The Early History of Football in the UK By Simone De Munster At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Football is one of those games that seems to have been around forever. Of course it hasn’t but it was first referred to in writing in 1170, which to us is a long long time ago! It was William Fitzstephen who recorded an observation of football being played by young people in the fields of London after dinner time. The game was played with a ball which was made from an inflated animal bladder. Two teams, made up of large numbers of young men, attempted to get the ball into the opposition goal. In the towns football was mainly played by craft apprentices which each trade having their own team. These games would be watched by the elders of the community, and in doing so stirred up in the elders ‘the joys of unrestrained youth’. So things haven’t changed much in the past 800 years!

Other records of the game are not so gracious and many were wholly opposed to it, including the constabulary who came after William de Spalding in the 1320s due to an opponent running towards him during the game and wounding himself on William’s sheath knife, killing him. This young man was apparently not the only footballer to have a fatality due to a knife during this period.

Edward II was also against football due to the time his archers spent honing their ball skills as opposed to their arrow proficiencies, which was almost sacrilegious at the time due to Edward’s attempts to make Englishmen the best longbowmen in the world. His solution was to ban the game, and Henry IV reinforced the ban in 1388, but to no avail – men still played, so the new solution in 1410 was to impose a fine and six days imprisonment on those caught playing football. Henry’s son Henry V, issued a proclamation which ordered men to practice archery rather than football, and Henry VIII introduced laws which prohibited the playing of the game in public. This banning went on for many years with the church getting in on the act, as they disagreed with the game being played on a Sunday.

No matter how much any one person, authority or institution objected against the game, the banning was not accepted by the masses, even though local councils also banned the game, with football officers being appointed to patrol and police the bye-laws. It wasn’t until after Cromwell’s death in 1660 that the game properly re-emerged as Cromwell had been particularly successful in bringing the game to a halt.

Things then came full circle, and by the 18th century football was played by most of Britain’s public schools, including Eton where it is known to have been played as early as 1747. In this era the goal posts could be several miles apart – for example there was one game, played every Shrove Tuesday in Derbyshire, which involved two huge teams made up anyone who lived in the town and the action took place between goals three miles apart.

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