It is a cold, sharp, sunny day in February, a sense of anticipation in the air. Small groups of people gather, some laughing and joking, others deep in serious conversation about the afternoon’s prospects. They break up, moving, meeting and merging with other groups, a tide of multicoloured shirts, freezing breath and boisterous conversation.
As the crowd grows and snakes its way closer to the scene of the afternoon’s action, the pace quickens and the chatter becomes louder. The familiarity of the ritual does nothing to diminish the growing sense of excitement.
And then, as they reach their destination, the crowd once more becomes individuals, some taking their usual places, others staking a claim for a good vantage point and newcomers wandering in search of somewhere to watch the day’s proceedings.
The stage is set.
The match begins. The crowd lets out a convulsive roar. The players tear into each other, desperate to get hold of the ball and drive through, around or even over their opponents. The match is locked into a succession of surges, counter-attacks, surges. Eventually, as the game wears on, the two sides begin to tire and taut defences become slack and baggy.
Suddenly, the ball squirts free of the pack and is kicked through into open space. It is picked up and moved rapidly and precisely from player to player as they scythe deeper and deeper into enemy territory. The decisive score seems unstoppable. Supporters bellow encouragement, while their opponents grit their teeth.
Then it happens. The ball reaches its destination. Time momentarily stops. Encouragement becomes ecstasy. The thrill of triumph has momentarily abolished the cares of the world. And then the game ends, and the crowd begins to drain away, some to celebrate, others to commiserate.
But whether winner or loser, player or spectator, each will be back, week after week, year after year, in search of that sublime everlasting moment that only this game can bring.
Mauls and mardi gras
Such a scene is experienced whenever and wherever rugby is played, from Sydney to Swansea, Perpignan to Pretoria, and all points in between. This isn’t a modern rugby match, however: it’s a description of the Shrove Tuesday ‘folk football’ match played annually between the Up’ards and Down’ards of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, the rural heartland of England, one of a handful of such games that survive from the rural past.
Like most of these games it is open to all inhabitants of the town, whose allegiances are divided according to whether they were born north (the Up’ards) or south (the Down’ards) of the River Henmore, which not only divides the town but also provides the two goals. These are three miles apart, the southerly goal at Clifton Mill and the northerly at Sturston Mill.
Play takes place through streets, fields and the river as hundreds of men, young and old, and occasionally women, seek the honour of scoring the decisive goal – which results in the scorer’s name being inscribed on the ball and it being presented to them.
In contrast to the complex rules of today, the Ashbourne game has never had many. The winner is the side that gets the ball to their goal and taps it three times against the remaining stones of the long-demolished mills. If no goal is scored, play finishes at 10 p.m., although if a goal is scored before 5 p.m. another ball is provided to prolong the game. Beyond that, whatever it takes to score a goal is acceptable.
Ashbourne is by no means unique or exceptional. Like a throwback on the evolutionary ladder of rugby, there are more than a dozen similar games still played today, from St Ives on the furthest reaches of Cornwall’s west coast to Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney off the north coast of Scotland. Neither soccer nor rugby, like all pre-20th century team sports involving a ball, goals, hands and feet these games were known simply as ‘football’ and are now referred to as ‘folk football’ by historians.
This type of game can also still be found in Europe. In France, the first written reference to a game resembling folk football dates back to 1147. La soule, also known variously as choule or cholle, was played among the villages of Normandy, Picardy and Brittany in northern France up until the first half of the 20th century. In Italy, versions of football known as calcio emerged during the 16th century. Calcio Fiorentino was revived under Mussolini and is still a major tourist attraction in Florence today. Countless similar games were born and died without troubling the historical record.
Each one was more than just a game. Each was part of the cycle of festivals and celebrations that punctuated everyday life in pre-industrial, agricultural society. Shrove Tuesday, traditionally the last day before the fasting period of Lent in the Christian calendar, became the most popular day for folk football.
Across the Christian world, Shrovetide was a festival of indulgence and licence. Sports and games – ranging from pancake-racing to cock-fighting – were an essential part of the festivities. When Shrovetide football games took place, entire villages would close for the day while huge scrums of men and youths struggled to carry the ball to their goal. Normal customs and rights would be suspended. Occasionally, women would play, as they did in the 1790s in Midlothian in Scotland. And, just as today, alcohol was always an essential lubricant.
Today, there are state-of-the-art stadiums, highly paid athletes and complex rules, but despite the distance of time and place, modern rugby stands firmly in the tradition of its medieval forebear.
‘Football’, rugby and soccer
The historian Barbara Tuchman once suggested that the invention of the ball was as important to the history of human leisure as the wheel was to the development of technology.1 She was undoubtedly right.
Across all continents and cultures, people have played ball games since the dawn of human civilisation. As early as 300 BC the Chinese appear to have played a game called cuju that involved kicking a ball over a silk net suspended between two bamboo poles. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis described harpastum, a Roman game in which a ball was seemingly carried and passed by the participants – and which some have speculated as being the forerunner of rugby, despite there being no hard evidence.
The first recorded description in Britain of a game called football, by William Fitz Stephen in 1174, chronicles its popularity in London: ‘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 the respective crafts, have theirs.’2
The emergence of folk football games like this may have been linked to the growth of towns, trade and the economy during the later Middle Ages that intensified local rivalries, the crucial competitive impulse for sporting contest. The word ‘goal’ seems to share some common heritage with the word ‘boundary’. It may also be linked to a ritual called ‘beating the bounds’, where local people would walk the boundaries of their parish to share the knowledge of where they lay and to ensure that they were remembered in the future.
