The Emergence of Football in Nineteenth-Century England: The Historiographic Debate

Abstract

The work details the history of football that became established in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the view that social and economic changes resulted in football disappearing from the general community, only surviving in the various public schools, who played a codified game. It was these games that were transplanted to the general population, becoming the sports of rugby and soccer. This remained the established history of football until almost the twenty-first century, whence it was replaced by an increased acknowledgement that during the nineteenth century football did not die out. In fact, popularly played football during this period was conducted under strict rules. It is maintained that rugby and soccer were produced in the nineteenth century by a fusion of influences from both the public schools and wider communities.

Keywords::

• football
• emergence
• public school
• nineteenth century
• development

Notes

^1. For instance, game is neither listed amongst the 12 golden recreations given by The Illustrated London News, December 27, 1845, 410 nor mentioned by J. Miller, Merry England. The game only receives a slight mention in Walsh, Manual, 500, where it is described as ‘only being played at rugby and one or two other public schools’.

^2.London Society, v, 1864, 247 and Chambers Journal, 1864, 176.

^3. To the author's knowledge, this view of the history of football in Britain first became recognised as the standard view of the game in an entry for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1879 (367) by H.F. Wilkinson, who cited texts by Alcock and Wests, the former appearing in 1867.

^4. In the opinion of the author, one of the best accounts of association football appeared in 1900 by Catton. The work was very comprehensive, incorporating detailed pictures of the game throughout Britain. This evidence was marshalled under the prevailing assumption that football was extinguished in the wider community by 1850 and that in the latter part of the nineteenth century new games that had been developed in the public schools were introduced to the general public. Catton believed that ‘as a sport with well defined rules, high standard of play’ football was a product of the Victorian era (Catton, The Real Football, 1).

^5.Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, 33–4.

^6. A number of scholars maintained that the picture probably required slight modifications on the margins but these were essentially theoretical objections. For example, see Holt, Sport and the British, 40 and Mason, Association Football, 10.

^7. Goulstone produced a typewritten work, Sports’ Quarterly Journal, in 1982, and this did contain footnotes. To the author's knowledge, very few libraries stocked it and he has only seen a copy because in 2011 Dr Peter Swain was kind enough to send him a copy that Goulstone had given him. In the late 1990s, the author stumbled upon a few copies of the journal in the library collection at Lords Cricket ground, though these did not include the material on football.

^8. The work made a lot of use of newspapers: Bell's Life in London (1822–1863), Manchester and Salford Advertiser (1840–1849) (which was absorbed by The Manchester Examiner and Times on November 8, 1848), and the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (1855–1862). Of course, the work remained obscure so far as the academic community, let alone the general public, were concerned. The author endeavoured to get an article based on the material published in History Workshop, but it was rejected in May 1991.

^9.Young, Football in Sheffield, 16–17.

^10. In a letter from the then editor of IJHS, James Mangan, dated October 6, 1994, it was stated that the article would appear ‘in IJHS in 1995 probably in either Number One or Number Two in September. More likely the former date’. The author awaited its appearance and alarmed that nothing appeared wrote to Mangan again on February 14, 1996. In his undated reply, Mangan stated that the article ‘would probably appear in August 1996 but no promises’. The author heard nothing further and contacted Mangan again on January 31, 1998. On February 5, 1998, Mangan replied stating that the paper had probably been lost and that it should be resubmitted to him. To the author's surprise, the work was made to undergo another set of editorial reviews and on Mangan's insistence rewritten, peripheral sections being added by Mangan. Not only that, on April 27, 1998, the author suddenly discovered that the article was not appearing in IJHS but in a new publication that Mangan was editing, The European Sports History Review. On April 30, 1998, the author phoned Mangan about this. To his surprise, Mangan denied ever having accepted the paper for IJHS. Naturally, the author was unhappy about things but simply accepted the transfer to ESHR. Although one might have thought that the piece had caused the author sufficient trouble, this proved not to be the case. Soon after its appearance in ESHR, the author received a letter from the Associate Academic Editor of IJHS, Gareth Williams, alerting him to the similarity of his use of Bell's and the earlier works of John Goulstone, who had contacted Williams, effectively accusing Harvey of plagiarism. Fortunately, the author was able to provide copious documentation proving that his article was not derived from the work of Goulstone and that its appearance had been delayed by four years through no fault of his own.

^11. See, for instance, Harvey, “An Epoch in the Annals of National Sport” and Harvey, Football.

^12. Harvey, Football, 141–7, contains a completely alternative view of the split between those delegates who supported the soccer and rugby games than is provided in the established histories.

