears to be William Fitzstephen’s preface to his 1174 biography of Thomas à Becket, which describes a Shrovetide game of ball between London apprentices. In the first decade of the fourteenth century Nicholas Farndon, the lord mayor of London, banned football because it caused ‘certain tumults’, and in 1365 Edward III declared a national ban on football and handball because they distracted the population from archery practice.2 Richard II re-imposed the ban in 1388, stating that ‘servants and laboured shall have bows and arrows, and use the same on Sundays and holidays, and leave all playing at ball whether handball or football’. It was the same in Scotland, where the first four King Jameses all banned the sport. 

Yet by Shakespeare’s time, football had become such a part of national culture that references to it in literature were not uncommon, perhaps most notably in King Lear when the Earl of Kent taunts a servant as a ‘base football player’.

folk football

Britain was just one of many countries around the world that throughout history have played games we today would call football. In France, ‘soule’ occupied much the same place in popular culture as football did in Britain, while in Italy ‘Calcio Fiorentino’ became a major feature of life in Florence as part of the celebrations of Epiphany and Lent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

 But these were merely the most well-known European versions of the game. The simple truth is that most cultures in most regions of the world have played games with a ball that is propelled by hand and foot towards some form of goal. From the Americas to Aboriginal Australia, humans have found limitless pleasure, unbounded fascination and deep satisfaction in playing and watching these games, which they may or may not have called football. In China, Cuju, or Ts’u Chu, emerged from a form of military training as a ceremonial game of the royal court under the Han Dynasty and survived in various forms for 1,500 years. Women occasionally played and apparently in its later years professionals were engaged to play the game. But as with many ancient sports, Cuju was a largely ceremonial game, played at the gatherings of the elite.

 Others, like Ulama and the various ball games of Mesoamerica, had a religious or ritual significance. But none of these games were either a direct ancestor or an inspiration for the modern games of football; humanity’s endless desire to play with a ball has always been shaped by the social and economic characteristics of the society it created. In Britain, traditional football was a product of the rhythm and structures of life in a rural society. Matches were staged as local customs during the ebbs and flows of an agricultural economy. Festival games held across Britain and Ireland at Christmas or Shrovetide were often occasions for teams of hundreds to attempt to carry, kick and throw a ball to goals at either end of a village or town.

 The Derby Shrovetide game reputedly involved 1,000 men, the Sedgefield game 800, Diss Common in Norfolk 600, while at Alnwick in Northumberland 200 men lined up for the annual match. With such numbers, the playing was similarly large. Goals were three miles apart for the Ashbourne game in Derbyshire, at Workington they were set at Curwen’s Hall at one end of the town and the harbour at the other, while Whitehaven’s goals were set at the docks and a wall outside of the town. 

With local pride at stake, few rules and often challenging terrain to navigate, including rivers and streams, the risks of physical injury were considerable, further contributing to football’s reputation for violence and disorder.3 But this was not the only type of football to be played. Some were far more organised and based on clearly defined rules. In 1729 Derbyshire played Gloucestershire in Islington for five guineas; sixty years later the stakes had increased somewhat when Cumberland played Westmoreland in a twenty-two-a-side match at London’s Kennington Common for a thousand guineas.4 In East Anglia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century ‘camp-ball’ was played on dedicated pitches, known as ‘camping closes’ where ten- or fifteen-a-side teams fought to carry the ball to their opponents’ goal.5 ‘Hurling to goals’ was played in Cornwall between teams of fifteen to thirty players and, like camp-ball, allowed forms of blocking (not unlike modern American football) and required a player to throw the ball to a teammate when tackled.6 Nor was traditional football always entirely restricted to men.

 In October 1726 women played a six-a-side match on Bath’s bowling green, married women played unmarried in Inveresk in Midlothian in the late 1700s, and as late as 1866 and 1888 women took part in the annual Uppies versus Doonies match at Kirkwall in Orkney Islands.

7 Although many of the larger matches required the support of the local landowners, the large numbers who gathered to play or watch often aroused suspicion or concern in the authorities. As early as 1480 villagers protested against the enclosure of land in Bethersden in Kent by occupying it and playing with ‘foteballes’.8In 1649 fears that a royalist revolt lay behind ‘a great Foot-ball play near Norwich, where the people were very tumultuous and disorderly’ proved well founded when part of the crowd declared for Charles I.9 And as the enclosure of common lands intensified in the eighteenth century, football again became a pretext for crowds to gather in protest, such as at White Roding, Essex, in 1724, or at Kettering in 1740 when a match served as a pretext for the attempted destruction of a local mill.10 From its earliest times in Britain, football was always, as noted by the early chronicler of sport Joseph Strutt, ‘much in vogue among the common people of England’.11 By the time that Strutt wrote this in 1801 football was increasingly under attack from the economic and social forces that were transforming Britain from a rural agricultural society into an urban industrial power. Enclosures of common lands led to more than 6 million acres of land taken into private ownership between 1750 and 1830, sweeping away many of the traditional customs and leisure activities of village life. As a Suffolk vicar explained in 1844, his parishioners now had

no village green or common for active sports. Some thirty years ago, I am told, they had a right to a playground in a particular field, at certain seasons of the year, and were then celebrated for their football; but somehow or other this right has been lost and the field is now under the plough.12

