Vain Games of No Value?: A Social History of Association Football in Britain During Its First Long Century

By Terry Morris

It should be unthinkable to write the social history of Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards without reference to association football. Yet by the time that the Football Association celebrated its centenary year in 1963, no serious academic analysis had been undertaken of the sport and of the various channels by which it had developed in different parts of the country. By the time that historians began to tackle that task, its complexity and diversity were such that it could only be undertaken in installments. Studies emerged that focused upon individual clubs and specific regions or which were limited to narrow time scales. No work examined the long century from the 1860s to the 1970s in full.

This book analyses the growth of British football in all its aspectsthe developments of the football crowd, the status of the professional player, womens football, the difficult survival of amateurism, to mention but a few. It also highlights the factors that contributed to diverse developmental paths in different parts of the country. The author has used the widest range of source materials to achieve a broader overview of the games history than has previously been attempted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504998529

Terry Morris

Terry Morris only misspent half of his youth, dividing his time between the calm of his study and the bedlam of the football terraces. Graduating in history from Oxford University, he combined his two loves in a teaching career, spent entirely at University College School, in Northwest London, where he served successively as head of history and as deputy headmaster. He is the author of a range of textbooks on the sixteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries.

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© 2016 Terry Morris. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/29/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9851-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9852-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016900982

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Primitive Football and Its Survival.

The Early Documentary Evidence.

Survivals of the Primitive Game. Mob Football.

The Antiquity of Mob Football.

The Decline of Mob Football.

Survivals of the Primitive Game: Camping.

The Survival of the Primitive Game. The Nineteenth Century Evidence.

The Forms and Conditions of the Popular Game in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Chapter 2. Football and the Nineteenth Century Public Schools.

The Public Schools and their Reforming Agendas.

The Public Schools and their Football.

The Roles of the ‘New’ Public Schools and of the Grammar Schools.

The Continued Isolationism of the Major Public Schools.

Reassessment of the Role of the Public Schools.

Chapter 3. The Development of The Amateur Game in London and the Home Counties. 1859-80.

The Origins and Structure of Gentleman’s Football Clubs in London.

The Development and Significance of the Wanderers Club.

The Lesser Gentlemen’s Clubs.

The Structural Weaknesses of the Amateur Clubs.

The Gentleman Amateur in the Home Counties.

The Development of Town Clubs in the South East.

Chapter 4. The Social and Economic Context of Football’s Nineteenth Century Development.

Urban Population Increase in the Nineteenth Century: Scale and Timing.

The Availability of Playing Space in the Urban Environment.

The Availability of Leisure Time for the Working Man.

Getting to the Match: the Growth in Disposable Income and the Question of Accessibility.

The Socio-Economic Context of the Inter-war Years.

Chapter 5. Case Studies in Local Development: Sheffield.

The Foundations of Football in Sheffield: Traditional Survival or Middle Class Innovation?

The Spread of the Game in Sheffield.

Sheffield Football and Sheffield Theatre.

From Sheffield FC to Sheffield FA: the Development of a Modern Structure.

The Rise of the Wednesday Football Club.

The Establishment of Professionalism in Sheffield.

The Rise of a New Club and the decline of the Old.

Sheffield’s Hinterland: the Development of the Game in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

Chapter 6. Case Studies in Local Development: Glasgow.

The Formation and Development of Queen’s Park FC.

The Spread of the Game in Glasgow.

The Spread of the Game Beyond Glasgow.

The Development of the Game in Edinburgh.

The Impact of Glasgow Celtic FC and the Development of the ‘Old Firm’.

Chapter 7. Case Studies in Local Development: Central Lancashire.

The Development of the Game in Darwen and Blackburn.

The Development of the Game in Bolton and Accrington.

The Cases of Burnley and of Preston.

The Establishment of the Lancashire Football Association: a Case Study in the Growth and Development of a County Association.

Chapter 8. The Growth of Football in the Major Industrial Cities.

The Development of the Game in the North East of England.

The Development of the Game in Manchester and Liverpool.

The Growth of the Game in Birmingham and in Staffordshire.

Chapter 9. Footballing Backwaters of the Nineteenth Century.

Provincial Membership of the Football Association in the Early 1870s.

Early Football in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire: a Slow Transition from Amateurism.

Rural Case Studies: Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset.

The Development of Football in Wales.

Scotland: the Highlands and Islands.

Chapter 10. Towards a National Sport: National Rules and National Competitions.

The Rules of the Game: Areas of Dispute.

Early Attempts at Codification.

The Definition of Football Association Rules in 1863.

The Limited Influence of the Football Association.

The Establishment of FA Authority: Cup Matches and Representative Matches.

The Division of Football Authority within the British Isles.

Chapter 11. Professionalism: The Crisis of 1884-85.

The Logic of Professionalism.

Importation.

The Growth and the Varieties of the Amateur Ethos.

Amateurism and the Issue of Control.

The Crisis of 1884-85.

The Legalisation of Professionalism.

Chapter 12. The Football League and Other Leagues.

The Financial Implications of Legal Professionalism.

The Problem of Fixture Lists and of the ‘Fixity of Fixtures’.

The Genesis and Aims of the Football League.

The Selection of Member Clubs.

Life Outside the League: the Fate of the Rejected Clubs.

Life Outside the League: Alternative Competitions.

The Spread of the League Principle.

Chapter 13. Scotland: A League, Professionalism and the Consequences.

The Struggle of the Scottish Football Association Against Professionalism.

The Formation of the Scottish League.

The Legalisation of Scottish Professionalism.

The Weaknesses of the Scottish League and the Departure of the ‘Village Teams’.

The ‘Old Firm’ and its Potential Rivals.

Queen’s Park and the Decline of Scottish Amateurism.

The Failure of Post-War Expansion.

Chapter 14. The Retreat of the Gentleman Amateur From 1882.

The Rise and Impact of the Old Boys’ Clubs.

The Corinthian Football Club and its Mission.

The Amateur ‘Split’ of 1907 and the Gentleman Amateur in Isolation.

The Corinthians During and After ‘the Split’.

University Football and the Last Gasps of the Gentleman Amateur.

Chapter 15. The Transformation of Elite Amateur Football in the South East 1885-1914.