^13. Ibid., 122–3.

^14. For example, see Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 29–31. Evidently, in the original version of Goldblatt's work, there was an altogether more detailed description of the thesis, as was made clear to the author in an email from David Goldblatt on December 12, 2007. Goldblatt explained that he was familiar with Harvey's articles and intended writing ‘that football emerges as a fusion of public school and non public school influences of which Sheffield is the most considerable’. Evidently, the omission of a more detailed reference to the topic stemmed from ‘a last minute cut of over 100 pages’.

^15. The main points of the debate can be found in Collins “History, Theory and the Civilizing Process” and Curry, Dunning, and Sheard, “Sociological Versus Empiricist History.” Collins argues that there is no factual support for the explanation that Dunning et al. provide for the split between soccer and rugby.

^16. Harvey, Football, 25–6, 35.

^17. Ibid., 40–1, 45, 48, 252. While it is clear that given the opportunity to snipe and bicker with one another old public schoolboys were very prone to express the virtues of their particular game there is no indication of their struggling to obtain the supremacy of their own code not propogate it elsewhere. It is instructive that issues relating to the supposed Eton–Rugby rivalry were not raised by Curry in his review of the text (Curry, “Review,” 125–6).

^18. For instance, the master who supervised football at Richmond Grammar School was Tate, a noted old Rugbeian sportsmen, but it is clear that the football game that they played was not rugby (Bell's Life in London, March 26, 1854)!

^19. Harvey, Football, 48–9.

^20. Ibid., 39.

^21. Ibid.

^22. Ibid., 40.

^23.Hutton, Curry, and Goodman, Sheffield Football Club and Murphy, From Sheffield with Love.

^24.Harvey, “150 years of Sheffield FC,” 531–6. There was a protracted debate over Sheffield's code between Harvey, Dunning and Curry: Dunning, “Something of a Curate's Egg”; Harvey, “The Curate's Egg Put Back Together”; Dunning and Curry, “The Curates Egg Scrambled Again”; and Harvey, ‘Curate's Egg Pursued by Red Herrings.”

^25. Harvey, “150 Years of Sheffield FC,” 533–4.

^26. Harvey, Football, 163.

^27.Taylor, The Association Game, 28. Taylor refers to Young, A History of British Football, 117–8. In fact, Young was using the same source as Harvey, the handwritten code of 1858, but was simply working under the assumption that the code was based upon the rules from the public schools. The handwritten code of 1858 was the earliest one in existence, for there was no printed code in 1857. The first printed code did not appear until 1859. Harvey would like to thank the Sheffield FC librarian Graham Curry for being kind enough to supply this information in an email dated March 30, 2009. The code that Harvey refers to was almost certainly the original set of rules that Sheffield created. To an extent, Taylor agrees with Harvey's argument that the Sheffield code was not based upon the public school rules for he notes approvingly that the early Sheffield rules did not include an offside law and that it is quite clear that the Sheffield club's founders were unable to understand the laws of the various public schools that they received.

^28. Taylor, The Association Game, 29.

^29. Ibid., 32

^30.Kitching, “‘Old’ Football and the ‘New’ Codes,” 1735–6.

^31. Ibid., 1741–2.

^32.Curry and Dunning, “The Problem with Revisionism.” Principally, the attack is directed towards Harvey but amongst the texts attacked are Goulstone, Modern Sport, and Swain, “Cultural Continuity.”

^33. Curry and Dunning, “The Problem with Revisionism,” 434.

^34. Harvey, Football, 96–9, 102.

^35. See note 33 above.

^36. Harvey, Football, 232.

^37. Curry and Dunning, “The Problem with Revisionism,” 437. On 434, attention is drawn to the small number of matches that did occur in relation to the period of time that is being considered. While they are naturally quite correct in this the broader point is that our sources show that some activity was taking place, how representative this is in numerical terms is anyone's guess.

^38. Ibid., 439.

^39. Ibid., 439–40.

^40. Ibid., 439.

^41. Ibid., 441–2.

^42. For instance, while Charles Alcock bitterly regretted professionalism, he was pragmatic enough to realise that it had to be integrated into football's administrative structure (Harvey, Football, 215–9).

^43.Swain, “Modern Football in Formation,” 92–184, 258–78.

^44.Swain and Harvey, “Bosworth Field,” 1439–40.

^45. Harvey, Football, 217–20.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Harvey

Adrian Harvey is the author of The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain 1793–1815 (Ashgate 2005) and Football: The First Hundred Years: The Untold Story (Routledge 2005).