The Roots of Football, Rugby, Etc.

An excerpt of an excerpt from Nicholas Orme's Tudor Children, abut the games of old England:

Other handball and football games gathered in large numbers of boys or youths, and were therefore popular rather than aristocratic sports. They probably took different forms from place to place. The Cornish historian Richard Carew, writing in 1602, described one variety, which he termed “hurling” and was, in fact, chiefly a form of handball since he does not mention kicking. It could be done in two ways. “Hurling to goals” was played by teams of fifteen, twenty, or thirty players on either side. It took place in a limited area with two goals, each having two goalkeepers. Each player formed a pair with an opponent. On getting the ball, the player could hold or throw it, at which point his opponent could tackle him by holding him and be fended off with punches. If he fell on the ground, he had to yield the ball. Having escaped the opponent, anyone could try to stop him. There were recognized rules, including an offside convention. Carew gives these for east Cornwall, which he knew, but others no doubt prevailed in other places. The matches in his own county commonly took place after weddings, which brought together enough youths or men to form teams.

Carew describes a second form of the game as “hurling to the country,” which was a larger and less structured activity. It was organized by two or more gentlemen who brought together men from as many as six parishes to play it. The goals were houses three or four miles apart, and there was no restriction on the number of players or much in terms of rules. A ball was used, small and of silver, which could be held or thrown, and the player could be attacked by any number of opponents but, if forced to the ground, had to surrender the ball. It was even possible to riders to join in and seize the ball if they could. The struggle went “over hills, dales, hedges, ditches, yea, and through bushes, briars, mires, plashes, and rivers, so as you shall sometimes see twenty or thirty lie tugging together in the water.” Carew commended the game for the manliness and courage required, but admitted that the result was often “bloody pates, bones broken and out of joint, and such bruises as serve to shorten their days.” . . .

Richard Mulcaster, writing in 1581, called it the activity “of a rude multitude, with bursting of shins and breaking of legs…neither civil nor worthy the name of any train [passage] to health.” Two years later, the Puritan writer Philip Stubbes added his condemnation of it as more of ‘a bloody and murthering practice than a fellowly sport or pastime.” Men lay in wait for their enemies and attacked them, “so that by this means sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometimes their legs, sometimes their arms.” He dismissed it as having any place as a Sunday recreation (and by implication at any other time) because, so he claimed in a fine array of synonyms, it leads to “envy, malice, rancor, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity, and what not else!”

It was indeed possible for communal games of action to turn into mimic wars, under the inspiration of contemporary events. Children in London had chosen kings and fought battles in 1400, six months after Richard II was overthrown by Henry IV. In 1548 the boys of Bodmin School in Cornwall, who were accustomed to divide into sides for their games, formed two religious parties: the old religion and the new. This was at the time that the Protestant Reformation under Edward VI was being enforced across the country. The division, which Richard Carew remembered long afterwards, led to rough conflicts, “each party knowing and still keeping the same companions and captain.” It ended when one boy made a gun from an old candlestick, charged it with gunpowder and stone, and succeeded in killing a calf, after which the schoolmaster intervened with a good whipping of those concerned. This affair had a sequel in London in March 1554, after the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary Tudor. Boys gathered in Finsbury Fields outside the city “to play a new game, some took Wyatt’s part and some the queen’s and made a combat in the fields.” The city authorities took immediate action over such a sensitive matter, and many of the participants were arrested and shut up in the Guildhall.