The Declining Influence of the Gentleman Amateur in London Football.

The Successors to the Old Boys’ Clubs.

London’s ‘Grassroots’ Football Culture.

Towards a New Kind of London Amateur Club.

The Further Development of Town Clubs in the Home Counties.

The Development of Amateur League Football.

The Impact of the ‘Split’ upon Southern Amateur Football.

Chapter 16. The Birth of Southern Professionalism. 1890-1920.

The Roots of ‘Pragmatic Amateurism’ in London and of Open Professionalism in the Shires.

The Case of London: Ambitious Clubs and Conservative Administrators.

The Emergence of Professional Clubs in North and West London.

The Implications of Professionalism for London Clubs.

The Development of League Competitions in the South. The Impact of the Southern League.

Professional Football in South Wales.

Chapter 17. Ireland: A Case Apart.

The Origins of Association Football in Ireland.

Northern Problems: Isolation and Home Rule.

Northern Problems: Sectarianism and the Case of Belfast Celtic.

Northern Problems: the Case of Derry City.

Southern Problems: Political Partition, Football Partition and Gaelic Sports.

Irish Football at the Closing of the First ‘Long Century’.

Chapter 18. The First Commercial Age. 1890-1914.

The Football Club as a Limited Liability Company.

Shareholders and Directors: From Democracy to Oligarchy.

Shareholders and Directors: it’s Capitalism, but not as we know it.

New Football Clubs and the ‘New Commercialism’: Lancashire and Yorkshire.

New Football Clubs and the ‘New Commercialism’: London and the South Coast.

Subsidiary Industries: the Growth and Development of the Football Press.

Subsidiary Industries; Balls, Boots, Betting and Beer (and Railways).

Chapter 19. Towards A Football Landscape: The Development of the Football Stadium.

The Precedents of the Cricket Grounds.

The Grandstand: From ‘Cowshed’ to Corporate Monument.

The Work of Archibald Leitch.

The Technology of Terracing.

The Football Stadium after 1920: Consolidation or Stagnation?

The Development of the National Stadiums.

Chapter 20. The Men in Charge.

Who was in Charge? National Association versus National League.

The Leaders of the Football Association 1863-1934.

The Leaders of the Football League. 1888-1950.

Who was in Charge? The Case in Scotland.

In Charge of the Clubs: The Club Directors.

In Charge of the Team: the Secretary and Secretary-Manager.

In Charge of the Team: the Development of the Team Manager.

In Charge of the Team. The Post-War Years. ‘The Age of the Manager’?

In Charge of the Match. The Development of the Football Referee.

Chapter 21. Football as a Career 1885-1960: Self-Perception, Recruitment and Rewards.

The Extent of Professionalism and the Professional’s Self-Perception.

Methods of Recruitment, 1885-1939.

Wage Levels for Professional Players.

Players’ Incomes: Beating the System.

Recruitment after 1945: the Development of the ‘Youth System’.

Chapter 22. Football as a Career 1885-1960: Conditions of Work.

The Professional Player’s Conditions of Work: Training.

The Professional Player’s Conditions of Work: Football Clubs as Employers.

Footballers and Trade Unionism.

The Professional Player’s Conditions of Work: Career Duration.

Life after football.

Star Status.

Chapter 23. The Home Crowd: Composition, Motivation and Culture.

The Football Crowd in the Nineteenth Century: Demonisation and Defence.

The Size and the Composition of the Crowds.

Spectatorship and Disorder.

Spectatorship and Identity: Civic Identity?

Spectatorship and Identity: Other Forms of Identity.

The Culture of the Football Crowd.

Getting a View: Risking Your Life.

Chapter 24. The Crowd. The Wider Implications of Supporting Football Clubs.

The Excluded Supporter and the Remote Supporter.

The Football Spectator as Consumer: Choice on a Saturday Afternoon.

The Crowd and the Club: Keeping the Supporter at Arm’s Length.

The Big Match at Wembley.

Chapter 25. The Impact of the First World War.

The Debate on the Suspension of Organised Sport.

Footballers at War.

Adapting to War: the Suspension and Reorganisation of Senior Football in Britain.

The Impact of the War upon Amateur Football.

Adjusting to Peace.

Chapter 26. From Football League to National League.

Did the Football League have National Ambitions?

League Recruitment Before the First World War.

The Formation of the Third Division: the Football League and the Southern League.

The Formation of the Third Division: Prospects and the Weaknesses of the Northern Clubs.

From Expansion to ‘Closed Shop’.

Chapter 27. Boys and Girls Come Out to Play. The Development of Schools’ Football and of Women’s Football.

The Emergence of Football in Elementary Schools.

The Formal Organisation of Schools’ Football.

The Purpose of Schools’ Football.

The Origins and Early Status of Women’s Football: the British Ladies Football Club.

Women’s Football and the First World War: Dick, Kerr’s Ladies and Many Others.

The Post-War Reaction to Women’s Football.

Women’s Football: From Subculture to Culture.

Chapter 28. The Second Commercial Age. 1920-70.

Football versus Technology: the Development of Floodlit Football.

Football versus Technology: the Slow Triumph of Floodlit Football.

Football versus Technology: the Cultural Impact of Floodlit Football.

Football versus Technology. The Early Years of Broadcasting.

A Star is Born: the Football Commentator.

Football Pools and the ‘Pools War’.

Chapter 29. Elite Amateurism From 1920: Golden Age and Decline.

The Structure of Elite Amateur Clubs.

The Amateur Club and its Supporters.

The Amateur Club and its Players: Recruitment and Mobility.

The Amateur Club and its Players: Shamateurism.

Elite Amateurism Beyond the Amateur Heartlands.

The Decline of Elite Amateurism: Post-War Resurgence and the Threat of Semi-Professionalism.

Chapter 30. The Grassroots: The Wider Amateur Game.

The Extent of Grassroots Football Beyond the Elite Levels.

Categories, Structures and Lifespans of ‘Grassroots’ Clubs.

Church Teams.

Works’ Teams: Paternalism and its Limits.

Works’ Teams: the Railway and the Mining Industries.

Works’ Teams: Some Success Stories.

Old Boys Football and ‘Elite’ Works Teams.

Sunday Football.

Chapter 31. The Impact of the Second World War.

