The Emergence of Football

Sport, Culture and Society in the Nineteenth Century

Peter Swain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138571600
• eBook ISBN: 9781351334037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Emergence of Football fuses sports history into mainstream economic, social and cultural history, setting the development of the people's game against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

The book challenges conventional histories of nineteenth-century football that surrounded mass games and the public schools and extends the revisionist critique of those histories with the imaginative use of new and original empirical evidence. It outlines the continuing presence of a working-class footballing culture across the century, arguing that the structure of football was a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth that had resulted in a far-reaching restructuring of the class system and urban hierarchies. It was these new hierarchies and class system that gave birth to professional football by the late 1870s.

It is essential reading for students of sports studies, economic, social and cultural history, urban and local history, and sociology, as well as a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football across the world. This is an absorbing and fascinating read for any of the millions of fans of the game who are interested in the early history of football.

1 A short history of early football

No one knows when, or where, football originated. Furthermore, precisely when the sport of football was first played in Britain is also unlikely ever to be known for certain.¹ Nevertheless, Morris Marples, in his History of Football, considers that the recorded history of football in Britain is generally agreed to begin with an account of Shrovetide festivities by a London-born Monk, William Fitzstephen, written in Latin in 1174.² However, not many lovers, students or historians of football are experts in Medieval Latin and so many, it will be of no surprise to learn, including the author of this book, are unable to adjudicate on the competing translations of part of Fitzstephen’s Descriptio Nobilissimae Civitatis Londinae.³ Still, if one of these translations is correct it would be, almost without question, the earliest record of the football in England. It reads,

Moreover, to begin with the sports of the boys (for we have all been boys), annually on the day which is called Shrovetide, the boys of the respective schools bring each a fighting cock to their master, and the whole of that forenoon is spent by the boys in seeing their cocks fight in the school-room. After dinner, all the young men of the city go out into the fields to play at the well-known game of foot-ball. 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.⁴

It is, though, a translation that knowledgeable Medieval Latin scholars argue over. So, although this version of the original Latin uses the term ‘foot-ball’, Francis P. Magoun, the outstanding Medievalist scholar from Harvard,⁵ had a different interpretation of the passage. He translates it (after the first sentence) as

After luncheon the entire youth of the city (sc. London) goes to the fields for the famous game of ball (pila). The students of the several branches of study have their ball; the followers of the several trades of the city (have) a ball on their hands. The elders, the fathers, and men of wealth come on horseback to view the contests of (their) juniors, and in their fashion sport with the young men; and there seems to be aroused in them (sc. The elders) a stirring of natural heat by viewing so much activity and by participation in the joys of the unrestrained (liberious) youth.⁶

Crucially, in this translation the word ‘football’ has been replaced by ‘ball’ and might, therefore, refer to other ball games extant at the time such as hockey or stool-ball. Magoun, therefore, dismisses this ‘passage from the authentic annals of football history’.⁷ Alternatively, the note in the preceding paragraph, that indicates the game took place at ‘Shrovetide’ and that ‘cock fighting’ was also involved, leads Marples to argue that ‘one cannot be struck by the number of points which this game had in common with football, as it appears regularly when records have become more explicit a few centuries later’.⁸ He goes on to note that although there are no more references to Shrovetide football earlier than the sixteenth century it seems that the celebration of Shrovetide dates back to Norman times. Furthermore, he argues that ‘if football was a Shrovetide game later, it may well have been so then’.⁹ Second, he also notes the involvement of groups of students and representatives of various trades, a practice reminiscent of later practices when apprentices, school boys and others traditionally played football on their Shrove Tuesday holiday. This then leads him to conclude that these are good reasons to suppose Fitzstephen is actually describing football, indicating that the game was popular and well-established in Noman times. Indeed, it may well be the phrase ‘playing at ball’ would axiomatically be taken by people in the Middle Ages to mean what later came to be described as football. We might find ‘ball-play’ or ‘playing at ball’ to be ambiguous but it might not have been so in Medieval times – this is the problem of what historians refer to as ‘perspective’. If football was being played at this time, then there is no reason to suppose that it wasn’t also played through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although there is no evidence to prove it. The difficulty for the historian is that the term ‘football’, and its equivalent in other languages, had not yet made its appearance and wasn’t to do so in England until the fourteenth century. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say football wasn’t played; it may be it just wasn’t described as such. Indeed, Shearman notes ‘that Fitz-stephen probably refrains from describing the game because it was too well known throughout the country to require a description’.¹⁰

In contrast to Marples, Percy Young claims that ‘the first specific observation’ on football came by way of a famous ballad entitled ‘Sir Hugh or the Jew’s Daughter’.¹¹ The event upon which the ballad is based apparently occurred in Lincoln in 1255 when a small boy was found dead at the bottom of a well. However, this blatantly anti-Semitic ballad suggests that the death was no accident but that the child had been murdered by local Jews. The verse relevant to football, according to Young, goes

Four and twenty bobby boys

Were playing at the ba’,

And by it came him sweet Sir Hugh,

And he play’d o’er them a’.

He kicked the ba’ with his right foot,

And catch’d it wi his knee,

And throuch-and-thro’ the Jew’s window

He gard the bonny ba’ flee.¹²

Although the murder of Hugh of Lincoln goes back to 1255, it has been claimed, by Francis P. Magoun, that ‘the ballad in its earliest form must be somewhat later’,¹³ although he also suggests that ‘since the football-motif occurs in four of the eighteen preserved versions, one may reasonably suppose that this feature was introduced relatively early’.¹⁴ What the date might be is, though, unknown. There are, however, three other dubious allusions to football in the thirteenth century, two in literature and one an account of an accident that occurred in 1280. The first literary reference is in Layamons Brut (c.1205) where it was recorded that all the knights, thanes, Kings and their chieftains, as well as all the bishops, clerks, earls, barons and swains

spread over the fields … some they gan to ride [horses]; some they gan to race [on foot]; some they gan to leap, [and] some they gan to shoot; some they [there] wrestled, and contest made; some they in [the] field played under shield; some they drove balls wide over [over all] the fields.¹⁵

Apparently, this is the first recorded instance of the word ‘ball’ in the English language (as opposed to Latin), and earlier than any other by almost a century.¹⁶ The passage about driving the balls over all the fields is reminiscent, though, of the cross country games that were to become so popular centuries later when one of a number of varieties of folk football was at its height.

The second literary reference is in an ancient English Christmas carol entitled The Bitter Withy,¹⁷ which reads

As it fell out on a holy day,

The drops of rain did fall, did fall,

Our Saviour asked leave of His mother, May,

If He might go play at ball.

To play at ball, my own dear Son,

It’s time you was going or gone,

But be sure let me hear no complaint of you,

At night when you do come home.

It was upling scorn and downling scorn!

Oh, there He met three jolly jerdins

Oh, there He asked the three jolly jerkins

If they would go play at ball.

There is, of course, no certainty that the author was writing about football although it is not altogether unjustifiable to think that he was. Similarly, in an account of an accident in 1280 it is debatable as to whether or not the author is referring to footba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A short history of early football
• 2 A brief historiography of the Industrial Revolution
• 3 Cultural change: football’s demise in the Eastern Counties before 1830
• 4 Folk, mass and festival football: the arguments
• 5 Folk, mass and festival football: the evidence
• 6 Cultural continuity: football outside the public schools, 1800–1830
• 7 The missing years, 1831–1840
• 8 Football in the 1840s and 1850s
• 9 The Football Association, Sheffield and Lancashire in the 1860s
• 10 Class, clubs and football: the unfolding century
• Index