Perhaps because of such contests, folk football was often seen as a sport of the common people. Joseph Strutt’s 1801 epic The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England describes the game as ‘formerly much in vogue among the common people of England’. It was also suspected, sometimes with justification, of being a cover for the organisation of protests, or worse. It was banned in Ireland in 1719 by the British as being nothing more than a ‘pretence’ for ‘tumultuous and numerous meetings’.3
The various ways a ball could be handled, kicked and passed were as diverse as the regions in which ball games were played. Some were far more organised and based on clearly defined rules. Teams of 22-a-side representing Cumberland and Westmoreland played each other for 1,000 guineas on Kennington Common in London in 1789. A four-a-side match was played in Ashbourne in 1846. Even one-a-side matches, based on the idea of cricket’s single-wicket contests, were not unknown.4
The game of camp-ball, which was played across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire from at least the 15th to the 18th centuries, had a sophisticated set of rules and specialised playing fields, known as ‘camping closes’. Teams of ten or 15 players would carry the ball upfield supported by ‘sidemen’ who would act as American football-style blockers. When a sideman’s progress was halted, the ball had to be thrown to another player.5
Cornwall’s ‘hurling to goals’ game was played between teams of 15 to 30 players and allowed similar forms of blocking. When tackled, the ball-carrier had to pass it backwards to a teammate. Forward passes were not allowed and when a player was tackled he would shout ‘hold’ and pass the ball back. If any rule was broken, wrote the 17th-century Cornish MP Richard Carew, players would ‘take for a just cause of going together by the ears, but with their fists only, neither doth any of them seek revenge for wrongs or hurts, but at the like play again’.6
No matter how different or diverse these early games of folk football, the descriptions of matches make one thing clear – most resembled modern rugby far more than they did soccer.
You don’t have to be a time traveller to see the connection. All you need is a map. Many of these early ‘football ‘games were played in areas that would later become hotbeds of rugby. In the area around Twickenham in south-west London, Shrove Tuesday matches were part of a well-established tradition. As well as Twickenham itself, matches were played in other outlying parts of London, at Teddington, Bushey Park, Richmond, Hampton Wick, East Molesey and Thames Ditton. The annual game at Kingston-upon-Thames did not finally end until 1868, just three years before the Rugby Football Union (RFU), the English game’s governing body, itself was founded.7
In today’s rugby stronghold of Leicestershire, matches were recorded from at least 1790, when the village of Ratby staged a match. On Shrove Tuesday 1852, a 15-a-side match was played between Blaby and Wigston in a field that is today just 15 minutes’ drive from today’s Leicester Tigers’ training ground.8 Enderby, another village in the district of Blaby, gained such a strong reputation that they played a team from Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, on Good Friday 1852 at the neutral ground of Sheffield’s Hyde Park.9 Fifteen miles from Leicester in the village of Hallaton, its traditional Easter Monday ‘Bottle-Kicking’ match (a misnomer: no bottles are used but three small barrels are carried but not kicked) is a remnant of an 18th-century mass folk football match that continues today.10
Further north, in today’s bastions of rugby league, the East Yorkshire town of Hornsea could boast of its own ‘football grene’ from the 1680s. In the 1820s Primitive Methodists would gather to try and stop the annual match between the villages of Hedon and Preston. Even as late as the 1890s, one Hull FC rugby player claimed that he learned his rugby skills by playing traditional ‘football’ in the local village of Sutton.11 In Yorkshire’s West Riding, games were played at Keighley, Pudsey, and most regularly at Holmfirth, the birthplace of Harold Wagstaff, arguably the greatest centre three-quarter to play either code of rugby.12
Across the border in Lancashire in the 1840s, Rochdale hosted a number of matches between short-lived clubs boasting names such as the ‘Body Guards’ and the ‘Fear Noughts’, prefiguring the town’s later rugby club adoption of the moniker of Hornets in 1871.13 In Orrell, a 30-a-side challenge was thrown out to local villages in 1841.14 And in Cumberland, the mass folk football ‘Uppies and Downies’ game survives today in Workington’s Easter game. Its neighbour Whitehaven also staged a match in which shipwrights would do battle with quarrymen.15
In Wales, a game called cnapan was apparently played by thousands in Pembrokeshire in the far south-west, in which men on foot and horseback would struggle for possession of a ball. It appeared to flourish in the 16th century and was being played on the River Teifi in West Wales in 1740.16 In the Scottish Borders, folk football games flourished, most notably at Jedburgh.
This roll call of rugby precedents raises an obvious question. Why were these games given the name ‘football’ if they weren’t played with the feet? The plain truth is, as with the origins of many words, we simply don’t know for certain. Soccer’s omnipresence in today’s world can lead us to assume that football means a sport that is played exclusively with the feet. This was never the case. Even the Football Association in its early years allowed the hands to be used by outfield players to catch a ball. And, of course, the feet are used extensively in rugby. Place kicks, drop kicks, chip kicks, punts, bombs and grubbers are part of the armoury of every rugby team that takes the field. It is a game played with both hands and feet.
In fact, soccer’s insistence that only the feet can be used by outfield players makes it the exception to the rule. This was widely recognised by the Victorian apostles of modern football. Writing in 1887, the first serious historian of the game, Montague Shearman, pointed out that ‘there is no trace in the original form of [football] to suggest that nothing but kicking is allowed’.17 Far from being a partisan of rugby, Shearman was a member of Wanderers FC, the first ever winners of the FA Cup.
Which game is the true inheritor of the traditions of early football? Indirectly, all of them. Directly, none of them. Viewed in terms of human evolution, folk football is related to modern soccer, rugby and the other types of football in same way that apes are the common ancestor to chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.
One simple fact remains, however. The sport most firmly rooted in the tradition of the football games played across Europe for centuries in which the ball is handled and kicked, and in which players are bodily tackled, is not soccer.
It is rugby.