Football’s Response to the Outbreak of War.

The Structure and Conditions of Wartime Football.

The Impact of the War upon Professional Clubs.

The Impact of the War upon Professional Players.

Football in the Forces.

The Impact of the War upon the Amateur Game.

The Readjustment to Peacetime Conditions.

Chapter 32. The End of the Beginning: The Crumbling of the Old Order 1960-1974.

Changes in Football Administration 1934-64.

The Economic Context: the ‘Missing Millions’.

The Erosion of ‘Soccer Slavery’.

The Collapse of Elite Amateurism.

1966. A False Dawn or the Shape of Things to Come?

To Martine.

All those hours spent at Stamford Bridge and at Lower Mead: I told you that I was doing research!

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On 27th December 1949, the matches played in the four divisions of the English Football League were watched by an aggregate total of 1,272,155 spectators. If matches played in the Scottish and Irish leagues, and in the many amateur and semi-professional leagues up and down the country were also taken into account, the total number of football spectators on that day would comfortably exceed two million. Such statistics, pertaining to one specific day can never have been matched by any other leisure activity in the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries. In the current century, as Association football comes more and more to be dominated by TV schedules, the trend is ever-upwards. Yet few comprehensive histories have been written of this most popular of sports. With the passage of time, and the increasing complexity of the game’s development, such a task becomes more and more daunting. While player biographies and club histories become the staples of publishers’ lists, academic research, with its greater demands upon time and detail, tends to focus upon short periods of time, or limited geographical locations. British football now has a huge literature, but little coherent history. This book aims to provide at least a partial remedy to this situation by identifying predominant elements in the game’s development, by summarising the work that has already been done in analysing these elements, and by exploiting the full range of available resources in order to broaden that analysis. The range of such resources is very wide indeed, embracing previous academic works, newspaper resources, player memoirs, and club programmes, to name only a few. Census returns constitute only one of the many online resources that are readily available.

Even so, this book only tackles part of the game’s history. It addresses the first ‘long century’, stretching roughly from the formulation of modern rules and forms of the game in the 1850s and 1860s to the crisis of popularity that seemed about to embrace it in the 1970s. The game survived that crisis and achieved new heights of prosperity, but it did so through developments that have not yet run their course, and whose outcomes cannot yet be traced with certainty. Within that first ‘long century’, however, the aim of this book is to replace myths with explanations, and to help football enthusiasts to understand the origins of their entertainment.

As with any such work, many debts have been incurred and must be acknowledged. Many enthusiasts have laboured on the histories of individual clubs and of specific regions, and my debt to these is acknowledged in my bibliography. Much is owed, too, to the patience and professionalism of local librarians and archivists. Visits to the County Record Offices, such as those in Durham, Surrey and Wiltshire, were extremely fruitful, and the many hours spent in the British Library were delightful in every respect. Without such assistance the book would have no firm documentary foundation. Without the dedication and astonishing expertise of the staff of the Royal Free Hospital, in Hampstead, North London, the book would have no author. The contributions unwittingly made to this work in particular by Mr. Tim Davidson, Mr. Giuseppe Fusai and Dr. Astrid Mayer, and subsequently supported so assiduously by my wife, Martine, are thus recorded with profound gratitude.

CHAPTER 1

PRIMITIVE FOOTBALL AND ITS SURVIVAL.

01.jpg.jpg

Street football in Dorking, Surrey, on Shrove Tuesday 1897. Note that two of the central figures are policemen, attempting to confiscate the football. (Dorking Museum)

The primitive man, he built his boat,

He cooked his dinner and made his coat.

He threshed his corn and he ground his wheat,

And he kept his ball at his own dear feet.

Brighton College Football Song.

How, when and why did football first develop in Britain? We might as well admit at the outset that none of these questions can be answered. Theories and legends abound, but they are almost universally fanciful, and the majority are laughable. The notion that the traditional game in Derby was first played in 217 AD as a means of celebrating the expulsion of a Roman force from the town, not only lacks any historical corroboration, but raises the obvious question as to why the locals chose football as a form of celebration. We might also wonder where they found a ball to play with. The legend that football in Chester, or indeed in Kingston-upon-Thames, originated when the locals celebrated a victory over the Vikings by playing with the severed head of the Viking chief, gets us around the problem about the ball, but it also fails for the lack of any supporting evidence.

The Early Documentary Evidence.

Written sources are a better guide, but for centuries they are few and far between, and the authors usually had an agenda of their own. In general, the men who wrote them had more serious matters on their minds than the description of a popular pastime. For centuries, therefore, we receive only tantalizing glimpses of the game. Sports historians rarely fail to begin their story with the account provided in 1174 by the Canterbury monk, William Fitzstephen, of the sporting activities of contemporary Londoners. Fitzstephen, too, had a separate agenda. His purpose in writing Descriptio Nobilissimae Civitatis Londiniae was to set the scene for the life of Thomas Becket, martyred not long before in Canterbury. As part of the background he refers to the ‘famous game of ball’ played at Shrovetide each year in the fields outside the city walls. His account is descriptive, and unlike many others, it is not judgemental. Even so, he doesn’t help us with the problem about the origins of the game, for if it was already ‘famous’ in 1174, its origins must lay much further back in time.

After dinner, all the young men of the city go out into the fields to play at the well-known game of football. The scholars belonging to the several schools have each their ball; and the city tradesmen, according to their respective crafts, have theirs. The more aged men, the fathers of the players, and the wealthy citizens, come on horseback to see the contests of the young men, with whom, after their manner, they participate, their natural heat seeming to be aroused by the sight of so much agility, and by their participation in the amusements of unrestrained youth. (1)

Fitzstephen’s account belongs to one of the four main categories into which documentary references to football may be divided between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries. Into this category fall references that are incidental to other purposes, the purpose in this case being to clarify the background to Becket’s life. A wholly different purpose was that of a work written, probably very late in the fifteenth century, to advertise the saintliness of the late King Henry VI, and to catalogue the posthumous miracles that he had wrought. Miracle No.91 concerned one William Bartram of Caunton, near Newark. Severely injured in a game of football, Bartram had languished in great pain for some time, until the dead king appeared to him in a dream, restoring him to health, if not to match fitness.