In countless other towns and villages strenuous efforts were made by businessmen, religious evangelicals and moral reformers to stamp out football games that caused town centres to close or violated the Sabbatarian’s sense of good order. This was formalised in 1835 when the Highways Act banned football being played on roads. Not all footballers went quietly. Attempts to stop Derby’s Shrovetide football match being played were regularly frustrated by determined opposition before it was finally repressed in the 1850s. Football games continued to be played informally in streets, at festivals and during holiday times such as wakes. The 1842 Royal Commission on Children in Mines and Manufactories noted that football was played widely in the West Riding coal fields. These types of football were essentially traditional rural recreations, which persisted in a similar way to quoits, cudgels and Maypole dancing. Occasionally organised football matches did take place in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829 a fifteen-a-side match was played for prize money of £6 between the Leicestershire villages of Wigston and Blaby. Rochdale staged games between teams dubbed the ‘Body Guards’ and the ‘Fear Noughts’ in the 1840s. On Good Friday 1852 a match between Enderby in Leicestershire and Holmfirth in West Yorkshire was played for £20 at Sheffield’s Hyde Park.13 But these were one-off events arranged for specific occasions – there were no organised competitions or nationally agreed rules other than what had been decided for that particular match.

 Organised football matches were few and far between during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even the most assiduous researchers have been able to locate only fifty-eight organised matches played between 1830 and 1859.14 We have no way of measuring the extent to which the playing of football declined during the industrial revolution, because no records were kept and newspaper reports are too fragmentary, but the sheer weight of anecdotal evidence confirms the 1842 judgement of the Nottingham Review that ‘the field games of old England have almost entirely passed away. Football, throwing the quoit, spell and knur, archery have become obsolete and forgotten, like an old fashion in apparel, or a custom known only by a name’.

15 The game’s decline was recognised by footballers themselves. When the landlord of the Hare and Hounds Inn at Bolton offered a fortypound cheese to the winners of a match in January 1847, it was intended ‘to revive the old sport of foot ball’.16 The short-lived gentleman’s club Surrey FC in 1849 was created partly in recognition of the atrophy of football (and wrestling) over the previous decades:

wrestling and football play continued to dwindle, until at length Good Friday became the only day upon which they were brought into operation. . . . its practice had been discontinued in the neighbourhood of the metropolis. The only locality where the game could now be said to exist near to London was that of Kingston

reported Bell’s Life, which went to say that the aim of the club ‘was to restore the equally healthful game of football to that district’.17 The position of football before the 1850s can best be gauged by the fact that sports weeklies such as Bell’s Life, The Field and dozens of local daily newspapers carried regular reports of cricket, boxing, horse racing and many other sports – but almost nothing on football. Newspaper coverage of the game was confined to short and highly irregular reports or advertisements. But that should not be surprising. Outside of the public schools, football was essentially an informal leisure practice or folk custom that had no connection to the highly organised sport of the late Victorian era.18 Insofar as we know anything about the games that were played then, there is nothing to suggest any connection between them and modern football’s rules, playing styles, organisation or cultural meaning. When football did emerge as a mass spectator sport in the last third of the nineteenth century it had been reinvented. Outward appearances can often lead to continuities being imagined where none exist. 

The fact that a penguin walks upright on its hind legs does not make it an ancestor of humans. How could football fail to become a major spectator sport before 1860? Why was it that when cricket, boxing and horse racing codified their rules and became commercial spectator attractions in the eighteenth century, football remained a marginal sport? Unlike these sports, football lacked the aristocratic patronage of the ‘Fancy’ – the leisured rich who provided the financial backing to sport in the Georgian era – and was not viewed as a sport that could be commercially exploited through gambling. Its lowly social status and reputation for violence precluded its developing like cricket because young aristocrats would simply not play alongside the common people.

 Its ephemeral nature made it unsuitable for gambling, the engine that drove the transformation of cricket, boxing and other eighteenth-century sports. And in striking contrast to the Victorian era, there were no clubs formed to play football, underlining its lack of appeal to the emerging associational culture of the urban middle classes. Without aristocratic patronage or middleclass social networks, there was no force that could standardise the rules of football or impose a governing structure, as the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) had done in cricket or the Jockey Club in horse racing. Moreover, the most popular and therefore the most commercialised sports of the Georgian era were based on individual professionals: the boxer, the jockey, the pedestrian walker or runner and the cricket professional. With the exception of cricket, eighteenth- and early nineteenth–century sport was based on individuals competing against each other. 

And even though cricket is a team game, its dominance by aristocratic amateurs on and off the field, together with the fact that no more than a handful of professionals were employed by teams, meant that it did not need a large market of regular paying spectators to financially sustain its teams. The economic basis for the development of the modern football codes – a large population with significant leisure time and disposable income, plus a national transport and communication network to facilitate playing and promoting the game – would not emerge in Britain until the last three decades of the nineteenth century.