The second category is commonly encountered in the period between Fitzstephen’s writings and Bartram’s brush with the supernatural. It consists of legal condemnations of football as a threat to social order, and of attempts to suppress the game. The image of football in these sources is inevitably one of violence and disorder. One of the earliest examples occurs in 1280, when Henry, the son of William de Ellington, was killed in the course of a game at Ulgham, in Northumberland, running accidentally onto a knife worn by another player. Shortly afterwards, in 1303, a game of football in the High Street in Oxford provided the cover for the murder of Adam of Salisbury by Irish students. As written records of court proceedings become more abundant, so do references to football-related violence. There are cases at Selmeston and Chidlam, in Sussex, in 1403 and 1404, and at Bicester, in Oxfordshire, in 1425. From Avignon in 1321 came a papal dispensation for a cleric, William de Spalding, who had been involved in an accidental death during a game of football. In South Mimms, in Middlesex, in 1583, Nicholas Marten and Richard Turvey were less fortunate, for they were indicted for homicide when the coroner found that in a game of football at ‘Evans Field’ they had brought about the death of Roger Ludforde by striking him with their elbows.

The association of ball games with violence and disorder was one of the reasons for a rash of prohibitions that occurred throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A further reason was found in the official assumption that such games channelled the energies of young men of military age in the wrong directions. The pattern for these prohibitions was set in 1314, when the Lord Mayor of London published an order that he had received from the crown ordering the strict maintenance of public order in the capital during the King’s absence, fighting the Scots. In particular, it seems, that order was threatened by certain tumults arising from great footballs, in the public fields, from which many evils may perchance arise. There were more profitable ways for young men to disport themselves, and in 1365, a royal decree specified that every able-bodied man of the said city [of London] on feast days when he has leisure shall in his sports use bows and arrows or pellets or bolts, forbidding them under pain of imprisonment to meddle in the hurling of stones, loggats and quoits, handball, football or other vain games of no value. The order was repeated in 1388, in 1409 and in 1414, on the eve of Henry V’s Agincourt campaign. In fact eight prohibitions were issued by the crown in the course of one hundred years. Protection of public order was sought by similar bans in the provinces, at Halifax for example in 1450, and in Leicester. Conversely, in Ireland, at Galway in 1527, a municipal law specifically exempted football from a ban on games that might be played without the wall. The Scottish crown evidently had very similar concerns to those of its English counterpart, for it too banned football in 1424, along with golf, because of the threat that they posed to the practice of archery. There, the order was repeated in 1457 and in 1491.

On a much more banal level, if football ceased to be considered a threat to national security, it remained a threat to property, and in particular to windows. This regulation entered in the Manchester Leet Roll on 12th October 1608 must stand as one example, albeit an outstandingly pompous one, of very many repeated all over the country in this period. That whereas there hath been heretofore great disorder in our town of Manchester, and the inhabitants thereof greatly wronged and charged with making and amending of their glass windows broken yearly and spoiled by the company of lewd and disordered persons using that unlawful exercise of playing with the football in the streets of the said town. Therefore, we of this jury do order that no manner of persons hereafter shall play or use the football in any street within the said town of Manchester, upon pain to everyone that shall use the same for every time 12 pence. This was the first of five such orders published in Manchester between 1608 and 1667: evidently the game was no easier to ban in the provinces than in the capital.

Another line of attack on football came, not from the state, but from the Church, which often saw such purely physical activities as evil in themselves, but especially so if they took place on the Sabbath. Before the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the attitude of the Church to traditional sports seems often to have been ambiguous, and the churchyard itself was frequently the scene of popular amusements. In some cases, evidently, the clergy identified themselves closely, even too closely, with those amusements. The curate of Hawridge in Berkshire, for instance, lost his living in 1519 when it was reported that he rushed back in his shirt from Chesham, where he had been playing football, and raced through Divine Service in indecent haste, in order to get back to the game. In many cases, however, the religious reforms of the sixteenth century brought a much tougher clerical line. In 1572, Bishop Freke of Rochester made a point during his inspection of his diocese of ensuring that the practice of playing football in churchyards came to an end. An unequivocal statement of the Puritan attitude to football and to similar games is provided by Philip Stubbs in his Anatomy of Abuses, published in 1583.

Any exercise that withdraweth us from godliness, either upon the Sabbath or on any other day else, is wicked and to be forbidden. Now, who can be so grossly blind that seeth not that these aforesaid exercises not only withdraw us from godliness and virtue, but also hail and allure us to wickedness and sin? For as concerning football playing, I protest unto you that it may rather be called a friendly kind of fight than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practice than a fellowly sport or pastime.

These sources, of course, tell us only a very little about football in the late medieval and early modern periods. We learn little or nothing about the form of the game, about its rules, if indeed there were any, or about the different varieties of the game that existed from region to region. We don’t even learn very much about official attitudes towards the game, for although we encounter condemnation, it is sporadic and, as far as we can tell, completely unsuccessful. The evidence suggests that local authorities took little action until forced to do so by some extraordinary event such as a death or a serious breach of the peace. The laws passed against such sports as football in the reign of Henry VIII, for instance, remained on the statute book until 1845, utterly ineffective throughout their three hundred year history. The one conclusion that we can draw with confidence from this early documentation is that football, in whatever form it existed, was practised throughout the British Isles, and that it was sufficiently popular to survive official disapproval and religious condemnation for centuries.

The same conclusion is supported by the fourth and final form of documentation that relates to football in this period. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, and increasingly throughout the sixteenth century, references to football occur in popular literature in a manner that makes it abundantly clear that the game and its vicissitudes were well known to the audience. The precedent for such references is perhaps found in a more reverend source, in a sermon by the fourteenth century religious reformer, John Wycliffe. He turned to what must have been familiar imagery to illustrate the casual treatment of the common man by those in positions of spiritual authority: In these days Christian men are kicked about, now by popes and now by bishops, as if they were playing football. (2) The image evoked here of a football as a casual and much-abused plaything, then appears almost as a cliché in the literature of the next three centuries. Shakespeare himself employs the cliché when, in The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus complains:

"Am I not so round with you, as you with me,

That like a football you do spurn me thus?

You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:

If I last in this service, you must case me in leather."

King Lear and his attendants were also evidently familiar with the darker side of the game:

Lear: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? (strikes him)

Steward: I’ll not be strucken, my lord.

Kent: Nor tripped neither, you base football player. (tripping up his heels).

Literary references of this kind recur repeatedly throughout Jacobean drama, to the extent that Francis Magoun fills eight pages of his study of early football references with examples. (3) If this body of evidence tells us nothing more precise about the game, it makes it clear beyond doubt that forms of it were very widely played over a period of five or six centuries at the very least, and that the concept of football, whatever moral and emotional responses it might provoke from those in positions of authority, was familiar to the vast majority of the population.

Before we leave these early and incidental references to football, from the prehistory of the game, we should note two documents from this period that are truly remarkable. Both are provided by educationalists. The first comes from the pen of one of the greatest teachers of Elizabethan England, Richard Mulcaster, High Master of St.Paul’s School, in London, from 1596. In 1581, he wrote with extraordinary insight, recognising the shortcomings of contemporary football play, yet realizing the potential that existed for its improvement.

The second kind [of recreation] I make the Football Play, which could not possibly have grown to this greatness, which it is now at, nor have been so much used, as it is in all places, if it had not had great helps, both to health and strength. And to me the abuse of it is a sufficient argument that it hath a right use: which being revoked to its primitive, will both help strength and comfort nature, though as it is now commonly used, with thronging of a rude multitude, with bursting of shins and breaking of legs, it is neither civil, nor worthy of the name of any train to health. Wherein any man may see the use of the training master. For if one stand by, which can judge of the play, and is judge over the parties, and hath authority to command in the place, all these inconveniences have been very lightly redressed. Some smaller number with such overlooking, sorted into sides and standings [positions], not meeting with their bodies so boisterously, may use football for – – much good to the body. And being so used, the Football strengtheneth and brawneth the whole body, and by provoking superfluities downwards, it dischargeth the head, and upper parts, it is good for the bowels, and to drive down the stone and gravel from the bladder and kidneys. (4)

The second document also comes from an enlightened schoolteacher, this time in Scotland. David Wedderburn, Master of the Grammar School in Aberdeen, wrote a book of Latin exercises, Vocabula, for his pupils in 1633. To encourage translation into Latin, he chose some situations that would be familiar to the boys, with appropriate phrases for translation. In one of these exercises we find the clearest indication that we have of what it might have been like to participate in a game of football in the seventeenth century.

Let us choose sides, pick your first man. Those on our side, come here. Kick out the ball so that we may begin the game. Come, kick it here. You keep the goal. Snatch the ball from that fellow if you can. Come, throw yourself against him. Run at him. Kick the ball back. Well done! You aren’t doing anything. This is the first goal, this the second, this the third. The opponents, moreover, are coming out on top. If you don’t look out, he will make a goal. Unless we play better, we’ll be done for. He is a very skilled ballplayer. Had it not been for him, we would have brought back the victory. (5) Although the compulsion to translate them into Latin has declined, the phrases are such as remain familiar in parks and playgrounds four hundred years later.

Survivals of the Primitive Game. Mob Football.

Evidence of football’s distant past occurs not only in documentary form, but also in the field. In many parts of Britain, games survive to the present day which have clearly been played for several centuries and which contain elements that are recognizable as contributing to modern football in its various forms. In his study of such games, Hugh Hornby has identified and analysed sixteen of them, distributed over the length of the country. (6) A cluster of these games are still played in a relatively restricted area of the Scottish Lowlands, and the games at Duns, Lilliesleaf, Ancrum, Denholm, Jedburgh and Hobkirk are the survivors of a greater number that once occurred throughout that region. Similar games at Hawick, Melrose, Kirk Yetholm and Lanton survived into the nineteenth century, while there is evidence of others at Peebles, Selkirk, Carterhaugh, Bowden, Westruther, Foulden and elsewhere. As might be expected, given their proximity to one another, the surviving games have a number of features in common. All of them take place at Shrovetide, the ancient period of feasting that preceded the austerity of Lent. They share this timing with most of the other games across the country as a whole, although a few take place on other religious festivals, at Christmas and the New Year (Kirkwall and Haxey), or at Easter (Hallaton and Workington). As a result of such timings, many commentators searching for a generic name for such games, have settled for the label ‘festival football’.

Most of the Scottish games, like those elsewhere, are played between two teams representing different areas of the town or of the parish. Here, as elsewhere, they are known as ‘Uppies’ and ‘Doonies’, representative of the upper and lower ends of the town. There is no limit to the size of the team, and the goals of the two sides are some way apart, making it a considerable undertaking to get the ball to the objective. At Jedburgh and at Ancrum, the goals are at opposite ends of the town. In rural settings, such as Denholm or Hobkirk, they will be in far-flung parts of the surrounding countryside, about three-quarters of a mile apart in the case of Denholm. In each case the teams attempt to convey the ball to the goal by a variety of means. They may run with it or throw it, but more often it is ‘smuggled’, hidden about the person of a team member, who will then try to carry it to the goal by a back route, or by hiding it until the opponents’ attention has turned elsewhere. Handling the ball is far more common and more useful than kicking it, and it may not be entirely coincidental that the region has become a stronghold of Rugby, rather than of Association football. The Lowlands exception, incidentally, is Duns, where the ball game is played in a restricted space within the town, between two small teams, one of married men and one of bachelors.

Naturally, the specific local conditions of each game have given rise to diverse rules and traditions, and this diversity is reflected in other parts of the country, where ‘festival’ games also survive. The ball may vary in size, from the cricket-ball proportions that are usual in the Scottish Lowlands to one of ‘medicine-ball’ dimensions that is used at Atherstone, in Warwickshire. Play may be carried into local waterways, as at Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, or even into the sea, as at Workington. In some cases, there are no goals. At Atherstone, as used to be the case at Dorking, possession is all that matters, and the winning team is the one that has possession of the ball at the end of the period allocated for the game. At Atherstone, the full duration of the game is two hours. At Ashbourne, where play continues until a goal is scored, the 2002 game took seven hours and twenty minutes to produce a result. Given many decades and even centuries of such diversity, the difficulties experienced by nineteenth century legislators in their efforts to design a common code of rules may be easily appreciated.

These modern games, of course, are merely the survivors from a much more extensive list. It is not possible to guess how long that list was, but a variety of sources, local histories, antiquarian and anthropological works, legal documents, or even casual references in private letters, provide brief glimpses of dozens of such games in all corners of the country. It is clear, for instance, that such games flourished in the rural east of Scotland, with some of them surviving until the latter years of the nineteenth century. Several of the enthusiasts who founded the Queen’s Park club in Glasgow at the end of the 1860s had learned the game under less formal circumstances in Aberdeenshire, Banffshire and Perthshire. Callander, in Perthshire, had a reputation for producing talented footballers, and the traditional New Year contest in the town was still being played in 1882, when a correspondent for Athletic News submitted an eye-witness account.

"We beheld, marching at the head of a band of villagers, two pipers playing ‘The Campbells are Coming’. Behind them came the hero of the hour, carrying aloft, by way of a banner, a football, fastened to the end of an old oar. After him came the natives of Callander en masse. The field of play was a large park of some five or six acres in extent. Along the sides and top of an embankment were tall trees, under which the onlookers stood. Fifty or sixty players were on each side, from youths of twelve years to white-haired old men. Rules there were none: running with the ball, dribbling, hacking, tripping, throwing, in fact anything was allowed that would propel the ball in the direction of the opponents’ goal." (7)

Such games also survived into the nineteenth century in parts of Wales, where they seem especially to have fallen victim to religious enthusiasm. All the same, Shrove Tuesday football persisted in Laugharne until suppressed in 1838, and it is reported in Dolgellau in 1850, and in Narberth as late as 1884. At Clyro, in Radnorshire, in 1871, the curate reported disapprovingly that at harvest time all the men played or rather kicked football at one another and then till it grew dark, when the game ended in a general royal scuffle and scrummage. In Cardiganshire, the clergy was more pro-active, for there in 1833, the New Year’s game known as ‘The Black Ball’ (Y Bel Ddu) was replaced by a competition of scriptural knowledge between the pupils of local Sunday schools. (8) It seems likely that this competition survived for a shorter time than ‘The Black Ball’.

The Antiquity of Mob Football.

The antiquity of these games is extremely difficult to establish, and the historian has to weave an uncertain path amongst clear documentary references and contentious local legends. The earliest reference to the game in Workington dates from 1775, but describes it as ‘long contended’. In Duns, the first written reference dates from 1686, and the record at present seems to be held by the village of St.Columb Major, in Cornwall, where the local hurling game was first referred to in 1594. There is also plenty of documentary evidence from the sixteenth century of games that have long since vanished. Guild records in Chester in the 1540s, in Glasgow in the 1570s, and in Perth at the very end of the century, contain references to the purchase of balls with which the guilds would subsidize and encourage the traditional Shrovetide games. (9) These indications certainly carry more weight than local legends, such as the one that encouraged the inhabitants of Atherstone to celebrate the 800th anniversary of their ball game in 1999.

From Haxey, in North Lincolnshire, however, comes some indication that such games may be older by far than even the citizens of Atherstone imagine. Haxey, too, has its legend to explain the origins of the ‘Hood’ game that takes place in the village each year on 6th January, but it is of interest more for its implications than for its details. The legend claims that the game has its origins in the fourteenth century, when Lady de Mowbray, the wife of the Lord of the Manor, was out riding and lost her hood in a high wind. The efforts of the local peasants to recover the hood, and the lady’s gratitude, caused the episode to be re-enacted each year. The ceremonies attending the game, however, provide clues which suggest a much earlier origin. Of particular interest is the role of the ‘Fool’ who initiates the proceedings in a ceremony unique to the ‘Haxey Hood’.

The Fool leads the procession and has the right to kiss any woman on the way. On the Green in front of the parish church the Fool makes his traditional speech of welcome. During this speech a fire is lit with damp straw behind him. The smoke rises up and around him, and this is known as ‘Smoking the Fool’. This is in fact a watered-down version of the earlier custom (abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century due to its obvious danger) in which a more substantial fire was lit with damp straw beneath a tree. The Fool was then suspended over the fire and swung back and forth until he was almost suffocated, before being cut down and dropped into the fire, where he had to make his escape as best he could. (10)

The game then gets underway with participants and spectators led by the directing officials (‘the Boggins’) to a nearby field. There the teams dispute possession of a length of rope wrapped in leather (the ‘Hood’) and attempt to carry it back by force of numbers (the ‘Sway’) to the public house that their team represents. It does not require too much imagination to see the Haxey Hood game as the mutated survival of a very ancient pagan ritual. The references to human sacrifice that survive in the ‘Smoking of the Fool’, the sexual licence that he briefly enjoys, the timing of the event in the depths of winter, the survival of the event in so remote a location, once isolated in the midst of the Lincolnshire fens, all hint at this. In this context, the legend of Lady Mowbray takes on an all together different significance. It emerges as an attempt to explain and to sanitize a practice of ancient and questionable origins, and to identify it with the socially dominant class. This is by no means the last time that we shall encounter this phenomenon in the history of British football.

The issue of a truly ancient and perhaps a pagan origin for these games of football has intrigued commentators, but has not necessarily convinced them. Francis Magoun, one of the foremost experts on the prehistory of the game, concluded that the argument cannot be resolved. Is Shrove Tuesday football a more or less faded relic of a heathen rite, or is it merely a case of the transference in relatively recent times of the ordinary game to a festival day? We cannot deny the possibility that one of these same prehistoric footballs may have symbolised the fertilising sun, or that the game may have represented a once bitter inter-tribal contest. (11) The element of long-standing local rivalry is also taken up by an early historian of English village life. It is impossible to contemplate these fierce contests, to note their connections with official authorities and official boundaries, without coming to the conclusion that the struggles were after all not football games so much as local struggles. The argument is forced home to us that we have in these modern games the surviving relics of the earliest conditions of village life and organisation, when different clans settled down side by side, but always with the recollection of their tribal distinctions. (12) A more recent authority on the festivals and traditions of rural England, Ronald Hutton, is inclined to emphasise the element of ritual disorder that links ‘festival’ football to other popular sports, such as cock fighting, which became increasingly difficult to sustain in an increasingly sophisticated and ordered society. (13)

While many of these games will have rolled on in obscurity for decades or for centuries, two attracted enough attention to provide us with a detailed impression of what took place. Probably the best documented game of ‘festival’ football is that which took place in Derby between two teams which, in theory, represented the parishes of St.Peter’s and All Saints. It is claimed that this game is the archetype of a contest between two sets of close neighbours, with emphasis upon local pride, and that it therefore gives us the terms ‘Derby match’ and ‘local Derby’. Play began on Shrove Tuesday at 2pm, and in the early nineteenth century it was estimated that the teams often numbered between 500 and 1,000 members. The goals lay about a mile outside town. The St.Peter’s team had to get the ball to the gate of a nursery ground on the London Road, while those representing All Saints had to reach the wheel of a water-mill to the west of Derby. There hardly seem to have been any other rules, and a modern reconstruction of the play makes the game sound more like a test of initiative than of sporting skill.

In most matches the St.Peter’s side tried to get the ball into the River Derwent and swim with it, a circuitous approach to their own goal but a tactical removal of the ball in the opposite direction from the All Saints’ watermill. If the Peter’s men could overpower their rivals in the water, the ball was landed at a point near their goal and carried home; if the defence was too strong it would be hidden until dark, sometimes to be relieved of its cork shavings and the covering smuggled in under someone’s smock or petticoat. Occasionally, when one side had uncommon muscle, the offence was straight overland, but this strategy obliged the Peter’s team to cross the brook which led to their opponents’ goal, an approach which could easily backfire. New ploys for attack or defence were warmly received: on one occasion, for instance, an enterprising fellow was reputed to have escaped with the ball into a sewer and passed under the town, only to be surprised as he surfaced by a party of opponents. (14)

Descriptions of the game that took place each year at Kingston-upon-Thames, in Surrey, suggests that it was a little more restrained. At about twelve o’clock the ball is turned loose, and those who can, kick it. There were several balls in the town of Kingston, and of course, several parties. I observed some persons of respectability following the ball; the game lasts about four hours, when the parties retire to the public houses. (15)

The Decline of Mob Football.

When and why did such games begin to decline and vanish? It would seem that the traditional strength of such games was that, for all their potential for short-term confrontation, they actually united diverse elements of the community in what Ronald Hutton has called an enormous annual release of emotion and energy. (16) In other communities, this release was achieved by other rituals at other times of the year. Guy Fawkes celebrations were prominent in a number of Yorkshire town, such as Huddersfield, Richmond and Malton, and in Guildford, in Surrey, the moves by the police to break up such celebrations in 1865 resulted in riots that were far more severe than those that attended the banning of Kingston’s football match twenty years earlier. Ritual tugs-of-war took place in some towns on the Welsh borders, notably at Ludlow, where the tradition was suppressed in 1851. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of factors appear to have eroded this community of interests. While players remained enthusiastic, local tradesmen raised greater objections to the disruption of trade, and to the material damage that might be caused by the games. In some cases, as at Kingston-upon-Thames, objections were raised as communications improved in the region, to the number of strangers who arrived to join in the ritual, increasing the potential for mayhem. Improved communications also began to transform the population profile of areas close to London. While some local administrators continued to defend local tradition, others clearly felt that tradition should yield to social and economic change. By the middle of the nineteenth century, those ‘modernisers’ had some powerful new weapons at their disposal. The passage of the Highways Act in 1835 made it illegal to obstruct the highway, and provided a powerful weapon against those games that were actually played in public thoroughfares. As late as 1932, that piece of legislation was used to suppress the traditional game at Chester-le-Street, in Durham. Whereas it had not always been easy for local authorities to exercise such powers, the introduction of local police forces from the late 1820s onwards provided a practical means of doing so.

The assault and the disapproval did not always come from those in authority, and we should not be tempted to view the suppression of traditional football as a routine engagement in the class struggle. Even at the social levels from which many of the players came, there were those who wished to see the end of ‘festival’ football. There were many in the nonconformist churches, and in the ‘Moral Force’ wing of the Chartist movement, who believed that the advancement of the labouring classes required the introduction of more sophisticated and more uplifting pastimes. Conversely, the players sometimes found friends among the powerful, who made it possible for the traditional games to continue. In Alnwick the patronage and protection given by the Dukes of Northumberland go far towards explaining why this game has survived while others in the region have died out. In Kingston-upon-Thames, although the game was eventually suppressed, that fate was staved off for some time by commercial interests in the town that actually stood to benefit from the crowds and from the money that they spent. Unsurprisingly, inn-keepers were frequently found in this supportive role. The game that is played each year in Jedburgh owes its survival to the Chief Justice of the High Court in Edinburgh who, in 1849, overturned an attempt by the local magistrates to suppress the game at a time when cholera threatened the locality.

Under such circumstances, however, it became increasingly difficult for such games to survive in a rapidly developing urban environment. The cluster of ‘festival’ games on the Middlesex-Surrey borders, for instance, came under intense and irresistible pressure in the years between 1840 and 1870. This period saw the suppression of games at Richmond (1840), Twickenham (1840), Hampton (1864) and Walton (1866). It is likely in each of these cases that suppression was the final act in a long and gradual process. In the case of Kingston-upon-Thames, for instance, the first banning order seems to have been imposed as early as 1799. For all that, the game was still flourishing in 1840, when the level of disorder was such that it led to the reading of the Riot Act. The Town Council, indeed, had proposed a motion to ban that year’s game, but it had been overruled by the Mayor, who thus provided an interesting example of how complex the response of local authority to these traditional games could be. In 1867, however, the game once again ended in a riot and, as a result, it was moved out of the streets of the town, and into the confines of Fairfield Park. When, the following year, it proved impossible to keep play within the limits of the park, the authorities were left with no alternative to a complete ban.

Deeper into rural Surrey, in Dorking, the local game, with its range of local peculiarities, survived until 1897, when there was a notable confrontation between local police and would-be players. By the time of that confrontation, of course, Dorking had already undergone a substantial transformation from a small country town into a genteel dormitory for prosperous Londoners, the kind of development which must also have played a major role in the disappearance of traditional games in such nearby locations as Cheam, Epsom, Ewell, Mortlake, Ripley, Thames Ditton and Weybridge. Further afield, the traditional games in Nuneaton (1881) and in Chester le Street (1932) succumbed to similar forces.

The death of the second great urban game, in Derby, was as protracted as that of the Kingston game. In Derby, the first recorded attempt to impose a ban came in 1731. By the 1830s pressure was being imposed from an unusual source, for it was local trade unions that sought to direct the energies of the local working population into more profitable channels. Uplifting meetings were held in local parks, attended by musical diversions, but they failed to match the attractions of the traditional game. A petition was presented to the Mayor in 1845, specifically citing the increase in Derby’s population as a reason for the abandonment of the game, and suggesting that horse-racing might be a more seemly alternative. The following year, in the course of the game, missiles were thrown, troops were drafted in, the Riot Act was read, and the game never recovered. A concerted effort to revive it in 1868 was unsuccessful, and suggested that the era of ‘festival’ football in such an environment as Derby, was over.

Survivals of the Primitive Game: Camping.

Although traditional games of ‘festival’ football occurred in many localities throughout England, Scotland and Wales, no significant record of them exists in East Anglia. The reason for this is that the eastern counties of England were, by the sixteenth century at least, home to a distinct form of the game, known as ‘camping’, or ‘camp-ball’. Two etymological derivations have been suggested for the term. One suggests a French origin, from the word champ, a field. The other traces the term to an Anglo-Saxon root, campian, to fight or to contend. The peculiarity of ‘camping’ was that, instead of ranging through the streets or across open country, the game was often confined to a single piece of land, usually enclosed, and specifically designated as a space given over to this, and perhaps to other sports. This piece of land, the ‘camping close’, became a distinctive institution in this part of the country, so much so that the social historian, David Dymond, was able to identify 105 such ‘camping closes’ in the eastern counties. (17) To this day, football is played on what was once the ‘camping close’ at Needham Market, in Suffolk, and the term survives in a number of places, as at Haddenham and at Sawston, in Cambridgeshire, as a modern street name.

When and why did this form of play develop in the eastern part of the country? (18) There cannot be any doubt that ‘camping’ was widely known and practised in this part of the country by the beginning of the sixteenth century. The ‘camping close’ that can still be clearly identified near the parish church at Swaffham (Norfolk) was bequeathed to the parishioners for recreational use in 1474, and that at Ixworth is first mentioned in a document of 1476. There is documentary evidence of the rental of ground for ‘camping’ at Walsham dating from 1509. A ‘Football Close’ is recorded at Chigwell in Essex in 1627, and fifty years earlier, Thomas Tusser advocated the Essex habit of playing football on areas of pasture because of the stimulation that it provided for the future growth of the grass. (19)

"In meadow or pasture, to grow the more fine,

Let campers be camping in any of thine.

Which, if you do suffer, when low in the spring,

You gain to yourself a commodious thing."

As is the case with legal references, it is quite reasonable to suppose that we hear more from the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries simply because more of the sources have survived. There is little reason to doubt that the early modern sources refer to a practice that their authors considered to be old and traditional. Perhaps the ‘Pleystowe’, or ‘playing place’, that is referred to at Halstead (Essex) in 1294, along with the Plaistows that exist today in Bromley and in the East End of London, were ‘camping closes’.

It is less easy to explain why the development was largely limited to East Anglia, but it is tempting to link it to wider economic and social developments that were peculiar to this region. It seems logical, for instance, that evidence of enclosed football fields should emerge in areas that were in the forefront of agricultural enclosure, and it is certainly true that Suffolk and Essex experienced this phenomenon earlier than most other parts of the country. As early as the late sixteenth century, the agricultural publicist Thomas Tusser was advertising the benefits derived from enclosure, and singled out these two counties (he being an Essex man himself) as regions in which these benefits could be seen. More recent historians of the English landscape, such as W.G.Hoskins and Oliver Rackham (20), note that Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had little impact in Essex. Less than 1% of the land area was enclosed at this time, for there was little land left that had not already been enclosed many years earlier. That proportion also applies to the larger part of Suffolk, with the exception of its western extremities. It seems likely, therefore, that in these areas land was specifically allocated within the community for recreational purposes at a time when open fields were being enclosed. Indeed, there is specific evidence at Cottenham and Oakington, both in Cambridgeshire, and at Felixstowe in Suffolk of camping grounds being constructed through the enclosure of what had previously been farming strips in open fields (21) An alternative suggestion, arising from the proximity of many ‘camping closes’ to their local parish church, is that the closes arose from a deliberate attempt to exclude popular recreations from the churchyard itself (22).

In either case, it is hard to understand how such land usage could have come about without the support and cooperation of landowners, and that consideration suggests a substantial degree of patronage for the game from the local ruling elites. Such a supposition is supported by the evidence that David Dymond has produced to show that many ‘camping closes’ were also used for other communal purposes, such as fairs. In other cases, the land allocated to football was owned by a local notable, such as the keeper of the local inn. Such a case clearly emerges in Ixworth, in Suffolk, in a legal case of 1625. If such assumptions are correct, they contribute to a complex picture in which ‘camping’ is seen, not as a labourers’ pastime, burdened by the hostility of the governing classes, but as a traditional and widely accepted element in rural life, deliberately and carefully preserved by the local elite as an element of stability. That picture sometimes emerges quite specifically at a later date, as in this testimonial from an East Anglian writer in 1830.

The late Right Honourable William Wyndham gave great encouragement to this sport during his residences in the country, and had many matches in the neighbourhood of his venerable seat at Felbrigg. He was wont to say that it combined all athletic excellence; that to excel in it, a man must be a good boxer, runner and wrestler. The late Lord Rochford was also a great patron of the sport, in the neighbourhood of his seat at Easton, in Suffolk. (23)

‘Camping’ was not a homogeneous sport, governed by a widely accepted code of rules. It, too, had its local variants. There was, as has already been mentioned, a variety which was played across country, after the manner of the ‘festival’ games. This form occurred widely in Cambridgeshire, perhaps because enclosure was less widespread there, and open land was more easily available. In support of that interpretation, David Dymond points out that the game of hurling was played similarly in two forms in seventeenth century Cornwall. ‘Hurling to goals’, played in an enclosed field, was more common in the east of the county, where enclosure was more widespread, while ‘hurling to the country’ held its own in the wilder, western